Been trying out Brightcove as a video service. Test film follows below:

If anyone has any thoughts on the use of Brightcove, please share.

I think this video does a nice job of showing what a museum a university education has become:

(h/t Andy Rush)

If I go often to the well of what’s going on in the Politics 2.0 and Reporting 2.0 space, it’s because few areas are going through such a radical high stakes change.

Not change in a political sense, mind you. Much of the change going on is a rather frantic bid to make sure that new technologies don’t erode existing power structures both in media and politics. But the stakes involved and the very real wakeup call received by the establishment in 2006 has led to a situation where the political space is ahead of the curve in use of new technologies and organizational principles.

So it’s no surprise that we see a glimpse of the new world of work today from Huffington Post’s Off The Bus group of reporters (disclosure: I’m one of those reporters).

It was a normal subject they covered today: Sen Obama’s campaign did a massive door-to-door operation this past weekend. The average coverage of this would be to send a reporter out to one of the 40-odd cities where this canvassing was taking place.

Off the Bus had a better idea: since they have dozens of reporters already in these locations, why not ask them all to stop by their local event, and get some basic information about the canvass — people involved, why they were there, basic turnout numbers, doors knocked on, general level of commitment of people talked to.

It was information a local person could gather in about 30 to 60 minutes, both by talking to the organizers and tagging along for a couple door-knockings. And since the people tagging along were local, they could put the information in context.

Off the Bus set up a Survey Monkey form, and mailed it out to any of their reporters who could spare the half hour. One blogger was responsible for compiling the data and putting it together, but the data was made available to all involved (in fact, the raw reports were made available to the general public).

And what was the result of this? Well, it was a mixed bag. The reporters were in many places stonewalled by the Obama campaign. Where they did tag along though, they found that for the most part support for any candidate was far softer than what polls have shown, and that people as a whole are tired of talking about the Iraq war.

Briliant? Groundbreaking?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. But look at the mechanisms and philosophy on display: radical transparency (in making all reports viewable), distributed tasking, use of simple online tools such as Survey Monkey, multi-literate reporters taking video, writing copy, all coordinated through a Google group, and done at almost no cost — because the reporters are already in place…

This is not just the future of reporting. It’s the future of our networked world. In fact, it’s the present already in many industries where need for the coordination of people with different specializations exists.

Do our students know how to work this way? Are we teaching them?

I’d argue that projects like UMW Blogs do just that, showing people through that ecosystem of Google Reader, WordPress, and MediaWiki the power of the network.

(and you can add any of my previous endings here — you know the screed. Why in the world would we send kids out into the networked world with a Blackboard^TM understanding of life?)

So after all the political stories I’ve labored over, I finally made front page on Huffington Post — with a story I wrote in 5 minutes while downing my morning coffee.

Oh well, I’ll take it! Thanks to the Off The Bus crowd who have been pushing hard to get these stories by amateurs like me better placement.

Finally got around to listening to this. It’s good. It’s nascent, but maybe that’s why I love it so much:

http://learnonline.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/10-minute-lecture-george-siemens-curatorial-teaching/

It’s not a total solution to the sage-on-the-stage v. guide-on-the-side but it’s a great rethinking, and it’s very practical to implement.

It’s also refreshing that Siemens approach is not kick-against-the-pricks* (an approach I’m often guilty of) — his approach respects that there is not here a complete historical break with previous teaching, but an accenting of things that were always a part of good instruction, and now need to be accentuated because of the realities of a highly networked world.

*Note on the phrase “kick against the pricks”: Since it seems this phrase is less known than I thought….”Kick against the pricks” is a Biblical phrase meaning roughly “rebel against authority despite immense pain”. It comes from a metaphor involving oxen and sharp pointy sticks. Kicking against the pricks represents an ideological yet futile rebellion against authority for the sake of doing the right thing, rather than out of hope of possible success.

It comes to me not through the Bible, but through the awesomeness of Nick Cave.

…and it’s not even that hard.

I’ve said before that one of the fundamental things the university has not come to terms with is that in an environment where failure is inexpensive, undergraduates can be pushed to solve real problems, rather than to practice solving problems they might encounter once they get out of college.

In the world of net-enabled education, this is possibly the most important differentiator.  And it will change the face of undergraduate education.

The product that colleges will be giving you in twenty years is not a degree, but a reputation. The number of students that have done something significant and public in undergrad will hit a critical mass, so much so that the reputation of colleges will be largely determined by what they helped their students do while the students were under their mentoring.

Here’s the thing: people in higher education often object — “But our students aren’t that smart! Not everybody can be an entrepreneur!”

