Back from BathCamp
September 15th, 2008 Posted by: l.dewis
Everyone who I’m following since BathCamp this weekend seems to be tired. It was a really packed day on Saturday and many thanks to the organisers, especially Mike Ellis and jukesie for the beer bath.
One of the highlights for me was Brian Kelly’s talk on Web 2.0 – Just Do It? So refreshing to have someone stick a question mark on the end of that. Brian is an expert in using Web 2.0 in HE. He recognises that we need to move from advocacy to getting this stuff embedded within professional practice with the emphasis on the word ‘professional’.
Start-ups (like ice-skaters) make what they do look easy and that creates a misplaced envy in more staid workplaces such as universities. In my experience, innovators and early adopters in universities also tend to be anti-establishment, anti-marketing and anti-business (not all, but many). There is an increased likelihood that they take the ‘build it and they will come’ attitude (helped by the fact they haven’t remortgaged their house to build it in the first place so does it really matter if they don’t come?).
Start-ups may make it look easy (its all those beanbags and pizza) but the people working for them are working long hours (translate ‘beanbags’ to ‘bed’ and ‘pizza’ to ‘dinner at your desk’) and are incredibly good at what they do. They are often people who’ve learnt from mistakes made during the dot com boom and bust. In HE I still experience ‘throw it over the wall’ management and a ‘build it and they will come’ attitude with the emphasis on ‘Just Do It’ than ‘Do It Well’. So while I think ‘Just Do It’ has it’s [essential] time and place, I also want HE to grow up and do these things well, if not better than everyone else, given the huge resources available to it for innovation.
And with that said, now for some juggling.
Entry Filed under: #bathcamp08, Communities, Innovation, SocialLearn
4 Comments Add your own
1. Martin | September 15th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Now, I know you’re talking about me here Laura, but I want to put the other side. Universities are often very risk adverse, and so it is very easy to get caught up in the ‘let’s do lots of research before we do anything’, and in the meantime people do just get on with it.
I think the opposite might be true – the danger is we think too much about what we are doing. Start-ups work very hard, but often they don’t start out with a ton of market research, but instead they adapt and respond to what people do.
My personal experience of this was with T171, where the institution doubted anyone would study this way, and it didn’t really fit in with existing models. So, we went ahead and did it anyway, because we believed it was worth doing. And lo, we got 15,000 students and the university had to change to meet our needs.
What worries me is that now I wouldn’t do T171, because I have too much knowledge about the OU – I would see all the problems. There is a certain power in ignorance.
So while I think you are right to say that HE needs to take some elements seriously, I’m also concerned that it will take them too seriously and be all grown up about things – with all the paperwork, research, focus groups, committees, etc that that entails.
2. l.dewis | September 15th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Hi Martin,
I agree – there needs to be new way to do things. No part of my post suggests that projects should be held up in order to do a ‘ton of market research’ or says that paperwork, committees or research were ever the reasons behind a successful website. However articulating design problems, undertaking user analysis and developing a robust set of requirements for developers is critical in any web project I’ve been involved in and are what communications are built on top of. These things are neither old fashioned nor superfluous. I don’t think just because Web 2.0 came along and reduced the barriers to participation in the web that it also reduced the need to rely on tried and tested methods of deploying web projects. The things I’m suggesting don’t slow projects down or create paperwork – they actually help you move forward without making huge errors that will set you back or lead to failure.
I don’t say HEI’s should take this stuff seriously (perhaps because I know that the word ’serious’ will be made to sound a negative thing). I say HEI’s should seek to understand new ways of working, if they want to produce the kind of results that start-ups/ web businesses do. I actually think the OU has a headstart on many HEIs because of its expertise in educational technology, publishing but I am still constantly surprised by how often something that most web businesses would take for granted is dismissed as no/ low priority.
And neither am I dismissing the power of gut feeling or the need for perpetual beta development based on user feedback.
For developers their hobby is often the same thing as their work. This is particularly true of those working in niche areas like gaming – a gamer knows what another gamer wants intrinsically. Early adopters do have an instinct for what works and they act as the filter for what is really useful about a technology so it develops to the point at which it becomes useful to many more people. From what you say about T171 the same is probably true of academics when designing courses. They live their subject and they don’t need research to tell them what will work. I could talk to you about the power of gut feelings for days. But you can’t intrinsically understand a web audience that is everyone and anyone.
All I’m saying is that ‘Just Doing It’ has its limitations. It can work some of the time but not all of the time. And it’s all too often being used as an excuse not to answer a difficult question.
The trick is in making it look like you ‘Just Did It’.
3. Martin | September 15th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
I guess we’re coming at this from different experiences. Firstly, I ought to stress that I’m rather overplaying the JDI angle here – SocialLearn has been rather painstaking in its approach if anything.
While _you_ may know that saying we need to be serious about a project doesn’t mean all those things I listed, I know that the institutional translation is exactly all those things. When I was VLE Director we did it all very properly – stakeholder consultations, functional spec, competitor analysis, pedagogical review, etc. Maybe it needed to be that way for an enterprise system, but very soon it felt that the function of the project was to produce reports for committees.
My feeling is that this would be inappropriate for SocialLearn, and I feel part of my duty as Director is to protect the project from some of these institutional machinations.
But from your perspective I guess it seems that too many academic projects don’t break out beyond the ‘this is interesting in a research way’ level of interest.
I think OpenLearn is a good example of these different perspectives – it was marvellous in many ways, and a very serious attempt to deliver at scale. For me though I always felt it lacked a bit of that buzz, joie de vivre, excitement that an open content project could have had. So from my view, it needed a bit more ‘just do itness’.
So the trick is how to combine those two demands, the need for a serious, proper project and the freedom to allow the Hirsts of this world to do their stuff.
4. Laura | September 16th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
I wasn’t talking about SocialLearn or OpenLearn exclusively in my post but about where HEI’s are in their adoption of Web 2.0 technologies. However, SocialLearn is a good example of this – the JDI approach has been used to persuade senior management to fund a mainstream project. The argument has been won. It now needs to move past that – the team working on the project shouldn’t be buying into the JDI hype, they are the doers and each have an understanding of what’s needed in their own area of expertise. There is a dangerous dichotomy brewing that suggests if you don’t follow the JDI philiosophy, you are a laggard.
Combining the two demands you mention isn’t difficult. There’s a real opportunity for SocialLearn to show how the OU can take on a new approach to team building and rapid development. The focus needs to be external facing and not inward looking. Now is the time to move from Just Do It to the next stage – Make It Happen perhaps, to borrow a phrase from my days at the Beeb? I think this article and the link to Art Kleiner’s article (from 2000 but still stands the test of time) gives a great explanation of how business and technical people can work well together well.
http://bizvprog.blogspot.com/2008/06/hype-versus-craft.html
(I consider online communications a craft although some might assume it falls under ‘hype’ and I’m not a sales person – online communications and marketing are not the same thing).
The buzz, joie de vivre and excitement of a project comes from people who are enthused to be working on a project where they are enabled to do their jobs well and feel rewarded for their contribution. This didn’t happen on OpenLearn for many reasons, but partly because new ways of working weren’t introduced and the project didn’t fit with the old ways. Unfortunately the JDI approach actually causes problems in this environment rather than solves them. It’s great to move away from the institutional machinations, but they need to be replaced with something more considered than the ‘JDI’ mythology.
As you say, there has been a lot of painstaking work done on SocialLearn. It’s important we make a distinction between where a JDI approach helps and where it doesn’t – we shouldn’t apply the JDI salve to problems that need another solution and we shouldn’t take the JDI approach just because someone else (looks like they) did. It’ll be interesting working it out.
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