Research from the US Department of Education suggests that students studying online tend to outperform those receiving face-to-face tuition; The Open University in the UK has topped 20 million downloads on iTunes U; and, worldwide, social media has overtaken pornography as the number one activity on the web.

However, recent statistics from the US show that the academy may be failing to capitalise on the potential offered by new technology.

Times Higher Education - Students 'let down' by the academic Luddites

I'm sure this trend isn't confined to the US. The article goes on to say that academics are short on time, and aren't able to commit the time required to learn about new technologies because it impacts upon their other scholarly activities.

But place-based education is likely to be less important in the future. Sooner or later, there will be a new generation of academics who won't have to take time out from other scholarly activities to learn about social media and technology in general. Will that be too late for some non-sandstone bricks and mortar higher education institutions? There will be other pressures of course, but the answer is, undoubtedly, yes.

My first post to Twitter was on 6 October, 2007.

Excel and Ruby

michaeltwofish

Goodness knows what I was doing with Ruby and Excel. I think it was something to do with trying to automatically process grades submitted by our African partners in the education project I was working on.

My first post to identi.ca was on 4 July, 2008, soon after it was publicly announced.

Hanging out on #laconica.

michaeltwofish

#laconica being the IRC channel for the software running identi.ca, since renamed to status.net.

I used Twitter for less than a year, and jumped ship because of ideology and downtime. After joining identi.ca and until recently I only used Twitter to support people doing Habari-related stuff. But recently there's been a critical mass of other interesting non-tech people who are on Twitter, so I've been posting more there, both directly when in conversation and indirectly through identi.ca.

The ideological reasons still exist, and I'd love to see both Twitter become more open and more federated microblogging, but at heart I'm a pragmatist. I think that means andyc would call me a sell out.

When I feel like I'm not making much progress with my PhD, I tell myself that everything I do is progress towards completion. Most of the time that motivates me to do something, anything, to move forward.¹

But if I keep making progress, why aren't I ever finished?

1. "Moving forward" will be one of those phrases that no-one can use without rolling their eyes. Thanks, Julia. ↩

In other news, when I finally do submit, I promise to actually try to write something that's, you know, interesting. At least to try.

Talking to my beloved last night, I said something along the lines that I'd never been excited by my thesis topic, and she pressed me. If that was the case, how did I end up choosing it? During the explanation I found that I'd raised my voice and became quite animated, and I realised that I might have rewritten history. I've previously written about some of the practical history of my candidature, but not the topical history. So how did I get here?

In the early noughties, I was doing a course in my masters called intelligent web systems, and doing a pretty bad job of it actually, mostly because I wasn't spending much time on it. That, and the fact that we could write our assignments in any language we liked, so I decided to start the night before it was due and do it in python, which I'd never used before. I digress. The final assessment was to write an essay of a couple of thousand words about anything that broadly fit into intelligent web systems. I was teaching at the time, so I was thinking about educational things, and so I chose to write about edutella, a p2p network for searching semantic web data with the aim of facilitating the exchange of educational resources.

In my final semester of the masters, I enrolled in a "dissertation", a one-semester course writing a few thousand words on a topic of my choice. I did the dissertation because I wanted to avoid having to enrol in the research masters program, preferring to try to go straight into the PhD, and needed to demonstrate that I could write. Not that I actually wanted to do a PhD, but the powers that be had made clear I had to do it if I wanted to keep my job. Still teaching and thinking about education, and in an attempt to make things as easy as possible for myself, I decided to continue on from my essay, looking at retrieval of educational resources.

The state of play was that, mostly, educational resources were stored in repositories. To retrieve them, systems would search human‑assigned descriptive metadata. That's pretty much still the case. I talked to some wise people in the school, and came to the conclusion that this library-style approach to retrieval could be improved using techniques drawn from the information retrieval community. For a start, I could extract text and search the primary resource, rather than secondary data.

That's where I got excited about things, but it's where I should have started to realise that doing a PhD wasn't a great idea for me. The dissertation ended up being about 5000 words, and I struggled. But I went ahead and blindly enrolled in the PhD anyway.

