Well, that’ll be it for Flash as we know it then. Microsoft are dropping it from the latest Windows Mobile. Not that Windows Mobile has more than a couple of percent of the market, but when Microsoft makes a move like this, people stop treating Apple as simply evil (which they are, but not because of their attitude to Flash) and start to believe what is pretty obvious to anyone who has tried using Flash on an Android device, struggled with a computer that is nearly dead from exhaustion through running a Flash video, or accidentally left a Flash animation running in the background on a machine running on batteries. Flash doesn’t work. It used to be a good idea and a neat solution to a gaping hole in the web, but it is now bloated, insecure, unreliable, slow, keeps rendering historical versions incompatible (I’ve long suffered from running Flash on Linux). It just doesn’t fit any more. And it’s boast about running on more machines than anything else was always stretching the truth way way way beyond credible bounds. Adobe are adopting a sensible exit strategy by making it easier to produce other formats with their flagship tools, including HTML5 and apps that can transfer fairly directly onto iOS. Apparently 68% of video is now free of Flash and HTML-5-ish so, though there is still a niche for simple interactive games etc, there’s not far to go before it has gone the way of ActiveX and embedded Java, ie. largely irrelevant.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/09/no-flash-windows-8-metro/?utm_source=pulsenews&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29

If you are building or designing anything to be used by people, personas are a great invention. If you are not familiar with the concept, then here is the Wikipedia link to get you started, but the idea is at heart a simple one that may be grasped very quickly. By creating a (usually fictional) individual and filling out their life story, interests, friends, jobs, etc, you can more easily imagine how people will interact with your designed object, respond to your marketing, navigate your site, etc. Sometimes personas are archetypes, averaged-out or idealised versions of real people/types of people, sometimes (I’d argue more fruitfully) they are just invented individuals with distinct and believable quirks, likes and dislikes. What matters most is that you can imagine how they would behave. It’s primarily a means of building empathy for end users that allows one to better understand how and why people are going to respond to and use whatever you are designing: a means of both generalising and at the same time relating to target audiences as individuals. Combined with scenarios, in which you imagine different contexts and circumstances in which your personas will find themselves, persona design is a time-tested and powerful tool.

But is there anything similar for groups (and here I am talking about ‘groups’ as being what Terry Anderson and I have described as ‘the many’ for want of a better word, not as a particular kind of collection of people)?

A persona, as generally used, tends to come to represent a group in the sense of being a way of categorising types of people. But that’s not a group as we generally understand it: that’s a set of people with shared characteristics. Groups are constituted by the relationships of their members with each other. They are communities of people who are in some way linked with each other for some kind of shared purpose or reason. People in groups interact with each other and with other groups. And there are many kinds of group. Here are just a few examples:

• gangs
• associations
• congregations
• crowds
• project teams
• classes
• pub regulars
• committees
• communities of practice
• communities of interest
• working groups
• geographical communities
• societies
• clubs
• political parties
• unions
• movements
• companies
• departments
• co-workers
• social networks
• neighbourhoods
• competitors
• organizations
• collectives
• couples
• nations
• partnerships
• etc
• etc
• etc

For almost all of these types of group, each particular group will have distinctive features and characteristics, particular dynamics, means of constituting membership, histories, behaviours, that will distinguish it from every other group. Groups are not, as a rule, the sum of the behaviours of their members – the way that they are constituted in relation to each other and the way the group itself is located as an entity in relation to the rest of the world means that the group is something more and something different. In fact, in many ways it would be reasonable to think of them as distinct agents in the world. This relates back to work that I have been doing for quite some time, including my extension of Terry Anderson’s interaction equivalency theorem in which I posited that the group is itself a first-class actor in a learning system.

In much the same way as there is great value from imagining how an individual will respond to a designed system, what are his or her needs, what are his or her expectations, fears, values and beliefs, habits, we might gain a lot of insights by doing something similar for groups, not to replace personas (which are enormously valuable) but to extend their value. By imagining how our environments/tools/designed objects affect particular groups for better or worse we might, with luck, design places and things that have greater value to them.

