In Daphne Koller’s TED talk about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), she discusses what she believes are the pedagogical foundations of MOOCs. For her, and also restated on the Coursera website (the company she helped found), those foundations include the effectiveness of online learning, mastery learning, peer assessments and active learning.

Of course the evidence cited to support these foundations is scant and is quoted without giving any context to the research. MOOC critics also rarely produce any actual evidence when dismissing MOOCs as being pedagogically unsound or when stating that they offer a worse experience than face-to-face education on campus.

Given that my university (the University of Western Australia) was about to embark on hosting our own MOOCs and combine them with a flipped-classroom mode of teaching for our own students, a colleague (Martin Forsey) and I decided to examine the actual research evidence supporting (or not) the notion that MOOCs are based on sound pedagogical foundations. We published this in First Monday and what follows is a summary of our findings.

The MOOC fingerprint

The starting point for us was categorising the attributes that define a MOOC as they are presented on platforms such as edX, Coursera and Udacity. These were: online delivery of content, lectures formatted as short videos combined with formative quizzes; automated assessment and/or peer and self-assessment and an online forum for peer support and discussion. The pedagogical benefits of these characteristics of MOOCs translated into: the effectiveness of online learning, retrieval learning, mastery learning, enhanced learning through peer and self-assessment, enhanced attention and focus due to “chunking” content into small packages and finally peer assistance, or out-of-band learning.

Having drawn up this list of MOOC characteristics and their corresponding pedagogical effects, we reviewed the literature for empirical research to examine whether there was evidence to support any pedagogical benefits.

The Effectiveness of Online Learning

The most obvious characteristic of MOOCs is that they are delivered online. Reviewing the research, there is little evidence that online learning is any worse than face-to-face modes of teaching and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it may in fact be better for some of the reasons that we are about to cover. Of course, this is not the general perception amongst US faculty staff at least. In a recent survey, 66% of faculty staff believed that online outcomes where inferior to traditional modes of teaching. The underlying subtext of why people believe that online teaching is less effective has not been extensively examined but certainly one would assume that it is related to a fear of technology generally which includes a fear of being replaced by that technology.

Retrieval Learning

MOOCs emphasise modes of learning that include retrieval learning and mastery learning. Retrieval learning acts to enhance long-term memory of facts by prompting recall of information from short-term memory. Each time this happens, it serves to improve overall learning as connections are made and strengthened each time there is a retrieval of information. In MOOCs, retrieval learning is enhanced through the practice of using frequent formative quizzes. Again there is evidence from multiple sources to support the notion that the use of tests and quizzes enhances learning over simply allowing students to listen or read content.

Mastery Learning

In regard to the benefits of mastery learning, this has a long history within education dating back to Bloom’s coining of the term in 1968. The basic premise is fundamental to the benefits of a site such as Salman Khan’s Khan Academy. Students are allowed to progress at their own pace until they achieve mastery of a particular topic and this may involve revisiting concepts that the topic is reliant on. Mastery learning is also enhanced by one-on-one tutorial style teaching and there have been arguments made that watching videos that can be controlled by the student gets closer to that mode of teaching than sitting in a lecture theatre.

Although there is evidence for the principle of mastery learning, there isn’t any evidence that MOOCs as they are currently implemented actually support this mode of learning. For the most part, MOOCs are being presented in the traditional timeline of different topics each week and are not especially structured to reinforce mastery learning compared with the Khan Academy for example.

Peer and Self-Assessment

When it comes to peer and self-assessment, there is general agreement that it is an effective means of marking. Assignments that are peer or self-assessed agree closely to those marked by instructors and tutors.

The evidence for this process having a learning benefit however is equivocal. Anecdotally, one would assume that giving students another task that engages them with the content and presents model answers would only serve to solidify concepts and knowledge. It is likely however that students do this anyway when instructors return marked work and hand out a marking template.

Short Videos

Stanford University lecturer Peter Norvig claimed that his decision to use short videos in MOOCs was inspired by the approach taken by the Khan Academy in keeping video length to 10 minutes or less. The argument was made that 10-15 minutes fits into the optimal time that students can maintain attention. However, on examination, the research that supports this assertion is particularly week. Also, Salman Khan has explained that the reason his videos are 10 minutes or less was because this was a limit imposed by YouTube when he first started uploading and not because of any pedagogical insight. There may be a benefit to short format videos, however more research will be necessary to provide evidence to support that notion.

Online Forums and Peer Support

Finally, there is the importance of the online forum to learning. There is little evidence to suggest that online forum discussions necessarily promotes learning in its own right. This is actually also the case for face-to-face discussions as well. What forums do achieve is that they facilitate the mechanics of a course by providing a means of unblocking students who are struggling either with content or some other aspect of the course. Online forums also can provide a knowledge base which accumulates over time. They are not currently being used in this fashion however and so this is something that MOOC providers could review in terms of the functionality offered by their discussion forums.

It is possible that when a course is constructed in a way to support group collaboration, online forums provide a mechanism for new knowledge to be created. This is the tenant of so-called “connectivist” style MOOCs, however again this awaits research to support this assertion.

So, are MOOCs an effective way to learn?

Overall, the evidence is that there is no reason to believe that MOOCs provide any less a valid learning experience than face-to-face courses. In many ways, they are simply a restatement of online learning environments which are optimised for large class sizes and modes of learning suited to todays digital milieu. When used for students enrolled in a university degree, they are usually combined with on-campus learning opportunities in a “flipped-classroom” style of presentation which brings the advantages of both environments.

What is exciting about the MOOC environment is that it will provide a rich opportunity to gather data that will tell us what does and doesn’t work and how students learn most effectively in as engaging an environment as can be provided. This will almost certainly mean that the current MOOC format will evolve rapidly over time as it is driven by this research supported by real data.

The review paper on which this article is based is available on First Monday

Although perhaps not willing to admit to it, many people are guilty of having gone into a shop and used their phone to check if a prospective purchase was available more cheaply elsewhere, including online. Some shoppers are even using bricks-and-mortar stores as a showroom for an online purchase, not necessarily tied to that particular business. Smartphones have made this whole process “point-and-click” by enabling shoppers to scan a bar-code to look up a product’s details and then return a price comparison tailored to their location. Not surprisingly, with few exceptions, the retail industry in Australia has reacted to this phenomenon by either pretending it doesn’t exist or by trying defensive strategies like charging fees to shoppers who come into a shop to browse.

Retailers Gain from Technology Too

The salad days of being able to charge the uninformed public a premium over your competitors are very nearly over. But the retail future is not all gloom. The use of smartphones in stores offers businesses an opportunity to interact with customers in a range of ways that go beyond simply putting informed salespersons in their way. Indeed, a recent report has highlighted how shoppers are now more likely to rely on their phones for information than talk to a sales representative in person. This is again not surprising as another common bugbear of shopping is the experience of store assistants giving you information about a product that they clearly aren’t that familiar with.

Euromonitor International Consumer Survey 2012

In fact, according to Nielsen, 80% of US smartphone owners have used their phone for “shopping-related” activities. The most frequent activity was finding the location of a store and checking the price of a product, followed by researching items and reading reviews.

Social Shopping

The Nielsen report revealed another aspect of the way we shop and that is that we haven’t as yet moved wholesale to a “social mode” of shopping. Only a small percentage of shoppers actually write a review about their purchases or use social media to comment on their purchase. Other reports have highlighted that websites and other more “traditional” forms of information are still used more frequently than social media when making decisions about what to buy. This does vary however with the type of product being purchased.

Virtual Stores

There are companies that are taking full advantage of the flexibility offered by the mobile phone by creating virtual stores. Tesco Homeplus created 20 virtual stores in bus shelters in South Korea where shoppers could order their groceries by scanning QR codes (a square type of barcode) associated with a picture of the product sitting on a virtual shelf.

http://www.scanlife.com/blog/2012/03/virtual-shops-from-experiment-to-fruition/

PayPal did the same thing in 15 Singapore subway stations to allow commuters to buy Valentines gifts. In Australia, Woolworths launched virtual stores at train stations in Sydney and Melboune earlier this year.

Hybrid Approaches

Woolworths is innovating in another area by trialling free WiFi in their stores. For Woolworths and other companies that have built an effective onlin strategy, it doesn’t matter whether shoppers in a bricks-and-mortar supermarket buy from the store or online and making it as easy as possible for the shopper is an effective strategy of making sure that purchase stays with your business.

This is an approach also taken by Apple who actively use their retail city showrooms as a conduit to their online store.

The added benefit of this for the retailer of course is all of the information that can be gleaned from what the shoppers did whilst attached to the wireless network.

Retail Tech: Who Wins?

The use of mobile technology when shopping will become more pervasive in the near future as it is another example of a technology use that is being driven by the consumer that will force even the slowest of businesses to respond. Retailers themselves will be able to use information about competitor’s pricing to become smarter about how they bring more value to their customers. It really shouldn’t be up to a customer to point out to a shop owner that they are charging twice the price of their next-door neighbour for the same product.

If there was ever any confirmation needed that the tipping point of the PC’s dominance as a computing platform has been reached, the IDC has just provided it with their latest report on PC shipments in the first quarter 2013. Worldwide PC shipments were down a massive 13.9% from the same period last year.

Top 5 Vendors, Worldwide PC Shipments, First Quarter 2013 (Preliminary) (Units Shipments are in thousands) (Source: IDC)

The IDC analysts are pinning the blame for the drop on the decimation of the mini Notebook or Netbook sales and the shift in consumer and corporate spending on phones and tablets rather than PCs. The boost expected from Windows 8 not only never materialised but it seems has had the opposite effect. Consumers have stayed away in droves from the new operating system, put off by the fact that it is a very expensive way of turning a PC into a tablet, when you can buy a cheaper tablet instead.

Apple was not immune from the drop in PC sales, with their shipments declining worldwide and by 7.5% in the US. Apple however partly makes up for its loss in PC sales with sales of the iPad. Not so for the others, including Microsoft who has seen lackluster sales of its hardware in addition to its latest Windows operating system. The reaction to Microsoft’s role in the end of days for the PC market has been a downgrade of its shares from Neutral to Sell by Goldman Sachs and to Neutral by Nomura.

What is interesting is that analysts see any future at all for Microsoft. The world of computing is changing so rapidly and what is absolutely clear is that Microsoft is singularly incapable of changing with it. The decline in the desktop is in full swing and the days of Windows as the dominant operating system are over. The many variants of Linux have taken over because it is significantly cheaper and now an equally functional operating system as Windows for everything from embedded devices to servers.

Microsoft’s delay in releasing a version of Office for platforms like Android and iOS has meant that people have found alternatives and discovered that they really could get along without the 90% of the features they never used.

In the server software market, again developers and IT departments have been hit with huge (and rapidly rising) costs using Microsoft database and web software and again have discovered cheaper and sometimes free alternatives. That is if they haven’t moved away from supporting their own infrastructure and taken up cloud-based services anyway.

The times have now indeed become mobile, and developers are more interested in building apps for iPhones and Android than coding web sites on a Microsoft platform. Open source web development environments like Python and Ruby are becoming more accepted in even the largest enterprises and so Microsoft will find it increasingly difficult to compete with “Free”.

Eric Schmidt summed up the new technological zeitgeist by saying that the dominant “Gang of Four” companies shaping technology now had shifted from the Microsoft, Intel, Cisco and Dell who reigned from the 1990s to Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook today. I personally would include Samsung and am ambivalent about Facebook as ultimately the world would hardly notice its passing as something else (even Google+), took its place.

