Author Archives: Phil Dawson

I do it in the cloud!

For a while now I’ve been exploring the value of the so-called ‘cloud’ technology paradigm to the education community. For clarity, I’m referring to services hosted off-premises and delivered to premises via wide area network connectivity. I’m interested in this technology paradigm because it offers the possibility of increased access to technology at reduced cost. More for less. But how?

Hosting applications and data away from school premises means fewer or no technical staff employed by the school. Every pound/dollar spent on employing technical staff to manage, deploy and/or support your technology is a pound/dollar less spent on the technology or staff directly supporting learning. A 2006 research report by Becta in the UK found that for both primary and secondary schools, around one third of the technology budget was spent on formal technical support. Pushing services out to the cloud reduces or eliminates the requirement for in-house technical support because technology management, deployment and support take place off-premises. For companies who deliver these services, aggregating demand means a lower cost-base, higher resilience and faster innovation. Cloud services also increase access. For example, web applications (apps) are available on any web-enabled device, including mobile devices, and fulfil the promise of anytime, anywhere, device-independent learning.


The pivotal question is: what proportion or parts of the user experience can be delivered with cloud services while maintaining or improving learning outcomes?

In order to evaluate the user experience, one must start with a baseline. Rather than use anecdotal evidence, I used audit data from three UK schools, two secondary and one primary. These schools are part of a large managed service and application usage data is recorded automatically by an audit tool. The usage was tracked over between 64 (primary) and 138 (secondary) school days in early 2011. It is worth noting that the sample schools had a high application diversity with over 3,500 application installed across all schools subscribed to the managed service. The technology paradigm is traditional client-server and MS Windows-based.

I don’t intend to reproduce all the detail from my analysis here, but I’d like to focus on some of the more interesting trends I identified. I excluded all browser events and non-user triggered events from the analysis. Firstly, I looked at what proportion of the events were ‘Office’ or equivalent, i.e. word processor, spreadsheet, database or presentation software.

Noting the high usage of ‘Office’ software titles, I reapplied the analysis, extending the range of applications to cover office and multimedia tools such as graphics, video and audio creators/editors. The objective of this analysis was simply to understand what proportion of usage a core productivity suite of software for education was receiving. The result were startling. This core productivity suite of applications was receiving very high usage relative to other applications in both primary and secondary schools.

Finally, I analysed the data with a view to understanding what proportion of the application usage might be delivered by an existing web app (as opposed to a local software application). We were trying to establish what proportion of a user’s current technology experience might be delivered via the web.Again the results were very clear. It’s quite possible to cover the majority of requirements currently delivered with local software applications with web apps. The key question that remains unanswered in this analysis is the relative merits of local versus web apps in supporting learning outcomes. In making this comparison, it would be understandable to think that the local version of the software is better than the web app but I want to challenge this assumption.

Most users, most of the time, use a small fraction of the total feature set of an application, especially core productivity applications such as Microsoft Office or indeed Open Office. So the first issue is one of utilisation. Local applications are generally too feature rich for most users, most of the time, and thus under-utilised. This problem is exacerbated by a lack of access to the same applications from any potential learning location and – as is still the case in the majority of schools – fixed provision of technology rather than personal ownership. Not only is utilisation of the resource low, but the utilisation of the capabilities of the resource is low. A double hit of inefficiency.

Most web apps are less feature-rich than their local cousins but they make up for it in other ways. They are upgraded regularly without any impact on the user and therefore evolve quickly with user demand. They usually have native support for collaboration and social engagement. Most importantly, web apps are available anywhere, anytime, and are broadly device independent. This means consistent delivery of user experience at home, in school or in any learning location.

So as a school leader, just imagine: you move to 80% cloud delivered services, saving money by reducing your support bill and paying less for applications. Into the bargain you greatly increase the consistency of the user experience and widen the choice. You use the saving to subsidise a personal device ownership scheme thereby further enhancing access, reducing your support bill further and focusing the attention of educators on what to do with technology rather than how to use it. Your learners are immersed in a web experience that they know and love already and will arm them with the skills they need for the workplace. Just imagine.

It’s my assertion that a cloud ‘desktop’ for education is here now, but as is often the case in the education community, we’re lagging a little behind . It’d cost less and deliver – arguably – more. I’m not suggesting that this is the end of local software; just that it is possible to have a lot less of it and use it as necessary rather than as first choice. We have the opportunity to put our learners at the heart of the web experience, absorbing the social and collaborative skills that today’s workplace demands, let alone tomorrow’s.

