A spot of tourism

 

Our stand at the Education UK Exhibition in Athens

As predicted yesterday was a long but enjoyable day.  I had a few emails to send in the morning and then I was down at the exhibition from around noon.  The exhibition started slowly but it got busy by about 3pm and then we had a fairly constant flow of people all the way through until 7.30pm.  At the exhibition I got to meet our partners here in Athens, who support about 500 or so of the university’s students.  After the exhibition finished we were taken out for a lovely meal on the seafront in South Attica.  Over dinner we were chatting about various things.  Predictably I was lightly grilled about who was I, what was my experience, where did I think the university was headed strategically etc. (of which I’m sure there will be more today and tomorrow.   However we also ended up in a wide ranging conversation involving politics, international relations, the differences between the genders, Greek life and culture, approaches to education and the role of bodies like the QAA.  It was a really fascinating conversation.

After dinner my colleague and I took a taxi back to the hotel, getting back just before midnight.  He was shattered and went straight off to bed but I decided I had to go up and see the bar at the top of my hotel from which there are fabulous view across to the Acropolis.  The bar was heaving and there were hundreds of people crammed in trying to get a drink and something to eat.  There was also thumping music.  I took one look and decided I probably wouldn’t stay.

Instead I decided to get up early in the morning as I knew that this might be my only chance to get some sightseeing done.  So in the rain I set off up to the Acropolis.  I got there early, before the gates were opened, and took in some of the sights of Athens on the way.  There were a couple of Americans and a Greek who were there early.  The Greek guy explained that all of the archaeological sites in Athens seem to be free on Sundays (at least at this time of the year).    The three of us rushed in and made our way up to the top.  The Greek guy was talking photos of Athens on the way up.  Whilst the Americans were also sauntering a little, taking in the views.  This meant that I arrived up at the Parthenon well before them and had the entire hilltop more or less to myself.  It was humbling standing in the rain on the top of the hill admiring the amazing structures that were built nearly two and a half thousand years ago.

In the distance you could hear bells ringing.  There were all sorts of different tunes.  Unfortunately the only camera I had was my iPhone so the pictures I took aren’t that great (I still need to sort and tag these properly), nor is the recording (M4A download) I made of one of the bell chimes.

Anyway must go – nearly time to be a stand bunny again.

 

Face to face

I saw this poster at Heathrow this morning and it struck me as being quite apt (especially because when I first started in my current job a number of people referred to me as the contracts guy).

It should probably come as no surprise that I don’t think of myself in that way.  I think my role is about listening and understanding our staff, our partners, our influencers and most importantly our students and then advocating to, for and with the university’s partners. But this is probably a different story.

I sort of disagree with the statement in this advert, but I do agree with the sentiment.  I’m a great advocate for using technology to allow the face to face communication to happen where possible.  However sometimes you really do need to meet in-person.

And this is why I was quite happy to be at Heathrow this morning at silly o’clock jumping on a flight.  I love travelling as it allows me quiet relatively undisturbed thinking time.  So on the drive down and whilst waiting in the airport I got the opportunity to do a little bit of work.  However I allowed myself to be sidetracked a bit on the flight by a delightful in-flight movie, “Julie & Julia” about a blogger re-creating every recipe from a book by a cook called Julia Child (who is played by a brilliantly over the top Meryl Streep).  I wished I’d given it my full attention and watched it properly as I think it would have been the perfect way to spend  flight and unwind.

It’s going to a busy week, as it’s not just about meetings with our partners.  I’ve also got four days of being a stand bunny both here in Athens and then in Nicosia.  I was hoping to have a bit of time this afternoon to have a quick wander out to see the Acropolis.  I didn’t, as I had to set up our stand this afternoon, send a few emails (that I wrote on the plane) and then attend a British Council briefing session.  I hope I’ll get a bit of time on Sunday morning.

It has been an interesting day for me that’s been full of reflections.  I’d begun to think about a few things and make a few mental notes about the market on the subway journey in to the city centre.