The ultimate disappearance of the PC will be noticed in the home first and will be quite rapidly replaced by tablets, phones and smart devices, especially the smart TV. The workplace will follow although docking stations with screens and external keyboards may allow workers to plug in their mobile devices to allow for more sustained computer-based work. In all of this though it is hard to see a place for many of the current PC manufacturers in their current forms, nor of their former ringleader, Microsoft.

Every generation laments their soon-to-be replacement for abandoning the prevailing culture and adapting it to create their own. And so it is with the current crop of post-middle-agers who perceive teenagers to have lost all ability to engage in conversations longer than sms-length and have meaningful relationships that are not solely based on “likes”.

This particular technological crisis facing teens has been heralded by academic Sherry Turkle. Once a cyber-utopian, her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other is rallying her generation to the dangers of technology that is serving to isolate us from each other and threatens to destroy our children’s ability to form any sort of meaningful relationship.

This refrain has been taken up by the [media[(http://www.forbes.com/sites/susantardanico/2012/04/30/is-social-media-sabotaging-real-communication/) with a vengeance and reiterated at every opportunity. World-wide, teens can no longer communicate in a meaningful way, have lost the art of conversation and prefer to text than talk. The damage that texting in particular has done extends to teenagers now being unable to write without using text abbreviations.

Nobody would deny that texting in particular has become all pervasive. US teens between the ages of 12 and 17 will send on average 60 texts a day. However, the mythology and generalisations that have grown up around texting doesn’t bear much scrutiny.

Research has shown that although teens express a preference in using messaging in certain situations over phone or face-to-face conversation, they do so because it is faster, asynchronous, available at non-traditional times, more effective and in some cases less expensive (where voice calls on mobiles are more expensive than text messages). Young people understood however that “in-depth and important” conversations should be offline and face-to-face.

Other research has shown that contrary to popular belief, teens use of “textish (words like gr8 or cul8r)” or abbreviations is relatively limited with 60 – 80% of texts sent using no abbreviation or “textish”. In addition, researchers showed that there was no difference in standard literacy scores between those teens that used textish and those that didn’t. Teens understood the difference and context where the informal language of textish was appropriate and where it wasn’t.

It is easy to assume in all of this, that communication between teens, and all other age groups for that matter, was perfect before the advent of technology. The fact that we notice more people seemingly more actively engaged with their phones than with their companions ignores the fact that in the past, those same people may have been sitting together in silence, or exchanging small-talk to fill that silence. People who text may rate higher on social anxiety and loneliness than people who prefer to use their phones to talk, but it is not as if they would have conversed with anyone if texting was not available.

Sherry Turkle is probably right in decrying the typical modern meeting where everyone is sitting doing their email or checking Facebook rather than listening to whoever is speaking. The point about this however is not that somehow technology brought this state of affairs about, but rather that it highlights the pointlessness of those meeting in which the participants feel no need to engage. And yes, people sitting next to each other may instant message rather than talk but that may actually serve to increase efficiency and reduce disrupting somebody’s train of thought for something that could wait.

Technological change is always met with anxiety that it will somehow detract from our humanity. From 19th century textile workers fearing losing their jobs to low-skilled labourers aided by technology to workers today fearing the same, the transformative nature of technology has always been seen as a panacea by some and an anthropogenic plague by others. As always with these things, the truth lies somewhere in between.

It seems that Facebook is coming to terms with the fact that teenagers are fickle and are unlikely to stay interested in anything for long – even Facebook. In their annual report, Facebook admitted that“some of our users, particularly our younger users, are aware of and actively engaging with other products and services similar to, or as a substitute for, Facebook.”. This, together with anecdotes of teenagers being questioned about their attitude to Facebook, has led the media at least to speculate that teenagers are tossing both their iPhones and social networks into the same category as everything else their parents are involved with.

Facebook at least, has apparently become uncool and boring.

The fact that specific social networks should become passe is hardly surprising. Social network sites like MySpace are a testament to how quickly a network can be abandoned and forgotten. There are also an ever increasing number of sites and mobile applications that allow sharing, leading to a corresponding decrease in time spent on any one platform. At the same time, social networks like Facebook and Twitter are trying to find ways of making money which has led to an increase in the amount of content that is pure advertising masquerading as shared content. This has recently been made worse with the announcement) by Facebook of a revamped news feed that will make the page look more like a personalised newspaper or magazine.

For teens at least, social networking sites have never been the primary means of communication. In a Pew Internet study in 2012, 63% of teens used text message to communicate with others on a daily basis compared to only 29% who used social networks to communicate daily with others. 37% of teens surveyed had participated in video chats on platforms like Skype, Google+ and iChat. In other words, teens will employ a range of modes of communication with their friends and will be driven by what peers are doing collectively above any sense of loyalty to a brand. The recent phenomenon of the popularity of photo sharing network, SnapChat is an example of this. Sharing photos that only exist for few seconds before disappearing supports a novel way of using images to communicate that is different to posting photos to Facebook or Instagram. Teens will use SnapChat in preference to the same feature hosted on Facebook.

Ultimately, for a group of teens to change social networks altogether would just be a matter of a collective decision (ironically coordinated on that network) and it could happen overnight.

Social Networks of the Future

In a way, for social networks to survive, they need to be all things to all people and provide a range of communication and sharing options. At the moment, users of social network sites are all treated as being uniform. Even our sharing options usually default to treating everyone on the network as a single group, even though connections will consist of friends, family, acquaintances, work colleagues and strangers. These groups are then a mix of different genders and ages. Although some networks allow a manual sorting of people into categories, very few people would do this and so sharing things that are relevant to even a small number of connected friends is made that much harder. Given that it is a small percentage of people produce the majority of the content and activity on social networks like Facebook, finding relevant and interesting things in a news feed or stream is a challenge.

Social network sites are trying to solve this challenge for advertisers by analysing audiences and deciding what to show to any given individual. This technology is likely to improve over the next 5 – 10 years to the point where relevance is assessed not only by your profile and interests but your actual needs. For normal users, the technology would allow them to have content selected for them and sharing tailored to people who would actually want to see the content. So teenagers posting pictures of drunken parties would automatically hide this content from family – especially parents.

A Personal Data Cloud

Of course, to get the level of sophistication in social networks making these decisions or even suggestions on our behalf, we would have to agree to provide a great deal of private information. This has often been a red flag to privacy advocates who see the benefits being far outweighed by the risks. There is a way around this however where individuals set up a private “personal data cloud” to store all of the information about themselves provided by social networks, apps and websites that they had interacted with. When a software system wants to decide what to do in terms of a person’s social connections, they could then just ask the user’s “personal data cloud” to give them suggestions without revealing anything about the information held in that cloud.

Social networks are likely to remain for the foreseeable future as part of the way in which we interact with others on the Internet. The degree of their relevance however will depend on how sophisticated they can become in filtering content that we consume and send. The technical challenges posed by this is the easy part. It is solving the privacy issue that will be the biggest challenge. This will have to start with giving individuals complete control over that data and when and how it is accessed.

It has been estimated that the average person living in a city today will be exposed to about 5000 ads a day. Of course, we are oblivious to the majority of these, but like SPAM, a small percentage of ads will be seen, and an even smaller percentage will result in a consumer taking some sort of action. When it comes to ads provided by Facebook and Google, the percentages of people noticing an ad and then clicking on it, are tiny. The average click through rate (CTR) of Facebook ads in the US) is 0.051%.

Of course, what actually happens when the user clicks on the ad is the big question and this is where Facebook and Google diverge in that the audience both advertising platforms target, and the outcomes they are trying to achieve, “may” be different. The emphasis here is that although Google and Facebook advertising is similar in some ways, it differs markedly when it comes to ads driven off search. With Google, ads have a higher likelihood of being shown when someone is actively looking for something that might be related. It makes sense to show someone ads for shoes if that is what they have just searched for. On Facebook, ads are more of the billboard variety, they are simply there as you interact with your news feed. Because there is no intention when the ads are presented, users are far less likely to click on the ad and even if they do, to act on the site they arrive at.

Understandably, both Google and Facebook concentrate on their end goal which is to get people to click on an ad so that they can charge for it. It doesn’t really matter to them what happens after that. In order to support this financial model, Google and Facebook have dashboards that provide detailed information and graphs of a range of measures. Facebook couches this in terms of “reach” and “social reach” for example. Reach refers to the number of people who “saw” the ad. Social reach refers to the number of people who saw the ad after it had been liked by someone. At the end of the day, these are fairly meaningless numbers but they fill out the page that would just consist of the amount of money you have paid for each “click” or “like” (anything from $1 to $10+ per click or like).

Facebook’s advertising has been likened to a form of Ponzi scheme. Although this is probably a little harsh, the sentiment is that there will be a never-ending supply of people who want to try to advertise on the platform, most of whom won’t end up becoming repeat customers for lack of measurable benefits.

For Facebook of course, advertising is the only way they can currently make money and they face a significant challenge in growing that business. Facebook’s Graph Search, if it takes off, would provide a possible means of emulating the functionality of Google’s targeted ads, although in a more limited way. Even here though, Facebook is going to struggle.

What Facebook has done is to try and provide advertisers with a better experience through its recent purchase of Atlas Solutions, an advertising platform previously owned by Microsoft. Interestingly, the software was part of a $6.3 billion purchase by Microsoft of advertising company aQuantive in 2007 when Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was trying to make Microsoft more like Google. Now that Microsoft has decided to make itself more like Apple, it sees no value in the advertising market which is actually quite sensible given its massive losses in that sector.

Facebook is hoping that Atlas Solutions will provide more data for advertisers to help justify their spend. In a world where we are increasingly de-tuned to most of what is presented to us on the web and on our phones, this may prove an impossible task.

In a departure from the usual hype that surrounds product announcements these days, Google last week announced in an almost understated fashion, its first foray into manufacturing laptops. Despite the lack of fanfare, Google’s Chromebook Pixel is actually quite a remarkable device and will certainly have Microsoft and Apple considering carefully the consequences of Google’s move into this area.

The most notable features of the Pixel are a high resolution and touch-enabled screen, built in 4G connectivity, and the choice of its operating system, Google’s Chrome OS. This is not the first bit of hardware that Google has built, but unlike the Nexus range of phones and tablets which Google developed in collaboration with other manufacturers, with the Pixel, Google has chosen to go it alone.

The use of Chrome OS continues Google’s support for a dual approach to its operating systems and its continued commitment to the cloud-based system. Chrome OS received a recent boost with HP’s release of the Pavillion 14 Chromebook. HP joined Lenovo, Samsung and Acer in supporting this platform. Chrome OS is built around the Chrome browser. There is no local storage on the computer with everything being stored on the Internet. In fact, with the Pixel, Google is providing 1TB of storage online for 3 years.

The advantages of Chrome OS are that the system is simple to operate, loads very quickly, is secure and is simple to update. It is likely also that it will be more secure than Mac OS X and Windows, although as Apple Mac users are now discovering, once malware writers target a platform, nothing is really that secure.

In some ways the Pixel is not that radical a laptop. Its use of USB 2 ports and Bluetooth 3 seems outdated as the newer versions of these standards are becoming standard. However, this should not lead anyone to underestimate the impact this laptop will have on the tech marketplace.

Like Microsoft, Google is increasingly turning to manufacturing its own hardware alongside partner organisations but unlike Microsoft, seems to be doing so comfortably. The devices that both Microsoft and Google are producing are showing a level of innovation that is highlighting Apple’s general lack in this area in recent times. Apple is now lagging both Microsoft and Google in not supporting touch screen laptops. Its advances in equipping laptops with high resolution displays is now passé. Google’s Pixel supports a higher pixel resolution screen than the retina displays in Apple’s Macbook Pros.

