With two colleagues I have just finished almost two weeks of research interviews in China. The research took us to Hangzhou, Guangzhou and Shenzhen (flying in and out of Shanghai).

Our project looks specifically at technology firms and predominantly those we might call new generation Chinese firms. New generation firms are style typically SMEs, though some have grown reasonably large, are privately owned and are most easily defined by what they are not (i.e., not state-owned enterprises (SOEs), not cooperatives or town and village enterprises (TVEs), not family firms, not foreign firms or joint ventures).

We were able to interview more than a dozen firms (a reasonable achievement given that they were spread over three cities and a very late announced three day public holiday got in the way). The firms included an animation business, an IT outsourcing firm, suppliers of telecommunications equipment, a mobile and a CRM software firm, a manufacturer of domestic appliances.

The interviews were intellectually invigorating has they brought together the three of us with our overlapping interests in Chinese business, IT industry and the institutional issues involved in understanding the working of capitalism.

Having spent less than 24 hours back in the UK, I’m writing this on the plane to the US where we will present a first run at the results at a conference.

I had a productive Christmas making geo-mashups for teaching. Mashups are a method of developing web applications that link different web platforms through their programming interfaces (APIs).

My first project has been to link Google Maps to my own database of articles and news stories about China so that students can locate them geographically. The articles can be categorised by broad subject (e.g., political, cultural, economic), source (academic or newspaper article, blog, photograph) and elevation (national, regional, city or local issue). I still have a little work to do on this project (mostly on the user interface), but hopefully can deploy it for teaching this coming semester.

I am hoping to link this system with one developed by my friend Ben Bedwell for a virtual tour of Bagdad. You can see a video of his work with Theresa Caruana here. The idea is that Ben could pull the data from my database and present it on his system.

I am still tweaking things (and adding content), so no demonstrations yet).

The second project allows comments about locations to be placed on the map to provide a site for later reflection (the comments are time coded so can be reviewed in the sequence they were created). My hope is that when I take students to China in April, this site can be deployed (and also be used to keep those at home in the UK informed about progress). I will have two opportunities to pilot test this system before April.

Having spent the last 10 days in Taiwan for work, I was able to do a test of the system. It is a bit ugly (and the contents a bit banal), but you can get an idea of how it might work with student posts. The link is here. Oh, and sorry, for some reason it doesn’t work in Safari (but Firefox and IE seem to be fine).

I went to Matlock and Matlock Bath on the weekend, both being Victorian towns in the Derbyshire Dales, the latter being an old spa town now very popular for motorcyclists to visit. The weather was lovely and some of the scenery great. Unfortunately, my photographs were nothing to write home about.

Board with trying to tinker with the photos to make them realistic and presentable, I decided to do the opposite, using the HDR software over-saturate the colours.

The effect is almost cartoon like and rather fun. Three of these are from Matlock Bath and one on Jubilee Campus from a few weeks ago.

I should shortly be heading to China again to prepare for travel with my students over the Easter break — the students seem quite exciting about the trip and during my preparations I’ll explore one or two new places that we could potentially visit to help the students understand more of the economic, cultural and historical richness of China.

I’m once again testing embedding maps in my blog posts … partly to see if it can be a useful way creating some multi-media templates that help us make more sense of our activities. This is using UMapper.com as a method of easily creating the maps. Any changes I make to this map should be reflected along the way.

Rather than manually enter the data in UMapper, I now have a database of links to my photographs, a description and longitude and latitude data (hosted on my server). This can be exported directly to the map above (you can click on the markers to see the photos and control-click or right-click on the photo to open the blog entries). Its also possible to use the ‘link’ button on the bottom left of the map above to get the URL to a new page with a larger version of the map (or click here). Once there, click the circle in the top right of the new page’s map to play the map full screen.

I can also export the same data for use in Google Earth. Open this file in Google Earth and then play the file (select it in ‘Places’ and click the play arrow beneath it) — depending on the Google Earth preferences, a fly-through should result, with a pause to open the photographs (preferences in Google Earth might need to be changed to have the photographs load, I use about 3 seconds).

I received an invitation to download and register with Sony’s Home, a virtual environment not unlike Second Life that is currently in beta and works on the Playstation 3.

The beta is still very limited: you can define how you look and move through your apartment (everyone gets one), a central square, shopping mall, cinema and entertainment complex.

It is possible to interact with objects and other people. You can, for example, move furniture around your apartment, close-up on posters and movie previews, play pool and other simple games (with others or alone). Text chat, gestures and voice chat are also available.

The graphics is quite impressive, much more so than Second Life, and movement and interaction is seamless, not unlike a typical Playstation game.

