Conferences. You know the sort of thing: long queues, presentations where you feel you need a fast forward button, complicated and conflicting schedules, sore shoulders from a mountain of brochures and freebies. And yet, what do people repeat, over and over, when they return? The best bits were talking with like-minded people, sharing ideas and experience, eating, drinking and companionship.

So. If we were to redesign the idea of a conference, to give the best and most valuable experience for every delegate, how would we go about it?

I've noticed several rumbings in the blogoshpere about this sort of thing recently. Doc Searls has some suggestions. He wants comfortable surroundings, sessions based on subjects, not personalities (nor, I assume, on blatant product marketing), and a chance to get your hands dirty actually doing stuff. Chris Corrigan repeatedly waxes enthusiastic about "Open Space Technology" (a fancy name for a way of organizing adaptable meetings that actually get things done), and I have many fond memories of "delegate-organized games" at UK GenCon.

I can't help thinking that there's also been a lot of educational research that might help with this. The "constructivist" approach to teaching and learning recognizes that some of the greatest value comes from the interaction between learners and teachers, rather than some direct absorbtion of a hosepipe of presented material. The most effective modern education tends to be interactive, creative, and continually adapting to the changing needs of the learners. If we consider our ideal conference largely as some sort of learning experience, it would seem crazy to ignore all this research.

I'm sure you'll all have your own ideas about how to take this forward, but here's a few of mine to be going on with.

• Bring and Share One of the powerful aspects of the Open Space Technology and Delegate Organized Games experience is it's "bring and share" nature. Everyone can propose topics for discussion, or bring games to run. And if something grabs your attention during the event, there's a way to publicize it and gather other participants then and there. This encouragement to participants to get involved with making things happen helps to blur the divisions between presenters/teachers and delegates/learners, which must be a good thing. So in our redesigned conference, everyone is encouraged to think in advance about what they want to gain from the event, and what they have to offer, and come prepared with information, resources, issues and questions.
• Tools to Create From constructivist theory comes the idea that people learn while creating - new ideas, new products, explaining to others. So our conference would make sure that the tools for this creativity are everywhere and encourage people to use them. Plenty of paper and pencils, wireless networks, computer workstations (or ask delegates to bring what they need), a bunch of cosy "booths" with tables and whiteboards, a central "store" where people can buy/borrow a range of other creative and thinking tools. Whatever seems appropriate to the scope of the event.
• Suggest, Schedule, and Contact Join "bring and share" to the "tools to create" by providing a simple way for people to contact each other, seek like-minded groups to work on something, or raise topics for discussion. Pinboards, paper blu-tac'ed to walls, an interactive web site, whatever works for the delegates.
• Choose and Change Your Mind From "Open Space Technology", comes the law of two feet. Your time is too important to waste on something that's not doing it for you, and there are so many other things that could make better use of your attention. So, if a a session is not what you were expecting, go choose something else. After all, with everyone at the event ready with their own topics, ideas, problems and questions, there's bound to be something else more suitable...

I'm sure there are logistical problems in a model like this, but wouldn't it be a buzz! And those corporate marketing presentations would really need to work hard to gather more interest than fast-moving, lightweight, catch-the-meme-of-the-moment individual suggestions. Think about this next time you are fidgeting your way through an hour or two of droning powerpoint slides that you could have skimmed on the web.

Any more suggestions? What would you like to see in conference version 2.0 ? Do you know of any events that actually work anything like this?

I've got so used to the notion of blogs as two-way conversations, that I feel off-balance and strangely powerless when faced with a blog that supports neither comments or trackbacks.

In this case, I felt that I'd like to let the readers of this post about usage patterns of Wikis and blogs in education know about my blog post from a few days ago on a similar topic. Usually, I'd just issue a trackback (which seems the polite thing to do). If trackback is not available, I'd leave a comment. Faced with neither, what should I do?

As a relative newcomer to the world of blogs, I skipped the period before comments and trackbacks were commonplace - is there an accepted protocol for connecting blogs where these tools don't exist?

It certainly looks like the term "learning object" is even less well understood than I thought! In my last post about learning objects, I expressed puzzlement about how someone was suggesting a (to my mind) limited taxonomy. Thanks to Rob Wall for pointing out that this is just a facet of a complex and on-going discussion.