The other likely impact of the release of the Pixel is likely to be felt by Microsoft who is still struggling to convince people of the need to upgrade to Windows 8. Google’s Chrome OS provides in many ways the ideal corporate computing platform. As more and more enterprise application become web-enabled and companies increasingly move to the cloud, Google’s OS is really the true definition of a cloud OS, ideally suited to that environment. Increasingly, Google is becoming a credible alternative to Microsoft in the corporate computing world.

If Google does face a challenge with the Pixel, it is in sorting out its supply issues. Its latest Nexus phones and tablets are still in short supply. In Australia, the Nexus 4 phone appeared briefly for sale on the Harvey Norman online store and is slated to ship in mid-march from Google’s own store. Chromebooks are next to impossible to source with Samsung’s Chromebook on backorder. Of course, if Google goes ahead with its rumoured plan to open retail stores, there may be a location where the public could actually see the devices that are impossible to buy.

This is where Apple does excel over both Google and Microsoft when it comes to hardware. Not only can it create a demand for its devices, but it can rapidly supply those devices into the hands of the public. Perhaps however, this will eventually play in Google’s favour. Apple’s current ubiquity is working against it in creating an exclusive brand. Everyone has a Mac and an iPhone. If you really want to stand out from the crowd, getting ahold of a Google Chromebook Pixel would be the best way to start.

Watching journalists and analysts discuss the rumoured impending release of another gadget from Apple feels very much like watching Samuel Beckett’s play “Waiting for Godot” except of course that it isn’t usually as entertaining or as thought-provoking. For most of 2012 we were inundated with stories about how Apple would release a TV (including, I am ashamed to admit, me – but hey, that was back in 2011). When the TV failed to materialise and even the slowest of journalists realised that every ounce of interest had been wrung out of this particular possibility, the world switched its attention to the possibility that Apple might release a watch.

The Apple iWatch rumours, made news have gathered steam this year. Hardly a day goes by without a story appearing, wrapped around a new piece of evidence about the iWatch’s imminent announcement. Bloomberg reported recently that Apple had a team of 100 people working on the watch. This was then echoed in literally dozens of other articles, superimposed on another rumour from the New York Times saying that the watch would be made using curved glass.

Of course, to complete the picture, no story about the iWatch was complete without the completely banal comparisons of the iWatch with the clever watches of characters like Dick Tracy, Inspector Gadget and James Bond.

Whilst it is possible that Apple may be about to release a watch, or even a TV, I somehow doubt it. But even if they do, I am not convinced there is that much of a market for these devices.

Overall, the watch market is said to be heading for $47 billion by 2017. This is mainly driven by the luxury end of the market where watches cost between $1000 and $5000. The point about these watches however is that they are essentially a blend of jewellery, high craftsmanship and status. The people that buy a Audemars Piguet Royal Oak watch in 18-carat pink gold, are simply not going to buy something that makes them look like a pocket-protector wearing engineer.

At the other end of the market, there is already a “smart watch” on the market called the “Pebble” that retails for $150 US. This watch can communicate with an iPhone or Android smartphone and show when your phone is ringing or when a text message has arrived. It uses a black and white ePaper display and whilst it is functional and not unattractive, it would be stretch to describe it as anything other than plain.

Getting to a watch that actually does function like a phone and has a colour display is the “i’m Watch”. This watch is much more functional and has a better display than the Pebble. However, it is more expensive, costing between $369 and $19,000 but more importantly, it weighs a massive 90 – 170g (the 170g is for the version of the watch in white gold with diamonds). By comparison, the Apple iPhone 5 weighs 112 g. So this watch is somewhat similar to wearing an iPhone on your wrist.

It is possible that Apple, with all of its engineering capability will be able to produce a device that is as light as the iPod Nano and does more than tell the time and play music. The difficulty they face is that more components and functionality means more weight and less battery life. So unless the device is intended to double-up as a form of weight training aid, it is unlikely to be comfortable to wear. The trade off between form and function with a watch will also have an impact on whether consumers see the device as being truly useful. It will never replace a phone and so the question is, how does it usefully enhance the phone that you are already carrying around?

The other point is that Apple’s previous watch-like device, the iPod Nano combined with a watch strap , was not that popular (as a watch). I wore one for most of 2012 and although I would get positive comments and surprise from people discovering that my watch was an iPod, I never met anyone else with one. This included several thousand Apple devotees at the Apple developer conference in San Francisco. Apple’s decision to change the form factor of the iPod Nano this year really confirmed that the ability to turn it into a watch was not seen as being that important to them.

Wearable computing will come of age and we will be wearing sensors and other devices embedded into our clothing and jewellery. However, I think it will only really be accepted when the technology is invisible and doesn’t scream out “Geek”,

Everything on the Internet is driven by clicks. It is how the value of things on the Internet are measured. The success of a site or an article on a site is judged primarily by how many clicks it got (there are other measures but we will return to that later). Advertising on Google and Facebook costs advertisers money only when someone clicks on an ad. In Facebook’s case you can pay for “Likes” and get a measure of how many Likes you are getting for clicks.

Even on The Conversation, authors are given feedback on their articles by how many “Readers” they have for an article. The graph below is my reader counts over the past couple of years.

There are a number of problems with this however that may seem obvious but are often ignored in the use, and abuse, of click counts. The first is that clicks are not necessarily an indication of whether someone spent any significant time on a page or read an article. In fact, they are a poor measure of that. Google provides a free service called Google Analytics that is able to provide detailed analysis of visitors to a web site and give additional measures that tell us more about what someone did after they clicked on a page.

Of the measures, for someone who is interested in a single page, or article, the average visit duration is the important measure. This tells you whether someone has just clicked on the link, found out the article wasn’t about sex and then “bounced” straight out. If you add terms like sex or even inflammatory comments into a title, you are likely to see high click counts with people not stopping to see what the article or page was about. Google provides even more detail about “Engagement” by telling you what percentage of people spent less than 10 seconds, less than 30 second, less than 60, etc.

The picture below is of a site I recently set up and the results of a mail-out we did to advertise the site https://www.class2go.uwa.edu.au. You can see that most of the traffic came from Perth where the email was sent to and also how long the visitors spent on the site. When you look at the Engagement you can see a distribution of pageviews and how long each of these pageviews was for.

The problem with click counts as I have alluded to is that it doesn’t give the whole picture. It is easy to misinterpret that as being representative of having something that people have valued. The Conversation also provides data on how many times people shared a page or article which does give another measure of the level of engagement with the content but this is also not perfect. This is because, all of this leads to the temptation of skewing content to something that appeals to a large audience. Writers of tabloid journalism know this well and it is tempting when being measured by click counts to fall into this trap. What sells? Sex. So if you want to increase your click count, write about sex or put sex into the title or allude to it.

It is not surprising that sex sells on the Internet. Around 30% of Internet traffic is related to pornography. I would argue however that given there is already so much of it, we really don’t need any more.

Even if it does get your click motor running.

If you talk about Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs to academics, or even if you read articles written around the subject, one question, actually a statement and a question, will inevitably come up: “Yes, but you can’t make any money from MOOCs so where is the business model?”. This is sometimes paraphrased as “Why would we give away what we do for free? Where is the business model?”. The first relates to the likely longevity of companies like Coursera and Udacity. The second to the question of the participation of universities in producing content. These issues are often conflated into a general view that the MOOC phenomenon is really a passing fad and if everyone holds out long enough, it will go away.

But the recent past is littered with industries that thought this when their turn came to be disrupted by both the Internet and the concept of “Free”.

Take the CEO of music company HMV who said:

“Downloadable music is just a fad and people will always want the atmosphere and experience of a music store rather than online shopping.”

or HBO Co-President Eric Kessler who said:

“the move away from traditional television to an internet-based model is just a fad that will pass – a “temporary phenomenon” tied to the down economy”

Of course there are more examples like this. All from people who believed that somehow what they did was special and unique and anything that didn’t offer the full experience would never be as good and would be rejected as a “passing fad”.

What is overlooked with the industries that have been disrupted by the Internet and Free is that they were already ailing. The battles to modernise the way newspapers were produced preceded the Internet and were being fought out in the late 80’s in Wapping, UK.

And so it is with Higher Education, with academic Clay Shirky who has argued that MOOCs are an answer to a higher education system that is already failing in the US.

But let’s come back to the question of the business model of MOOCs for universities and the question of giving away something for Free. Chris Anderson, in his book “Free: How Today’s Smartest Businesses Profit by Giving Something for Nothing” deals with the subject of the many companies and industries that have created businesses around the concept of giving something away for Free. Again, this pre-dates the Internet, but it is also something that universities, in particular research universities have been doing for some time.

Research rarely pays for itself, even with government funding and so at most universities, it is subsidised by teaching. Salaries of academics working on grants are rarely paid for. The university that they work for makes an “in-kind” contribution towards the research. Some of this is recouped from extra funding from the Government (in Australia at least) but it never covers the full cost. Academics go further, the research is normally published in journals who do not pay the academics for their work. Beyond making the work available in an officially recognised capacity, they do nothing to promote that work but they profit from it. Again, the universities have given away something for Free. And finally, the research itself is normally contributed into the public domain where anyone can profit from it. Rarely does the university that donated it do so.

So why have universities engaged in a practice for hundreds of years that effectively contributes knowledge to the world using a business model that has consistently made a loss and in most cases, gives away its products for Free?

Because that is what universities are there for. They are there to create and contribute knowledge to society and to use that knowledge to enhance the teaching of students, not necessarily just those at their own institutions.

However, and in line with Chris Anderson’s arguments about the power of Free, the research that universities have done has had a side effect. It has been used to establish reputation which in turn has influenced the choice of students wanting to come and study at those institutions. This has been accentuated in recent years with the advent of university rankings such as the Shanghai Jiao Tong Academic Ranking of World Universities which is based on the research performance of universities world-wide.

So universities enjoy a virtuous circle. They give away some things for Free that encourages students to come and pay money to be educated that in turn provides money to do more research.

For the universities that are providing MOOCs, there is no question that it has been a huge benefit to their reputation on a scale that advertisers and their public affairs and marketing offices could only dream about. MOOCs have reached an audience of millions of students, many of whom have now experienced something of the learning experience of the institutions that offer these courses. It has enhanced the brands of universities who are now seen as being progressive and altruistic, turning the universities and academics into household names. Achieving this through traditional advertising campaigns would cost substantially more than the relatively trivial costs of putting on MOOCs.

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald suggests that Telstra plans to start a trial to shape Internet traffic during peak periods.

This has been interpreted as including the possibility of slowing down traffic from peer-to-peer services that are used for the most part to illegally download video and music. Of course, peer-to-peer or BitTorrent downloads are used for legitimate purposes and opponents to ISPs shaping Internet usage have been quick to point this out. There is also an assumption that power users, who are responsible for 80% of all broadband usage are also the ones using BitTorrent and that is not necessarily the case.

The problem for Telstra and other ISPs is that Internet traffic growth is outpacing the ability of networks to carry it. More importantly has been the thorny problem of how to guarantee fair access to traffic and preventing a small number of users from dominating bandwidth. This has been at the heart of the debate around network neutrality where supporters have argued that all traffic should be treated equally and Internet providers should be prevented from discriminating users by differential charging or filtering content.

Between 2011 and 2016, global Internet traffic is expected to increase 4 times with the increased use of video and file sharing being the main drivers of that increase. Countries like Australia are investing in infrastructure, as in the NBN, to support this increase in traffic but we still face the issue of limited resources being available from our increasing use of wireless networks.