It will be interesting to see how the environment develops. I suspect the next additions will allow people to buy things to customise their avatars and apartments (the stores in the shopping mall are for clothes and furniture). This part of its interests me because it might make for suitable sites for multi-party audio conferencing (with 3D like sound to help). While the video is not necessary, some 2D / 3D representation of voices does help with multi-party conversations. I suspect though that this is not the primary purpose that Sony imagines.

After some customisation, I guess Sony will roll out more spaces to explore and probably in combination with other companies so that they might be commercialised. For example, arcades of casual games from developer-partners.

The real question for me is the extent that Sony will open the system. In Second Life much of the value is offered by individuals and firms creating spaces with unique content. For example, there are lots of education institutions (many of them with significant ambitions for teaching and learning provision in Second Life).

Sony has never been great at this type of synergy development, so despite the great graphics and user experience (at least in terms of control and interaction), I’m not convinced that it will take off, especially given the crowded space (see kzero.co.uk). If it does, then the content and monetization will have to be tightly linked to the current Playstation user base (unless Sony can introduce a PC/Mac version, perhaps with lower quality graphics, but some of the same user experience). That, though, seems unlikely.

I have concluded a couple of weeks of experimenting with multimedia to support my teaching and have come to some conclusions.

The most important is that, at least for my subject material, there are very limited learning benefits from developing teaching support resources beyond well structured web resources and podcasts — at least in terms of the time for production and the alternative uses of that time.

A key reason for this, is that for lecture material that is mostly argument or summary, synchronised video / text adds almost nothing to the learning experience (just as it almost nothing to a live lecture). The reason for this is that during a, well structured audio presentation the headings and structure should be obvious — if they are not, then the problem is in the spoken material not in the absence of supporting synchronised text (e.g., PowerPoint or similar slides).

Of course, this is not the case for colleagues who need to talk through complex diagrams or equations. For them, an electronic equivalent of interacting with the chalkboard might be very helpful.

One of my worries with typical powerpoint presentations is that there is a tendency to treat the text as the only method of engagement. I suspect that for a lone student listening and watching with headphones in a computer lab, library or study, this might be even more so the case — but impossible with audio only.

This cost-benefit analysis (rough as it is) must be essential to all such choices. I estimate to make a 30 min lecture, with synchronised audio and slides and decent production values would take at least a full working day (assuming the content is prepared). However, as I note, the incremental learning over an audio only production be are probably negligible. As such, that teaching time would be better spent answering email, extra tutorials, etc.

I have slowly been getting back into some experimenting with multimedia. Some of this has been prompted by my experiments with podcasts and subsequent attempts to think about adding supporting text and interactivity to them (all without spending 3 days a week to produce 10 minutes that will only be used once). Some has been prompted by seeing the work of others. Some has been prompted by new technology.

One idea that I had been discussing with a more multimedia and technologically savvy buddy has been produced fantastically and is available on Wired. The project captured sights and sounds for the internet and has them in a visual and sonic collage.

While this is probably not at all useful for my teaching, it could be the basis for a great student project (particularly for field schools). While I wouldn’t expect business school students to be quite so artistic and to, instead, be somewhat more explicit in their expression of meaning, so kind of audio visual collage could be a useful part of making sense of a field school project.

I have also been motivated by by the release of a new Canon camera (the 5D Mark II). I’ve been waiting for this for a very long time as an update to my ageing (camera) body. The new camera is much, much better in low light (for evening and night time footage) and, most impressively, has excellent video capabilities. Vincent Laforet’s blog had (and will have again) links to footage from a pre-release version of the camera.

While, the video capabilities are much better than I could ever use, it will mean only taking one device and using my existing lenses. So, for capturing some sense of movement, video interviews and documenting student experiences on the field school, this sounds idea (if a little excessive). It will mean developing some new skills with video editing and a more dynamic sense of interaction with the world I want to capture.

Finally, I have been pondering the difference between photography from a journalist’s perspective and from an artists perspective. The journalist seeks to show the world as it is, though it might be hidden from view (and perhaps change it through that documentation). The artist seeks to show it in different ways, to force us to reconceptualise what we already know (and perhaps change it through that process). Perhaps there is a third category, who takes photos of pretty things.

This photograph is in the second category. Its in the second category because I have attempted to highlight the grand old building in Market Square. Lots of people don’t like the new fountain. However, I think it works powerfully to not overshadow the building and not overpower the space for people to meet. By hyper-saturating the colours, I hope to show the building as it is, and as the square will be once the fountain because an accepted, naturalised part of the square.

One of the things I set out to do this year is to provide podcasts to support my students.

Rather than simply make the lectures available (an easy option), I have decided to create an extra weekly podcast to support reading and lecture preparation. My reason is that I know that my students can make sense of the journal articles I give them to read, but are less good at managing time and (importantly) integrating them. My podcasts therefore address these issues by directing reading, suggesting order of reading, areas to focus on, etc.