Then, when I went in to the exhibition hall to prepare our stand this afternoon I saw that a Open University in Greece stand was in a prime position.  And then when I got back to my room after the British Council briefing I saw that Brenda Gourley was speaking at #educause09 (quite an interesting hashtag that I’d been following for the past couple of days).   I watched the video for a while and there was quite a lot of interesting stuff, especially I would think for an American audience, who may not be familiar with the Open University.

One of the key issues that I picked up on, was Brenda talking about the need for collaboration with partners for delivery as a survival strategy in the global context.

I’ve heard Brenda speak several times but unfortunately this time I wasn’t able to hear her finish.  It had got to about 8:30pm and neither my colleague or I had eaten since breakfast on our flight in the morning.

However interestingly at dinner my colleague raised the importance of meeting our partners face to face.  His quote was something like, “One meeting is worth a thousand exchanged emails.”  So I showed him the photo I took this morning.  He smiled, said yes that’s it, and it felt like a circle had completed.

More on Sidewiki

Having written about searching Sidewiki a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been  reading a bit more about it and I’ve also been been playing about with the API.

I’m approaching Sidewiki from the perspective of someone who is involved with a brand and wants to ensure I understand Sidewiki’s potential as another conversation channel before/in case it is adopted in a wide-scale way.

In order to help me do this  I created a couple of Yahoo Pipes that use the Sidewiki API – one takes a URL and checks the API for Sidewiki entries (in a similar way to Claude Vedovini’s  Sidewikirss) and then another which takes a list of URL’s in a CSV file.  I then thought about another pipe using an RSS feed (e.g. to easily pick up all comments across a blog) however by that stage I discovered the limitations of the API.  I saw someone selling commercial software that could be useful but they recognised the limitations – they were the people that put me on to the idea that the API only surfaces comments that have been liked.  From my reading around the subject I  think that the API is actually much more severe than this – basing what it shows on an alogorithm.  As far as I can tell this means that the only way of checking your site for comments is by visiting every page (and every variation of each URI – something that is impossible to do – see parameter-ised URI below) with a version of Firefox or IE with the Google ToolBar installed and Sidewiki operating!

My frustrations with the API combined with some of the very negative posts I had read and I started wondering whether in releasing Sidewiki Google had broken their “Do no evil” mantra. This is  something that would sadden me as I’ve always been a bit of a Google fanboy.

I’m not naive enough to think that a brand is in control of how it is perceived, nor that there is anyway that you can follow every conversation involving your brand.  So I thoughtsome more and decided, that excepting that potentially rogue content can be positioned next to your own within the browser, Sidewiki comments are no different from those found on Facebook (a truly walled garden in which conversations can easily be missed).  Then I came across this excellent Neville Hobson post and I felt that much of my thunder had been stolen.  However Neville’s post raises some interesting issues for me:

1. The idea of Sidewiki as a commenting platform.  I don’t think this is something that brand/website owners should encourage mainly because comment monitoring is so difficult.  For example Neville invites people to leave a Sidewiki comment on http://www.nevillehobson.com/.  People might see this and assume that Neville has got the monitoring in place for http://www.nevillehobson.com/2009/10/25/opportunity-knocks-with-google-sidewiki/ or for http://www.nevillehobson.com/2009/10/25/opportunity-knocks-with-google-sidewiki/#comments and other URLs.  However such monitoring may only be visible from your website logs – and then only if you know what you are looking for, e.g I’ve commented on this:. http://malleablemusings.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/searching-sidewiki/?putsomethingherejusttoshowthatit’snotthesamepagewithoutthisparamete.
2. Google have provided a mechanism for page owners to provide a top placed comment in the side wiki.  However you need to do this on every page on your site.  What’s more there is no such option on public sites in which your brands might be investing, e.g. think how much time and energy you might push into your Facebook Fan pages or You Tube Channels etc. (e.g. this video from UNSW has a Sidewiki entry).