On Rob's recommendation, I read Alan at cogdogblog's "my left big toe" rant from a few months ago. I felt that that was unsatisfactory, too, and when I tried to search for other definitions and opinions I was swamped.

So, in the timeless tradition, I'll add even more layers of confusion while pretending to clarify things :)

First, some limits:

• For this discussion, I shall only be concerned with digital learning objects, which can be stored, retrieved, located and shared using information technology systems.
• Likewise, I shall only be concerned with learning objects which are associated with one or more forms of directed study. I am specifically excluding ad-hoc available information contained in web sites, books, newspapers, random blogs, company account records, movies and CDs, etc. unless they have been associated with specific learning goals.

Even with these limitations in mind, there is still a potentially infinite range of learning objects to consider. Luckily, my definition excludes Alan's left big toe, although his blog post about it qualifies as soon as (for example) someone associates it with the goal of learning about learning objects. For me, the key to thinking about learning objects is the idea of association. The world is bulging with information, of wildly varying style, value and appropriateness. A definition of learning object that includes all of it is semantically worthless. A definition that includes or excludes based on style of presentation or some externally-imposed value metric is inflexible and inevitably doomed as presentations and perceptions of value change and evolve.

Let's step back from the issue of what a learning object is for a moment and look at how these learning objects might be used. There seems to be some unstated assumptions underlying several of the articles I have read. One such assumption is about the nature of teaching and learning that uses digital learning objects.

Wisconsin Online presents learning objects as units of learning, analogous to a course or a lesson, just smaller. While I understand that "learning" is the politically correct phrase at the moment, their definition does read more like units of teaching to me. It seems to embody the approach that I shall call object driven - the assumption that the role of learning objects is primarily to be assembled, Lego-like, into larger and larger units. Taken to the limit, this approach marginalises the creative and adaptive input of a teacher, instead handing that responsibility to a machine and it's programmers, with possibly some choice on the part of the learner. I'm sure we have all encoutered poor implementations of this kind of "courseware", where unexpected learner questions remain unanswered, and digressions (however valuable) are eliminated.

This glossary at the University of Warwick offers a different approach. This definition emphasises the The use made of the content objects, e.g. a lecture, PowerPoint presentation, essay, etc., placing responsibility for the structuring and sequencing of learning objects in the hands of a teacher. While potentially more flexible and adaptive than the object driven approach described above, this teacher driven usage depends very much on the skill and familiarity of the teacher with the available sources of learning objects. If finding and incorporating learning objects is too hard, they will be ignored, and it's back to chalk and talk.

For me, the challenge facing initiatives in learning objects at the moment is to forge links between object-driven and teacher-driven assumptions about the use of learning objects. Such links may then be used to inform the direction of development in systems to store, retrieve, locate, share and associate digital objects in intuitive ways for both approaches.

What we don't need is more bottomless-pit repositories that require teacher re-training to add or find resources, or any more both-hands-tied-behind-my-back "virtual learning environments" that need a team of computer geeks to integrate into existing teaching.

I've seen the term "learning object" used in several places recently, and I thought I was getting some idea of what it means. Then I stumbled on this blog entry from John Doyle's Thoughts on Education.

I generally agree with the defintion of "learning object", as any digital entity with associated metadata that may be used for learning, education, and training. However, I can't help thinking that the later part of the blog, which proposes a taxonomy of learning objects, is somewhat misguided. This could, of course, just indicate that I have missed the point and that it is my understanding of the common usage of the term "learning object" which is incorrect.

Doyle writes: I would like to propose a particular hierarchical taxonomy of learning objects which I believe to be particularly helpful at the level of discrete digital objects. He then proceeds to describe learning objects consisting of a hierarchy of modules, each built of section, paragraph, figure, table, response unit or hyperlinked entity items.

While this taxonomy is fine as far as it goes, I worry that it does seem to be describing not a "learning object" in the general sense of the term, but rather a group of largely passive pages of information. Look again at the above list of items, substituting "page" for "module" and "form field" for "response unit", and you have no more or less than a web site.

