Judging by the uproar on the T320 forums, many people got a much worse grade than they normally would and, as some pointed out, at this stage (a level 3 course) that could have a direct effect on people’s final degree grades.

Luckily, as it’s a new course in its first year of presentation the course team seem to be taking on board that they will need to make some kind of adjustments, and it sounds as if grades for TMA 1 will be adjusted as the question was ambiguous and the word limit was very short (1500).

Click for more from ‘Mediated Cultures’ at Kansas State University, which describes itself as:

“home of the digital ethnography working group, a team of cultural anthropology undergraduates
led by Dr. Michael Wesch exploring the impact of digital technology on human interaction
and human interaction on digital technology”

This next link uses a WordPress plugin called Video Embedder to play a Quicktime video within the blog.

Introducing the Service Oriented Approach
An animation from JISC, the Joint Information Systems Committee.

Couldn’t get the next one to embed, so here’s a link to ‘Amazon’s Web Services Strategy‘, a Quicktime webcast by Jeff Barr, Amazon’s Technical Evangelist, speaking to the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute.

Confused about what Web 2.0 really means? You’re not the only one, but here’s the answer: ‘What is Web 2.0′

(quote:)

there’s still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means, with some people decrying it as a meaningless marketing buzzword, and others accepting it as the new conventional wisdom.

I couldn’t help thinking, if the tutorial was going to be about this, couldn’t we have had it a week ago??

But there were definitely some points worth remembering, eg:

• References must be given in enough detail to be completely identifiable, eg don’t give a website’s home page if what you want is an article page.
• If you quote a reference that you found cited in another reference (eg the course materials), but you haven’t read it, instead of citing that reference, you must say ‘cited in ‘ and give the reference that cited it.
• In a report, they are looking for a single overarching cohesive argument, from start to finish, within the word limit and with a conclusion that sums up but doesn’t introduce any new evidence.
• When analysing an internet business, you have to consider the business related prerequisites (eg the existence of affiliate programmes, banner advertising programmes etc) just as importantly as the technical ones (such as the existence of broadband and streaming audio technology).
• And possibly the worst omen of all, from my point of view: whereas I’d thought this assignment was focused on Last.fm, it should in fact have been a critical discussion of the various models that could be used to analyse Last.fm.

How this was all supposed to be done within the word limit remains a mystery to me! At least it should be helpful for my few remaining OU assignments (fingers crossed I should be finishing in October )

So I’m not over optimistic about my grades this time: I just referred to the models rather than discussing them critically, and I don’t think I made much of an argument as such. In fact, I was so focused on trying to draw some point of analysis from each section of Block 1, and trying to use as much of the new terminology in context as possible, I felt a bit like I was playing ‘Al Gore buzzword bingo’ (anyone remember that from the 90′s?)!

So, a disappointment on the XML/Soap front, but I did at least get a heads up that the next couple of blocks will be more technical, and will require the installation of Eclipse, which sounds like a fairly large software development environment. The tutor also had some examples of web services being used in the context of hotel booking agencies, which explained the bigger picture a bit more, and some interesting AdWords stories (presumably Adwords / Adsense is another example of a web service).

The next tutorial planned sounds to be much better timed, about a week into the end of course project, so hopefully that should be a great help.

I’ve carried on experimenting with Last.fm and now that I’ve listened to more of the music and added some songs to my playlist I thought I’d try out some of the widgets: it’s Web Services in action folks!

So I’ve figured out how to get the playlist widget and ‘Top Albums Musical Quilt’ for embedding in WordPress (here they are – not sure if the red goes with the blog theme or not!). I haven’t listened to enough to get my personal charts yet, and I was disappointed that you have to pay a subscription to get your own personal radio station, but maybe I’ll do that to cheer myself up if I don’t get the couple of days of extra work I’ve been interviewing for.

Several people had posted the answers to the ‘Personal history of the Internet’ exercise. Some had used Prestel and similar early bulletin boards. As often happens with the OU, it’s reassuring when so many of them are about the same age as me!

This was an interesting exercise in the course materials: once you start looking back and putting dates to your recollections, you realise things really were quite different, and not that long ago.

The BBC has an interesting history of the Web here, with videos and pictures and things.

Here’s my personal history of the Internet:

1980′s My family had a ZX Spectrum. I heard of Prestel and bulletin boards on TV but never used them. I mostly played games, and tried a bit of programming.