On the strength of my dissertation, and knowing the right people, I was seconded to RMIT's Teaching and Learning Portfolio, to do a scoping project aimed at helping improve the management and reuse of educational resources. During this time, along with Henric Beiers, I conducted a bunch of interviews, focus groups, and a survey. How did other universities manage resources? What are the barriers to reuse? How did educators want to find resources? This work would become a chunk of my thesis, and by that time I felt my path was pretty much set.

After three years part time, I decided to leave my job, go full time, and spend the next 18 months finishing my PhD. Six months in, working on applying IR methods to retrieval of resources from respositories, I realised I had no faith in the area. Millions and millions of dollars was being spent around the world trying to set up these repositories, and the top down approach just didn't seem to be working. I'm sure there are many, many people working on these projects who would vehemently disagree with me, but that's how I felt at the time. How had those educators said they wanted to find educational resources? They wanted to search with Google.

So I threw away six months' work and tried to regroup. I changed focus to filtering educational resources from search results returned by a regular search engine (Yahoo! because their API was easier to work with), changed to thinking more about learners in general rather than academics. The question of how such filtering systems should be evaluated became the next chunk of my thesis. The final part was the implementation of a simple filtering system, throwing a bunch of resource features at some machine learning classifiers and seeing what worked.

I'm now approaching the end of the road, I'm due to submit my thesis to the school in six weeks (I'm quivering with stress at the thought of how much work that's still left to do).

And after all that, it seems that at times I have been excited. But I sure as hell hate it now.

I've been serving this blog as HTML5 for a while now, but that was basically just a change doctype. I've now redesigned, with some layout inspiration from Daring Fireball, and I'm using the new HTML5 structural elements. My goal was to get rid of as much clutter as possible, both visually and in the HTML and CSS, and give myself a more enjoyable base from which to experiment.

If you notice anything broken or ugly, or you have any other feedback, please let me know.

Revelations that the federal government wants Australia's 400-odd internet service providers (ISPs) to log and retain customers' web browsing data, so law enforcement can access it during criminal cases, have sparked alarm in the industry.

Big brother wants all your bits and bytes

I find it completely mind boggling that Conroy can be mouthing off in parliament about "the single greatest breach in the history of privacy" and then be considering laws that would compel ISPs to hand over data without a court order.

Both our major parties are complete crap. It's very depressing.

Do please wait until I'm not using them any more, but I'd like to put it on public record that at that point, I'd like my organs to be given to those who can still use them.

Australia has an opt in organ donation system; people aren't organ donors unless they've actively agreed to be. I've made sure that my loved ones know that I'd like to donate my organs when I'm dead, but it can't hurt to shout it from the roof tops. Even if only a dozen or so people can hear me if I shout from here.

If you're in Australia, you can register to be an organ donor too.

... asking users to input their email address and password from a third-party site like GMail or Yahoo Mail is completely unacceptable

Adactio: Journal—The password anti-pattern

Jeremy Keith's password anti-pattern post came across my radar again recently. This was written almost 21 years ago in Internet time (2007), and it's still an issue today, even with the growth of OAuth as an alternative.

We should start a shame file. I've only just signed up for it, and it looks like it might be really useful, but the first entry is Dropbox.

3-D is a waste of a perfectly good dimension. Hollywood's current crazy stampede toward it is suicidal. It adds nothing essential to the moviegoing experience. For some, it is an annoying distraction. For others, it creates nausea and headaches. It is driven largely to sell expensive projection equipment and add a $5 to $7.50 surcharge on already expensive movie tickets. Its image is noticeably darker than standard 2-D. It is unsuitable for grown-up films of any seriousness. It limits the freedom of directors to make films as they choose. For moviegoers in the PG-13 and R ranges, it only rarely provides an experience worth paying a premium for.

Roger Ebert on 3D (emphasis mine)

I've only seen one 3D film in the modern era. Perhaps you can guess which one, especially if I tell you it was like Dances with wolves in space (I think my friend Cameron first said that).

I saw a few 3D films during 24 hour scifi fests at the wonderful Valhalla cinema, such as a Mothra film that I may or may not have fallen asleep in, and I felt then just as I felt after seeing Avatar; 3D is a gimmick that adds nothing to the actual film.

I'm sorry that film makers I respect, such as Tim Burton, have been sucked into the 3D hype, and I dread the coming wave of 3D productions and devices (3D television?? *shudder*).