My Daily Read

I'm going to try to pull together a number of different posts I've read today. The first that got my attention was an article about security expert Bruce Schneier. In thinking about computer security, the risk comes down to people's behavior. We don't assess risk in a purely rational function. Schneier, coming from the technology, doesn't come up with the next widget, but looks to how people think and feel about computer security. The answers lie in the brain, specifically the amygdala and the neocortex. Both handle risk differently, emotionally and analytically, respectively. Security technologies ultimately don't handle this difference in psychological functioning. Therefore the products fail. In a sense, any design needs to work in collaboration with all parts of the brain, not just enforce us to use one part over another. This principle is important to education and schooling, how we feel about what we learn has to be treated in accordance with what we think about what we learn.

Another thread about Australians and possible mobile phone addiction. First off, the blog did not provide any link to the original research report. It turns out that the research found that while mobile phone addiction does occur, it was a small portion of the sample of 2,500 people surveyed online. Addiction is a psychological condition in which brain neurochemistry is involved. Evidence of addiction has been found using fMRI studies, now including video games. Once these feedforward and feedback loops of neurochemicals are out of whack, it can be difficult to resolve without concerted therapy. In light of this, heavy or poor usage could be due to poor decision-making in the frontal lobes, or risk perception in the neocortex and amgydala like above. Many hypotheses are available that have nothing to do with the psychological condition of addiction. Going back to the report, it seems as though Australians are a special population, in which 22% of the population have mobile phones, labeled as a high penetration rate. Off the top of my head, South Koreans and the Japanese, would possibly have higher penetration rates. More generally, we have no cultural instincts when it comes to how to use these technologies. Technologies are designed so rationally, they rely on the neocortex and frontal lobes, the newest parts of the human brain. Once we start using them socially and emotionally, linking usage with these parts of the brain, our behavior looks irrational. Great design is emotional, Apple know this, Don Norman wrote a book about this.

Continuing this thought about new behaviors arise with new technologies... a new book titled, Mobile Communication in Everyday Life - Ethnographic Views, Observations and Reflections by Höflich and Hartmann, brings together chapters on all aspects of how mobile phones are impacting how we live. From the everyday conversations in public to the terrorist attacks, mobile phones are unquestionably part of how we communicate to others. There is also a chapter discussing the research methods of ethnography in capturing the new behaviors. It would be interesting to examine how behavior with mobile phones looks from social organization to how the brain is organized.

Finally, the blog, ecolocal, discusses how big time grocers, like Wal-Mart and Tesco, have embraced organic and green more as a marketing campaign rather than for sustainable community development. They end by saying that each store could be a place where citizens have the opportunity to be educated about new technology in order to engender new consumer behavior. By applying their own values to others, the bloggers have it wrong. The Wal-Mart's of the world have a core compentency, that is economy of scale through global supply chains. Everything they do exploits the advantage that they hold. Their core compentency is not education or community development. By sticking to what they know, they can have a huge impact on the environment and their profits and produce some social benefits, the Triple Bottom line. However, these are side effects not their core values.

New technology must be learned. Old behaviors and assumptions about technology must sometimes be unlearned. This takes time with accurate feedback. I think teachers, or Charons, play a key role in ferrying people across the chasm, to learn and earn with new technologies in their lives.

Hyperlocal Media

The hyperlocal media movement is really important lever for instructional technologists. This movement makes the local community the source of content for media coverage. Teachers naturally are content creators, but they have terrible tools to use at their skill level. Hyperlocal media enablers, Rob Curley and Adrian Holovaty, have found value in what local community actually value, their towns, their teams and their kids. They worked together at Lawrence Journal-World. Does education not share these values?

I first read about Rob Curley in a Fast Company article. This is where I first heard of this idea of hyper-local. (Notice how I've since dropped the hyphen, a sign of shared meaning). I tried to learn a little more about him, but he seems to be a hired gun moving from one media outlet to another. Currently he is at Newsweek Interactive. I thought that was the end of that.

But today, I picked up on a thread about Adrian Holovaty, a colleague of Curley. In American Journalism Review and Corante, they portray him as a mashup of computer programming and journalism. Holovaty created Django, a Python-based web framework. In the family of rapid application development frameworks as the more famous Ruby on Rails. These frameworks cut to the chase and help developments build out user requirements in the order of days not weeks or months. I read the overview of Django, and really wanted to learn it. However, I don't have a project right now that would be a good learning opportunity. I'm learning to use the ModX content management system. But I digress. Holovaty is right, rapid development tools turn creative ideas of all participants into something that is journalism.