Surely an increasing propoprtion of the "learning objects" we might wish to deal with will be much more complex than this. How would an interactive simulation, a sound recording, a video, a game, a blog, a search engine, a powerpoint presentation, a spreadsheet, a database or any of the potentially infinite number of other object types fit into this simplistic categorization? These are the things I want to annotate, store and share - am I crazy?

After some awful mismanagement and a bit of a hiatus, it looks like GenCon UK, (traditionally the UK's biggest residential board games, card games, miniatures games and roleplaying games convention) is back on for 2004.

This year it's being run by a different group who have licenced the GenCon name from the US owners. They seem to have decided to take the convention back to its roots in this country, and are holding it at a Butlin's holiday camp in Minehead, Somerset. I think this is a good idea - many of us have fond memories of the early UK GenCons held at the Pontin's camp at Camber Sands in Kent.

I'm currently trying to sort out arrangements to run a bunch of games with a team from the Steve Jackson Games Men in Black volunteer demonstration and convention support team. According to the con web site there will be plenty of other games of all sorts, as well as space to bring and play games of your own.

As with any first-time event, the main issue is one of publicity and attendance. I really hope they can get the word out, and attract a decent number of people to attend. It's much cheaper to attend than the previous GenCon efforts in London and Manchester, and if it is a success it will help to ensure the future of residential gaming events in the UK or the next few years.

I've been complaining about this ever since the debut of Netscape 2, many years ago. But it's still little better. Am I the only one that cares? Aargh!

As part of my studies I am required to submit a portfolio of evidence of practice and research, including things like newspaper clippings, copies of meeting minutes, work I've produced and so on. All this is fine, except that getting a printed copy of research from web pages is a nightmare. Let's take today, for example. I found an interesting article at techlearning.com. Very appropriate to my current study, I thought. I'll print this one out.

Now, I'm not so green as to assume that any of these screen-furniture-encrusted pages will print straight away. So I looked for a "printable version" button/link. Hooray. There's one near the bottom of the page. I clicked this link, and up popped a new window with most of the navigation and junk missing. Just a top bar with some buttons and an ad or two. The text below looked delightfully simple, so I hit the print button.

That, of course was too easy. Why ever would I expect that a "printable" page would actually print all of the text? Foolish me. About 5% of each line, at the right of the page is simply not printed, rendering the article effectively unreadable. The reason for this, it seems, is that even the "printable" page is laid out using a table of width 795 pixels. Luckily, I'm HTML-savvy enough to save the source, go in, strip out all the frickin' table markup, and let the text flow to fit the page as Tim Berners-Lee intended from the dawn of the web.

Sure, then. I can work round this. But I have to do something like this for almost every page I print. It seems we are in the worst possible position, here. If pretty much any of the parties involved did something about this, the world would be a better place:

• If the web designers who make these "printable" pages actually tried to print them (duh!), they'd learn not to use tables, fixed-width CSS and other abominations for "printable" pages.

• If browser makers actually asked the OS/printer-driver for the width of the paper, and adjusted the printout to fit (like most every other application does), there wouldn't be a problem.

• If browser makers offered a sensible set of printing options to remove/trim "off-page" images and markup and let the text flow properly, there wouldn't be a problem.

• If OS/printer-driver makers provided options to squeeze or scale overlapping pages to fit the available paper size, there wouldn't be a problem.

A web page that fits comfortably on a screen just 1024 pixels wide, can't be printed on 8 inches of paper at 600dpi. WTF?

On a slightly less ranting note, if anyone has any good solutions (browser recommendations, smart web proxies that strip out screen-furniture etc.), please let me know. This really is driving me nuts.

It looks like the age of nutty record attempts is alive and well. I've just been to grab myself a dollop of the world's largest curry.

A group of students and staff from Suffolk College decided to stage a charity world record attempt to make the worlds largest curry. It's been cooking all day, so I popped down to drop a donation and grab a tub full, and we'll be eating it for dinner tonight. Mmmm...