My first attempt took about 4 hours to produce, split between production time and preparation time. The preparation time duplicates as lecture preparation time. An extra two hours of preparation time seems a lot for a ten minute podcast so I need to develop my workflow a bit more and also monitor the use by the students before deciding if I will continue next year. Although each podcast is only about 10 minutes long, they support many hours of student work.

I had a number of small issues that added considerably to the time (on top of preparation). The first problem was that I did not record the podcast at a loud enough volume. I also created a file too large for the university system so had to compress it at work which lowered the volume further. The file size constraint has been lifted and the second recording has been much louder, so these have been addressed.

Apple’s Garage Band on my Mac at home is my only choice to produce the podcasts — there is far too much noise from the window and walls in the office to it feasible to do at work. A lot of time is spent editing out half finished sentences, stutters and the like. While these are acceptable in a live setting, they do not seem appropriate on a recording. Hopefully with practice this editing will become quicker and needed less.

I have not bothered with fancy sound effects. I have experimented with url links to article in sync with my commentary. However, they don’t seem to export reliably so I will dispense with them.

Having got to terms with the basics of the audio, adding video seems like the logical next step (for audio and visual cues for learning). So, some experiments with the production of annotated slide shows where lecture slides will be in sync with the audio. In theory on the Mac this is easy because Keynote has the facility to record and play the slides at the same time. At the end of a lecture this can be saved to a QuickTime file and shared. However, my lecture theatre doesn’t have sound out at the lectern so there is no easy way to get good quality audio into my Mac. My solution is to record the audio with a boundary microphone and also record audio from a lapel microphone and digital recorder. In theory I can relatively easily then combine the two sets of audio files in sync with the video exported for Keynote.

Alas, its not that simple. Keynote doesn’t seem to export the audio properly so I need to pull the video and audio files into iMovie then add everything together. Some sound processing to make it more easier on the ear is then needed in Garage Band. Unfortunately, this all means that the video then is proper video rather than a series of synchronised JPEGs and an audio track. The result is a huge file and a couple of hours of faffing around on the computer. I’ll continue to experiment a little in my spare time, but the additional value is not at this stage worth the effort. It might be, for example, if I was involved with distance education, for example.

Meanwhile, some of my dinner time experimenting on the last issue is nearly finished exporting, so I’ll check that and get back to sorting things for the lecture tomorrow.

The last two weeks have been great.

I took at trip to Greece for a friends’ wedding and managed to catch up with family and friends. The weather, food, beer and festivities were all fantastic.

The weekend just passed was a trip to Oxford for the alumni weekend and the first event of my soon to be merged college. It was great to see some old faces — and all of them looking healthy and happy. One of the nicest parts of this was meeting some new people (postgrads and fellows at Green) and also being remembered at my own college when I rolled up. Its really rather easy to forget how touching such things are until they happen.

Its now the beginning and term and things have got very, very busy.

Trundling on the same as last year would be the easy option, but when has that ever been an option for me?

New things on the horizon this year include:

• My first attempt at using podcasts as part of teaching. I think I have the technology largely sorted, but this will probably turn out to be the easy part. I have also put a lot of careful thought into how this might work. In particular, I want the podcasts to augment rather than replace existing methods of communicating with students. This of course breaks with tradition, so there are embedded practice issues (for students) that I have to nudge. I’ll report on this as I see how it works (or not).
• Getting back into the swing of research. There has been something of a hiatus for me in terms of traditional academic research. I have now submitted two workshop papers and am about to submit a conference paper to get back into the swing of things. My hope is to consolidate and use as a catalyst all of the exciting things I’ve done over the last couple of years (particularly involving China).
• I have plans to extend and vary again the Overseas Project trip and introduce some new types of assessment. Nothing major, but probably much more work for me than the students. The same issues emerge here as with the podcasting: how to engage with new media, technology and practices without diminishing the best of traditional education.
• Reengaging with some hobbies — all work and no play is not healthy, so I want to spend less time in front of the computer and more time out and about working on my photography — and if the timing is suitable take a documentary making course.

This all seems like a rather heady agenda. However, as much as being mid-career and almost middle aged seems an almost certain recipe for having the ambition kicked out of one, ‘they,’ whoever they are, haven’t got to me yet.

In my (precious little) spare time I have been experimenting with Google Maps and Google Earth.

Things have gone well, except for working out how to embed the maps into my blog posts.

Now, if you happen to be using Firefox (I’m not sure about Internet Explorer), below is a map I made using Google Earth of the trips I have taken this year.

Unfortunately, for some reason it doesn’t display in the shipping version of Safari 3, though does in the Safari 4 preview.

Note: You can drag the map around inside its frame and use the zoom tool to see city names.

An idea I had was to make a similar map to show where my students come from (since we have a very international cohort).

If you have Google Earth installed, then clicking on this link will show the same data but wrapped around the planet.

Special thanks to Ben for his tips and examples on his own site (growlingfish.com).