I know that there are Sidewiki Policies which supposedly provides some protection against vandalism (I don’t like using that word – as I see them as comments that need to be responded to). However for me the bigger issue is that Sidewiki isn’t searchable (it looks like Google isn’t indexing sidewiki entries and may be removing entries that have already been indexed) and then there are the issues with the API highlighted above.

In it’s current state like others I’m left confused about Sidewiki. At the moment I think movement in this direction is inevitable but can only see it being gamed and as someone who is involved with a brand it scares the hell out of me. I guess that we all just need to keep watching.

Blog Action Day

Today is Blog Action Day and the topic is climate change – which is something I think about frequently but only in a peripheral way.

I was first introduced to this idea at university 15 or more years ago so I spent this evening seeing if I could search out one of the old essays I wrote back then.  The specific essay I wanted was about climatic history since the arrival of homo sapiens on the planet.  I remebered that it contained some predictive data and I was interested in seeing how this data stacked up today.  I was also interested to see what my thinking back then was.  I imagine I bordered on the radical.  Unfortunately I couldn’t find what I was looking for.

These days I’ve probably become too comfortable with life’s little luxuries and I’m sure I don’t do enough personally.  I imagine that there a lot of people like me on the planet.

However changes are happening to our planet and for once I find myself agreeing with Gordo…

“Like every parent, I want to leave a safe and secure world for my children. And I want to be able to look them in the eye because our generation stood up for their future.”

Although I wish it went further (in terms of an earlier peak for ommissions) I’m actually quite proud of the UK bid for Copenhagen and I pledged support online tonight.  The pledge is copied below in full.

‘I call for a global deal on climate change, and I want it to be:

• Ambitious – no more than 2 degrees temperature rise, developed-country emissions to peak in five years; the whole world in ten
• Effective – keep countries to their word, and let money flow to where it will make most difference
• Fair – support the poorest countries to cut their emissions and adapt to climate change.’

Searching Sidewiki

I got around to hearing about, reading up on and having a quick look at Google Sidewiki last week. I actually quite like the idea of Sidewiki but as I’ve taken to using Chrome as my usual browser I’m unlikely to be using it that much. (Bizarrely the Google Toolbar with Sidewiki currently only works with Firefox and IE).

To illustrate what Sidewiki does lets consider Seth Godin. He’s recently just launched a service called Squidoo. As an aside this is well worth a look as to what a listening post can look like for a brand, link is for MailChimp. This is Seth’s post about launching the service. Strangely he normally doesn’t allow comments on his posts so what’s happened is that comments like this are appearing in Sidewiki.

I’ve seen some tools out there that claim to block Sidewiki although I haven’t investigated these properly yet.

Sidwiki may cause brands issues because it’s another place where conversation can happen, so it’s another place that needs to be monitored.

I mentioned on Friendfeed last week that we’ll need to see if and how Sidewiki takes off.  However this looks like it’s going to be difficult to monitor.

There is a Google Sidewiki API however I can’t see that it’s going to provide the one thing that brand owners with large websites are going to need which is notification of comments that could be written on a large number of pages across their website, e.g. look at this university press release and the comment that was made on the Sidewiki.

I therefore wondered how far I could get with searching for Sidewiki comments on Google.  The comments are of the form:

http://www.google.com/sidewiki/entry/userid/id/entrykey

but a quick search of site:http://www.google.com/sidewiki/entry/ on Google only reveals 2,190 results, which I think must be too small a number.  What’s more none of these seem to have been made in the past week.

Therefore it makes me wonder how accurate or useful more complex searches are e.g. search of “ac.uk” site:http://www.google.com/sidewiki/entry/

I think I need to think about this and explore it some more as I haven’t been able to produce a search that produces the 10+ comments shown on Seth Godin’s blog post (linked above).   Maybe what’s needed is to engage with the API.