The issue with Telstra’s plans are that people will simply switch from using BitTorrent to using direct downloads of content. As fast as Telstra tries to catch up with people’s usage of the networks, users will change faster to stay at least one step ahead.

The other thing to note is that ISPs are probably already shaping some BitTorrent traffic. A study by Measurement Lab showed that many ISPs are using a technique called Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) to throttle BitTorrent traffic. This includes Telstra, iiNet and other mainstream providers. Tools are available to check if your ISP is currently shaping traffic.

Despite the suggestion by the SMH that Telstra is going to clamp down on peer-to-peer users, few people, including the BitTorrenters will notice the difference. The Telstra trial will allow people to opt out and should the policy be introduced permanently, as mentioned before, there are a number of ways of getting around it.

Since the New York Times reported last week that Chinese hackers had been attacking its computers over the past 4 months, it now transpires that the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Bloomberg News have also been subjected to attacks thought also to be originating in China.

The attacks have all seemingly coincided with stories run by the various media companies about Chinese politicians or dignitaries. In the case of the New York Times, it had published an investigation into the accumulation of large amounts of wealth by relatives of China’s prime minister Wen Jiabao. The targets of the hackers were the journalists involved in writing these stories and it is presumed that the Chinese hackers were looking for information relating to possible sources in China.

The hackers are thought to have gained access to the systems via phishing emails. These are emails that get a user to click a link which ends up downloading software that provides the hackers with remote access to that person’s machine. In total, the hackers obtained passwords belonging to 53 of the New York Times’ staff. Systems that the New York Times was using to protect their networks and computers failed to prevent the attacks. In fact, of the 45 pieces of custom malware eventually installed on the computers, the Symantec software that was supposed to protect the computers, found only one. Symantec later claimed that the fact that their software hadn’t protected the New York Times was the newspaper’s fault and that they had not been “using their software correctly”.

China meanwhile has also denied being responsible for the attack with a statement by the Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei calling the accusations “groundless” and “irresponsible”.

The outcome from the reporting of this story by the New York Times has been somewhat self-serving. The idea that a nation state would attack another country’s news organisations is the stuff that sells novels, let alone papers. It fuels our worst fears that if anyone dares criticise the Chinese, they will be subjected to ruthless attacks. And of course, through all of this, the New York Times will carry on valiantly despite all of the threats and possible danger in order to bring their public the news.

The fact that the New York Times was hacked is not in dispute. However, the claim that it was the Chinese Government is based largely on circumstantial evidence. Cyber security expert Jeffrey Carr has written an analysis of the claims of Chinese Government involvement made by the New York Times and Mandiant, the security firm that they hired to stop the hacking attacks. The evidence that the attacks were being carried out by the Chinese military included the fact that the time of the attacks usually coincided with a workday in China, that the patterns of attacks were similar to attacks that the Chinese had been thought to be involved with before and that the origin of the attacks were from the same Chinese universities used by the Chinese military to attack US military contractors in the past.

So, whilst it could be the Chinese who have been responsible for the attacks, it could also be any number of other individuals, groups or for that matter, nations. This was a point reinforced by outgoing Secretary of State Hilary Clinton who said that the Chinese “are not the only people who are hacking us”.

In our always connected world, it is safe to assume that no information stored, or shared, via mobile devices or computers is ever going to be secure. It is also true that journalists or analysts of any kind that establish networks of information contacts will be a prime target for attacks by people wanting to know what, and who, they know. Journalists, like others who may be being surveilled (and that may include all of us at some point), will have to learn skills of using tools to encrypt information and communications and being ultra-secure with their devices. Perhaps in future, spy training and learning spy tradecraft should be part of the journalist school curriculum?

The federal government and the CSIRO announced this weekend a new $400 million ($40 million a year for 10 years) research project to boost Australia’s digital economy by an estimated $4 billion-a-year in productivity gains by 2025. These gains are based on the assumption that the country will be fully connected through the National Broadband Network (NBN) by this time as well.

The launch of CSIRO’s Digital Productivity and Services Flagship (DPAS) today was attended by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, presumably there to lend some credibility to the venture. Being an election year the Government will be keen to ensure that any spending receives popular support and reinforces an image that there really is a plan for what Australia will do once the mining boom is over.

Although research funding of any kind is to be welcomed, it is somewhat hard to believe the claims being made for the eventual impact of this funding. Specifically, how CSIRO will have any impact on Australia’s overall productivity, especially within the stated time frames, over-and-above the benefits that will accrue through the general adoption of high speed broadband.

The CSIRO promotional video for DPAS starts with the premise that Australia’s overall productivity has been falling and that this research programme will be the thing that provides the keys to reversing that trend.

It is unclear what evidence is being used for the claims that our declining productivity has anything to do with digital inefficiency or that increasing it (assuming this is possible) will actually make a difference to Australia’s overall productivity as measured by the OECD and others. In fact, a federal government Productivity Commission paper on Australia’s productivity and the likelihood of Australia being able to match the US, warns of the dangers of making comparisons about productivity at anything other than the industry level. The paper specifically warns against making aggregate productivity levels a target measure and states: “the aggregate level of US productivity should not be regarded as a realistic target for Australia to achieve”.

More importantly however, are all of the labour market regulations and practices that have an impact on work productivity. Even here, it is hard to assess what the drivers are. Crikey journalist Bernard Keane has made the observation that the Howard Government’s WorkChoices introduction coincides with Australia’s largest fall in productivity between 2005-2008. He goes on to quote Judith Sloan who says: “fiddling around with periods of different labour market regulations and trying to line them up with macro figures on productivity, particularly changes in labour productivity within incomplete cycles, is a futile and unconvincing exercise.”

The DPAS video goes on to explain how rising health costs are going to be unsustainable in the future and that something needs to be done. Nobody would argue with this. We have an expensively ageing population and an increasing burden of costly chronic disease. Unfortunately, no manner of broadband or eHealth is going to help much in this regard. Efficiencies brought about by the introduction and use of eHealth have been notoriously difficult to demonstrate. This is not to say that eHealth isn’t an improvement from a work practice perspective, just that it doesn’t lead to cheaper or more productive health services.

The most effective way of containing costs of chronic disease is to reduce the incidence within the population, i.e. convince people to eat less and exercise more.

One can understand why CSIRO and the government needs to justify the planned expenditure of $400 million over the next 10 years. It is a pity that it comes at a time when the government has decided not to increase funding to Australian universities. Tertiary Education Minister Chris Evans has said that universities need to increase productivity like any other sector of the economy. One wonders why, if the Senator thought this was possible, we needed to spend $400 million on the CSIRO to show us how this is done?

Two UK men were sentenced to jail last week for their involvement in launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on several websites, the most notable of which was that of PayPal. The attacks were part of “Operation Payback”, coordinated by Anonymous and started as a general protest against organisations that were involved with enforcing copyright. The operation was later extended to involve PayPal, Mastercard and Visa over their roles in blocking donations to WikiLeaks.

The men, Christopher Weatherhead (22) and Ashley Rhodes (28), were found guilty of “conspiring to impair the operations of computers” between 1st August 2010 and 22nd January 2011. They were sentenced to 18 months and 7 months in jail respectively. Their contribution to the DDoS consisted of them running a piece of software called LOIC, which can be downloaded and set up by anyone with little technical skill needed. LOIC also needs large numbers of people or automated computers to run enough copies to render a site like PayPal inaccessible.

The prosecution however described the attack launched by the pair as causing “unprecedented harm” to the companies involved. In the US, where others are standing trial for their involvement in DDoS attacks, defendants are being accused of causing actual damage to computers and networks.

Many, including criminal law specialist Jay Leiderman have argued that DDoS is a valid form of protest and that, in the US, should be protected as free speech. Although it is unlikely that DDoS will ever be seen in this light, it seems unreasonable to argue that it causes damage or unprecedented harm to computers or networks. In the UK trial of Weatherhead and Rhodes, each company affected by the attacks stated a financial cost of the denial of service. These costs ranged from about $6,000 in the case of the British Phonographic Industry to a massive $5.25 million in the case of PayPal. It is also worth remembering that these two individuals were not the only people participating in the attacks, although it seems that they were tried as if they were.

DDoS in and of itself doesn’t harm a website, computers or networks. It just brings them to a halt by flooding requests at a rate the computers can’t handle. Once it stops, everything returns to normal. The computers and networks are not damaged or worn out in any way.

Companies like PayPal calculate the cost of these attacks by claiming loss of revenue during the time the site was down and, more contentiously, the costs of employing staff and software to try and prevent the attack happening again. Claiming the latter cost is like charging a burglar with the cost of fitting security screens to your house after it has been broken into. Claiming staff costs is also somewhat spurious as they are just doing what they would normally do which is looking after their machines and networks.

When calculated in this manner, inflated costs are designed to over-emphasise the case against the defendants. They can also be used by law-makers and politicians to emphasise the necessity for funding of cyber security services, as Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard did just recently, when she announced the formation of an Australian Cyber Security Centre. The spending of $1.46 billion was justified by the claim that the annual cost of cyber crime to Australia was $1.65 billion per year.

As with the case of the over-zealous prosecution of Internet activist Aaron Swartz that resulted in his taking his life, prosecutors and judges treat the punishment of hackers and Internet activists as an opportunity to set a harsh example and act as a deterrent to others. Whether they achieve their objective or not is open to question. Certainly the prosecution of perhaps naive, but essentially well-intentioned activists, is not going to deter cyber criminals or hostile nation states from committing cyber attacks.

But this hasn’t dissuaded the criminal justice systems of Europe and the US from pursuing this course of action. There are still a large number of people awaiting trial in a number of countries for offences committed under the banner of Internet activism. Many are facing the possibility of years in prison and having their lives destroyed as a consequence. For these mostly young men, there has to be a better form of punishment for what they have done.

The recent tragedy of Internet activist Aaron’s Swartz’s suicide cast the spotlight directly on MIT’s actions in dealing with this case. MIT’s actions were totally at odds with their rhetoric of being a University that believes in open access. More fundamentally however, it brought into focus how a university differs from any other public institution in supposedly standing for educational ideals, for enquiry and for nurturing the development of students who will go on to change the world for the better.

In this case, ideals were not in evidence and banal corporate practice kicked in. MIT administrators did their jobs unthinkingly, untouched by their context. Although some members of the faculty were opposed to the actions of the University, it seems their voices went unheeded. As a result of the publicity from Swartz’s suicide however, MIT President L. Rafael Reif launched an investigation into MIT’s role in the prosecution of the young man. It is yet to be seen what MIT will do as a consequence of this other than try and limit further damage to its reputation, and more importantly, limit any consequences for future donations from MIT alumni.

In a case that has parallels with MIT and Swartz, a Canadian student, Ahmed Al-Khabaz has been expelled from Montreal’s Dawson College for exposing a security flaw in a student system which could have compromised the security of over 250,000 students’ personal information.

The Director of Information Services and Technology at Dawson College initially congratulated Al-Khabaz on finding the flaw and promised that Skytech, the company responsible for the flawed student system Omnivox would fix the problem.

Two days later, Al-Khabaz decided to check if the flaw had been fixed by running a web site vulnerability testing software program called Acunetix. This was detected by Skytech who contacted Al-Khabaz asked him to stop the program and allegedly threatened to report the incident to the Canadian police unless Al-Khabaz signed a non-disclosure agreement.

