Facebook: I Quit!

Facebook, I quit!

Tonight, I decided to deactivate my Facebook account. Additionally, I deleted my Twitter account and my Yammer account.

I have actively used Facebook since 2007, Twitter since 2008, and Yammer since 2009. In the early days of Web 2.0, I was quite interested in how the power to interact, collaborate, and self-publish (all while reaching a large audience) had the potential to change society for the better. In particular, I held a fundamental belief that a more transparent, open society would be a better society.

I still hold these views but I don't think that Facebook, Twitter or Yammer are the tools to make this happen any time soon. Instead, I am focusing this year on bringing my teaching into Wikiversity and spending the extra time to take advantage of and contribute to Creative Commons-licensed material and accessible online publishers such as ANU ePress.

After much debate over the years with colleagues at the University of Canberra, I am ready to give the open source curriculum model a run and stop wasting my time on networks that don't really add much value to my research.

Using Web 2.0 in higher education has been an interesting journey. At each stage, I have immersed myself in various applications, technologies and devices early on, often only to find myself in the 'trough of disillusionment' just as everybody else is starting their journey towards the 'peak of inflated expectations'.

But my journey up 'the slope of enlightenment' to the 'plateau of productivity' has led to some unexpected outcomes.

At the beginning of 2009, the contract ran out on my i-mate JASJAM, a 3G mobile phone I had bought in 2006. I did not renew the contract and, after having used a mobile phone since the mid-1990s, I decided to see what life was like without one (see "Life Without a Mobile Phone"). Three years on I am happier, my telecommunications budget is healthier, and I marvel daily at the people around me who fill every moment gazing at or speaking into their handsets the moment they are alone. Or sometimes even when they are not!

I found that by having a mobile phone, I was actually paying for a device that others used to interrupt my time with my family. Ridding myself of the mobile phone facilitated a much better home life, and despite my being constantly online with my work, now when I walk away from the computer I am completely unplugged. Others have to wait until I am ready and I feel like I am in control of my Net interaction.

This year I am hoping the same will be true of removing myself from Facebook, Twitter and Yammer. Although I enjoyed the sense of community on Twitter in the beginning, it was quickly dominated by broadcasters and the intimate networks established by the Twitter pioneers disappeared in a torrent of "Twitterati". 

But Facebook was great to catch up with people from the past and to stay abreast of what was happening for my friends on the other side of the world. These things I will miss.

Yammer I found was a great way to communicate with colleagues and to try new approaches in a relatively safe environment. Yammer is like an Intranet version of Facebook that is restricted to members who share a common email domain-name (for e.g. @canberra.edu.au). This means that you can be candid about organisational issues you normally wouldn't want to share on Facebook or Twitter.

So in 2011, I introduced Yammer into my teaching in an attempt to sway my students away from that bane of my existence, email. 

My simple theory is that email is a reservoir, while a micro-blogging tool is a stream. When you receive emails, you are expected to respond. But the reservoir is never empty and quickly becomes a source of workplace stress. Add 1,000 or so students per year and email gets out of hand. And often by the time you respond to an email the problem has been resolved anyway, making the whole process a waste of time.

With micro-blogging tools, messages flow past in a stream, putting the onus on the sender, rather than the receiver, of the message. If I miss the message, then the sender must resend or revise and resend. Responsibility is completely reversed!

Regrettably, my attempt to use Facebook and Yammer as alternatives has had mixed results. Given the aim was to improve my efficiency in corresponding with many students, what tended to happen was that students would correspond via Facebook, if I didn't respond within moments they would contact me via Yammer, and then send an email - all asking the same question. 

Add to this an internal email function in the learning management system (LMS), and your life quickly becomes an endless stream WITH an overflowing reservoir, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year. Without institutional support, these levels of service are clearly unsustainable.

After 5 years of using Facebook, Twitter and Yammer in my teaching, I am back to square one. Unfortunately, email remains the dominant communication tool within many Australian organisations and old habits die hard.

But all is not gloomy, I have found wikis and blogs to be useful tools in the classroom and will continue to develop these in 2012. I will also be trialling the BYO technology model using some new teaching spaces at the University of Canberra. It really is an evolving process and I am pleased to be moving on.

But tonight, Facebook: I quit!

The über-efficient teacher: Harnessing technology for a student-demand driven “now”

For many years I've been incorporating Web 2.0 technologies into my teaching. This year I have found some success with my teaching model, and today I presented the model at the University of Canberra. The video-recording of the presentation is below:

Here is the description I used to advertise the event:

Michael de Percy demonstrates how he can teach 250 students with zero admin support AND zero sessional staff support. His approach will enable you to achieve learning outcomes better than ever AND have students raving about how good it is! This is not a theoretical talk-fest, Michael will show you how he does this “NOW.”

Enjoy!

Akamai State of the Internet: Canada still leads Australia (and here's why)...

The recently released Akamai State of the Internet Report shows that Canada is still leading Australia in all measures except the number of subscribers to connections of less than 256mbps. Here is a break down of the comparison from the Q2, 2011 report:

Despite the roll-out of the NBN and a policy focus on broadband, Australia still lags behind Canada. Will the NBN help Australia to "catch-up", or does there need to be a fundamental move away from the single national solution?

It is popular to believe that Australia has always been a "world-leader" in telecommunications outcomes. But not long after federation, things weren't looking too good. Here is a little snippet from Hansard in 1909. The "single national solution" wasn't working even back then:

With reference to your recent verbal inquiry as to how many new telegraph line extensions, apart from those along railways, have been provided in Queensland since the transfer of this Department to the Commonwealth... As every one is aware, Queensland has developed enormously during the past ten years... Yet every day I receive complaints of the telegraph system, and requests to try to get something done to improve the communication with Brisbane... Yet nothing has been done to cope with the increase of business, though all that would be necessary in cases like those, the poles being already in position, would be to fix more insulators, and put up new wires. Notwithstanding the public complaints, and my efforts, I cannot get the Department to move, and so desperate are my constituents becoming that some of them talk of voting against me because nothing is done for them. I ask the Postmaster-General to give us fair treatment.