There's been some mumbling recently about the poor state of print magazines for Java (Alan Williamson, ex JDJ Editor-in-Chief) writes

I personally believe that the best people to morph into print is one of the large online communities. JavaLobby I see as just a less dumber version of Slashdot; no real meat with just a lot of ranting. TheServerSide is slipping into the rant mode of late, with only the likes of JavaWorld and JavaGuru being potential candidates with their large back catalogue of quality content. Ironically, the best company to do a Java magazine, would be IBM. Their ibm.com/java is full of juicy content that is ripe for printing.

I can't help thinking that he's forgotton at least one other major Java online community, but in general, I like the idea. For me, the number one thing a magazine needs is credibility. One of the best ways to get that, it would seem, is to leverage the respect of a trusted source of genuine knowledge.

Personally I'd be very wary of a magazine from IBM. Their skillful and well-funded corporate marketing machine would find it extremely tempting to "spin" the content in their favour

Paul Chenoweth at "Chasing the Dragon's Tale" has had a go at a video diary-style blog entry. In the spirit of geeks everywhere, both the video entry and the associated text are primarily about the technology and the production of the video itself. No more than 10% of the video content is actual 'content'. That's to be expected from a first post in a new medium, I guess.

I liked the idea of using an interesting background for the piece to camera. However, I would have loved some sort of link to information about the park, campsite and cave, and maybe the music. With all the fun of video it's important to remember that it is often the links that bring a blog entry to life, converting a dull diary entry to a real research/learning experience. A user interface for hyperlinks in video has yet to be sorted out, though, so I guess these would need to be in the accompanying text for the moment.

I found the breakdown of the time and effort involved in the production of the video segment to be very interesting. The last time I did any analysis like this, the time ratios were much worse. In my case a short movie of a little over 3 minutes duration took about 8 hours of setup and filming and about 24 hours of editing and titling. My project was a multi-scene shoot with two actors and a lighting rig, and I was using old-fashioned video-video editing, though. It looks like the technology implications of simple firewire connections and laptop video editing software may be the really positive force that we need to get this sort of thing off the ground.

Looking at Paul's progress, and thinking about how it might heve been streamlined even further, I noticed the time and movement taken in setting up the camera and sound. It seemed to need several takes and some twiddling to get it right. Maybe a discretely positioned LCD monitor and/or headphones cabled together with the mic would help get this right quicker and with less getting up and sitting down. Or maybe taking a step back from "proper" video quality and doing the whole thing using a webcam.

While reflecting on this I keep bouncing back and forth on the idea of whether some sort of autocue or prompt system would be useful in this situation. On the one hand it would help give a more measured, professional impression on the finished video. On the other hand it could lose the immediacy and personal nature of a blog post and become more like someone reading an article with nice scenery in the background. Paul doesn't say how much he had planned what he was to say in advance, although I'm guessing that this was largely ad lib rather than read or memorized.

Well done Paul, you've got me all keen to do this myself, now...

I just found out about the Photokina Videofun amateur video competition. Entries are in, and anyone can go watch the finalists and vote! One day I'd love to enter one of these things. sigh...

As I have mentioned elsewhere, I'm currently spending some time and effort trying to work out how to maximise the effectiveness of Wiki technology in education, using the developing features of my own Wiki implementation as a test bench.

One of the most significant things I have noticed every time I have tried Wiki technology in the classroom is the usage pattern. Wiki is a web technology, provided via web servers to users via browsers and the HTTP protocol. There has been tons of analysis of internet usage patterns, which I won't go into here. However, a "rule of thumb" that I have successfully used for capacity planning on several projects is that traffic for a globally-accessible web site on a weekday is roughly twice what it is on a weekend, and traffic when the USA is awake is roughly twice what it is when the USA is asleep. All the sufficiently busy sites I have examined (such as the software developer resource site JavaRanch.com) seem to tend toward a fairly smooth usage curve.

All of this accumulated experience fails in the face of specific situations, though. Imagine I suggest to my students at 10:35 one morning that we do some work on a Wiki. If the students are at all interested in the course it's pretty obvious that the great majority of them will try to access the same system within the next few minutes. No smooth curves here - just very sharp spikes. This usage pattern can cause all sorts of consequences. For an effectively static site or web application where the main activity of these visitors is to read/view content, the issue becomes one of allowing enough "headroom" to handle the expected peak load, or of somehow "cacheing" content for easier provision of preprocessed output to multiple clients. For an application like a Wiki which is very interactive (often with several users trying to edit the same information at once) it all becomes much more complicated. Cacheing is worse than useless - a student who is shown old page contents when he thinks he has changed something is quite likely to panic, repeatedly resubmit changes (making the usage spike even worse), or even abandon the whole exercise and miss out on a major part of the intended learning.