What would a group-persona (maybe a ‘groupa’) look like? Well, I guess it would have a name. It would have members (perhaps defined by personas). It might have purposes, values, perhaps a location or region, though it might not (that might be what makes it interesting). It would have a structure of some sort – maybe a network, a hierarchy, a formal set of connections. It might well have subgroups or overlaps with other groups. It may share aesthetics, or ethics, or interests. It may be defined in relation to what it is not or what it opposes, or with what other groups it is affiliated. It would certainly have a size, though that might be a bit uncertain or fuzzy and would be expected on many occasions to change, sometimes considerably. Which I guess implies it would have a dynamic pattern of change – growth/shrinkage, churn of members, changes in patterns of interaction or relationships that constitute the group.

I think there is a lot of scope for this kind of process in social system design.

A great article on the success of Finnish schools. They are doing pretty well:

In the 2009 PISA scores released last year, the nation came in second in science, third in reading and sixth in math among nearly half a million students worldwide.

Ninety-three percent of Finns graduate from academic or vocational high schools, 17.5 percentage points higher than the United States, and 66 percent go on to higher education, the highest rate in the European Union. Yet Finland spends about 30 percent less per student than the United States.

What is really remakrable is that , until not so long ago, Finland had a system that failed in the much the same way that most national systems of education fail. But they made an active decision to change it. One side-effect of the change is that there are no mandated standardized tests (it’s up to teachers if they use them), no rankings, no comparisons, no competition between students, schools or regions:

 “Americans like all these bars and graphs and colored charts….It’s nonsense. We know much more about the children than these tests can tell us.”

“We prepare children to learn how to learn, not how to take a test”.

This is remarkably clear and sensible thinking. Or, maybe, what is remarkable is the fact that so many educational systems do employ such meaningless and harmful measures and lose sight of the main reason they exist in the first place – to help people to learn.

The reasons for the Finns’  succcess boil down to common sense and a focus on learning rather than assessing. Educators have to know how to educate (all must have a masters level qualification in education). Unusually, this knowledge is actively used and valorised. They have freedom to teach how and, within fairly broad and mostly advisory limits, what they like. And they are systematically encouraged to continue to learn, through experimentation, study and sharing. They spend time with each other, observing each other and talking about what they are doing, sometimes working together, if and only if it makes sense. They do not have punishing goals set by those who do not understand education. They do not make kids compete for someone else’s benefit, nor do they stifle creativity in the name of standards. They recognise that classes are made up of individuals and give the time to those that need it:

“Children from wealthy families with lots of education can be taught by stupid teachers….We try to catch the weak students. It’s deep in our thinking”

The school day is short and split up with lots of time for play and very little homework, giving time for teachers to assess properly (ie to improve learning, not to filter or judge), give attention to those that need attention, and to plan well. And kids start relatively late in life – age 7. 

“We have no hurry….Children learn better when they are ready. Why stress them out?”

Compared with kids in most countries, Finnish kids learn better, learn more, at a lower cost, in less time. And Finland achieved this in the past couple of decades mainly by leaving education to people who know about education and giving them the freedom to exercise that knowledge and educate. That seems like a good idea to me.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands-Schools-Successful.html

Just need an MRI to catch the brain in the right state and thus to boost your ability to memorise stuff by 30%

Address of the bookmark: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128264.300-natural-brain-state-is-primed-to-learn.html

Yet another brilliant post by Kevin Kelly. As Kelly puts it, it’s about the  “ Noosphere, or MetaMan, or Hive Mind. We don’t have a good name for it yet.” It’s what I and others call the collective. The impossible is happening because we are getting better at thinking as one, to become something greater than the sum of the individual shared creations that the collective consists of. 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/08/why_the_impossi.php

I wish I’d heard this talk – quite clearly reported but not quite the same as the real thing. Particularly interesting ideas about the need for structured conflict and a general theme that you can never disentangle the technical from the “soft human squishy stuff.”

I very much like this…

“It’s also important, says Shirky, that people cannot join the project too easily. Even given the presumption that all the participants have goodwill towards the project, he says that it shouldn’t be too easy to change every aspect of a project. Some parts of the system should be easy to change, some parts should be hard.”