The matter was referred to the administration of Dawson College. Al-Khabaz was interviewed by the coordinator of the program Ken Fogel and the dean, Dianne Gauvin. Then fifteen professors of the computer science department were asked to vote on whether to expel Al-Khabaz and fourteen voted yes. Any further appeals were refused.

In what is turning out to be a reputational disaster for Dawson College, it bizarrely decided to use Facebook to post a statement about the incident. The College claims that the media report only presents one side of the story and are inaccurate but that they are not allowed to discuss the details of the case because of student privacy.

Of course, as in MIT’s case, following the letter of the law, they were probably “justified” in expelling Al-Khabaz and in some ways, the student is lucky that the matter has not been referred for criminal prosecution as in the case of Swartz or others that have tried to point out security flaws on sites.

But that is missing the point. Al-Khabaz was a computer science student putting into practice skills that he had learned at the College that was now expelling him. The intent was not malicious and the consequences for the College and others if the vulnerability had been maliciously exploited would have been severe. There would have been any number of ways the College could have punished Al-Khabaz without resorting to expulsion. It is also not clear that everyone who was asked to vote on the expulsion would have really understood the nuances of Al-Khabaz’s actions – despite their teaching computer science.

The consequences for Dawson College however were immediate. Their website and Skytech’s website have been offline and unavailable all day, ironically probably as a result of someone exploiting a vulnerability in their sites.

An online petition to reinstate Al-Khabaz has been set up and already has 6,827 signatures. Media worldwide have picked up the story and companies are now apparently sending offers of employment to him. This includes an offer from Skytech of a full scholarship to a private college in order for Al-Khabaz to finish his studies.

If Dawson College thought it was making a point or example by expelling the student, it was one that had resulted in the absence of any profound thought or consideration of how educational institutions should be teaching a lesson.

Everything about the suicide last friday of 26 year old Internet activist Aaron Swartz is tragic. Not only to those that knew him or knew of his actions but those who have discovered this only now through his death. Although battling with depression, a major contributory factor in his death was his ongoing prosecution by the US Attorney’s office over the illegal download of millions of academic articles hosted by the journal archive JSTOR. Swartz was originally planning on making the articles freely available through file sharing because he objected to JSTOR’s policy of charging for access of articles even when they were officially in the public domain.

Although JSTOR and MIT did not proceed with civil charges, the US Attorney’s office decided to proceed with a criminal case on charges of wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and damaging a protected computer. By November of last year, this had been increased to 13 counts and Swartz faced a maximum of $4 million in fines and more than 50 years in prison. In effect, this was for little more than violating the terms of reference of JSTOR’s web site and MIT’s network. The idea that Swartz could have profited from these actions or caused damage to JSTOR or MIT was patently absurd.

Although MIT was not active in the prosecution of the case against Swartz, they released network logs and security images without requiring a court order or valid subpoena. It is not clear who at MIT would have approved this but the IT department claimed that its actions were necessary to “protect its network”. Given MIT’s often public rhetoric on support of open access, it is particularly sad that these principles were set aside so easily in the case of Swartz’s actions.

Swartz was known for much more than just the incident with the download of publications. He was involved in the development of the specifications for RSS at the age of 14 and was involved in the early development of social news site Reddit. Swartz co-founded Demand Progress an activist organisation aimed at fighting Internet censorship, in particular the SOPA/PIPA acts, and more generally fighting for civil liberties, rights and government reform.

It is always tragic when someone with so much to offer and fight for is finally defeated and at such an early age. I hope that his legacy however will live on.

Update: MIT President L. Rafael Reif has published a tribute to Swartz and announced a full inquiry into the circumstances of MIT’s involvement

This didn’t stop hackers taking MIT’s website down for a short period this morning.

Academics from around the world have been posting their papers online as a tribute to Swartz’s efforts in championing open access and announcing this on Twitter using the hashtag #pdftribute.

Lawrence Lessig’s article on the Prosecutor as Bully
Cory Doctorow: RIP, Aaron Swartz
Statement of the Family and Partner of Aaron Swartz
Quinn Norton’s tribute

In the UK, the Office of Fair Trading estimated that in 2006, 3.2 million adults fell prey to mass marketed scams and lost 3.5 billion GBP. In Australia, consumers are estimated to have lost $1b in 2008. It is easy to believe that society is becoming more sophisticated in identifying the ways of Internet scammers and therefore would be less vulnerable however, scammers are becoming more sophisticated and consumers’ increased dependence on the Internet increases their exposure to a wider variety of scams.

This vulnerability to scammers was recently brought home to me when an acquaintance nearly fell victim to a scammer when trying to sell a car on the ad site Gumtree. What was intriguing about the entire incident was the level of sophistication in the build up to the actual sting which involved sending money via Western Union to a “courier”. The scammer had used a variety of techniques to establish credibility. They firstly engaged in a series of communications via SMS and then email asking for more details including photos of the interior of the car. The back story was also designed to elicit trust by the scammer claiming to be a “researcher” engaged in research “out of town”. The icing on this however was the scammer sending a photograph of their Victorian driving license which looked genuine. It is likely that scammers have crafted their art by trial-and-error rather than being based on a deep understanding of psychology but the end result is comprehensive in its use of behavioural theory nonetheless.

The build-up was all designed to get the victim to not look so carefully when the sting for payment came. Unfortunately for the scammer, the story here was less believable. It turned out that he wanted a courier to come by and pick up the transfer papers of the car. He claimed that he had made the payment via PayPal but this turned out to be a notification from PayPal saying that they would complete the transfer of funds once the Shipping and Handling charges of $1,950 had been made via Western Union to the courier’s head office in the UK.

On closer examination, the PayPal emails were obviously faked and showed the same characteristics of your common-or-garden scams; idiosyncratic english, different reply-to email address and some careless editing on the part of the scammer.

But the scammer had done such a good job in gaining credibility up to that point that it was easier to be fooled by the PayPal emails when they came. It certainly almost had me fooled and prior to this incident, I would have rated myself as being pretty good at spotting these sorts of scams.It turns out that this type of scam is actually quite common when people advertise high value items for sale on sites like Gumtree. It is listed on WA ScamNet and on phoning them, they recommended reporting the scam and to exercise caution in the next few weeks because the scammers often used some of the personal information gained in an initial scam to try again. The ACCC’s SCAMwatch also reports this type of scam. Of course, the scammer hasn’t given up quite yet. The emails asking why the payment hasn’t been made are still coming.

The difficulty here of course is that this is fine after the fact but not terribly useful if you were unaware of the potential for these types of scam. The ACCC and others would possibly argue that this type of information should be included in our high school curriculum as part of a general education on all matters cyber. Certainly technology can play a part with email anti-SPAM extending its information that it gives to a user when it declares something as SPAM, possibly consulting a database of known scam types and alerting the user to that.

In the end however, the takeaway message for me could be distilled into the single statement of “Beware of any offer or request that arrives over the Internet from strangers”.

It is that time of year where, amongst other things, we will all be formulating our New Year’s Resolutions that are always as aspirational as they are sadly fleeting. In one survey the top resolutions where to “lose weight and get fit” and “get organised“. Only 8% of those making resolutions however claimed to be successful in carrying them out. Part of the problem is that we don’t follow the golden rules of setting goals. Our resolutions are too general and usually unrealistic. We also don’t think about the means of attaining those goals. Joining a gym to get fit for example doesn’t work for the majority of people and 60% of gym memberships go unused.

In the case of getting fit and losing weight, it is possible to improve our chances of sustaining an increase in activity if it is integrated into our daily lives and demands only small but frequent adjustments to what we normally do. Another essential ingredient to this is to be able to measure this activity to provide the motivation to continue.

This is where technology comes in and how our resolutions can be technologically mediated to become realistic, achievable and have lasting impact.

So, having said all of that, here are two tech resolutions you can try this year:

Getting Fit, One Step At a Time

Devices like the FitBit are small and unobtrusive electronic devices that you can carry around with you and that measure and report on your daily activity. They synchronise seamlessly to your phone or computer and help set achievable goals for daily activity. It is the seamlessness of this that makes these devices much more likely to change behaviour.

The default target of 10,000 steps a day is about twice the US national average and will require some extra activity for most people, but that just might be walking the dog down to the shops or walking up and down stairs instead of taking the elevator.

Of course, when you achieve a goal, you get sent a congratulatory email that you can share on Facebook. Better still, you can organise to share your activity with friends to help motivate you further.

The important thing, however, is understanding your baseline activity levels and having an easy way of measuring improvements.

Inbox Zero

Being organised today means having absolute control over email. The sheer volume of emails makes this challenging at the best of times, which is why asserting control over your inbox is so critical.

Inbox Zero is a concept that was coined by Merlin Mann and is a modified version of a time-management practice created by David Allen called Getting Things Done (GTD) . The essential idea is that every email that arrives in your inbox is dealt with in one of five ways. It is either deleted (the most common action), delegated to someone else, responded to, deferred (flagged) or actioned. In every case, the email is processed and removed from the Inbox, although deferred emails could potentially stay.

The problem with leaving everything in the Inbox and relying on search, memory and possibly flagging for follow-up is that the larger the inbox becomes, the larger the cognitive load of processing anything new or already in the Inbox.

The other thing to avoid is constantly checking email and so setting your email to only update when you fetch it manually is a good idea, and checking/processing email only 2 – 3 times a day is another.

Of course avoiding emails in the first place is probably one of the best ways of staying organised. Filters can be used to shift incoming mail that is low priority into a separate folder that can be processed less often. Making sure you don’t subscribe to email notifications (or unsubscribing from them) from social media and other groups is also a really good idea.

Finally, help cut down on electronic pollution by avoiding sending unnecessary emails. Every time you send a message, even if it is just to say “thanks”, means you have caused someone else to have to delete yet another email.

Apologies first of all – the actual discussion is going to happen on The Guardian at 12 GMT – however, I will update the main points that people make here.

The discussion is, in a nutshell, a live debate about MOOCs – pros and cons. Panel at the bottom below – I will be updating the post during the debate and giving a summary of the points made.

Initial thoughts: (11:34 GMT)

The Deniers

Clay Shirky has summed up the argument of the “Deniers” very well. Talking about how the music industry viewed the advent of online music, he said:

“The recording industry concluded this new audio format would be no threat, because quality mattered most. Who would listen to an MP3 when they could buy a better-sounding CD at the record store?”

Napster proved them wrong and the rest is history.

It is interesting that the people who have argued that MOOCs will not threaten universities (including in the Conversation) are the people who stand the most to lose from their rise in popularity. In fact, commenters have seen the MOOC supporters as “attacking” the very notion of universities and all they stand for – in much the same way that newspapers attacked Google for aggregating the news – or bloggers (amateurs) for daring to subvert “quality” journalism.

12:15

The discussion has surfaced some of the same points that are usually raised about MOOCs:

• business model (or lack of one)
• no substitute for face-to-face teaching
• labs that can’t be done online
• high attrition

Not sure why people think that Coursera doesn’t have a business model – apart from raising Venture Capital and charging fees for licensing of content, they have “contributions” from joining institutions. They can also, like Udacity, charge companies for recruitment of students taking MOOCs – there will be other ways that they can monetize.

My comment regarding face-to-face teaching:

I don’t think that MOOCs are proposing to be a complete substitute for a university learning experience – but even here, people are filling in the blanks – they are meeting up in person and conducting collaborative projects and discussing their experiences on forums and social networks. This may come close enough for many who aren’t in the position to do anything else anyway. I think it is too early to say whether someone doing an entire degree through MOOCs would come out substantially different someone doing it through a university – especially if they were working at the same time

MOOCs as Recreation

Interesting thread that probably hasn’t been discussed is the role of MOOCs as recreation – or simply contributing to life-long-learning.