This usage pattern is also sufficently far from the original context in which Wiki technology was designed, that it puts pressure on some of the original design decisions. Many Wiki implementations (mine included) rely on experiential data from the original wiki at c2.com. In particular, long usage has shown that "edit clashes" (where two users try to submit differing versions of the same page to the system at once) are so rare that they can successfully be left to individual negotiation to coordinate. It's clear that during the massive usage spikes found in a classroom setting this does not hold true.

During one internet research activity I ran for a class of about 20 students, I asked them to choose (as a group) a recent topical new story, then (as individuals or small teams) search the web and any news sites they could think of, and paste URLs to as many related pages as they could on to a Wiki page. Some aspects of this activity were very positive. Adding links to a Wiki page is simple and transparent, and pooling the results of all the groups' research helped avoid redundant effort and share knowledge of web research techniques in a very natural way.

What didn't work was the traditional Wiki laissez-faire approach to coordinating edit clashes. During the initial flurry of activity, where most of the students were "cherry picking" the obvious hits from the likes of Google and the BBC, at least half of the intended additions never made it to the list. Things began to settle down as the interval between new additions became longer, but the initial performance of the Wiki as a link-gatherer was not really acceptable.

There are several possibilities to remedy this sort of situation. The one that seems to have had the most discussion among the general Wiki community is the approach of simply "bouncing" edits which clash. A typoical implementation of this approach might store some sort of "version number" with each page, and (when an edited page is submitted for update) check the version number in the edit submission with the current version of the page. If the stored page version is higher than the one in the edit submission, things have changed and the edit is invalid. The problems with this approach include the difficulty of remembering and re-applying changes to an altered context.

Another possibility is some sort of "smart merging", where the system calculates the actual differences between the submitted page and the one it was based on, and automatically applies those changes to the current version of the text. This would work great for a list of URLs, but could go very wrong with more subtle changes to the meaning and arrangement of written work.

A third feasible possibility is to somehow mark whole or part pages as "append only". and apply all incoming changes in a first-come, first-served manner. This, again, would be a good solution to something like link gathering, and even to sequential comments. This is effectively the approach taken by the comment facility in this blog software, for example.

More off-the-wall solutions include "branching" the page every time there is an edit clash - keeping several independent versions of the conflicting pages and requiring some sort of manual merging when activity has slowed, or even cloning the whole page base for each user or implementing some sort of two-phase-commit transactional protocol as used in big database systems.

If anyone has any other solution suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

James Farmer at "incorporated subversion" has spent some time researching Wiki implementations. I'm chuffed to report that my Wiki implementation Friki gets a nod as being "nice", but obviously slightly saddened that it doesn't make his final shortlist.

I understand the reasons for his choices, and can see that Friki (in its current version, at least) would not be a particularly good fit for his needs. However, I would like to reiterate (on the off-chance that anyone reads this) that Friki is under continual development and I'm always willing to accept suggestions for improvements and new features. One of my major themes for the next few releases is to improve Friki to provide a better fit for educational uses, so if you have any suggestions (or feature envy from other software) in this area, please let me know.

As I was coming home from college this afternoon, I walked past a van from a gas company and some workmen who had dug a big hole in the road. One side of the workings smelled strongly of sewage, and the other side smelled of gas. I hurried past, but somehow the incident set me thinking about the history of providing services to urban buildings.

This side of town has been in constant habitation since the mid-1800s. In Victorian times it was popular to be proud of each completed job, and many of the houses have names and dates carved into a lintel or large stone brick at the front. Most of the houses in my street were built between about 1880 and 1910 - nearer the centre of town they are older. As part of a planned urban development, certain infrastructure services were provided as a matter of course.

Although I have never seen documentation, I'm pretty sure that all these houses were built with piped fresh water coming in, and sewage/waste water going out. I suggest that this sort of provision might be considered a first level of service provision. The service being provided is identical to the material being provided. Water from a tap is consumed directly by people living in the house.