Or they say something else with more syllables, but they mean that.

They are wrong.

Case in point — the hottest New Hampshire political blog right now is not Blue Hampshire or GraniteGrok. It’s New Hampshire Presidential Watch, a blog run by a St. Anselm’s undergrad.

What is it that attracts visitors?  Incisive political analysis? Horse race statistics? Round the clock reporting?

Nope. What the kid who runs it does is take all the emails and other info he gets from all the Presidential candidates, and does the painful but absolutely essential work of organizing it into a single calendar. And because he’s become the destination site to find out who’s in the state, candidates now send him the updates. And because he now has an audience, he *can* do political reporting, and be read by thousands.

No algorithms. No advanced marketing plan. Just someone saying to a kid, you know, I wish I didn’t have to go to 16 different sites to figure out who was in town, and the kid thinking: I can solve that.

The talent is not in the compilation of these materials. It’s in that impulse: I can solve that. And because this impulse is what fuels the new economy, this kid will never want for a job. He will graduate Saint A’s, and the degree will be a footnote to what he already accomplished.

He’ll graduate with a reputation.

You can call it service, or entrepreneurship, or academic engagement; in truth, it’s all three.

What you can’t call it is idealistic. It’s here and now. It’s happening. And there’s absolutely no reason not to embrace it.

The end is near. And that’s a very very good thing.

Radiohead is offering it’s newest album on it’s website for advance download.

The revolutionary thing? You pay what you want for it. Two dollars, ten dollars. Whatever. You make the call.

The experiment has even got mainstream investing sites abuzz, saying that if this works, it could be the end of the pricefixing era of music.

Sometimes though, history needs a push. I’m going over to get the new album right after I finish posting this.

You should come with.

Update:

I told you I was serious:

This is me buying the album for about 5 bucks American (damn that exchange rate!).

That’s a decent deal for a Radiohead album (if it was the new NP’s album, it’d be more).

You should go do it.

I know it’s good form to say where you’ve been when you disappear off the face of your blog for two weeks.

Answer: bilge-pumping.

That said, we’ll try to do better next time.

Now onto to other things.

A side project I do got some news coverage this past Sunday. And it was a pretty nice article in that they represent our political community site fairly well. (I wish sometimes they’d focus on how hard it is to do this with so little spare time, but oh well).

But the hook in these things is always so predictable I have to laugh. Here’s the final paragraphs:

“Bloggers are the new key influencers in the community. National bloggers are shaping opinions. They are engaged in the daily dialogue of national affairs and some voices are very influential,” Hynes said.

He said in New Hampshire for the 2008 election, three or four influential bloggers have emerged with “tier one” access to candidates – i.e. press credentials to cover events and interview the candidates – when many believed the blogging trend had plateaued.

“Bloggers will have a marginal effect, but a lot of races are decided in the margins,” he said.

I hate to pick on this article, because it got more stuff right than most. And they are just quoting Patrick Hynes a “blog outreach consultant” (Wow!) for John McCain. But much of the article follows the same philosophy, ticking off a list of types of access the campaigns give us, and saying isn’t it crazy? The world is upside down!

But it’s the press that has the battery wired backwards.

The reason blogging works is not because we’re so influential that we get access. The reason it works is that we don’t care about access. Frankly, we’re not corrupted by it. I receive so many invites to blogger conference calls I route them to a special folder. I hardly ever go. Why should I, when it’s just the candidate repeating the same talking points they just put out in a press release?

And I think it drives some campaigns crazy, but I don’t write stories off of press releases either. And although I get invited to “surrogate” events, for the most part I don’t go. I have no desire to see so and so’s daughter tell me how great their Dad is. Sorry. I just see that as another commercial.

Patrick Hynes, the blog outreach coordinator quoted, doesn’t know me, but I know his candidate. And that’s by design. I took a $119 video camera to an event of McCain’s last Sunday, and I sat in the back row, listening and filming.

I’ve been thinking about what I heard, and how he reacted to the audience questions. I’ve been thinking about which issues he dodged and which he didn’t, and how this might differ from his last spin through New Hampshire. I’ve been thinking about the reaction of people around me — people I might add that were the audience, not fellow reporters in some “press pen”.

All that “access”? Let’s be honest. The access beyond see the candidate in a Town Hall setting is spin control. It’s entry into the PR ecosystem.

And I have very little interest in it. Strip away credentials and access, and I’d argue what you get is better reporting.

Via Udell, a link to a paper that attempts to refute David Hockney’s theory that the sudden shift to photographic styles in the Renaissance was due to the use of optical projection.