Final Thoughts

My parting thoughts:

MOOCs are here to stay – they will be driven by people’s desire to participate in a social event centred around learning and by academic’s desire to provide that opportunity They will develop rapidly and be more influenced by research and support a range of flexible approaches to engagement. They will provide opportunities for higher learning to people with no access to the possibility of a university education – whatever their constraintPeople will continue to deny their relevance until it is too late

Josie Taylor is director of the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University with more than 20 years' experience in research, development and evaluation of interactive media and innovative pedagogies

Peter Scott is director of the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University @peter_scottJohn Daniel is assistant director-general for education at UNESCO. He served as a university president for 17 years in Canada (Laurentian University) and the UK (Open University) before assuming the presidency of the Commonwealth of Learning in 2004

Helen Keegan is senior lecturer in interactive media/social technologies at the University of Salford and a UK national teaching fellow at Higher Education Academy @heloukee

David Kernohan is responsible for the JISC/Academy OER programme and other work around learning resources and activities @dkernohanTony Bates is president and CEO of Tony Bates Associates Ltd, a private company specialising in the planning and management of e-learning and distance education

Jesse Stommel is assistant professor of English and digital humanities at Marylhurst University in Portland @Jessifer

Jeff Haywood is vice-principal for knowledge management, chief information officer and librarian at the University of Edinburgh

Bonnie Stewart is a writer, PhD student and sessional lecturer in theUniversity of Prince Edward Island’s faculty of education @bonstewart

David Glance is director of the University of Western Australia’s Centre for Software Practice. The UWA CSP is currently collaborating with Stanford University to build a MOOC platform Class2Go @david_glance

Michael Thomas is senior lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire and editor of a four-volume major work on online learning

Since the launch of the massive open online courseware (MOOC) phenomenon, universities not involved in one of the three main platforms have been trying to decide how they should respond. The concept of free online courses from some of the world’s most prestigious universities like Harvard, MIT, Stanford and others has certainly proved popular with the public with literally massive enrolments. 160,000 people enrolled in Stanford University’s first MOOC on artificial intelligence given by Professors Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun.

Despite the massive interest generated from the initial course offerings, progress has been limited by the speed at which the current platforms, like edX, Coursera and Udacity, can expand. For the moment, these groups are taking on partners very slowly or not at all despite 120 different universities having approached edX. Coursera has just taken 17 more universities on with 180 other universities having expressed interest.

The other issue is that once Coursera and edX start taking on other partners, the competition amongst candidates is likely to be fierce with only a small number of universities being added each time.

Another option is for universities to host their own MOOCs, either on their own or in small groups. This will now be a great deal easier thanks to a small group of engineers at Stanford University. They have released an open source platform called Class2Go which is being used by Stanford itself to host two upcoming MOOCs on Computer Networking and Solar Cells, Fuel Cells and Batteries.

Developed using open source databases and software itself, Class2Go also makes use of existing services like YouTube to host video, and piazza to host online exercises. The idea is that content becomes portable and not necessarily locked into the platform. This also has the advantage of dealing with the issue of scalability. A key problem facing anyone putting on an online course is scaling access if 160,000 people all decide to watch a lecture. Class2Go’s use of YouTube to host video makes the problem YouTube’s to deal with.

The Class2Go interface captures the essential approach to online courseware that is being distilled from Coursera and Stanford’s own prior experience: short-format videos of 5 to 10 minute duration, reading material and other content, online assessments and an online forum. A simple interface allows academics to edit content and decide when that content should go live.

Using a platform like Class2Go effectively reduces the barrier to establishing a MOOC from any university. This means that we could soon start seeing courses offered in languages other than English, tailored for local cultures and content. We could also see universities potentially collaborating to provide content for basic introductory courses that otherwise would be done separately by each university.

In addition to providing a Stanford experience to anyone around the world, a stated aim of Class2Go has been actually aimed at its own students. According to Jane Manning, Manager of Production and Platforms in the office of the Vice Provost of Online Learning at Stanford University, “the ultimate aim from a Stanford perspective is to improve the experience of our enrolled Stanford students. Having a platform that lets instructors easily “flip” their classrooms”. In this way, students get the content for their courses from the online videos but use class time to do other activities.

The concern over differentiating an on-campus experience that is paid for, from an online course that is free, has been expressed by many when considering offering MOOCs. Although you can indeed “flip” a classroom, it is still dependent on the students attending. One of the dangers is that if it is made too easy for them to do the course entirely online, then that is what they will choose to do.

At that point, it may prove harder to justify charging the same fees unless the on-campus experience is significantly enhanced.

How much do you rely on instant messaging services like Google Talk? One way to find out is for the service to go down around the world as it has done today. Quickly trending on Twitter, the impact seemed to be world wide, highlighting how important a mechanism of communication it has become and how vulnerable we happen to be when it fails.

Unlike other communication media that have some robustness through many different participants providing the service, the problem with Google Talk was a central issue affecting large parts of its global network. This is similar to the global outage experienced by RIM’s BlackBerry messaging users which was caused by a central network failure, something that shouldn’t have been able to happen of course. Part of RIM’s downturn could possibly be traced to this failure and the realisation that something that was marketed to businesses as a secure and ultra-reliable service, wasn’t.

Whether this outage has the same impact on Google will be interesting to see. Google’s reputation has been built around delivering a reliable and technically sound service in everything it does online. A service disruption as wide-spread as this one has the potential to cause lasting reputational damage to the organisation. Of course, it also highlights that as everyone rushes to the “Cloud” and relies on services like Google to preserve our digital lives, this trust may be misplaced.

However, it is a testament to Google that a free service like Google Talk could become so popular and have so many people rely on it for day-to-day communication. The irony here of course is that it is an almost advertising free medium and for Google would bring very little, if any, direct revenue.

One of the aspects of the Google Talk outage is that despite the attention it will get, it highlights the multitude of different channels we have available to communicate electronically. There are many instant messaging alternatives such as Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft and others. Even social games like Words with Friends has a messaging function built in.

There are suggestions that the overall popularity of instant messaging has been waning with the number of users decreasing by 29%. However both Skype and Google have seen their user numbers grow. Whether their growth continues after tonight will be interesting to see.

The sacking of the University of Viginia’s president Teresa Sullivan is a story that can be (and has been) told in a number of different ways. In one version, it is a story of American university governance and the importance of benefactors in their financing. In another, it is about the twin challenges that all universities face; dwindling revenues and the “technological tsunami” that is being driven by increased competition both in the real, and virtual, worlds, in particular from free online open access education.

In the latter version of the story, Sullivan was sacked because she was an “incrementalist”, and was not pushing strategic change fast enough. This, according to Rector Helen Vargas who published a statement outlining 10 challenges faced by the University of Virginia that she, and others, felt were not being dealt with by Sullivan.

The list would be familiar to anyone involved with universities anywhere in the world; Funding, workload and workforce, and research performance.

The interesting items in this list however, dealt with the impact of technology on teaching and the (inadequate) use of social media in the University’s communication and marketing strategy.

The particular concern of Dragas was the moves of other US universities such as MIT, Harvard and Stanford in offering online open access courses through platforms such as Coursera and edX (something I wrote about previously). She believed that the University of Virginia had no formal centralised response to this.

More specifically, it was the opportunity to use online approaches to teaching introductory courses that were not being taken. Here there was a reference to the University’s neighbour, Virginia Tech who uses a completely online approach to teaching courses in mathematics to classes of up to 2000 students. Virginia Tech’s Math Emporium is a warehouse-sized room filled with 537 computers that is open 24 hours a day. It only takes 12 staff, who are just teaching assistants, to manage seven courses.

The results of the Math Emporium are impressive. Not only have the students adapted to the approach, but pass rates are higher than when maths was previously taught in the “traditional method”.

Returning to the main story, it turned out that students and staff actually quite liked incrementalism (unsurprisingly) and didn’t see this as a fault in Sullivan. After a vociferous campaign, she was reinstated).

Something must have come of the whole event however as the University of Virginia has recently signed up to deliver four online open access courses through Coursera.

It is hard not to feel sympathies with both parties in this story. The pressures universities are under to change are very real and the consequences of not changing are dire, even for ancient and revered institutions. This change however, will only come about through the use of technology and those who are first to adapt are going to be best placed to benefit.

Dragas obviously believed that these changes could only be brought about by central leadership. Interestingly however, the initiatives taken by Stanford, MIT and Harvard have largely been through the efforts of individual academics (like Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig) and not necessarily through central dictate. The individuals may have subsequently received central support but perhaps leadership here was the good sense of presidents and rectors in staying out of their way and not stopping them.

In 2004, Wired Editor Chris Anderson wrote an article and later a book about how online businesses were taking advantage of the economic principles of something called the long tail.

A long tail distribution is one in which the majority of the events in the distribution are attributed to a relatively small number of items. This is also referred to as the Pareto principle (after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist who devised the concept in 1906) or the 80/20 rule.

In the case of online book sales for example, only 20% of the books sold will be “hits”. This is the same for music, movies, mobile phone apps, TV shows and games. The other 80% of things will be in the “tail” of the distribution, which, as the name suggests, is very long.

The point Anderson made in the book is that providing the methods of production and distribution are essentially free (which in essence they are with things digital), then it doesn’t really matter that something in the tail only sells one copy because if you have enough things in the tail, you still end up making a lot of money. So for Amazon, iTunes and Netflix, providing huge catalogues catering for every niche interest imaginable turns out to be very profitable.

Of course, the people producing the music, books or movies in the tail will all presumably have day jobs because they won’t be able to directly make a living out the sales of a few copies of their work – but they are writing and playing for reasons other than making a living.

It turns out that in universities, academic publication also follows a long tail distribution. A relatively few academics produce a lot of work each year and the majority (80%) produce very much less, perhaps 1 or 2 outputs a year.

As a consequence of government funding approaches and global university ranking schemes, universities have been encouraged to look at the quantity of overall output from their institutions. This has caused some universities to focus on the “short head” part of the distribution, imagining how good it would be to expand that section by having every academic be a “hit” and move into the head of the distribution.

By focussing on the head of the distribution however, they have missed another approach that, like Amazon, Apple and other online industries focuses on the long tail.

The long tail in academic terms represents a whole range of people who produce a modest amount of research around an almost equally large number of research topics. The benefits of this are that the range of research that is carried out by a university is broad and diverse. This should factor into the overall quality of the teaching that the university carries out, which is also usually broad in coverage. It also factors into the potential impact and social engagement ability that the university is able to bring to bear.

From the perspective of a university worried about performance in ranking or government assessment exercises, the issue is not having a tail in the first place but that the tail is not sufficiently long and is related to the number of staff that are employed. The answer here is not how to get rid of people in the tail or somehow to convert them into superstar performers, but to extend the tail by various means. Two ways of doing this are already employed by most universities although they probably don’t realise how important they are. The first involves increasing collaboration with other academics in other universities. The second is by increasing the number of people who can publish, use the university by-line and not cost anything, e.g. visitors and other adjunct appointments.

As every other industry has shown, it is impossible to increase the number of “hits” you have beyond the 20% without unsustainable investment. This doesn’t leave universities with much other choice than focus on the tail and instead of making it shorter, they should be striving to make it longer.

I have just enrolled in a university course called Introduction to Sociology taught out of Princeton University. It is the same course that is given to the students at Princeton except that for myself and 30,000 others enrolled in the course, it is free.

