Tech Lunch

The Economist is running a series of online debates it is dubbing ‘Oxford 2.0’. The debates are based on the formal, Oxford University Union-style forum in which one side makes a proposition and the other side opposes. This week’s inaugural debate takes the proposition: “This house believes that the continuing introduction of new technologies and new media adds little to the quality of most education”.

A fascinating debate is in progress between those who argue that technology is transforming education and those that think technology has completely failed to deliver on its many promises. The proposer is Sir John Daniel, a man who has spent much of his working life at UNESCO trying to introduce technology into education across many countries. Although he says it saddens him to propose the motion he admits that there are very few examples of effective educational technology deployment.

Take part in the debates until 26th October at:
http://www.economist.com/debate/index.cfm?action=hall

On Tuesday the Conservative Party announced the results of a policy working group which has looked at education and other public services (entitled Restoring Pride in our Public Services). One of the proposals (no. 7) discusses the role of smaller schools and recommends investigating the use of ‘several small schools under one roof’, an idea that has been tried in a number of American States.

As luck would have it, I was at the Association of Learning Technologies’ annual conference (ALT-C 2007: beyond control) yesterday, and by the far the most interesting talk was the keynote given by Professor Dylan Wiliam, who made what must be one of the first public responses by a leading educationalist to these proposals.
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Today’s report on Personal Internet Security from the House of Lords Science and Technology committee makes a small reference to the issue of the ‘openness’ of Apple’s iPhone, which I discussed on this blog last month. The first section of chapter 4 looks at usability vs security and presents an argument, based on expert evidence given to the committee, that there is always a trade off between security and usability (flexibility).

The report argues that interoperability with lots of different third party hardware devices and software products has been the priority for leading operating systems like Windows until very recently. This is Microsoft’s view of the system as ‘complex eco-system’. The report then goes on to note, however, that, because of the increasing level of concern about security, there may be a move towards locking users in to the products and software of one company in order to improve and guarantee security.

This ties neatly in to Apple’s approach, which the report summarises as: “Microsoft might seek to maximise flexibility at the expense of possible insecurity, Apple would sometimes make [security] decisions on behalf of users even if that made it more difficult to download and run third party applications” (p.36). It then notes that Apple plan to make iPhone a closed platform on which it is not possible to execute any non-Apple applications. But, as far as I can make out from Apple’s press release, the iPhone will support third party Web 2.0 applications. Indeed, Apple argue in the release that this allows them to extend the capabilities of the phone, via third party solutions, without compromising the security.

However, I’m not convinced about this. If the House of Lords are investigating Internet-based security, I think it’s highly likely that these kinds of applications represent some of the security worries the committee is looking into.

Two recent reports from consultants KPMG make interesting reading if you are planning a quiet weekend in a garden chair or hammock. The first, Enterprise 2.0: fad or future, by Gary Matuszak, covers the emerging use of Web 2.0 social software in corporate environments. It argues that such software can be used to help tackle what it refers to as key modern management challenges: “knowledge sharing and management, problem solving, innovation and collaboration”. The report gives a number of interesting corporate examples of the use of Web 2.0 in these different areas. For example it details the use IBM has made of a series of internal wikis for project collaboration and a chat-room process in which thousands of employees participate, simultaneously, in “innovation jams” to debate new ideas.

The report is generally pretty up beat, arguing that Web 2.0 services could “fuel a burst of productivity, as e-mail and the Internet have already done.”

This contrasts neatly with the other KPMG report, The Digital Bubble, which argues that we are in the midst of a revolution driven by the digitization of content. Although this presents unprecedented opportunities, the report warns, darkly, of the great potential for a “digital bubble” not unlike the dot-com boom and bust of the early 2000s. KPMG argue that in the kinds of environment that currently prevail for many Web-related businesses (rapid growth and change, over-heated valuations, unproven business models etc.) there is a tendency for management to focus on growth and increasing market share at the expense of ensuring that “the operational strengths required to support this growth are properly in place”.

One thing the report doesn’t mention is the role that the ‘Network Effect’ played in the original boom and bust. This is an Economics concept that describes the increase in value, to the existing users of an interactive service (e.g. a telephone network), as more and more people start to use it. This increase in value is often used in business model calculations and is one of the big ideas driving the Web at the moment. However, it is not without problems. Without getting into the ins and outs of it, it turns out that recent work by two academics might show that the original formula used to calculate the Network Effect may have been badly understood. If you’re interested in this, I discuss it more in the section on the ‘big ideas behind Web 2.0’ in my report on Web 2.0, which was published in February. The reason I think this is important is because we need to understand where we’ve gone wrong in the past, and if the Network Effect was part of it, then it has to factored in to future business models.

We have been warned!

Wednesday was budget day. Thankfully lunch was not taxed, but one little-noticed item could cause serious debate amongst technology types.

Digital TV delivered by the FreeView system makes use of a portion of the radio spectrum. With the switchover from analogue to digital TV there is an opportunity to re-jig the way the radio spectrum is used and, in the process, release some spare capacity. This spare spectrum is known in technology circles as the ‘digital dividend’.

So why is this important? Well, buried on page 151 of the Budget Report, the Government notes that, through its agency Ofcom, it is consulting on a proposal that the “spectrum released by switchover should be auctioned on an open basis during 2008-9”.

Herein lies the rub. Note the word ‘open’ in the Budget report. The Government is suggesting that this ‘digital dividend’ could be auctioned off in a process similar to the radio spectrum auction that took place a few years ago, when the Government made billions auctioning spectrum to phone companies for 3G mobile phone capacity. Yet it is this ‘spare’ capacity that is partly needed if Freeview is going to be able to deliver High Definition TV as a free-to-view service.

Such an auction might end up with prices that no public sector broadcaster could compete with and therefore effectively freeze out Freeview from the next generation of spectrum capacity. This could be a problem for the millions of people, who, anticipating the great switchover, have invested in a nice, shiny, new HD-ready TV. If an open sell-off happens, there’s a good chance that they won’t be able to get HD TV pictures over free-to-view services.

I spent yesterday afternoon at the eBusiness Expo 2007 which was held on my home turf of Nottingham. Lunch was a buy-your-own sandwiches affair which I’m afraid doesn’t win any prizes for originality. The main talk of the afternoon was from Danny Meadows-Klue, from the Digital Training Academy, on how to use Web 2.0 technologies for marketing purposes. On the whole, the talk was a fairly reasonable trot through the different areas (social networking, RSS, podcasting, mash-ups etc).

There was one point, though, where Danny and I parted company. He doesn’t think Second Life is worth much attention and I’m afraid I have to disagree. If you look at what is likely to be the next step in the development of the Web it is in advanced, 3-D graphics. IBM are investing money in a project to take the visual ideas behind Second Life and transplant them to the Web and Tim Berners-Lee, speaking at last year’s WWW2006 conference, indicated that he thought advanced graphics were the next stage in the Web’s development. Second Life may only be a ‘dry-run’ for a more visually arresting Web, but if you’re interested in where the Web is going, then Second Life is currently the easiest way to explore the implications of 3-D at an early stage.