This is the kind of discussion that needs to be had and gets away from the ‘network at all costs’ perspective that is fine if that is all you want to do: but most social software, apart from some high profile systems like Facebook and its direct competitors (e.g. Bebo, Hi5 or MySpace but not Google Plus), is not aiming at that. Getting the right balance of soft and hard, and building communities through deliberate exclusion as much as deliberate inclusion, is closely related to what we are trying to do on the Landing and is also why Google Plus stands a good chance of long term success. It’s also why we (and Google Plus) are not competing in the same space as Facebook despite some superficial similarities. We are building networks where it is just as important who is not included as who is included. There’s a nice discussion of this point at http://gizmodo.com/5831497/google%252B-is-a-deserted-wasteland-to-the-public

Address of the bookmark: http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/08/clay-shirky-says-good-collabor.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29

Wonderful stuff – ways that simple LSA, examination of linguistic markers and other forms of linguistic analysis can reveal differences in social status, our chances of success in academia, our gender, even whether we are lying. There is just a taster of the fascinating findings revealed in this interview – there are many papers on different applications of the various methods used available at http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Faculty/Pennebaker/Reprints/index.htm

Thanks to George Siemens for tweeting this one!

Address of the bookmark: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-language-code

All the news that’s fit to fabricate. It may not be real but it’s true. 

Address of the bookmark: http://scoopertino.com/

I was a bit disappointed with the iPad 2. Yes, it was a little bit faster, a little bit lighter and it finally had the cameras that it should have had in the first place if Apple had not been such an unpleasant company and deliberately avoided reducing their profits by a dollar or two per device so they could squeeze a few more sales this time around. However, it’s an unequivocally worse design. The curved corners make it harder to hold but, more importanty, mean that whenever you rest it on something you invariably wind up pressing a button you dont want to press (often the volume key, which can be disconcerting) and, to fit it into a marginally smaller space, the quality of the speakers is noticeably lower. And, while the magnetic ‘case’ is innovative, it’s virtually useless under almost all normal use cases, offering minimal protection, falling off with even a light shake and being notably awkward to balance when used as a stand. So, when the first Android came out that really looked like a competitor, I thought I’d give it a try. So here I am now, $500 the worse for wear, typing this on a 16GB Asus eee-Pad Transformer. The combination of price, performance and features makes this the first tablet of any kind that I have come across that potentially offers better value than an iPad – others can do better prices and some have marginally better features, but this is the only one I know of that does both, decisively.

The hardware is great

First impressons are mixed. The aesthetic is a cross between steam punk and 50s kitsch and I’m not sure I love it. It’s certainly not as adorable as the iPad though it is definitely quirkier. With its keyboard detached it feels a little lighter than the iPad 2 and it’s much easier and more comfortable to hold for long periods. With the keyboard attached it is much heavier, but it works and feels like a very good netbook with all the nice benefits of a multi-touch screen and multi-touch mouse. The keyboard is easy to type on and feels like a higher quality mechanism than even the Macbook Air, though it is rather small overall and the space bar and return keys in particular are much too tiny. The main thing the keyboard gives, however, apart from two full-size USB ports and a fullsize SD card slot, is a stonking 16 hours of battery life. I really love that. I like that you get a second micro-sd slot in the tablet part of the machine, I like the two perfectly usable cameras, sensibly centre mounted, and and HDMI output that works at full resolution. I don’t like the proprietary USB connector, but I understand the need for it, given the smart docking needed. I prefer the Apple power supply but the Asus equivalent is not too bad.

Android has some good points

The machine comes with a straightforward and pretty plain Android 3.1 installation, with a few useful apps such as a workable office suite ( Polaris – not at all bad) and a universal book reader that pulls in books from other readers like Kindle and so on – and they supply Angry Birds (ahem). I’ve spent a fair bit of time on the Android Marketplace and have replaced most, though not all of the apps I love most on the iPad. Of those I really miss, I don’t think anyone is likely to improve on Garageband for the foreseeable future and Netflix, though available for some Android devices, is not yet available for this machine, at least not in Canada. There are other quirky apps that use the various Apple goodies to do nice things that are not there yet (the compelling iDough, for instance, or the truly magic MagicPlan, or the brilliant PhotoPuppet), and Apple’s own office apps are very hard to beat but, in general, there are good alternatives and the Google integration (much better docs, maps, Goggles, search and G+) is great. I’m sad to say that Skype’s alleged support for video in Android 2.2 and greater does not extend to 3.x – obviously, now they are being purchased by Microsoft, they have adopted a similarly creative approach to arithmetic.