These rapid development, web frameworks are not going away. They represent a sea change in how developers/programmers are becoming vital team members to any project, be that media, education, politics, scientific. This connects me back to an episode I heard on the .Net Rocks podcast about the SubSonic ASP.NET-based web framework, created by Rob Conery. Instead of Django or Rails, the next time I get the chance I'd like to try SubSonic. I already understand ASP.NET, so I can focus on learning how web frameworks work.

Allow me to jump back to Corante for a second. As I follow threads on blogs and articles most mornings, I often like to look at the home page of the site. Is the article I'm reading representative of a larger body of work that I'd be interested in? Or is the article an anomaly that just happened to align with my interests? Corante seems to be a network of writers, and not exactly a good fit for daily reading. I managed to click through this network into the Business Information Factory. I immediately wanted to read and watch most everything they had. Maybe tomorrow, I have to stop blogging at some point today.

I thought Bruce Nussbaum's article might be a separate post today, but I think I can wrap it into this one. The RSS feed mentioned "shifting from experience to identity." I just had a thought about identity last night. Teaching a course on developing a graduate student portfolio, I rambled on to a student about how a goal statement should represent the development of identity as an instructional designer. (This will be a separate post in my portfolio). But then Bruce talks about C.K. Pralahad's term, co-creation. People need to build their identity with products, tools and services. The more those products, et al., allow them to build their own identity rather than conform to the brand's identity, the more value gets created. Co-creation of identity is the engine of hyperlocal media?

This is the last one I swear. Who'd have thought an article on ESPN would apply here too? Jayson Stark tells the story of how the Colorado Rockies video training guys started using iPods to deliver video on hitters and pitchers. Now players are studying on the plane, in the restaurant, before the game, during the game, after the game. These guys travel all of the time, portable video players totally change the rules of the game. In fact, at the end of the article they allude to the fact that a rule about iPods may become necessary. More importantly for me, these guys are studying more time in the day, time in places that would otherwise be lost to them. Tying it back up, baseball clubs have been creating hyperlocal media for a long time, baseball at-bats. With this better platform, an explosion happens over night. Learning and performance increase nonlinearly.

2/11/07 Update: Businessweek's article on GateHouse Media buying up more than 400 local newspapers.

How to Answer a Technology How-to Question

Being known as the tech-guy, I get asked how-to questions. I think people ask me not only because I might know, but also they feel comfortable asking as well as the fact that they are going get an answer that makes senses to them. I don't speak some foreign language of acronyms at them. This is an important competency that instructional technologists must have in order to be successful. Here's a question from today:

Do you know of any software (the simpler the better) which you can use to extract a still image (photo) from video footage?

The short answer is "It depends." There are a bunch of ways. If you just want a picture to post to your website, then a quick and dirty way like Print Screen will work. If you need a still for publication, then you need to capture at a very high resolution.

I'm going to assume you want really easy, just for web-level purposes. Low resolution, decent quality.

• Just hook up the camcorder to the computer.
• Then open up your video editing software, Premiere or even Windows Movie Maker (free).
• Enter into the Capture tool.
• Cue up, or fast forward to the still you want.
• Then press Print Scr on your keyboard.
• Now open up a photoediting software like Photoshop, Fireworks or GIMP (free).
• Open a new file.
• Then paste the screenshot.
• Then crop out of the still.
• Save and export into a jpeg.

Here's the response.

Thanks John for your detailed instructions. I will have to try this method out and see how it works for me.

It would be better if the individual tried it out right now, as the question and the instructions are in short-term memory. The individual is visualizing the end product, but doesn't know how to get there. There will be a need to draw on long term memory to visualize this image. Of course, this is not pragmatic when working with busy professionals. Since the instructions are written, the individual can go back to them and attempt it when the timing is right.

Ones to Watch

The Etech conference is being held March 26-29, 2007 in San Diego. Though I can't go, I wanted to know a little more about what I'm missing. Looking through the Speaker's list, two programs caught my eye.