1989 I had my first email address, at university. I was aware that the computing students seemed to doing something interesting in connection with those at other universities. Unfortunately, I had chosen to do a Psychology degree for some reason, but soon got interested in artificial intelligence.

1990- 92 I learned to use CD-ROM databases as a student, but graduated without ever seeing the Web.

1993 I bought a home computer and setup Compuserve dialup, with some kind of Gopher / Veronica type directory access, but it was incredibly slow, perhaps 1200/ 2400kbps. I worked in local government computing, but still had no internet access at work: I used DOS 3.3, and my computer caught fire on my lunch break.

1994 I interviewed for a postgraduate course in computer science and was shown the World Wide Web at the interview, with the Mosaic browser.

1995 I started working at a university in London, where they had internet access using ftp, telnet, Veronica and Gopher. They didn’t have a website yet, and I was so keen to get involved in creating one that I learnt HTML and made some prototypes, but they didn’t get round to agreeing on a website for another year and a half (long after I’d left – I guess I was an earlier adopter of the web than them!). I made personal pages instead, with a lot of home made graphics and WAV sound files, and spent far too much time using MUD and talker type telnet applications (some very early online social networking!).

1996 I attended the postgraduate school in Cognitive and Computing Sciences at Sussex University, in the first year of their MSc in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems. With the digital revolution just taking off, it was a fantastically exciting time to be studying Artificial Life, complex adaptive systems, insect societies, neural networks and evolutionary robotics etc – a great course if you liked your sci-fi – which we all did

Along with most of my coursemates, I opened a free Geocities account, and I made loads of personal web pages as a kind of procrastinating hobby while writing up my MSc project. I learnt a bit of javascript, for such critical applications as showing scrolling text in the status bar.

One of the things I’ve often wished in retrospect is that this course had included some elements of business and entrepreneurship. Without prompting, it may only occur to those with a business background to start businesses, but you don’t have to be born with an entrepreneurial genius: many elements of success in business can surely be taught. And given the timing, and the investment in us, and our technical enthusiasm, many of us on the course could have been well placed to start high tech businesses. At the time none of us did, though several of us started businesses later on.

I remember a couple of my coursemates talking about buying books on Amazon.com. ‘But why would people do that, when they can go shopping, which is fun?’ I wondered.

Sussex University had a lot of web pages in 1995-97, which were mostly plain text academic documents.

I graduated from my MSc and entered my own kind of personal desert: I’d met my husband, who is American, but we weren’t allowed to work in the same countries. So for the next for years, we spent time in both countries, travelling, doing temporary jobs and volunteering. I did an awful lot of low paid temp jobs. He got a high tech job first, working for the 1997 equivalent of what now exists as ‘Site Pal’: lots of AI natural language text processing to allow user interaction with a web based animated character. That company was called extempo.com. We met some very nice people there, and the company outings were always good.

And that’s how we came to spend the height of the dot.com boom in Silicon Valley. It was fabulous, and always just that bit too far out of reach: multi million dollar homes, sky high rents, shops selling wine for $1600 and Star Trek fandom everywhere. We lived in a small flat in Redwood City, bought inflatable furniture, went wine tasting in Napa Valley and took camping trips in Northern California, cooking dinner on the engine block of our truck on the way. I loved it, but we still weren’t married.

And that’s also how I spent the dot.com boom in Silicon Valley volunteering with Far Eastern and Latin American immigrants, tutoring English as a Second Language, volunteering in primary schools and helping children at an after school club with their homework. To get a job, I’d either need to have been married for long enough to get US employment authorisation, or to be sponsored by a company.

Finally, I almost got my lucky break, thanks to my husband’s cousin, who worked at Net Objects. They produce Fusion, which is similar to Macromedia Studio / Adobe Creative Suite. She got me a phone interview, which led to an on site interview for a technical support job there, and the second I walked in, I loved it. They were friendly, informal people, with cardboard cutouts from Star Wars – the first time I’d seen that in an office. Surprisingly (to me!) what seemed to interest them most was that I knew some French and German. And they said in the end that I could go back for a job there later, because what happened instead was that my father in law in Colorado got cancer.

So we left our tiny flat in Redwood City and moved back to be near my in-laws in the autumn of 1999. We got engaged, and married shortly afterwards. Thanks to immigration laws, we had only 90 days to arrange our wedding, but it was good that my father in law was able to be there: sadly he died four days afterwards.