I really like being able to really choose a web browser (Chrome, Firefox, many others) rather than being stuck with the awful limitations of Safari’s mobile webkit which sits under every browser in iOS. At last I can use a proper rich text editor on the web, and upload files easily and without intermediate steps. Even though the rich-text editing is not quite perfect (very hard indeed to position a cursor on the form, only really works with the detachable keyboard) this alone makes it a viable notebook replacement for travelling. Little touches like a virtual keyboard that doesn’t require three keystrokes just to open an HTML tag mean that I can use plain HTML almost as easily as on a desktop machine so, even when the WYSIWYG editor is not usable, I can still write in web forms. This means I can now do virtually all my routine work on a tablet computer, not just most of it. There are even plausible bibliography managers which I can hook into desktop tools like Mendeley.  I like being able to choose email clients too: currently I’m leaning towards K-9, which is a good open-source toolset, but the built-in Android mail client is OK and it would be better than the Apple Mail client were it not for the inability to search IMAP server messages. The widgets that let me show stuff that interests me most are really cool and I like the great control over general look and feel for most aspects of the machine. I like that I can install apps from anywhere I wish but that the Android Marketplace is sufficient for most needs (though I wish it would make it clearer whether an app is only for phones). There is a noticeably much smaller range of apps available and the quality of apps is, on average, much lower than those written for iOS. However, though there are some surprising gaps in the range here and there, there are plenty from which to choose. Some of the interface choices are good, once you are used to them – I slightly miss the single button control of the iPad but the Android navigation buttons are mostly pretty sensible and generally fairly consistent.

but…

I deeply dislike the corollary of the flexibility and choice of the Android approach. Compared with iOS, it feels clunky, awkward, ugly and unreliable. It is a long time since I felt the need for anti-malware tools. On my desktop Macs and Linux machines I do use such things but they are very light weight compared with those I use for Windows. Android makes me nervous again and I’ve installed some malware defences. That’s a small issue compared with the big one: the vast majority of Android apps are inconsistent, poorly integrated, fail to adjust to hardware properly and often fail. They frequently provide options for things that the device cannot provide (for the Transformer, this includes options for buzzer settings and things relating to phones and GPS). I’d judge stability to be around half that of iPad apps, on average. This is certainly true of tools that are duplicated on both platforms such as Pulse, Skype, Zinio and YouTube, and I am fed up with having to respond to unnecessary alerts: it feels a bit like Windoze again. The much vaunted Flash support is a *really* bad idea and is a great advertisment for Apple’s stance that it should be wiped from the face of the Earth. On the rare occasions it actually works for a moment roughly as you might expect it to work, it is slow, unstable, with features that occasionally succeed and often fail. Worse, it doesn’t quite know what to do about multitasking so you can wind up with a Flash movie not-quite playing in the background with no obvious way back to stop it. It is painfully inconsistent, even compared with early iPad apps. A particularly irritating lack of consistency is that some apps understand what it means to rotate the machine, others do not. Some behave differently with a keyboard attached, some do not. This is made all the more unfortunate because the eee-pad uses soft keys for the Android navigation that move (or sometimes do not move) with the screen orientation. Some apps like to provide a settings menu in the right place, others like to move it around. Some allow other buttons to be used when dealing with settings, others do not. There are few parts of the screen on which I have not found the settings menu. At least almost (but not quite) all leave the home and back buttons untouched.

