Hannah Whaley . com

A recent study informs us that 75% of 16-24 year olds feel that they “couldn’t live without the internet”. I hope we can presume that the removal of technology does not pose any actual physiological threat to their well being, and they are referring to the “OMG, like, soooo totally dead” kind of not living. Sadly 16-24 has not been my checkbox of honesty for a while now, but it still made me ponder about a week that I recently spent with very limited access to technology and internet. We found ourselves in a technology black spot in the Lake District with no phone signal, no 3G or Edge, slower than modem internet (3G USB dongle was insistent on using all processor power available to maintain a steady speed of 1kbps) and a TV that was used almost solely for the baby channels (sis-in-law and baby were with us). I did survive, but a series of very minor events led me form a similar conclusion to that expressed in the study:

1. My husband always buys a new PC game for going on holiday, to play when others are reading or generally having downtime. While PC games don’t require an internet connection just to play, it seems they now require a connection to install themselves and do their anti-piracy stuff before they will let you play. Dongle not working, we paid our £1 for 1 hour of wifi at the reception area (several times) and downloaded approximately nothing. After a day of failed attempts, we eventually resorted to finding a McDonalds and buying a Big Mac meal in order to use their wifi. All for something that previously we hadn’t even known required the internet.

2. A chap on local radio said that the new Cheryl Cole video was “not what he’d expected from her at all” which made me curious enough to whip out my iPhone and have a look. Unable to get YouTube, I became irked at every mention of it on the radio thereafter. My hubbie reminded me that I could always watch it when we got home the following week, instantly creating a fine line between passing interest and semi-obsessive Cheryl superfan.

3. Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace prize. Despite the fact that I have followed every minutiae of media effort surrounding him for the last 2 years, I was four days late in finding out this news. Even now, there is a significant part of me that doesn’t really think it happened, because I didn’t *see* it happen online. I didn’t get the realtime reaction and interest on twitter and by the time I was reading about it online, it was very much in the post-analysis phase.

So have any of these things had any significant impact in my life? Of course not, but either I’ve become a product of the spoilt brat culture of modern civilisation and can’t wait for anything, or the promise of ubiquitous computing has arrived and changed the way I expect to interact with the world and events around me. I am going to choose to believe the latter.

In real terms, Husband played his game, I watched YouTube when I got home and world events have now been proven to happen even without my watchful gaze. However, in the not too distant past, McDonalds was merely a place to eat, favourite videos would wait to be viewed on Thursdays on Top of the Pops, and at some point in the week it may have occurred to me to buy a newspaper. It highlights how automated our expectation of access has become and that it now requires a conscious adjustment to live without it. I guess that’s what the teens were trying to tell us in their survey.

I’ve been thinking a lot about academic profiles lately. Partly because writing a blog like this makes you consider your own public profile, but also because of the recent release of Google Profiles. The release of any Google tool should make us all stop to consider why they made it and what the potential impact could be. We’ve seen enough apps from them grow into meaningful entities in their own right to have a right to get excited when something new is released. So what is Google profiles all about and how does it relate to academics?

In short, Profiles is a place to collate all the information held about you on other Google apps so that you can control how you are presented to the outside world. It lets you link out to your blog, twitter, flicker and facebook pages and so becomes your central profile. Nifty features include things like allowing others to email you at your GMail account without giving out your email address, and automatically incorporating data that you enter into other Google services. And the killer hook? The more you populate your profile, the higher up the search ranks it goes. Wham. Google just put themselves at the center of everything you do online - all they need is single sign on to them all and they control the internet. Well, control it more.

Researchers and academics are starting to cotton on to the power of a good internet presence. Open access to publications gives earlier and more citations - citations matter in external assessment exercises. Even without open access publishing, a good web presence will ensure that people who go looking for your articles can find out easy information about your work, research, conference attendance and forthcoming publications. Despite these obvious benefits, it is not commonplace for Universities to provide their staff with the tools, space and training to create online profiles. It is left to the interested few to develop their own techniques and find the ways that work for them. There are hundreds of simple html attempts (of the nature of ‘Jim’s Research Page’) left unattended and not updated on uni servers around the country due to an initial wave of academic enthusiasm for the internet.