The next step in our internet related personal history was making a website together for our wedding photographer. I could probably have learned a lot more from him about digital image processing and photo galleries, but it was an odd time to say the least. It was strange to be making a proper commercial site, and looking back it seems pretty poor now, but at the time they were all like that: a bit rough around the edges. It actually did bring him a lot of enquiries and new business though, and the last time I looked, a few years later, some elements of it were still incorporated into his new site.

After a few too many months, we moved from Denver to San Diego in the summer of 2000. By this point, living abroad made it convenient for me to buy most of my Christmas and birthday presents online. I bought most things from Amazon, and also sent flowers, with mixed results(!). We also discovered Napster, the peer to peer file sharing music site that went into a massive and influential court case, and we spent a lot of time on that for a while.

My husband got a job in computer modelling and I began the 3 1/2 year bureaucratic wait for a greencard. I had temporary employment authorisation cards in the meantime, which I used to work first in a very nice travel goods shop, then unsuccessfully as a computer technician in an AIDS research centre, and finally as a testing analyst at the video games publisher Midway. I worked on American and European versions of Game Boy Advance, Playstation 2 and Xbox games, but they had not yet developed online gaming for these platforms. In between, I took classes in anthropology and games design at the local colleges, which I really enjoyed. I even did archaeological fieldwork, and found very small bits of broken native American artefacts. I finally got my greencard three days before we moved back to England.

Meanwhile, my internet use had moved into online gaming. I played Starcraft online with my brothers in England, and after joining Midway I met some people from Verant / Sony, who got me into Everquest, a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) which was also known as ‘Evercrack’ for its addictiveness. ‘This is the worst decision you’ve ever made,’ they told me. But it wasn’t: sure, it became time consuming over the next couple of years, but I’ve never regretted my Everquest time, and later, when I had a small and constantly crying baby, the thought of the snowy ruins in Everfrost Peaks could sometimes still bring me peace.

In the year after my first son was born, being back in England meant I could continue the Open University studies I had begun with courses in maths and computing many years earlier. So I took two more computing courses, to go with the earlier ‘Microprocessor based computers’, and qualified for the Diploma in Computing.

After the diploma, I discovered the Technology short course programme in 2004, and began with Design and the Web’, and ‘Web basics: design, development and management’, the first in the Certificate in Web Applications Development. It was in the second course that I learned about Web Standards, and that enabled me to get temporary web design work as a contract for a friend’s business.

I continued with the Certificate in Web Applications Development, with another OU course in between, ‘Java Everywhere’. I continued searching and applying for jobs, but found jobs at my level, and part time jobs, were extremely rare. Despite the possibilities of flexible working and teleworking that have been talked about ever since the internet began, it seems that by far the easiest way to get a good job that fits in with children is to have the job first and then go back part time.

Eventually, I decided that someone had to give me a job, and so I did: I started my own business. I set myself a minimum requirement that if it was to be successful, the OU courses would have to fund themselves by enabling me to take on new work, and they have done.

It’s slow and very hard work starting a part time business with so much still to learn, and childcare to arrange for, and I was very lucky to find a local women’s business training programme that helped me with business training sessions, mentoring, and two sessions a week of free childcare, without which I could never even have got started. I sometimes regretted not having started the business years earlier, when it would have been much less complicated, more unusual, and probably a lot more profitable! But it’s good to have done it now, at least.

So now I work mostly from home, on the internet. I have a few long term clients, the occasional new one, plus one day a week of web development in a long term contract, which is very enjoyable as a change. I also try to find enough free time to build assets in the form of my own set of websites, each with their own potentially money making business models, in the hopes that these could eventually increase the security of our income via Adsense, affiliate programmes, advertising, etc.

I made some forays into Second Life recently, to see what it was all about. I like the idea of reconnecting with some of my earlier studies of artificial life, adaptive systems etc. But I haven’t had that much time to get into it yet, and I also had the impression it may be past its most socially interesting and innovative early days.

But I imagine the constant change will continue into the future. I don’t think that makes me an ‘e-business enterprise’ though.

My favourite book about the dot.com boom / bust in Britain (which I missed!) is:
Dot.Bomb: The Rise and Fall of Dot.Com Britain

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few (J. Surowiecki)

(plus much more on the T320 website!)

It isn’t fair really, because you can play free music on it, and lots of things are ad-supported. I guess I will be learning a lot more about this in the course of the next week.