Sidewiki is a secret hidden world but there are bound to be ramifications in all sorts of areas, SEO springs immediately to mind.  Sidewiki is definitely a technology I’ll be watching.

Percy Endrizzi doesn’t quite make it to FOTE’09

Tim and Frank, a couple of friends (ex-colleagues) of mine, put on a conference on Friday - The Future of Technology in Education (FOTE’09). Given Friday was my first day without meetings for about a month I thought I might be able to follow along. (I find that I can follow audio reasonably well without it distracting me from filling in spreadsheets, working on databases or carrying out other administrative work.)

Video was being streamed into Second Life (SL) so on Thursday evening I downloaded the SL client software on to my netbook set up a new account (Percy Endrizzi) and I checked that I could get in to the virtual lecture theatre.

Percy Endrizzi in the FOTE Lecture Theatre

Unfortunately on the Friday I wasn’t able to login to SL using my netbook on the wireless network at work. Neither was I able to access the audio via @kwameoh’s quicktime link. I presume that all of the necessary ports for Second life and RTSP are blocked by default on the university wireless network.

So whilst Silversprite Helsinki was able to “closely follow #FOTE09 while in a branch of Ladbrokes”, Percy Endrizzi couldn’t listen in from within a university!

So unable to listen in to what was going on at FOTE’09 I looked in on the twitter stream every now and then.  Actually I dipped in to @andpowe11’s coveritlive page every now and then and when I got home I also read a few blog posts and worked through the twitter stream. In doing so I found a few things that made me stop and think, for example this on Hallucination, Virtual Reality, and Reality.

However I as an off-site participant I would have loved it if it would have been possible to:

1) feed audio and video in to uStream, Dim Dim, Elluminate or various other more accessible services than Second Life – as an aside I think Percy Endrizzi may have made his last outing for a while.

2) discuss technology in relation to other areas of education – teaching and learning seemed to be the main focus and research and, most importantly for me, the administration of education seemed to be lacking.

That said, I’m definitely looking forward to seeing some of the videos when they eventually get posted.

Newsnight vs Question Time

This evening I was slightly torn. Should I watch Newsnight or Question Time. I settled on Newsnight but had Tweetdeck open and one of my search columns was #BBCQT so I didn’t feel that I was missing anything.

Bizarrely I received this tweet.

A Tweet from BBC Have Your Say

Hhmmm, #BBCQT was trending at the time!

The tweet is obviously trying to bring people to the official BBC QT discussion page which has moderated comments. Two things struck me:

1) Why didn’t @BBC_HaveYourSay use the #BBCQT hashtag?
2) The conversation was happening on Twitter and elsewhere – so why not use this on the discussion page? You could even moderate it if this was really necessary!

Xtranormal

This week has been a whirl of meetings so I feel like I’ve not managed to get anything done. Yesterday in particular was one of the longest days I’ve ever had at work. Luckily this evening I got home just about early enough to see the kids before they jumped in to bed.

Later on in the evening I discovered xtranormal.com. It looks like a fantastic little tool for creating animations directly from text. This is my first attempt at using it. (Shame I can’t embed it directly here.) I was amazed at how simple it was to use and how it only took a few minutes to render. Amazing!

>Post Alan’s suggestion<
I created a ScreenR version but then realised I’d run in to the same problem because of the embed on wordpress.com. However I then remembered you can embed from YouTube and you can make the YouTube video directly from xtranormal or from ScreenR.

So here we go. I can see a lot of fun to be had with this tool and so can others.

When things go wrong

For about the past month I’d been trying to get hold of a tree surgeon who’d been recommended to me.  Last weekend I could bear it no more and gave in and consulted Yellow Pages and found a bloke (I’ll call him Eddie) who came around later that day.

My wife and I discussed what we wanted doing with him – we wanted about four-six feet taken off the top of six conifers and have them cut back a little bit to take them off our deck and away from the kid’s playhouse.

