misc notes #4

Just checking bits of paper from the mobile holiday, now coming to an end. Scribble from listening to Today program on the Web. Not sure Sir Paul Nurse was detailing the research outside universities during the UK industrial revolution. Some engineering I think. But I was going back to sleep at the time. So this is a topic to come back to.

It made me think about the current scene. There is research into online learning as could be used by universities but there is also work by companies who happen to need some sort of learning to occur. 

Various magazines skip read. Business to Business moving out of print. Not sure of the timescale. Lots on brands, will look again at Futurelearn course. Can academic terms be thought of as brands - Management Learning, Networked Learning, Critical Management Studies - not sure, but the Futurelearn course sees almost everything as a brand. InPublishing Nov / Dec David Hepworth advice to interns is not to sue Conde Nast for wasting their time but just get on and make the tea. They might be just as well off doing a startup.

Don't get me wrong. I like print magazines but they may just vanish one day. I am losing track of time. Meanwhile there is still a bookshop on the Exeter university campus but it is scheduled to close at the end of January. I still think it was strange to design the new forum without a bookshop. It is now hidden away in the student union area but at least some people know where it is. 

Putting Cross Media alongside IPEX should demonstrate how media can mix. There is still a place for a bookshop. Also magazines in various formats.

Time to get the hard copy out of the archive.

misc notes #3

Dates for 2014, around which I will repeat mostly the same sort of story, that better links between communication technology, learning and quality are now possible or more possible, even probable. Could be quite boring and obvious but seems to need a fresh go every so often. ( Jeff Jarvis has a theory that articles are on a loop anyway. I think that's it. must check Buzzmachine )

BETT 22-25 Jan

Learning Tech 29,30 Jan

concentrated week at end of March

IPEX 24 - 29th

includes      25 -27  Cross Media Production

25 Deming

28 TEDx Exeter

Also online the Consumer Electronic Show is quite soon but according to Eric Franklin at C Net the announcements may come in Barcelona during Feb. It may not matter much, the BETT discussion will be about what is happening already. Presumably some Chromebook news from CES, this is looking like a basis for comparison with other offers. I saw some interesting Microsoft kit in Exeter John Lewis yesterday but it did seem quite expensive.

 

misc notes #2

It turns out that there is a Google connection with the MOOC idea. They are supporting a new site called MOOC.com . Found a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education. But I can't see any cause for panic or alarm. Probably John Naughton will report this at length later. Maybe he has already and I missed it. I don't buy the Observer every week and my point of view has been influenced by Guardian negativity as I see it.

Checked out the BETT website. Google will be pushing the Chromebook. This is a genuine technology show. There are still some in education who keep a distance but I think there is a lot to learn at such an occasion.

No media section in the print Guardian today, but there is an ad for the new Android App. Make your own mind up where this is heading. I don't think the Guardian will continue in print on weekdays indefinitely. The specialist sections are not getting the resource to justify the cover price on any scale of circulation.

But I guess there will be something about the MOOC during January.

misc notes #1

Now back in Exeter. Reading Guardian for Saturday and Observer for today. These are notes for a future post I think. Maybe a rewrite of a pre4vious post will be the format for many future ones. Several issues are much the same. There may be events but even that is open for discussion. Reports on shopping show continued interest in tablets etc.

Andrew Martin on resolution to get more into gadgets for 2014. On balance he is moving forward, but there is much that seems more of the same. Could be a representation of journalist opinion

Of course, the techies will always be one step ahead. At the start of my journalistic career in the late 1980s, I won a prize for an essay about how newspaper offices were tyrannised by the patronising blokes of the computer department. ("It's ctrl-alt-9, like I told you before.") I believed that the means of producing any given article was becoming more important than the article itself, and I don't think I was wrong about that. 

My technophobia was underscored by writing historical novels, invoking a world without McDonald's, manmade fibres, plastic or fluorescent lighting. This work reflected my view of postwar Britain as a country beset by a post-imperial midlife-crisis, a glib neophilia; hence the destruction of our Victorian city centres and our industrial capacity.

But I am losing my nerve. When I meet people who have a mobile phone as basic as mine, they'll indulge in a bit of mock-Luddite banter ("Got this in a pound shop … No extra features but the date and time, and they don't work"). But it usually turns out they're expert texters, purists who don't like predictive texting, just as good drivers prefer a manual car to an automatic. They have one foot in modernity anyway. I'll meet a man who smokes a pipe … but it turns out he designs websites for a living; or a woman who plays the lute … but she blogs about it.

Taking a large chunk there but useful as probably what most of the people writing for the Guardian think.

Steven Poole trying to go back in time I think with review of Blockbusters-

In 2006, the then editor of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson, published The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. Thanks to new digital distribution methods, it claimed, the blockbuster was on the way out, and most profits would henceforth come from niche products. It didn't work out that way, as Elberse now demonstrates. "The importance of individual bestsellers is not diminishing over time," she shows. "Instead, it is growing." (A remarkable statistic: 74% of all individual MP3s purchased online in 2011 sold fewer than 10 copies each, while 0.00001% of songs made up 15% of total revenues.) Why The Long Tail was nonetheless a blockbuster book is a mystery Elberse does not investigate.

I find almost nothing in the Review about the state of publishing, how digital effects the structures etc. Do they think a few bestsellers from major publishers will do the trick? whatever they think it is.

There are even more adverts for Masterclasses, sessions where Guardian readers can pay to learn from a star source. Presumably the blockbuster model fits this well, there are only a few people who have the secret. I think there could be a related conversation on how actual and lapsed Guardian readers can learn from each other and free sources online.

John Naughton very worried about Google.

What makes the Google boys so distinctive is not the fact that they did update their assumptions about what machines can and cannot do (because many people in the field were aware of what was becoming possible) but that they possessed the limitless resources needed to explore and harness those new possibilities. Hence the self-driving car, MOOCs, the Google books project, the free gigabit connectivity project, the X labs and so on…

 Why are MOOCs on this list? Much comment seems to assume that MOOCs are only commercial, not from proper academic sources. I think that in 2014 other models may be on offer. The word MOOC may well change to something else. There will be some claims that they don't work but I can't see how long that could continue. The people who don't like them will have to propose an alternative. I don't see why they cannot learn from what Google and other companies are doing - Apple and Adobe for example. They know about learning in some form. But they are not the only model possible.

Last year Guardian Education had only negative comment about MOOCs and very little news. 

Trying to keep an open mind for next year. Guardian may change unless their plan is to rely on King's Cross as a campus with blockbuster instruction.

 

Mobile holiday, J Sainsbury , Chromebooks

There is some new info about the mobile holiday #MobHol but lots more to come.

I went to J Sainsbury in Lancaster yesterday for the bargain Stilton and discovered a surprisingly full range of mobile devices, probably taking more space than the televisions. There were some with Windows 8 and copies of Office but also other choices.

Through Seeking Alpha I found a blog post from  Preston Galla who claims that Chromebooks now have a significant share of new purchases. Checking the link to Amazon shows Chromebooks in the top two slots for current sales. So the shift away from desktop computers is continuing.

This is written on a Chromebook but I think I will be able to do more when back in Exeter with Photoshop and Premiere for example. When the Cloud versions get better this could change,