I discovered something else on Last.fm. The song I happened to search for was Bittersweet Symphony by the Verve. When I played it, there were comments people had left down the side of the screen and a couple of them said the Rolling Stones had sued the Verve so extensively that the Verve made practically nothing out of Bittersweet Symphony, their most successful song. Apparently they had negotiated a license to use a sample of string music from an orchestral version of the Stones song ‘The Last Time‘, but when Bittersweet Symphony became too successful, the Stones took them to court for using too much of the sample, sued them for every penny and sold the song for use in Nike and Vauxhall adverts. The Verve understandably got really depressed about it and eventually broke up.

I just can’t like the Stones for this. This is far worse than the JK Rowling / Harry Potter encyclopedia case: whether they were technically correct or not, this long established and wealthy band have squashed another truly creative entity out of existence and it’s a great loss to the rest of us.

Some interesting comments on the JK Rowling case can be found here by Neil Gaiman, with more commentary here at Techdirt.

(Meanwhile here’s another copyright case that’s made me a bit cross:
BBC warns fan off posting knitting patterns for Dr Who characters: http://technollama.blogspot.com/2008/05/doctor-who-partnerts-in-copyright-crime.html
TechnoLlama: Doctor Who: Partners in Copyright Crime )

So the box arrived, I opened it and thought ‘S**t, my computer hasn’t got a DVD player’. The course DVD seems to be a common feature this year, so we bought a DVD player for the computer. (For this block, it turns out to be ok on the TV as well thank goodness, but I need it for the activities in the later blocks, and a couple of other courses as well: I’m also doing ‘Fundamentals of Interaction design’, which has a DVD of computer activities).

Then work got frantically busy for a couple of weeks, and by the time I got into the course it was week 2 and somehow there already seems to be a TMA due in another week. I have to find it, and find all the course materials.

The next thing I noticed: there aren’t any course books. Now this is a real shame for me, because with small children I have free time in a lot of small amounts, distributed in various play type locations: mini tennis, Jungle Fun, the park, toddler group etc, whereas I have very little free time at home. So I tend to take my course books around with me.

In this case, all the course ‘books’ are available as PDFs on the website, and to give them credit, there’s a lot of recent stuff in there (the Northern Rock case, for example). So the online materials have the benefit of being up to date, with the downside of having to be printed out. At this point, I discover my printer is running out of black and magenta. I have 5 spare magentas, 5 yellows and a cyan, but no black, so I have to go out again and buy one, and that’s another day of study time gone

I looked for tutorials on the Student Home website as I’ve found these very useful in the past: I loved the maths foundation tutorials, found the Java Everywhere tutorial I went to essential for the last TMA, and the Fundamentals of Interaction Design tutorial extremely helpful. But there don’t seem to be any for this course that are less than a 4 hour drive away so I guess it’s just me, the DVD and the internet.

Finally after an hour and a half of printing last night (!) I have got Block 1 and the first TMA assembled. The next step is the course DVD…

The DVD player kept telling me to buy some software called Nero, but I found a good and free alternative here called Media Player Classic.

I watched the first video on the DVD today. It was about Tesco’s. I learned a couple of things from it:

1) Tesco’s warehouse / distribution centre is enormous, and five storeys high.

2) Tesco’s want to get their products from the supplier to the shelves as quickly as possible, which I knew, and they measure this in some way relating to the amount of handling involved.

It was weird watching a video on the computer: I kept feeling like I should be doing some work, and getting distracted because computers have so many things to do on them.

So I tried it in the DVD player instead, got the menu with no problem and then could get no further as my two year old had thrown the remote control behind some furniture and I couldn’t find it.

So I watched the second DVD on the computer. This one was about the music industry, including Last.fm, the web 2.0 music website that is used as a case study for the first TMA. The video was about the music industry adapting to music downloads, from various points of view, eg bands, HMV, BPI, Last.fm website founders. I feel old because the BPI communications guy looks about 15.

I think I will probably have more luck watching the DVDs on TV. I will read the TMA questions next and then read the course notes with the questions in the back of my mind. I have the feeling this course is the kind of subject area that distinguishes the website mechanics (like me) from the true web development professionals. In any case, I am relieved that I have started, and there may be a couple of less organised people doing this course, but let’s face it, if I can get through this, we all can.

Heroes is on TV now: surely the perfect background to reading any TMA