I'm less sure about how many of these houses were built with piped gas for heating and lighting. I know that around this time (the end of the 19th century) gas lighting and heating was increasingly common, so I will assume that some at least of these houses were fitted for piped gas. I suggest that this sort of provision might be considered as a second level of service provision. The service provided is a secondary property of the material being provided. Gas from the pipes can't be consumed directly, but is instead burned to provide light and heat.

Later, in the 20th century, pretty much all of these houses were fitted with electrical wiring. In a lot of cases the old gas pipework can still be found in the walls, where the fitments were just plastered over during the conversion to electric light. The provision of electricity might be considered a third level of service provision. The material in the "pipe" is copper; it's not used directly by the consumer, or even converted to form something directly useful. Instead it merely serves as a conduit for an even more intangible service: electric power.

Levels beyond this third level seem harder to pin down. A good example of a fourth level service might be telephone or cable television. Athough the cables carry electricity, it's not used directly for power. Instead, fluctuations in it are used to carry information. It might also be feasible to consider some sorts of digital information services as a fifth level. I don't really pay my internet provider for the signals on a cable, but for derived properties of those signals, such as bandwidth, quality of service, web space, email addresses and so on.

As time has progressed, urban infrastructure has become increasingly complex, with each new level of service provision eventually becoming accepted as a basic requirement. Would you consider buying a house without connections for water, heat, light, power, and telephone/TV? I don't know of many new housing developments being built with included broadband internet access, but it seems inevitable. And I'm drawn to wonder what might be the next level of service that we will learn to depend on and demand from our builders ... piped learning? banking? employment?

I've been silently following the progress of the NMC 2004 Wiki/blog/presentation/project (What it actually is, defies description). As a long-time Wiki fan, blogger, and educator I have been intrigued to see how it has been getting on. Alan at "cogdogblog" seems to think it's not going too well

In response to his call to action I've added a few comments to the Wiki, and I shall probably go in there and stir things a bit more. Over here in my blog, however, I'll try and add some analysis (or at least observation and opinion) about why and how I think things are not quite what was hoped for.

Alan writes:

It's like a fresh coat of paint on the walls of a large building in tough urban neighborhood, at the intersection of 3 rival gangs' territory. A hardware supply truck takes the corner too fast, the back flies open, and a few cases of free spray paint land at the base of the walls! Why would the walls stay blank???

Except that it isn't.

How about this alternative simile:

It's like a municipal-sponsored "graffiti wall" in a back lot behind a community center. The community center is in a nice part of town because, well, the sponsors and their wives are not really comfortable with going into a rough neighborhood for their photo-ops and sanitised thanksgiving donations. Meanwhile, the worthy people at the graffiti-wall sub-committee couldn't agree on what to put on this "blank" wall, so they divided it into three areas based on what they could remember of gang turfs from when they were teenagers themselves. And they thought it important to put pretty borders round the sections and carefully write an introductory paragraph to make it clear who should paint in each section (just in case of any misunderstandings.) Beside each section of wall is a laminated map of the community center and a list of sponsors. If you think to lift up the map, there are a set of spray cans in a box underneath. Of course the cans are chained to the box - it just wouldn't do to have anyone steal them and go spray anywhere else. On the side of the community center, mounted high to avoid tampering, are a bank of cameras pointing at the graffiti wall providing a live feed to a local cable station that people have long given up on watching. From time to time, one of the community center staff will go and (somewhat self-consciously) scrawl something on the wall, in the hope that it might look more lively.

Inside the community center there is a suggestion box, to put ideas for the graffiti wall project and its associated newsletter. Unfortunately, it seems you have to be a community-center member to submit anything. These days, on the rare occasions that a newsletter is published, it mostly consists of puzzled desperation from the project organizers wondering why this grand and empowering vision seems to have fallen so flat.

Does that sound harsh? Maybe. But I hope that it goes a little way to show how different things can appear to outsiders.