I like the configurability of the machine for most things but sometimes it is tedious (K-9 mail is very flexible and configurable if you have an hour or so to spare in order to make it behave the way you wish) and some are extremely irritatingly unconfigurable: right now I can’t make the VPN work at all with AU’s PPTP servers and there is really nothing to set that would fix the problem: and yes, I have already tried a vast range of tools and utilities that claim to help. It *is* (of course) possible to root the device and thus add pretty much anything to it, including OpenVPN, but I think I’d generally prefer a Linux machine if I were intending to go to that much trouble.

Conclusions

My expectation of an Android tablet, admittedly based on my experience with iOS devices, is that it should be an appliance, not a full-blown computer. And that’s the problem: unlike Apple, Google find it very hard to let go of the computer underneath: they make it part of the way but don’t follow the path to its logical conclusion. I’m an unreconstructed geek and I’m used to file systems and like being able to browse the SD card and see the system logs, but even for me this kind of stuff is a throwback to a less enlightened age and it greatly reduces the usability of the machine. Likewise the ‘friendly’ pop-up messages that tell you what the system is doing, what kind of errors it is experiencing and so on.  It takes away from the experience because it emphasises the workings of the underlying machine, not the technologies that it is enabling which are what we really want and need. Why should I have to care about which bit of hardware my file is saved on or how the system has decided to record it? Why should I have to find a peculiarly placed ‘save’ button when I have just done something that clearly was meant to be recorded? Why do I need to know that a device has been added or removed? Just show me the thing, don’t tell me what I know I have just done! The computer is here to help me, I am not here to help the computer.

I’ve really really tried to love this device. I hate Apple as a company and I feel fairly positive towards Google and towards Asus, who have produced every one of my favourite non-Apple machines over the years. I much prefer the relatively open and evolutionary approach to the tightly controlled and design-led approach. I believe in freedom and diversity as essential elements of creative and positive growth. The eee-Pad Transformer is a very well designed and keenly priced bit of hardware that oozes quality and sturdiness even if it does look a bit like one of those stunningly ugly brown plastic Dolce and Gabbana bags beloved by bag counterfeiters. It has all the good things of an iPad, plus wonderful battery life, wonderful flexibility, better sound, better input and better output options. When the next version comes out in a couple of months with 3G and improved hardware, it will be hard to beat as a bit of hardware.

However, I am sad to say that Android is not ready and I fear it never will be as long as it tries to compete head-on with iOS while still trying to battle the likes of RIM and Nokia on home ground. It’s not just a question of evolution and refinement, though it is getting a little better and a little more slick with every point release. No, the problem is at the most fundamental design pattern level. The philosophy behind Android is too heavily oriented to the machine, not the human being. With some effort I could probably make the Android do pretty much anything the iPad can do, but why should I have to struggle when the iPad does it painlessly already? There are probably many really great apps that just work perfectly with the machine but why do I have to struggle to find them when every app, no matter how awful in concept and execution, just works on an iOS machine? And, if I really want some serious flexibility, it makes more sense to use a real operating system like Ubuntu, with a friendly interface on top of it. Android is fairly successfully trying to please everyone by being as many things as it can be, but there’s not much in it to delight anyone. It is much like Windows of yesteryear: it’s the next best thing, an adequate, cheap and flexible alternative to what we really want.  It could be more than just the Windows of mobile devices, the cheap family car version of the real thing, the system you use if you have a really good reason not to use an iPhone or iPad. However, it needs a clearer vision and a braver attitude to become something better: the true genius of iOS lies in what Apple were unafraid to take away, not in the features that they provided. Android has dipped a toe in the water but won’t leave the beach behind.