Do I have a choice?

Christmas is fast approaching. An unfeasibly large tree now inhabits half the front room and is bedecked with crimbo-bling. My fourteen year old daughter has started talking to me. And last night we went to see a pantomime (Peter Pan at the Bristol Hippodrome) starring – wait for it – David Hasselhoff. Oh yes. Christmas is fast approaching.Now I’m not a bah humbug kind of a guy. Far from it in fact. I love Christmas and I revel with the best of the, uh, revellers. Nevertheless, it’s difficult not to become slightly frayed at the edges as the commercial machine cranks up and launches a multi-mode assault on our senses designed to engage us in bumper consumption. Perhaps the new TV advert from John Lewis does represent a minor backlash this year, triggered by that pesky global economic recession. So I think perhaps I’m allowed a little cathartic moan around mid-December to purge myself of negativity before gorging myself on Christmas spirit…

My theme this year is the paradox of choice. You may be wondering whether this theme will eventually meander anywhere near the intersection of technology and education but please bear with me. It’ll happen – eventually. So, choice. Go and watch this video from 2006. It’s Barry Schwartz talking about this very subject at TED and promoting his book ‘The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less’. If you haven’t the time, then here it is in brief. In essence, it posits the following:

  1. Freedom is good!
  2. We must therefore maximise freedom.
  3. The way to maximise freedom is to maximise choice.
  4. But more choice means higher expectations.
  5. Higher expectations mean more disappointment.
  6. Ergo, more choice leads to less happiness.

In other words, life was simple when there was only one type of TV. We bought a cathode ray TV and that was it. Now we have a choice between plasma, LCD and LED! OK, so we plump for plasma because of its faster image response time (so say better for watching sport). But ringing in our ears is the counter argument: but the picture isn’t as bright… Perhaps I should have bought an LED TV? And having seen the LED TV in the store, when I get home and I’m not watching sport? Well, the image just isn’t as bright is it? I’m disappointed. The choice that was supposed to fulfil my every consumer need has in fact left me disappointed because of what I didn’t choose! And that’s if I didn’t fall into consumer paralysis through the sheer overwhelming breadth of choice.

Now, here’s where it gets relevant. If there’s one tool that could have exacerbated this problem beyond all recognition in the last two decades, surely it’s the Internet? The proliferation of shared ‘stuff’ is simply staggering. No infographic is really going to help me here. It reminds me of a quote from Douglas Adams: “Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.” Substitute ‘Internet’ for ‘space’ and you’ll get where we’re coming from. If more choice leads to less happiness then the Internet must be the single greatest cause of depression in all history. Is that how it feels?

OK, so I don’t feel like that although I’m open to the possibility. There’s no doubt that the amount of information available on the Internet is vast. And the more creative we all become, the more there is to consume. No doubt the quality bar is continually raised and we become more and more discerning in order to filter down the volume to a manageable level. And surely if our discernment is high, then our capacity and tolerance for ‘sub-standard’ is diminished? If our tolerance for sub-standard is diminished then surely we’re going to be disappointed more often and live miserable lives? Here’s where I think the theorem breaks down for the modern Internet age. Why? Two reasons:

  1. Because as the number of choices we have to make increases, the relative investment we attribute to each micro-choice decreases. If we’re not attributing high value to choices because of their sheer volume, then we’re less likely to suffer as a consequence of them.
  2. Because the crowd power of the Internet further dilutes the potential negative impact of wide choice by reassuring us that somebody else has and will always make the same choice. We’re not alone.

It’s the second of these two points that I think really holds the key and represents important value for the education community to grasp. The way in which human beings cope with complexity is through reliance on social structures, not by developing highly tuned skills in the field if information filtering and critical analysis. There’s no harm in teaching young people these skills but they depend on a single point of failure – the individual. But the power of a best friend’s interpretation? Or 50 friends? Or 50,000 acquaintances? The power of a crowd dialogue? As unfathomably vast as the Internet (or possibly the universe).The point I’m trying to make is that the emerging social structures in the Internet are an extension of our essence as learning beings. We intuitively grasp that our social structures extend and enhance our senses, the capacity of our brains, more effectively than any individually learnt skill or fact. The Internet is a tool that offers us a vast expansion of our social capacity and therefore enormous opportunities for relevant and engaging learning (personalised if you must), both informal and formal. Of course it can be frivolous too. Nothing wrong with a little bit of ‘frivolous’ from time to time. But it can also be serious and formal if those words offer some comfort. The challenge to educators and education systems is to embrace social learning and collaboration through the Internet, not eschew it.