So Google Profiles could provide a good solution? It certainly allows people to quickly create and maintain professional profiles. The recognisability of them as Google ones brings benefits, not least the jump in search ranks. However…. it is forcing our academic staff down a very individualistic route - there is nothing that identifies them resolutely as belonging to a particular university. Staff and their work are major assets of any institution, and the ideal solution would be to provide functionality of this kind in house. Interestingly, I was informed recently that Google rankings actually weight University domains highly, meaning that an in-house solution would also achieve a very visible public profile.

The other option would be to see Google expand their system to facilitate Academic Profiles - specifically associating them and their work with an institution, linking to that institution’s repository and other work from the same research groups/schools.

So which is more likely: institutions understanding the intangible benefits of social networking presence and providing a solution, or Google moving to expand its Profiles service into academia, and linking with existing services like Google Scholar, Google Reader and Google Book Search? I’ll let you decide.

I realised recently that my Twitter addiction has weaned me from my YouTube addiction without my knowledge. Sneaky Twitter. As I was reminiscing about my forgotten video friends I got to thinking about videos that I would happily watch again and again – and why. I think some videos are just good for you. So here is my pick of 3 videos that educational technologists should make time to watch every so often. I am sure you will have seen all of these before, but take 5 mins or so to watch them again now and think about why. If they don’t make you smile even a little then consult a doctor – you may be dead inside.

1. Michael Wesch’s Students: A Vision of Students Today
Great video which I first saw when he was a keynote at a Blackboard conf. I’ve heard many reactions to this video – some saying that it scares them, that they worry about how fast HE is changing, that they feel sorry for students today. Personally, it makes me happy, it reminds me that I’m glad I do the job I do. I’m glad there are others out there too, trying to make universities grow and change. Watch this and smile – you’re doing a good job.

2. Mrs Palin: Song for Sarah
I first saw this after a friend of a friend on facebook posted it, saying that it was two Russian students that they had taught. In the midst of the biggest election campaign in history they produced this video themselves, in response to Sarah Palin’s infamous interview about her foreign policy credentials (which seemed to centre around the fact that America used Alaska to launch planes into Russian airspace). Watch this and remember that your students are ingenious – you would be daft to underestimate them.

3. Dancing Matt: Where the Hell is Matt?
I can’t remember where I was first linked to this video. Matt dances all around the world, and finds some friends to dance with along the way. A great reminder that it is in our nature to build communities as soon as we have any common ground at all. Watch this, and think about how many more ways we could find to really interact with each other.

Any others?

Tweetie is my preferred twitter client for iPhone. I have about 4 others installed (including Twitterific and Twitterfon) but use nothing but Tweetie. I therefore had good reason to be excited about the release of the Tweetie Mac client a couple of days ago.

I expected it to be good, I didn’t expect to love it. And I do love it.

At first, I thought this was because:

• It has proper customizable show and hide commands
• You can easily do searches without switching client or using twitter’s webpage
• You can ‘tear off’ searches and keep them running
• It displays conversations as conversations
• You can retweet, and you can post webpages using a Tweetie bookmarklet
• Easy access to @ replies and direct messages

Then I realized something – those are the things that make it good, not the reason I love it. I actually love it because it is simple yet does advanced things, its smooth, it’s well laid out, it flows, it looks pretty. It has streamlined things I didn’t even realize I did regularly until I can now do them with less hassle. In short: it is well designed. You can never underestimate the power of something that is well designed - its what moves software from being useful to being a real pleasure to use.

The Twitterific client has been removed from my Mac dock. Not only has Tweetie taken its place, but I’ve actually designated some screen real estate for it to live in. It deserves it. A reminder to us all that thoughtful design is worth more than the sum of any number of features.