Telecommunications remains a great "policy lever" for Australian governments, to be pulled in case of political emergency. Or not.

For example, the Royal Commission into Postal, Telegraph and Telephone Services (1910) found that sufficient funds to maintain the telecommunications network were withheld by the Treasurer to achieve other political aims in federal-state relations:

[T]he system of management is faulty, in that it permitted the Treasurer to assume financial control of services for whose efficiency he was not responsible.

This is more than just one historical flash-back where politics got in the way of the adoption of new technologies. And it wasn't necessarily the fault of Telecom Australia (back in 1982):

The present Government has rejected several of Telecom Australia’s attempts to enter new growth areas. These initiatives have included approaches for Telecom to be permitted to supply services such as facsimile machines, telephone answering machines, and videotex services. Telecom has also tried to obtain permission to market and supply under 50 line private automatic branch exchanges. Each of these initiatives has either been rejected by Government or not responded to...

The reasons why Telecom Australia was refused entry to the markets listed above appear to be political and ideological rather than a rational assessment of what the future requires for a viable and dynamic Australian communications enterprise.

Moreover, Single solutions take too long:

In 1998, the external territories and many remote communities on the mainland are still awaiting the delivery by satellite technology of many of the expectations of 1977 for instructional TV, telemedicine and digital data transmission.

Australians have always paid too much for these inferior services, too. And it isn't because of factors peculiar to Australia. According to the Productivity Commission (1999: xxiii):

• Australia’s residential and business telecommunications prices rank about average among the countries benchmarked.

• However, prices in the best performing countries are 20 to 40 per cent below Australian prices on a purchasing power parity basis in most major market segments.

• The results are not sensitive to changes in assumptions about usage.

• Further, the price performance gap is too great to be explained by factors outside the control of industry participants, such as technological change, input prices, taxes and geography.

• An overall assessment of the evidence points to government involvement and intervention having a major influence on prices across the countries benchmarked.

My argument is not against government ownership per se, but against monolithic control by one particular government. So long as the provision of communications services remains purely a political (rather than a commercial) issue, Australia will always be behind other developed nations. And what's more, we'll continue to pay too much.

Steve Jobs R.I.P.

Today I took delivery of an iPad 2 wifi, courtesy of the AFR Smart Investor SMILES survey. Today also happened to be the last day the founder of Apple Inc was of this earth.

Typically, using Apple devices gives me a little taste of what it's like for my parents when they use Facebook, but the iPad is proving to be very intuitive.

I've been a big fan of desktops but the iPad is definitely changing the way we connect on the go. It's little wonder that now more Australians use mobile connections than DSL with such lightweight devices.

The popularity of iPads and iPhones is such that the next iteration of my e-textbook will be in VitalSource as the company's iApp is proving very popular with my students. So popular, in fact, that the success of the earlier version was limited by its accessibility via an iApp.

Jobs' enthusiasm for an interconnected world will be sorely missed, as will his presence in an industry that has been dominated by only two uber-geeks for most of my lifetime. But as Henry Ford was the mass producer who set the tone of the 20th century, Jobs and Gates have certainly set the scene for the information revolution that still, after all these years, seems just that little bit around the corner.

For Jobs, not being here to witness the fruits of his foresight in its full glory is one of the all-too-common tragic consequences for many of history's great visionaries.

Government tries to solve NBN puzzle with more government

Who knew back in 1901 that by giving the Commonwealth the power to deal with “Postal, telegraphic, telephonic, and other like services”, we’d be in this mess 110 years later?

In October last year, NBN Co and government officials briefed Gungahlin residents on the local NBN rollout, but they had very little to say. Most people wanted to know the big things: Who will get access to it? Where will it be deployed? When will this happen? How much will it cost? Instead, NBN Co rattled on about sharing the future via the NBN, to think of the possibilities, and not dwell on the facts.

Approaching a year later, and with NBN’s Gungahlin rollout imminent, the big questions still haven’t been answered by NBN Co or the federal government. The release of the House of Representatives standing committee on infrastructure and communications report yesterday had this to say about the communications problem:

To date, much of Australia’s public debate around the NBN has focussed on relatively narrow issues such as pricing structures, technology options and governance issues. During the inquiry, the Committee perceived a growing appetite for a broader public discourse around what benefits the NBN could enable across Australia’s economy and society (Chapter 10, p, 245).

Rather than fix the problem, the “Labor-dominated” committee has found, after fluffing off any arguments which challenge the very design of the NBN governance model, that the solution is to talk more about the benefits of the NBN.

Citizens still want to know the big questions about NBN: Who will get access to it? Where will it be deployed? When will this happen? How much will it cost? None of these questions have been answered. Citizens are still treated with contempt and asked to “imagine the possibilities”.

Australia’s communications industries have always suffered from politics. Since the early days, we’ve been told how fabulous our communications infrastructure is when clearly we haven’t stacked up well against other advanced economies.

The only way to fix the NBN’s woes is to get the industry out of the hands of politicians and let it deal with market demand – it really is that easy.

The litmus test to check when the politicians are further enough away from the industry is just as easy: when a telecoms company CFO resigns, the event won’t even raise Malcolm Turnbull's eyebrow. In the meantime, government is the problem, not the solution.


Photograph: Copyright © 2007 Michael de Percy, taken in Canberra, 16 April 2007
_____________________________________________________________