Open or closed?

I’ve just finished listening to Steve Jobs’ biography by Walter Isaacson (thank you to Audible). By the way, whilst I generally resist simpering plugs for individual companies, in this case I’m happy to send you there, or indeed anywhere that sells audio books, as gratitude for the transformation to my health. Up until recently Henry Ford had my vote saying, “Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you don’t need it: if you are sick you should not take it.” I now feel like exercise is not wasting my time. Whilst walking, cycling or otherwise self-powering myself about the place, I’ve been immersed in the drama of Steve’s life, feeding off his impressive energy to drive me up the next hill.

What did I learn? Well, Steve comes across in the book as an enormously forceful individual with an obsessive character and a passion for design. He believed that design should lead the user experience, not technology. His spiritual affiliation to Zen Buddhism in his early life was probably symptomatic, rather than causal, of his black and white view of life. Things were either “shit” or “amazing”. There was nothing in between. He strove compulsively for simplicity, both in design and in product focus. He used his “reality distortion field” to drive people where they didn’t want to, or didn’t think they could, go. Whilst he was definitely not known for being a ‘nice guy’, let’s be honest, it worked for him and for Apple.

Part of the book’s narrative is built around technology paradigms characterised as ‘open’ and ‘closed’. Steve passionately believed that Apple needed to own the end-to-end user experience, including hardware, in order to design in quality control – a closed approach. The likes of Google are proponents of a (more) open approach that invites consumer driven innovation to varying extents. There are those who feel Apple has betrayed its roots and become the Big Brother it once parodied but that’s a blog for another day. In reading Steve’s biography, I realised I was hoping for an answer to this question: which is better, open or closed?

I pulled myself up short. There’s rarely one right answer and certainly no happy ending in sight to the open versus closed narrative. Life isn’t black and white because people aren’t black and white. The unique Apple culture is a reflection of a unique individual with the passion and energy to drive the company where he thought it should go. Steve also quotes Henry Ford who supposedly said if he had asked his customers what they wanted before coming up with the Model T, they’d have asked for a faster horse. In other words, he didn’t listen to what his customers wanted, he worked out what they needed. To make this work, one needs to have an exceptional vision. Perhaps, in the last analysis, this was Steve’s greatest gift: to build a future that people wanted, even if they didn’t know it.

Without an exceptional visionary like Steve, what’s a company to do? This brings me to the open approach and consumer driven innovation. I was reading a blog post by Jason Dixon regarding Android in which he was celebrating the large number of Android app downloads (over 10 billion now) while lamenting their poor quality. I pondered this issue and came to the conclusion that this is in fact the sign of a very healthy ecosystem. Why so? Well, in the absence of a visionary like Steve Jobs, it is the sheer number-crunching power of the crowd that will micro-innovate us towards the future. It’s essentially natural selection at play in the technology ecosystem, relying – as does evolution – on a staggering number of mistakes to eventually ferret out success. The only way to generate the volume of failure required to create success is to expose technology to the crowd. An open approach. The problem with the open approach is that companies who start out that way become increasingly afraid of failure because they feel they have more to lose as they grow. Innovation is inversely proportional to the intolerance of failure (Dawson’s Law).

As a point of interest, that’s not exactly the basis of most education systems. The DNA of most education systems is success-focused with failure seen as, well, failure! I’m certainly not the first to point out this fact but perhaps this is where we find the genetic parent of the closed and the open technology paradigms. In different ways, they provide a strategy for managing risk and reward. In the case of Steve Jobs, he had the combination of personal qualities and the seniority required to bet the company on his instincts. Apple was agile and innovative because Steve had the sheer willpower to make it so. I mean, look at the iPad? Who’d have guessed, eh? The important question is: what happens to Apple without Steve at the helm?

For companies with an open culture who rely, partially or completely, on crowd-driven micro-innovation, risk and failure are happening thousands of times a day and slowly but effectively evolving their products. You only have to look to the natural world to see how well this approach can work. The challenge here is to find ways of curtailing the ascendancy of corporate risk aversion as the share price rises.

In this characterisation of the open and closed technology paradigms, I’m thinking the closed system will only really work with an exceptional leader at the helm. A rare breed. For the majority of companies, the open approach is more likely to deliver sustainable and consistent innovation because the risk attached to each micro-step is relatively low but the cumulative reward is potentially (and eventually) great. After all, this evolutionary approach is nature’s greatest achievement so we’d be fools to ignore it, wouldn’t we?