It’s an interesting paper because it introduces what seems to be a new method of objectively measuring geometric deviations of paintings from “reality”, and applies that geometry to a chandelier that figures prominently in Hockney’s book :

In Sect. I we introduce the basic mathematics of homographies and plane-induced image registration. In Sect. II, we apply digital image registration to detect and measure geometric imperfections in the painted chandelier. The analysis of photographs of a representative sample of surviving 15th-century dinanderie is conducted in Sect. III. Finally, in Sect. IV we judge the abilities of contemporary realist painters in the absence of optical aids by testing the perspective of paintings of elaborate chandeliers done “by eye”. We find the accuracy comparable to that in the Arnolfini painting.

I haven’t sorted through the method yet, and in all likelihood I doubt I’ll be able to add anything to that side of the debate. But the fascinating part of the article is toward the end.

Underlying the arguments of Hockney and Falco is the assumption that good perspective cannot be easily achieved “by eye,” that is, without the help of optical devices.

To test their assumption, as part of our research, British realist painter Nicholas Williams painted two chandeliers entirely “by eye.” Figure 6 shows one of the two chandelier paintings he realized for us. Our perspective analysis applied to this painting resulted in a good but, as expected, imperfect alignment of arms. The average measured deviation was about 8.55% the image width, of the same order of magnitude as that of van Eyck’s chandelier. This experiment confirms that realistic-looking structures can be painted merely by eye, without the help of optical tools of any sort.

This part of the experiment shows more than a little historical naïveté. They took a 21st century painter, who has seen photographs and realistic paintings every day of his life, and found that he can paint photo-realistically.

What they of course miss is that to a person in a pre-photorealist society the process of mapping a three-dimensional reality onto a flat plane is considerably more difficult — that is, if such a notion even occurs to them.

Technology changes us. It changes what is possible to think. Take a top-notch mathematician trained before the computer and ask them to model the growth of lemming populations in a limited resource environment and watch as they drive themselves slowly insane in pursuit of the solution. Take an average Excel user or the most novice programmer of today, and watch how effortlessly they stumble into the algorithmic thinking that is crucial to the solution.

Does this prove it was possible for the mathematician to have come up with the solution on his own? Quite the opposite. The computational thinking that is now taken for granted in our society evolves not from native cognitive abilities, but from a cultural store that finds it’s birth in giving machines iterative instructions where output states become inputs.

Such historical thinking is crucial to Hockney’s premise. In the history of computing, one notes that Turing and Post came up individually with their theories of computing in 1936 — and from there the logical progression is to ask what was happening, technologically, that led two people to individually come up with the same model at the same time.

Hockney has before him a similar conundrum — the sudden explosion of photorealistic technique in Rennaissance art. And he searches for the technology that may have made such photographic thinking possible. He concludes, based on various effects of darkness and light, restricted focus, and orientation that optical projection technology may have been largely responsible for this sea-change in technique, and more importantly, this sea-change in thinking.

The research paper may be right about the irregularities in the painting for all I know. But in structuring their final test they show that they have very little understanding of cultural history. The briefest look at Derrida, the history of fractals, or the development of the slow-motion action shot in film would have demonstrated to them the fallacy taking a modern painter to prove a historical point. Technology, and the cultural store that evolves from it, changes us. My eight year old paints cups from life in a way that was simply not available to the Ancient Egyptians. My four year old concieves of quick events happening in slow motion. Both of them have a conception of language impossible before writing — and my four year old can’t even spell yet.

The ultimate thing to take away from Hockney is not whether the Masters “cheated”. It is to better understand the fluid boundaries between technology, culture, and our own cognition. Hockney may or may not be right about methods or particular paintings. But his impulse is right on target.

I had intended today to write today about the odd fracture in the recent ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, a fracture between Chris Dede’s “technology as world changer” intro, and the rather pedestrian “technology as customer service” bias of the questions posed by the actual report.

I say “intended”, because when I went to pull a paragraph out of the document to demonstrate Chris’s line of thought, I found that this freely distributed PDF had been secured against all copy operations.

You want to cite the ECAR report? Start typing.

I know, I know. I’m supposed to be delighted this is free. I’m supposed to be thankful I even get to cite it in my blog.

And I suppose making me retype that quotation will just make me appreciate the report all the more, right?

Give me a break. This is ridiculous. To write a stirring intro about how the free flow of information is revolutionizing the world and then distribute it in a PDF format that disallows copy operations?

Unbelievable.

But yeah, I won’t be citing it. Mission accomplished.