When I first read of this project, I recall a mention that "all" you need to do to get blog comments aggregated into the SmallPieces hairball was to sign your blog feed up to edu_RSS, and tag posts with some keyword. I tried to sign up as suggested about a week ago, but so far have not seen any of my posts appear on the edu_RSS feed. There seems no obvious way of tracking the progress of an application, so I don't know if I have been missed, ignored, rejected, or just not reached the top of the queue. I've also lost the link to the article with the magic keyword, and can't find instructions on the wiki.

All of this pales in comparison with the strange way the Wiki has been set up, though. Seeding it with carefully-crafted prose and pretty pictures, imposing a nonsense process "to get things started", hiding the edit button among a bunch of navigation links, and reminding people that they are being watched all contribute to raising the barriers to entry. And what's with the wierd '/' on the page names? Did you choose an ovecomplicated wiki implementation deliberately to confuse even hardened Wiki users?

Trust me, if you want people to contribute on a Wiki, give them a real blank page and actively encourage posting by making it as simple, obvious and unambiguous as possible. Look at c2.com. Look at my demo installation of my own Wiki software. Wiki is about freedom and simplicity. With the the possible exception of the formatting markup, Wiki technology nestles in a "sweet spot" of approachability, usability and power. Move away from that sweet spot in any direction, however well-intentioned, and you begin to lose or dilute the things that make it work.

This morning I happened to find a small tin of promotional mints I got in a "goody bag" at a Sun Developer Days conference a few months ago. Not overly significant on its own, but it reminded me of some thoughts I had at the event.

The conference was arranged in a familiar format - a few "threads" of presentations (interrupted by coffee and food breaks) and an accompanying vendor hall filled with shiny-suited sales folks. In general, I enjoyed the conference, but one or two things about the presentations, in particular, struck me as a bit dumb.

In the "goody bag" provided to every delegate, we were given a whole bunch of stuff, including: a bizarre liquid-filled mouse with a floating "Duke" (still can't get this to work with my laptop); a notepad; and a fancy silvery pen which flashes and shines some bright electroluminescent strips if you push a button on the side. As you entered the vendor hall, there was a table piled high with small tins of mints, so most everyone got at least one of these too. So far so good. However, when we went into the conference halls for the presentations, the first thing they did was to lower the house lights, making it a bit tricky to take notes. After a while, our eyes adjusted, but that just made it especially iritating as every few minutes someone nearby would accidentally bump the light-and-flash button on a free pen. Then the mints. They come in a special tin with a flexible lid. To open it, squeeze the sides. To close it, press the top. Both operations generate a quite loud "popping" sound.

Admittedly, a room full of geeks, hunched and squinting over small notepads and surrounded by random flashes and pops is hardly Saving Private Ryan, but it really doesn't seem a good way to aid concentration, reflection and understanding at a conference.

Over at Incorporated Subversion, James Farmer mentions another post and a local webcam. To add to the list, we also have two webcams at Suffolk College, where I teach.

I wonder how many of these we can gather together? Anyone want to host a list?

Over at techreview.com, Simson Garfinkel has written a thoughtful article about whether moving from 32 to 64 bit computing makes much sense.

While I agree with most of the detail of his article, I think he has missed a few points, and I don't entirely agree with his conclusions.

I agree that "64 bit math" is a red herring. I'm astonished that so much emphasis is still placed on numerical capabilities in IT systems. When I first learned about computers back in the late 1970s, they were considered fundamentally numerical devices. The example applications everyone trotted out in classes were things like weather prediction and ballistics modelling. The first computer they got at my school was the sole preserve of the maths department. These days it's completely different. Anything numerical that regular folks need is done with specialist hardware. Ask any hardcore gamer if he'd rather have polygon rendering and shading done by the main CPU! Computers in the early 21st century are almost exclusively used for information storage, transfer and reformatting.