He seemed to know what he was talking about and gave me a price I was happy with so he came back on Monday with a couple of lads to start work.

As I was leaving work on Monday I got a phone call from my distraught wife, “Eddie’s butchered the trees”.  I tried to reassure that it can’t be that bad and that trees grow back and then I set off home.

Within two minutes of landing at home I’d left a very strongly worded message on Eddie’s answaphone (one or two swear words were used).  Eddie phoned me back within five minutes explaining that he hadn’t managed to finish the job yet and had run in to a range of unanticipated problems. I remember saying to him “Eddie, look I’m sorry you’ve lost my trust I really don’t know whether I should let you back in my garden.”

However I did let Eddie back in the garden.  We met early this morning before I set off for work.  I put aside the fact that Eddies measurement of six feet off the top seemed to be at least double  mine and I ascertained from him that the several of the main trunks were dead and that there was unlikely to be any real re-growth for around three years.  I therefore asked him the question should we really not just chop the bloody trees down.

Therefore when I came home on Tuesday evening I found the sight below. 

We only wanted a few feet off the top

It’s not really what we intended.  In addition I also found a broken deck, wrecked plants around the trees and damage to the new patio (scuffing and oil spillage).  I think there may also be damage to my neighbour’s garden.  Having spent two hours scrubbing the patio I think I’ve managed to get rid of the oil.  I’ve still got to pop around to the neighbour – he’s on holiday at the moment.  Whilst Eddie has promised that he’ll be around tomorrow to repair the deck and do a final bit of finishing off.

I can only assume that this was a job that has gone horribly wrong for Eddie and said so to him on the phone this evening after he’d said to me, “I don’t advertise, I rely on recommendations and goodwill so happy customers are really important to me.” 

Nothing Eddie can do is likely to ever make me feel I can recommend his services.  All he could possibly do at this stage is pacify me and probably more importantly pacify the wife.

However it did make me think about faith, trust and making apologies especially as this week I’ve had to make a couple of apologies and have had to take part in a couple of rather difficult conversations.

Volleyball

OK so I’m finally updated my volleyball club’s website with details of the fixtures that we have this season. This post will hopefully just allow me a quick way of updating the website using WordPress on my iPhone so I can add scores quickly on the night.

Basically what happens is a PHP script just rips the table below and places it within a webpage.

Fixtures

Date	Warm-up	Opposition	Where	Score
Fri 09 Oct’09	8:00pm	PVC	Nuffield Sports Centre Wyggeston Drive Gate 1 Off University Road Leicester LE1 7RJ	We won 3-0 (25-18, 25-15, 25-10)
Mon 09 Nov’09	7:30pm	Loughborough University	Bablake School	We won 3-0 (25-10, 25-8, 25-19)
Mon 23 Nov’09	7:30pm	Nuneaton	Bablake School	-
Tues 01 Dec’09	8:00pm	Tamworth	Wilnecote High School Tinkers Green Road, Wilnecote, Tamworth, Staffordshire, B77 5LF	-
Mon 07 Dec’09	7:30pm	QEWGS	Nuffield Sports Centre Wyggeston Drive Gate 1 Off University Road Leicester LE1 7RJ	-
Mon 14 Dec’09	7:30pm	Loughborough Lions	Bablake School
Mon 18 Jan’10	7:30pm	PVC	Bablake School	-
Sat 23 Jan’10	2.00pm	Loughborough Lions	Limehurst High School Bridge St Loughborough Leicestershire, LE11 1NH	-
Mon 01 Feb’10	7:30pm	QEWGS	Bablake School	-
Mon 15 Feb’10	8:15pm	Loughborough University	Loughborough University New Sports Hall Leicestershire, LE11 3TU	-
Mon 08 Mar’10	7:30pm	Tamworth	Bablake School	-
Sat 21 Mar’10	6:00pm	Nuneaton	George Eliot School Raveloe Drive Nuneaton CV11 4QP	-