This course is one of about 50 or so other courses anyone can enrol in on a site called Coursera. The courses come from academics at Princeton University, Stanford University, University of Michigan, University of California Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania. And for the moment, they are all free.

Not to be outdone, Harvard University and MIT have announced their own version of Coursera called edX. They plan to offer a range of courses in the third quarter of 2012.

The availability of free content from university courses is not new. MIT has been offering content from a range of its courses. Universities have been offering free access to lectures and other material for download through iTunesU.

The difference with Coursera and edX is that an entire course is offered which is interactive, has assessment components and offers a certificate of completion.

It is the move from simple content to content plus interactivity that makes free online courseware so disruptive to the higher education sector.

I have often wondered why every university in the world needed to teach exactly the same subjects every year, when the means are now available for anyone in the world to access a subject from a single provider. There are only so many ways you can teach introductory courses, for example, just like there is a limit to the number of introductory textbooks that need to be written. Once you have recorded a version of the course, why is it that we need to have someone deliver that content live each year? More to the point, what right does a university have in charging for that?

Then there is the issue that even within universities, academics are coping with larger class sizes on smaller budgets. But most are still persevering with the same traditional (and expensive!) approaches to teaching and learning that they have always used when class sizes were more manageable and they had teaching assistants to help.

Stanford Professor Peter Norvig has discussed the ways in which he and Sebastian Thrun modified a course on artificial intelligence to allow for 160,000 people to enrol in it. Ironically, he managed to keep many of the same principles of one-on-one tutoring in the online format. He also kept the videos short (2 – 6 minutes) in the style of Salman Khan’s online teaching videos at the Khan Academy.

In online courses, assessment can be done with little to no cost by either fully automatically using multiple choice quizzes or by using peer assessment. Support is also crowdsourced. Responses to questions and queries can be rated to guide students into filtering the most appropriate answers (this is similar to the approach taken by a tech support site called Stack Overflow and it is incredibly effective).

There are a number of motivations for universities to support the move to online courseware. First of all they are able to explore more effective ways of delivering courseware to their own on-campus students. This extends into carrying out research into this area because of the mass of data that they will be collecting. Then there are the reputational and marketing elements of it all. There is probably no more effective mechanism of enhancing your reputation as a university than providing high quality courseware for free to massive numbers of people around the world.

The big question of course is whether money can be made out of all of this. That is more difficult. Providing official accreditation for the courses, and even full degrees, may be one way. Charging small amounts for participation is another. But at the end of the day, it may be something that is done just for the sake of providing access to high quality education resources on a global scale.

There is no doubt that this will be disruptive to the higher education sector. You would have to wonder why anyone would do an Introduction to X at Y University and pay for the privilege when they can do it for free from Princeton, Harvard or MIT. It is not going to be long before students start asking their universities these questions.

It is clear that for those universities that only do teaching and struggle to attract quality staff and students, the future is as bright as it is for newspaper companies still clinging to the ideal of print.

I was invited to participate in a Q and A session called “Profs and Pints” organised by Scitech in WA on the subject of how kids were now finding out about sex.

With the pervasiveness of pornography on the Internet, the assumption could be that most of what kids were learning was coming from their computers rather than their parents or teachers. If true, the follow-on from this would be whether this would be a good or bad thing.

Leaving aside the porn, the other aspect of this is whether kids are motivated and able to actually find resources on the Internet that offer more targeted sexual education and support. Here also, the question is about the quality of this information, the circumstances under which kids might seek out these sites and whether they would do this on their own, or under guidance from parents or professionals.

So it is certainly true that on the Internet, sex is pervasive.

A recent article claimed that 30% of the traffic on the Internet is pornography – one site alone called Xvideos has 4.4 billion page views per month. But since each page actually represents someone watching a video or two, this translates into an enormous amount of traffic.

So how much of these page views are down to teenagers?

In one study, over 70% of 16-17 year-old boys had watched X-rated videos by themselves, and 84% of boys (and 60% of girls) have inadvertently “stumbled” onto porn on the internet. The study did not support the view that teenagers were viewing pornography extensively. (Of course, this is not a view of advocates of Internet filtering who would have everyone believe that this is a problem of crisis proportions.)

Even if teenagers were watching porn, it is not clear what they would learn from these videos from a sexual education perspective. Sexual education encompasses more than just the mechanics of sex even in all of its variety on the Internet.

The Internet is playing a role in the broader sexual education of teenagers. In a Canadian survey, 40% of teens said that the Internet was more useful than parents in providing sexual knowledge and 25% rated the Internet better than their sex ed classes at school. Mind you, 27% of the kids also thought it was possible to get pregnant from oral sex and so their idea about the quality of information they were getting was possibly a little suspect.

Actually finding sites about sexual education is surprisingly difficult. When googling “sexual education”, I got about 343 million hits. But most of the top hits were about the delivery of sex education itself rather than actual content aimed at kids – googling the keywords “information about sex” gave hits about sex offenders and crime record services!

So like a lot of things on the Internet, you just have to know where to go. Sites like Sex Etc have content that is provided by teens with forums and social media sites. They have a Twitter tag called #SexEdFail where they encourage kids to send in stories of the worst advice or moments during sex ed classes or sessions with their parents.

Of course, a major source of sexual information is obtained by talking to friends. It is unlikely that social media is playing a huge part in this. In fact posting anything related to sex on Facebook can lead to a warning about violating the site’s terms of use. Sex talk may happen in the privacy of GoogleTalk or Facebook chat but less so in public unless it happens to be on a specific forum designed for that purpose.

The overall discussion of the evening reinforced the value of parents, teachers and responsible adults talking to kids on a regular basis about sex. In particular, it was agreed that helping kids of all ages develop the ability to make sense of the wide range of sex-related video and images that they are bathed in from an early age from media of all forms, but in particular from the Internet, was the key to effective sex education.

If you are in WA, Check out Scitech’s Profs and Pints sessions.

In 2011, nearly 8 trillion SMS messages were sent by about 3.7 billion users. These numbers are staggering for a technology that is limited to being able to send 160 characters from one mobile phone to another.

It turns out that there are a few reasons why SMS has become so popular as a communications technology. Firstly, the simplicity of a text message of 160 characters is enough to carry important information and restrictive enough to ensure that people are concise and to-the-point.

Secondly, there is the pervasiveness of SMS-capable phones. There are approximately 6 billion SMS capable subscribers world-wide.

Finally, there is the cost, with SMS messages being affordable and certainly cheaper than a phone call.

All of the characteristics of SMS have led to its use in a range of applications aimed at fostering improved communication in rural and remote regions, especially in the so-called developing world.

One such application, called iCow allows farmers to be prompted about fertility information about their cows, telling them the best time for the cow to be fertilised. The application has extended into an information network amongst dairy farmers, all based on SMS messaging.

Another application, also developed in Kenya, is called FrontlineSMS. This is an open source application that allows organisations or even individuals to customise communication with large numbers of people over SMS. This has been used in a large number of initiatives. Activists in Indonesia have used SMS to coordinate palm oil cooperative farmers in their battle to assert claims over plantations. Also in Indonesia, Ruai TV have used SMS to allow citizen journalists to report news items.

In rural Kenya, SMS is being used to engage with people living with HIV. SMS messages are sent out to patients with health information in order to improve their understanding of the importance of diet and hygiene in their illness.

The use of SMS in health has been extended to a patient record system called PatientView that allows for updates of the patient record via SMS.

With all the attention that Smartphones are getting in the media, especially phones like the iPhone, it is tempting to think that all applications can be built for these platforms and rely on the internet for sophisticated communications. However, Smartphones are still only a relatively small percentage of the overall market for mobile phones (17%) and of course access to the Internet is still extremely limited world-wide. So feature phones and communication strategies that rely only on existing telephone networks are still very important and will be for some time to come.

IBM has just released a commissioned report “A Snapshot of Australia’s Digital Future to 2050”. The premise of the report is that high-speed broadband will be ubiquitous and will enable the so-called “Infotronics Age”. It then details which industries will succeed which will fail. 15 industries that “risk demise” include the movie, entertainment industries and mainstream media unless they reinvent themselves.

Obviously that reinvention would require the assistance of IBM to adapt to this new age.

Leaving aside the details of the report – it features data on increased productivity driving a growth in GDP and various benefits such as decreased emissions (more people working from home) – it is incredibly difficult to foretell the future in terms of predictions about technology. This is especially the case when you try and comment about what will be happening in 40 years. These predictions also become particularly tunnel-visioned when they are funded by companies painting a particular view of the future that features the importance of their role in it.

It is a form of marketing in which the status of the company is elevated by over-emphasizing its position in an imagined future.

IBM is not the only company that has used the technique of future predictions as a marketing tool.

In 1939, General Motors (GM) made a film depicting their vision of the 1960’s. In an analysis of the film, Dr Leonard Evans deconstructs the predictions based on “stridently naïve optimism” about life continuously improving for all. This of course has parallels with the IBM report.

The GM film focuses on cars (of course) being able to travel on uncongested freeways with wireless sensors maintaining an awareness of other vehicles around them. GM were only out by 50 years of so – this technology has become available to a certain extent in recent years. We certainly don’t have fully autonomous cars though, and there is no hint in the film of the horrors of the Second World War and other wars to come between the making of the film and the 1960’s.

Technology companies have a vested interest when portraying the future. It is presented in a way that highlights the use of their technologies (real or imagined) and is always going to be fettered by that perspective.

If one wants to see what technology will be dominant in 40 years time and what impact that technology will have on society, we are probably better off reading science fiction than marketing documents portraying “science fact”.

The Apple faithful, or maybe just the jet lagged, have been lining up all night outside the Moscone West conference centre in San Francisco to hear Apple CEO Tim Cook announce Apple’s latest changes to its software and product lines.

I must admit to being sceptical entering into the keynote. The rumours about what was going to be announced suggested that this was going to be another set of incremental changes.

The first 20 minutes of the keynote reinforced this view. Tim Cook and others recapped Apple’s continued growth in terms of apps downloaded, user accounts created on iTunes, mobile devices sold (365 million). The upgrades of the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptop computers were good but unexceptional. Faster processors and graphics and interestingly not, as some had hoped, an upgrade to the display.

But then, Apple pulled the proverbial rabbit out of the hat: the next generation MacBook Pro.

This is a truly amazing laptop.

Essentially a fusion of a MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro, it is very thin for a laptop of this type. Just 0.71 inches, which is about the same, thin size as the Air. Still heavier at 4.4 lbs. The centrepiece however was the 15.4“ Retina Display with a staggering 2880 x 1800 pixels.

The laptop has top end quad core i7 processor and up to 16 GB RAM. Storage is provided with up to 768 GB of solid-state disk. It now features USB 3 ports and HDMI output. An interesting feature is the inclusion of dual microphones with beam forming to enable new audio features. It also has extended battery life claiming up to 7 hours.

And there was more.

Mountain Lion, the new Mac OSX operating system, has new apps, bringing iOS apps like todo lists, notes and iMessage to Mac OSX. Other iOS features like the notification centre can be accessed using a side swipe on the track pad. A new version of the Safari browser brings faster Javascript, an integrated address and search bar (finally) and the ability to synchronise tabs across devices.

Siri didn’t make it but voice dictation, based on some of the Siri technology did. Dictation is now integrated into all apps on the Mac.

PowerNap is a new sleep feature that updates content when the laptop is put to sleep.

AirDisplay has now been built in so that the Mac can stream video and audio to enabled devices.

Mountain Lion will be released next month for $19.99 for an upgrade. Essentially it is free.

Finally, and most significantly, iOS 6 was announced.