How to Innovate on Time by Scott Berkun (his blog). This talk sounds like an elaboration on what PaylPal founder, Max Levchin, said on NerdTV. "I actually think that a successful startup is 5 percent good idea and 95 percent execution." This idea that execution, implementation, and delivery are what success is about in the field of innovation seems to be a more shared view. I noted in a previous post on the Cox Review, which distinguished between creatively generating new ideas and using innovation process to exploit it's potential into real products and services.

Coder to Co-Founder: Entrepreneuring for Geeks by Marc Hedlund. This kind of training is necessary not only for programmers, but for all new media participants who are creating rich content. Also, in the session blurb he mentions intrapreneuring. This is what I do at George Mason. I don't have any contacts outside of the university. I just bounce between departments seeking to collaborate on different projects. I think this is a synergistic way of developing the next generation of doctoral students. They learn to work in a collaborative fashion, while professors get access to new technology skills and ideas.

When I went to his company's blog, Wheaties for your Wallet, to find out more about him, I noticed that he was attending SXSW. This seemed strange to me because I thought this was a music festival. Boy was I wrong.

The South by Southwest Interactive is kinda of a mashup of an O'Reilly conference and Sundance and Bonnaroo. Or at least that's what it seems like on first glance. Especially on the new media side, it might be a great place to interact with new people. Seems very cool and I plan to go sometime soon.

Dreamweaver Alternatives

Aptana is free and pretty robust, however it doesn't have one thing, wysiwyg editing. What I mean is you can't edit the page like a Word document, a very nice feature of DW. You can configure it to view your work in multiple browsers, but all editing is in code. The built-in FTP work very nice, maybe better than DW. The interface is confusing at first. I deleted most of the panels in the workspace. You can add them back as you get more comfortable.


SeaMonkey is an updated version of the old Netscape Suite. It offers wysiwyg editing, but the FTP features are very weak. It's upload only. Although you could use separate software for ftp'ing. It's not as nice a workflow. With every change to a page, means you have to upload a file in a separate program. The interface is easier than Aptana and it seems very stable.

KompoZer is the best of both worlds. It's built on the same codebase as SeaMonkey's web editor and the Nvu program, but it's much better than both. The Ftp features are faster and more stable than in Nvu. The KompoZer development group really just took over for Nvu community. It is for this reason that I would use this software for teaching any sort of basic web development.

An important selection criteria for me in evaluating free and open-source software (FOSS), is to read up on the development community's support of the project. Without their continual efforts, exposed bugs will never get fixed. In my field, I'm often evaluating the viability of software for students to learn in order to get work done. Taking this user-centered approach to product evaluation, I need to make sure that the interface is easy for a beginner to figure out, and that the necessary features are present. Buggy software is just not a good teaching situation, students get frustrated because they have not learned to discriminate errors of their own from errors of the software.

New Media Strategies' 'Online Analysts' Scour the Web

In the Washington Post today is an article about the emergence of online marketing companies. Spending their whole day interacting with new media, on the web, playing games, IM'ing, these companies work in these channels in order to both manage the public image of Hollywood clients as well as find opportunities to market new brands.

To me this is really a land grab/arbitrage opportunity. As old line marketing companies have to protect investments, they are slower to jump into media that carry greater risk. The same thing has been happening with advertising in Second Life. In these early days it's good to just field a team, although each day the field gets more crowded. Eventually the predators start showing up, and then it's a more balanced ecosystem. (See what I did there? I went from sports metaphor to ecology metaphor.)

What other opportunities beyond Hollywood is out there for new media analysis? What role does education and learning play? Helping an organization employ new media in meaningful ways for all stakeholders, like customers, clients, employees, shareholders, students, teachers, etc., has got to be something. What's the business model? Consulting, operations, sales, training?

Quizlet is a tool for learning vocabulary

Quizlet provides a robust way for teachers and students to learn vocabulary. It an interesting approach coming from the instructional design field. In that Andrew Sutherland has turned what I would call a teacher test-making tool into a student studying tool. He adds some nice Ajax gui-ness and social networking sharing to the mix. Bringing this software code to the web unlocks a lot of untapped energy through the network. Imagine a student taking a quiz 5 times, rather than once. Okay, this ruins the validity of the assessment instrument, but they learned it nonetheless.

I would love the ability to embed a quizlet into my blog, similar to YouTube.