When we get to the potential need for 64 bit memory addressing, I begin to have doubts about the conclusions in the above article. Personally, I'm drooling in anticipation of a new wave of systems with massive memory capability (and the lowering of the price of bulk RAM that I hope will accompany it.) Todays low-cost systems with their typical maximum 1-2GB of RAM are a major roadblock to several types of applications. Let's look at a couple of examples:

• Video Editing Desktop video is getting better and better, but it's still not as simple and reliable as vendors would have you believe. When I first got into video editing, I had to use purely analogue technology - tape decks, cables, switches, mixers and stuff. My first digital editing system was so limited it was only barely useful - digitising analogue video required wierd unsupported hardware, my "top of the range" Pentium 133 CPU struggled under the load, the "huge" 1.6GB hard drive could only hold a few minutes of footage, and the Windows 95 OS was so flakey it hurt. Cameras now include their own digital output, CPUs are fast enough for basic preview, my 250GB drive can hold several hours, and Windows 2000 can go for days at a stretch without needing a reboot. Even low-cost editing software is usable for simple projects.

  But, the whole process is still slowed down by the need to continually read from and write to disk. The whole thing would be much smoother if all the footage for a project could be loaded into RAM, including multiple copies with different colour-correction settings, or at different resolutions. Sure, save it out to disk in idle moments in case the whole thing goes pear-shaped, but work entirely in RAM. To do this for a reasonable-sized amateur project might need something like 100GB of RAM

• Collaborative applications. We all work on the web these days. Massively multi-user web applications such as Google, eBay, Amazon, Slashdot are the bread-and-butter of IT knowledge work. But all these applications are hugely disk-bound. I don't know the details of the traffic and storage for these monsters, so let's take a look at one closer to my heart: JavaRanch.com, and in particular, its collaborative forums The Big Moose Saloon. The Ranch typically get around half a million unique visitors a month (page hit counts are much higher) and has a steadily growing collection of something like 500,000 messages at the moment. Currently this system uses CGI-based bulletin-board software; information has to be loaded from disk for every request and the poor old server is groaning under the strain. We've even had to turn off some of the more useful searching facilities because they crush the system completely. Now imagine how smooth and responsive this system could be if all the data was in RAM, with comprehensive indexing, and a broad instant-access cache of pre-rendered popular pages, threads and searches. As it stands, this system is just on the edge of what 32 bit addressing can support. We could probably fit it into a 4GB address space, but only because we just allow plain text messages which average out at around 1KB each. Any sort of multimedia or executable content (it's a board for programmers, but you can't upoad and share programs, d'oh!) would blow it out of the water. Power and responsiveness for this application would need RAM, and lots of it.

  And JavaRanch is just one of a whole galaxy of massively collaborative web applications. It's not even a particularly big one. Imagine if there were platforms and software available that would scale such communities without being limited by clumsy mechanical disk access.

And this is without considering things like all the millions of small-to-medium databases scattered around corporations and small businesses. I've done a lot of consulting, and the world of database design seems stuck with an obsolete model of hardware capabilities. Corporate departments proudly demonstrate their "huge" databases with "millions" of records, and the big, expensive, servers they live on. But do the sums. Even if each "record" is 1KB (in practice most seem to be much smaller, containing just a few dates or addresses), a million records is just 1GB. Even at the top end of 32 bit technology, the great many of these databases could fit entirely in RAM, - no messing about with expiry algorithms for cached data, paging strategies, and all that nonsense. If we move forward to 64 bit, multi-gigabyte memory, think how many databases could live and work entirely in RAM, with disk storage only there as a backup for when the power goes out.

The main problem now, though, is getting the programming languages and operating systems 64-bit-capable as soon as possible. I can't wait for massive-memory systems, but I want to use a familiar language like Java to program for them.

Well, we're back.

Last Saturday I spent over 11 hours driving. It felt like one of those mythic journeys. We got up pretty early, gathered the remaining stuff that we hadn't been able to pack the night before, locked up the house, and jumped in the car. We left about 9am. The first half-an-hour was fine. After that it got more interesting.

Essentially we wanted to go west. But every road west was jammed, blocked or just moving really slow. Once we hit the M25 (118 miles of freeway in a ring around London, for those that don't "get" the UK road system) we began to slow down. We tried the M4 for a bit, but the traffic information on the radio got worse and worse. So we left, went south for 20 miles or so to join a slightly smaller road heading west, tried that until it slowed, then went south again to another, yet smaller, road and so on. Each step any direction except west was fine, but as soon as we turned west trouble started again.

It was about 8:30 pm when we finally got to the campsite, and we just about pitched the tent before it got too dark to see.

Here's a picture from the following morning.