80% of Apple users are on the latest version of iOS compared to 4% of Android users on their latest operating system. This makes a big difference to the ability of developers to make use of new features and is something Google and the other smartphone manufacturers will struggle to match.

Siri has been upgraded – it can understand questions about sports – American of course. So if you happen to be in the US, you can ask Siri questions about Baseball, Basketball and US Football. There is improved information about restaurants (again US only).

Most usefully, Siri can launch apps directly and more importantly it has been brought to the new iPad, another surprising but welcome addition.

Siri can also be launched in Eyes Free mode – this is a feature designed for the car where manufacturers will add buttons to the steering wheel of their cars. The display of the iPhone does not light up in this mode minimising any distractions to the driver.

Facebook follows Twitter with integration into apps on iOS.

Phone has new features (yes the actual phone part of the iPhone). The phone has a pull up screen that shows on incoming calls and allows you to answer a call with an automated reply message or the ability to set a reminder. The reminder feature can activate once you have left the location that you are in.

You can set your phone to a Do Not Disturb feature allowing you to stop calls and text messages from notifying the phone.

FaceTime is now available on cell networks in addition to wireless.

PassBook is a new app that allows electronic tickets to be organised and accessed simply. This is particularly useful for boarding passes and electronic tickets. Deleting a ticket is done through an animated shredder. The power of this app is that it is fully integrated with the phone. Updates to a gate on a boarding card will show up on the screen.

Apple Maps. The much anticipated replacement to Google Maps brings novel features including anonymous crowd-sourced traffic information. Apple have also added turn-by-turn navigation. The maps are also integrated with Siri. The maps includes a new 3D feature called FlyOver that lets you view parts of cities in 3D with full 360 degree rotation.

Overall, iOS 6 will help Apple retain its dominant position in the mobile market. The new features show Apple’s increasing insinuation into numerous other industries in a way that other manufacturers including Google and Microsoft have not been able to match. Ironically, the new MacBook Pro has probably staved off the complete move to mobile with a real reason to hang onto a laptop.

Iran it seems has been the target of another novel form of malware christened “Flame”. Much has been made of this new threat because of novel characteristics that set it apart from traditional malware. It is much larger in size that normal malware (20MB vs a more traditional 1MB) and consists of a modular architecture with components that have more in common with normal corporate software than with “regular” viruses and worms.

It is Flame’s use of normal business technologies that made the malware look like regular corporate software and possibly helped it escape detection for so long. Mikko Hypponen, CEO of security firm F-Secure, has commented that Flame basically “hid in plain sight” making itself indistinguishable from all other software running on the infected PCs. However, security companies also failed to detect the possibly related malware Stuxnet and Duqu and they were very different from everyday software. Illustrating perhaps, the general limitations of commercial grade anti-virus software in detecting highly specialised malware.

Because of the countries targeted by Flame (Iran and its Middle East neighbours), suspicion has fallen on the US and Israel as Flame’s creators. It now seems that Stuxnet may have been part of an official US operation called “Olympic Games”, specifically targeting enemy countries’ critical infrastructure. It has been alleged that Flame was not part of this program. Stuxnet specifically targeted and aimed to damage nuclear facilities whilst Flame appears to be a more general espionage tool, recording conversations, keystrokes, screenshots and other information from its infected hosts.

In this respect, Flame has more in common with the German Trojan software R2D2 that was used by the German authorities to spy on its own citizens.

It is somewhat surprising that no commentators have made the connection between Flame and the dozens of commercially available spyware. The levels of sophistication between Flame and commercially available surveillance software are similar – the only difference being that Flame has the ability to replicate and infect other machines whereas surveillance software’s installation is normally targeted.

In fact, there is nothing to say that Flame was not actually installed or being used by the Governments of the countries involved to spy on their own citizens. The belief that Stuxnet was of Israeli or US origin was held on the basis that the programming skills required and funding for the development would have only been found in these countries. But as has been detailed on the Spyfiles site, the more general surveillance software is relatively inexpensive and can be bought “off-the-shelf”. So anyone could have been the originator, even private corporations.

The origins and objectives of Flame will probably never be known. It reaffirms however, that cyber threats are increasingly common and real and that protecting ourselves and our infrastructure against them increasingly difficult.

I was interviewed about Facebook today on RN Drive by Waleed Aly (you can listen to it here). When the producer asked if I would do the interview, I suggested that a business expert may be more appropriate to comment on the Facebook IPO and the class action suit that has resulted. But we agreed that we would discuss the issue from the perspective of how Facebook hoped to make enough money from its nearly billion users to justify the high share price (even at the current $32).

Although I have covered my thoughts on this before in the Conversation, the interview prompted me to really question whether this was going to be a “tipping point” in our understanding of the limitations to social networks as money-making vehicles.

There is a generally held belief that if something is immensely popular, it follows that you can’t fail to make money out of it. We are deeply enamoured by social networks and all of the possibilities they bring. If they can mediate changes of government, surely they can bring vast fortunes to those that control them?

It hasn’t just been Facebook trying to cash in on this belief. Google has “bet the farm” on underpinning all they do with social networking. Almost every other tech company is looking at ways of making their products integrate with the phenomenon that is our network-mediated lives.

This is what made the recent Facebook IPO and the fallout from the falling share price so ironic. This one episode may have been the pivotal moment that people started conceding that the new socially networked emperor may indeed have not been wearing that many clothes.

This was despite articles suggesting that nearly 50% of Facebook users are now accessing the site via mobile devices “where the company doesn’t generate any meaningful revenue”. Or stories of large customers such as General Motors pulling out of $10 million worth of advertising on Facebook citing that it wasn’t working.

Of course, the reasons given for GM’s retreat range from the fact that GM was “doing it wrong” to conspiracies involving Google offering GM the service for free.

It is also ironic that the “new media” companies are struggling with the same issues that the older, main stream media have faced up to, namely that:

the opening of access through the Internet generally acts to lower the cost of all resources.

We have seen this with newspapers, music, film, books and many other markets.

Like main stream media’s approach to dwindling revenues, none of the suggested solutions to Facebook’s (and others) income problems have even remotely sounded plausible. These have ranged from paid subscriptions (aka “paywall”) through to delivering movies and music (aka “mediating content”).

It has been suggested that if Facebook was priced like Google in terms of its revenue, the stock price would be around $7.

So if people are unhappy about Facebook’s share price now, just imagine what the future holds…

I am watching the ABC logo on iView spin around, not going anywhere, stuck at 68%. The problem is not with my broadband connection. I am on cable broadband and according to Speedtest I can download at speeds of around 30 Mbps. That is around 30 times the recommended speed I need to watch streaming video from iView.

According to NBN Co, waiting for things to download will be a thing of the past once we have access to the NBN. In fact, they claim that it will lead to increased productivity and reduce time wasted.

Clearly, this can only happen if companies such as the ABC can actually deliver content from servers powerful enough and over a big enough connection to service the demand.

And there is the rub. The speed of the connection to the home is only a part of the whole equation that determines whether you spend an hour waiting for a file to download or 60 seconds.

NBN Co claims that with the NBN, we will all be able to use high definition video conferencing. But at a university where I can get speeds of 100 Mbps (the fastest speed promised by the NBN), I can’t guarantee a clear, unbroken Skype audio session, let alone video, with someone else at another Australian university on an equally fast connection.

When people claim that the NBN will bring about a technical revolution, they talk as if the speed of the Internet was the only thing holding it all back. But again, unfortunately, there is more to it than that.

Promoters of the NBN claim that it will spur the use of telehealth. However, recent uptake of videoconferencing by GPs in Australian, even with government financial incentives, has been poor. The barriers to adoption did not include the speed of the Internet but were to do with time constraints, interoperability issues and workload.

From a consumer perspective, it is also not speed necessarily that is the main priority when choosing an Internet connection. The real growth in Internet connections in Australia has been in wireless. Mobile broadband makes up 47% of the total Australian customer base. 90% of new connections added between June 2011 and December 2011 were wireless. Convenience and the post-PC world are continuing to drive our usage of the Internet, not speed.

Speed of Internet connections is obviously an important factor in determining what it can be used for. There is a point however, at which it is not speed, but other factors that are holding back the use of particular technologies. It is unfortunate then that it is this just this one feature that has been used to justify the NBN’s $36 billion – $50 billion price tag.

BlackBerry manufacturer RIM announced their fourth quarter earnings today. Revenue was down 19% from the third quarter to $4.2 billion and they reported a loss of $125 million. Total BlackBerry shipments fell 21% to 11.1 million units.

New CEO Thorsten Heins has cleaned out the top level executives including ex-co-CEO Jim Balsillie who has resigned from the board.

It is difficult to see where RIM goes from here. Thorsten is admitting these are “difficult times” and that there is “no guarantee of success”. The main strategy appears to be to focus on the enterprise.

If this is all they have as a survival strategy, it is difficult to see that working for them.

Companies have already moved on from BlackBerry as being the only corporate option, with the acceptance of Apple and Google’s Android platform as suitable for business. Employees already perceive the Apple and Android phones to be more flexible and popular than the stodgier BlackBerry.

BlackBerry Messaging, the most popular feature of the BlackBerry now has rival services provided by both Apple and Samsung.

Even RIM’s patents are not thought to be worth much with a valuation of around $2.5 billion.

The decline of RIM sees the mobile phone market continue to solidify around Apple and Android phones. It is still possible that Nokia’s move to Windows Phone will be a third player in the new post-PC mobile world. But Nokia and Microsoft face as much of an uphill struggle as does RIM.

Apple has told a court that it will offer refunds for anyone who was misled by advertising for the new iPad. Apple will also publish a clarification that the device is not able to connect to Telstra’s 4G network. Lawyers for Apple still claimed that the description was valid as the iPad could connect to networks that were 4G in other parts of the world.

Apple’s Australian website has already changed to qualify what it means by ultrafast. Gone are references to 4G and in its place are acronyms requiring a degree in electrical engineering to understand. The new site now says: “The new iPad supports fast mobile networks around the world, including HSPA, HSPA+, and DC-HSDPA”.

What this means in English is that on Telstra’s Next G network, you may see a speed improvement over the iPad 2.

The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) is going to court in Melbourne on Wednesday alleging that Apple misled the Australian public with its launch of the iPad 3 by claiming that it was 4G compatible. In fact the Australian Apple website still refers to “the new iPad with Wi-Fi + 4G” and constantly refers to the “Ultrafast wireless” feature of the device. It is only when you get to the features page that there is a footnote that clarifies that “4G LTE is supported only on AT&T and Verizon networks in the US; and on Bell, Rogers and Telus networks in Canada”.

The ACCC is seeking to get Apple to correct its advertising and offer consumers refunds if they purchased the iPad believing that it would be able to connect to 4G.

Telstra is the only company in Australia that is offering the version of 4G that is supported by the iPad. Called 4G LTE, it operates at several frequencies. The iPad 4G works at 700MHz and 2100MHz but Telstra only supports 1800MHz. Although, it is likely that Australia would move to using 700MHz, that frequency is currently being used for non-digital TV. It is unlikely that this will become available until 2015 at the earliest.

This is not the first time that Apple has marketed products to the world as if everyone lived in the US. Many of the advertisements for Siri, the iPhone 4S virtual assistant, initially focused on capabilities such as maps and service location that were only available in the US and are still not available elsewhere. In this case however, Apple has now been careful not to advertise these capabilities on their Australian site.

With the new iPad however, there were so few new features, that Apple would have struggled to market the differences between the iPad 3 and iPad 2 without mentioning the 4G capability.