Call for papers:
SCA2011 - International Conference on Social Computing and its Applications,
Dec.12-14, 2011, Sydney, Australia. Website:
http://www.swinflow.org/confs/sca2011/ Key dates:
Submission Deadline: extended to August 15, 2011.
Submission site: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sca2011 Publication:
Proceedings will be published by IEEE CS Press. Special issues:
Distinguised papers will be selected for special issues in Journal of
Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce; Social Science Computer
Review; or Computers in Human Behavior. ===========
Introduction Social computing is concerned with the intersection of social behaviour and
computing systems, creating or recreating social conventions and social
contexts through the use of software and technology. Various social
computing applications such as blogs, email, instant messaging, social
networking (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), wikis, and social
bookmarking have been widely popularised where people interact socially via
computing space. Such applications have been profoundly impacting social
behaviour and life style of human beings while pushing the boundary of
computing technology simultaneously. While people can enjoy or even indulge
in the benefits such as freedom and convenience brought about by social
computing, various critical issues such as privacy protection, touch-screen
based HCI design, and modelling of social behaviour in computing space still
remain challenging. SCA (Social Computing and its Applications) is created to provide a prime
international forum for both researchers, industry practitioners and
environment experts to exchange the latest fundamental advances in the state
of the art and practice of Social Computing and broadly related areas. Scope and Topics Topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to: · Fundamentals of social computing
· Modelling of social behaviour
· Social network analysis and mining
· Computational models of social simulation
· Web 2.0 and semantic web
· Innovative HCI and touch-screen models
· Modelling of social conventions and social contexts
· Social cognition and social intelligence
· Social media analytics and intelligence
· Group formation and evolution
· Security, privacy, trust, risk in social contexts
· Social system design and architectures
· Information retrieval, data mining, artificial intelligence and
agent-based technology
· Group interaction, collaboration, representation and profiling
· Handheld/mobile social computing
· Service science and service oriented interaction design
· Cultural patterns and representation
· Emotional intelligence, opinion representation, influence process
· Mobile commerce, handheld commerce and e-markets
· Connected e-health in social networks
· Social policy and government management
· Social blog, micro-blog, public blog, internet forum
· Business social software systems
· Impact on peoples activities in complex and dynamic environments
· Collaborative filtering, mining and prediction
· Social computing applications and case studies Submission Guidelines Submissions must include an abstract, keywords, the e-mail address of the
corresponding author and should not exceed 8 pages for main conference,
including tables and figures in IEEE CS format. The template files for LATEX
or WORD can be downloaded here. All paper submissions must represent
original and unpublished work. Each submission will be peer reviewed by at
least three program committee members. Submission of a paper should be
regarded as an undertaking that, should the paper be accepted, at least one
of the authors will register for the conference and present the work. Submit
your paper(s) in PDF file at the SCA2011 submission site:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sca2011. Authors of accepted
papers, or at least one of them, are requested to register and present their
work at the conference, otherwise their papers may be removed from the
digital libraries of IEEE CS and EI after the conference. Publications Accepted and presented papers will be included into the IEEE Conference
Proceedings published by IEEE CS Press. Authors of accepted papers, or at
least one of them, are requested to register and present their work at the
conference, otherwise their papers may be removed from the digital libraries
of IEEE CS and EI after the conference. Distinguished papers presented at the conference, after further revision,
will be published in special issues of Journal of Organizational Computing
and Electronic Commerce, Social Science Computer Review, and Computers in
Human Behavior. General Chairs
Irwin King, The Chinese University of Hongkong, China
Igor Hawryszkiewycz, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia Program Chairs
Jinjun Chen, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
Shaun Lawson, University of Lincoln, UK
Nitin Agarwal, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, USA Program Vice-Chairs
Rajiv Khosla, Latrobe University, Australia
Tim Butcher, RMIT, Australia
Man-Kwan Shan, National Chengchi University, Taiwan Workshop Chairs
Nathalie Colineau, CSIRO-ICT Centre, Australia
Xiangfeng Luo, Shanghai University, China Steering Committee
V.S. Subrahmanian, University of Maryland, USA
Irwin King, The Chinese University of Hongkong, China
Igor Hawryszkiewycz, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
Jinjun Chen, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia (Chair)
Feiyue Wang, Chinese Academia of Science, China
Wesley Chu, University of California, USA
Shaun Lawson, University of Lincoln, UK
Jianhua Ma, Hosei University, Japan
John Yen, Pennsylvania State University, USA
Jiming Liu, Hong Kong Baptist University, China
Adrian David Cheok, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Craig Standing, Edith Cowan University, Australia
Laurence T. Yang, St Francis Xavier University, Canada (Chair) Local and Finance Chairs
Chang Liu, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia Conference Secretary and Web Chair
Xuyun Zhang, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia