Swabbing the decks

I'm swabbing the decks me hearties! Yep - it's time to do some spring cleaning, so I just deleted my Friends Reunited account. Had to really, because firstly I have never really used it - it feels just a little old and outmoded now - and secondly, I kept receiving annoying little updates via e-mail. I wouldn't have minded so much if the FR message didn't persist in starting with 'Stephen...' Look, no-one except my mother and Graham Attwell (no they are not the same person) has called me 'Stephen' in a very long time. If they do I'll not answer. I'm Steve to my friends and colleagues (note the distinction) and Tim to those who are a little confused about my digital identity. Not Stephen. That's guaranteed to get my back up every time.

I got shot of my Friends Reunited account in the same way I did with Plurk, Bebo, Myspace and a whole host of other not so useful tools. Facebook survived by the skin of its teeth, mainly because at the time I was (just a little bit) obsessed with Farmville, and also because a lot of my friends still communicate with me on my Facebook wall. (It's also a sureptitious way to keep tabs on my two teenage daughters, but don't tell them - they don't read this blog, so I hope I'm relatively safe mentioning it here... maybe). Facebook has some uses, so I'm keeping it. However, Twitter and my blog are now my most important Web 2.0 tools. There are a few others - you can read here about my top ten web tools.

On reflection, the reason I have been shedding so many of the services I so naively blundered into during my early days using the social web, is because they become a little like old clothes. I'm told that if you don't wear a garment for 6 months, you are probably very unlikely ever to wear it again. It's the same with many web tools. Suddenly they aren't so useful anymore. You leave them derelict, and don't use them for a few months, and they become like old clothes. You forget your password and can't be asked to request a reminder. Unwanted, probably outgrown, and looking slightly worse for wear - these old spaces go past their sell by date. I give my old clothes away to charity shops, or dump them if they are beyond repair. A purge now and then of old web tools I no longer frequent feels like another part of my life laundry.

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'Swabbing the decks' by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

2010: The year we fake contact

Warning - This one is a bit of a rant. Social networking tools create contacts. That's what they were designed to do. It's in their job descriptions and they do exactly what it says on their can. Problem is, just how many people can I connect with who are actually people I know? Do I need to have any kind of connection with my Facebook 'friends' beyond the fact that we are linked on the site? When does it become a problem that you are sharing your photographs and your innermost thoughts with friends of friends of friends (I mean total strangers). Just where do you draw the line?

It's just possible that the guy who cut you up on the way home yesterday (you know, the one you exchanged angry words with from the safety of your own driving seats) is the same one you are having a poke exchange with tonight on Facebook. The woman you looked daggers at this morning at the superstore when your trolleys clashed could be the same one who sends you a pomegranate tree this evening on Farmville. You just don't know for sure, because a lot of your Facebook friends aren't really friends at all - they are actually strangers. And if you did meet them in the street, they wouldn't have 'Facebook user' stamped on their foreheads that's for sure. Some are just people you have casually clicked 'yes' to on a friend request, without checking out who they are because you didn't have the time ... at the time. They may have requested friendship status with you simply because you have been auto-suggested by Facebook or because they have a causal acquaintance (i.e. a Facebook link) with one of the people you also have a Facebook link with. And you are now eternally linked, because you can't bring yourself to unfriend them, or you simply forget to do so. And then others with even more tenuous links request friendship. And on it goes....

What does it really mean to have 4000 friends on Facebook? Well, fortunately, unlike Jesus, you won't have to feed them all. Most of them won't be invited to your daughter's wedding and they won't be on your Christmas card list either. They might come in handy if you wanted to besiege Carthage or recreate the T-Mobile Flashmob dance provided they were all living in spitting distance. But with 4000 Facebook friends you might have to face a shed load of requests to join the 'Prevent Ferret Strangling in Equador' Campaign or 'I love Robert Pattinson but I think Twilight sucks' Fan Club. It's no joke. I have well over 100 requests waiting for me on Facebook as I write this. It thrills me, it really does, going through each one, and being told accusingly: 'You have ignored a request from Mother Theresa to prevent Baby Seal Culling in Nova Scotia'. I guess it's fine if you want to feel popular, but ultimately, I think it's all just a big fake having so many 'friends' on your social networking site. I closed down my Bebo, Plurk and MySpace accounts in 2009 because I was being overloaded by so many friend requests and spurious linking to things I couldn't be asked to spend time on. Call me an old humbug if you like, but I'm through with poking, vampire battles and food fights. It's for these reasons I may take the plunge and also close down my Facebook account in 2010. Any reason why I shouldn't?

A happy new year to you all!

Image source (tampered with)

Noughties ... but nice

The first decade of the 21st Century was highly significant for personal learning. Such a vast array of new personal devices and web applications was introduced that have become so deeply ingrained in our everyday lives, many of us would probably feel at a loss if we were suddenly transported back to 1999. If we time jumped from then to 2009, the way we now communicate, learn, search for information, share content and consume entertainment would be unrecognisable. The concept of personal learning environments was also introduced, as a counterpoint to the notion of the VLE. Here are just a few of the personal technological innovations (good or bad) that emerged in the noughties:

Mobile ringtones: OK.... perhaps we could do without ringtones. Those irritating little tunes you hear on the train, in the supermarket queue and even interrupting performances in the theatre have actually grossed over £112 million in sales in the UK alone, and they ain't finished yet. As the next generation of mobile users comes of age, they too will demand that their favourite tunes be made into ringtones. The music industry must be rubbing its hands with glee.

iPods and Podcasts: The Touch, the Nano, the Shuffle, the Classic, you name it, versions of the iPod popped up and grabbed our attention in the noughties. First appearing in 2001, the iPod series is now the most successful digital audio player in history with over 220 million worldwide sales at the time of writing.

The Nintendo DS (Dual Screen) appeared in 2004 and was one of the first handheld games consoles with a built in microphone and wireless connectivity. The dual screen technology was not as smart as we first thought, but never the less, it's a great little device to amuse yourself with for a few hours whilst waiting for a train, on the bus, or in the dentist's chair (eew).

The iPhone: Apple strikes again. For most people who have them they are the best thing since sliced bread. But there are those who absolutely hate this smart, touch surface mobile phone. Battery life sucks, the camera on the first series was naff and they are expensive when you are locked into an O2 contract. But they have revolutionised mobile phones with their pinch gesturing and responsive multi-touch screens, and with several copycat devices available, there really is no going back now.

Social networking sites: Facebook (2006), Myspace (2003), Bebo (2005), LinkedIn (2003) and other sites together have changed the face of social networking for ever. For good or bad, millions of users worldwide flock every day to their favourite social networking sites for their daily fix of pokes, foodfights, online games status updates and live chat. Friends and friends of friends - the race is on to see who can collect the most links to people they will never ever meet. Seriously, social networking has blurred the boundaries between public and private, business and leisure, even good and bad taste. The way you manage your on-line identity is more important than ever. Nothing it seems, is 'yours' anymore - once you have posted personal information or photos to Facebook, they are no longer simply 'your property'. They are there forever, and burying the past may prove to be a problem for many...

YouTube: Freaking out, spoofing, parodies, pirated music videos and plenty of dross - that's YouTube for you. Before Youtube it was very difficult to upload your video clips to the Internet. Youtube made it easy for millions. If you want to know a fact you Google it, but if you want to see a clip, you YouTube it.

Nintendo Wii: This small object of desire appeared in November 2006. If we were cynical, we could surmise that Nintendo worked out if all their games playing customers continued to sit on their backsides, they would get fat and die of heart attacks. So they invented an active sports style handset to get games players up and moving about, thus keeping them alive longer so they could earn more money and spend it on Nintendo games and Wii technology. Clever.

Wikipedia: Created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly to become one of the largest reference web sites, attracting approximately 65 million visitors each month. It's the first stop students make when they need to know something, and also the most vilified reference source for many scholars and academics. Where else would most of us go though, for quick information.

Google apps: Streetview, Scholar, Google Earth, Docs, etc - all of these applications appeared in the last decade, and have revolutionised the way we learn, work together, look up information and generally play out our online lives. Augmented reality was introduced as a result of the combination of a number of smart device apps including mashups, global positioning and touch screen technologies. The coming decade will see smart devices, augmented reality and haptic semantic applications coming of age. We will then see how these can be applied to enhance and extend the personal learning environment.

...and of course.... there was Twitter: Forget all the celebrity rubbish and media hype. Twitter is one of the best stripped down social networking tools available to humankind. Don't be deceived by it's simplistic appearance though. It's a powerful tool with plenty of filtering capability and its amplification and connection potential is yet to be fully tapped. Twitter and its third party bolt-on tools will be one to watch in the next few years.

So what are we to make of this truly technological ten years? We have seen radical shifts in our views of identity, relationships, copyright, communication and learning. These are deep changes that will not be recinded, and as we move into an ever more connected society, the changes will increase in their pace and intensity. Personalised learning has never been so easy to establish, and never more contentious. No-one can quite agree on what a personal learning environment is, but that is predictable, because for each of us, it is something different. And what of the future? We don't know what the next decade will hold, but we do know this - it will be increasingly connected. It will also be different - probably more different than we can begin to imagine.

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Virtual clans

This post is a continuation of yesterday's post entitled: Digital pervasion and loss of identity.

Virtual clannish behaviour can be observed in a number of ways, but probably most overtly in the subtly distinctive ways in which people use their mobile phones. Members of the mobile tribe can be divided into at least two clans. One clan can be observed holding their mobile phones to their ears whilst another group tends to stare at their devices. This is the audio message clan and the text message clan. The former continue to conceive of the mobile phone as having the same functionality of the fixed line telephone – ‘that’s why it’s called a phone’. The latter have made the conceptual leap of seeing the mobile phone as a multi-functional communication tool, and as we have already seen, have developed their own reduced or slang version of common language.

Another example is the social networking tribe which boasts many clans, such as the MySpace clan, the Bebo clan, the YouTube clan and so on. One particularly interesting comparison can be made between the users of Flickr and FaceBook. The Flickrite kin group generally trades in images (photographs) and members rarely identify themselves using their real names. By contrast, FaceBookers identify themselves using real names and photographs, and coalesce around groups with common interests that are wider than photographs. FaceBookers also have a reputation for being frivolous, and engage in virtual food-fights, ‘poking’ each other and sending silly notes, much akin to the naughty school children who sit in the back row of the classroom. Flickrites are more likely to trade in affirmative comments, the ‘favouriting’ of attractive images and the awarding of prizes in mutual celebration of each other’s photographic skills. FaceBookers on the other hand, are more intent on gathering together as many ‘friends’ as possible – some with strong social ties, many with weaker ties, as they are ‘friends of friends’ or simply random acquaintances.

One virtual tribe will behave in a manner that can be distinguished from other tribes. Clans on the other hand tend to be large ‘kin groups’ that generally involve themselves in an identifiably common practice, but are distinct in some way within this practice. They yet remain a part of the larger social mass of the tribe. Whereas clans represent a part of society, tribes may constitute the entire society. Virtual clans are defined more by the technology they subscribe to, and ultimately, the software they use. Although we are bombarded on all sides by advertisements and corporate images prompting us to subscribe, buy into and involve ourselves in commodities of all shapes and sizes, many of us also have infinitely more choice in what we do, the alliances we make and how we spend our money. As a result of this plethora of choice there are many virtual clans – the distinctions are often subtle, but the clans are different, inspired by different motives, identified by different artefacts and activities, and ultimately, distinguished by different aims and destinations.

Virtual youth clans spend much of their time texting each other on their mobile phones. They may identify their clan more subtlety that through the kind of mobile phone they use, its features and capabilities. They may identify as a part of a clan through the use of specific language and other symbolism. Some virtual clanships are emerging through the choice of social networking service – Bebo users are distinctly different in many small ways to their counterpart clans who subscribe to FaceBook, who are again different to those who use MySpace.

On Friday: En masse, online

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Dangerous liaisons?

Keeping children safe on the Internet is an increasing concern for parents and teachers alike. Sites such as CEOP's Think You Know have become useful resources to raise children's awareness of the dangers of using social networking tools such as Bebo and Myspace. Yet media reports continue to highlight a number of concerns about how children use social networking services and whilst schools continue to block access to a number of sites, the question is: How can teachers train/educate children to understand Internet safety in authentic contexts?

I created a poll below, because I was interested in finding out what people thought was the biggest threat to children who use social networks. The poll was open for a week, and 160 people voted. I will post an analysis of the results on this blog later, and hopefully engage us all in a discussion about what schools can do to improve children's understanding of how to keep safe while enjoying use of the web. One of the questions already posed by @simfin (Simon Finch) is what should be our priorities for children's safe use of social networks in the future? Many thanks to all those who voted and made comments!

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One degree of connection

In conversation with some colleagues a few years ago I claimed that I was one degree of separation away from both U.S. President George W. Bush and UK Premier Tony Blair. But it was true. I knew people personally, who worked with each of them. I'm not sure whether I should carry on claiming this, what with the ignominy both ex-heads of state have since been assigned. But the point is this: We are all closer to everyone else in the world than we ever were. Back in the 1960s when psychologist Stanley Milgram did his famous experiments to establish that everyone in the world was no more than 6 degrees of separation from everyone else (6.6 as it turned out), there were no social networks, no internet, and a cumbersome analogue fixed line telephone system which most of the world was excluded from. Technology, and in particular, popular social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Orkut have made connections between people much easier, more immediate, and certainly a lot richer in terms of experience. But people are still separated by weak social ties ... friends of friends of friends ... the 6 degrees of separation Milgram proposed. It's probably a good thing.

The popular game where you had to link famous movie stars in 6 moves to the actor Kevin Bacon has sparked off all sorts of artefacts including board games, plays and the inevitable Hollywood movie. But the ease of social connectivity of 7 billion people on this planet has taken on a whole new resonance through recent media-hyped swineflu pandemic warnings. Just how close are we to each other, and how viral are the connections we make between ourselves and others?

A recent article in the journal Technology, Pedagogy and Education - written by my friend and IFIP colleague Thomas Ryberg with Ellen Christiansen - got me thinking about this again, but this time in terms of pedagogy. Ryberg and Christiansen report on their use of a Danish social networking site called Mingler, and how they have used it to promote both vertical learning (accrual of knowledge) and horizontal learning (the transfer of knowledge across communities and contexts). They point to the social fabric of SNs (norms, language, sociability, tolerance, support) as vital ingredients to successful learning of this kind. These are very powerful ideas, and my interest is now piqued enough to go off and do some of my own research.

My own opinion is that Facebook, MySpace and their ilk have certainly facilitated greater social connectivity and reduced the level of separation between like minded people by aiding the formation of transient self-organised communities of interest. However, many of the connections are weak or relate to people we have never met, and have no real interest in. Twitter works on an entirely different level to that. The connections made on the microblogging tool are more direct, immediate, and can connect anyone to anyone else. I have had tweeted conversations with many people over that last 18 months that have led to firm friendships, productive collaborations and concrete outcomes. The same I cannot say for my Facebook and Bebo accounts, which I recently criticised in an interview for Information World Review journal. Twitter is promoting conversation that is only one degree of connection away, and the results are longer lasting. It's just a pity more people don't get it.

Reference: Ryberg, T. and Christiansen, E. (2008) Community and social network sites as Technology Enhanced Learning Environments. Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 17 (3), 207-220.

Image source: The Millenium Bridge, Tyneside (c) Steve Wheeler 2007

Being there

Well, I finally managed yesterday to get some time to complete a proposal for a workshop at ALT-C 2009. I co-authored the abstract with Tara Alexander, who is in the Faculty of Health and Social Work here at the University of Plymouth. I won't spill the beans on the workshop topic just yet, but it is ironic that, if it is accepted, and we both travel for several hours all the way up to the University of Manchester to present it, that most of it could be done remotely without us, or any participant, actually being there. People will be able to participate for most of it sat at home on their Internet linked computers if they choose. It's nothing new. I have been delivering remote classes for over 15 years and so have others. But I still find it interesting after all these years that people still want to come together face to face to do workshops, seminars, participate in lectures and demonstrations, and generally network in a co-present manner. This despite all the issues of travel pollution, rising fuel prices, travel delays, terrorist threats, stress and anxiety, and so on.

People still have an innate need to meet together face to face, and just about every survey and study I have read on the subject reports that face to face is still valued as the richest social experience. Well - of course - you reply. Yet I wonder just how long this might last, with emerging technologies increasingly mimicking and even replicating co-present experiences.

Second Life has its detractors, but the majority of SLifers I have spoken to talk about the 'other worldliness' and addictive interactive nature of the multi-user virtual environment saying they love it and invest a 'lot more time on it than they should'. Millions of people play almost obsessively on massively-multi player online role-playing games (MMORPGS) such as World of Warcraft and interact socially on another plane. My own children spent an inordinate amount of time on MSN and Bebo talking to their friends in the evening, even though they have spent all day at school with them. We are a technologically mediated society, and I could go on, and on, and...

Here's a question: Is Western industrialised society becoming a world in which we are reluctantly substituting our favoured forms of communication for synthetic versions? Are we migrating to virtual forms of social interaction because we don't have the time or space to meet personally anymore? Or is it simply the case that we are learning and practising new communication skillsets as we increasingly spread our lives ever more thinly across so many spaces and technologies?

I'm looking forward to going to ALT-C again this year - I will be there physically, but I will also be there virtually through my blog, Twitter, Flickr, Blip.tv, Crowdvine... through my iPhone...

Bored to tiers

A lot of the rhetoric surrounding the more popular social networking sites such as FaceBook, MySpace and Bebo seems to be related to the more negative factors such as identity theft, threats to children, breahes in privacy of personal data and copyright theft. Now FaceBook and the others have a new threat to contend with. A recent new item in The Register (an interesting little online journal with the tag line 'biting the hand that feed IT') suggests that large sections of the previously avid social networking population are feeling a little bored about poking each other, throwing sheep and sharing their favourite movies, iPod downloads or party tricks. Apparently they are leaving in .... well, droves. Makes you wonder where they are actually going to get their online kicks.

So I guess now we all have to wait to see what the next killer social web application will be. Whatever it is will probably assail our senses and grab our attention, subscriptions and precious spare time all over again, as we all queue up in our neat little rows to join up in case we might be missing something. Where will it all end?

Probably in tiers.

Buzz words for 2007

Running under the title of Schott's Alamanac, the Times newspaper today carries an article about all of the new buzz words that have supposedly been introduced in 2007 and suggests that these are the words that will define the year. Many of them are technology words already familar to Edubloggers and some are irritatingly unfamilar.... shall we?

• Podslurping: Illicit copying of data to a portable storage device (e.g. iPod)
• e-Thugs: Online cyber bullies
• Lifecasting: Webcasting all your life's activities 24/7
• iSlavery: Apple's attempts to lock iPhone users into one network provider
• Macolyte: Someone who worships at the altar of all things Apple
• Network promiscuity: Tendency by social networkers to spread their membership across FaceBook, MySpace, Bebo, etc... (See also FaceHooked, an addiction to FaceBook; Face vs Space, war for supremacy between FaceBook and MySpace; FaceBlocking, where companies ban employees from accessing social sites at work)
• GoogTube: Offspring of the marriage between Google and YouTube
• Flog: A fake blog run by a company or marketing agency posing as a real-life consumer
• Upgrage: Upgrade rage experienced by all those installing Windows Vista
• Exergaming: Unlkely combination of exercise and gaming (Wii all need it)
• Cyber-vetting: Use of the web to assess the (inter)NET REP(utation) of potential employees
• UGC: User generated content
• Blogola: Fees (or bribes) paid to bloggers for favourable comments (Never had any offered...)
• Digerati: Elite members of online communities and computer industry
• Meganiche: The theory that because of the vastness of the Internet, even obscure items or content can receive massive exposure and publicity

Well fancy that. Any of the above resonate with you? Some of it sure does with me. But some of them go back a few years, so although they may now define 2007, some may actually also define the first few years of this century, I think.

A moving experience

My life is in boxes. Just like a Likert scale questionnaire. I am moving today from a communal office space into a basement office on another part of the campus. My soon to be ex-office is piled high with packing cases containing everything I need to survive a day in the office (and some things I don't need, but have kept anyway, just in case). The move is good and also bad. It's good because there will be less distractions but it's bad because I won't be able to mingle with colleagues as easily. It's a fine line, but social networking is delivering the same problems online. How many FaceBook, Bebo, MySpace, Flickr or (perish the thought) SagaZone (for the over 50s) accounts should I have? How many is it feasible to maintain? How do I stop social networking taking over my life? And why the hell am I writing this blog when I should be packing? (**call it a displacement activity**)

So at the moment my life is in boxes. Some of them are cardboard, others are made out of electrons viewed through flat screen technology. By the end of the week, most of the cardboard boxes will have been unpacked. It will be an infinitely harder job to unpack the electronic ones...

Viva la difference

Yesterday I blogged that there was little or no difference between FaceBook and MySpace, principally because I thought there was no difference between the social class profiles of users. Now it seems that there may be a difference between the two social networking services after all.... A new report (see BBC News online) reveals that MySpace is fast losing ground to both FaceBook and Bebo, and that in the UK in particular, these two are much more popular.

Says the report, by Rory Cellan-Jones: 'There was also evidence that there is plenty of promiscuity amongst the social networkers - at least when it comes to visiting the various sites. Around half a million British users visited all three services in May'. Promiscuity? What does Mr Cellan-Jones mean by this?? Lack of loyalty I hope, otherwise they must all be bonkers ....

City of the dead

City of the dead. That was my impression of Pompeii. Back in AD 79 old Vesuvius blew its top and destroyed an entire area of the Roman empire, including Herculaneum and of course, the infamous Pompeii. It was witnessed by Pliny the elder, who was then admiral of the Roman fleet. He subsequently died in the conflagration along with thousands of other unfortunates, who didn't try to leave until it was too late. Curiosity killed the Capt. Other Pompeiins decided not to leave, no doubt hoping that it would all 'blow over'. Well blow over it did. All over them, tons of it. When I visited there on 13th June (look - the picture is above) I saw the results - plaster casts of bodies writhing in agony as they were incincerated by the pyroclastic flow from the volcano.

I think that Managed Learning Environments are like Pompeii. They are doomed, because firstly, everything that you pay to do on an MLE can be done outside, on the web, for free. Secondly, the new generation of social networking students don't want or need to be managed. They use FaceBook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Bebo, MSN and a host of other free utilities to connect and share with their peer group outside of the university structure. They resent being controlled and told how to communicate with each other. MLEs are in my opinion, cities of the dead. The Personalised Learning Environment (PLE) will take their place. MLEs are doomed, in the same way Pompeii was doomed. Some people got out in time. Others didn't. I'm standing watching from a safe distance....

Saving face

A few days ago I set up my own FaceBook account. I already have 6 friends, all people I know in some way or another. 2 others have also tried to hook up with me, but I don't know them from Adam (who is also not one of my friends) so I declined the offer. You can't be too careful - they could be axe murderers or window salesmen or something worse.

Anyway - it's similar to other social networking spaces such as Bebo (which has a much younger user base) and MySpace (where age doesn't seem to matter - they take anyone). FaceBook seems to be for twenty-somethings, who are linked to a university, college or other youth fraternity. So why, I hear you asking, am I also on FaceBook, seeing that I'm ancient and decrepit and other perjorative, ageist terms (how dare you...). Well, have you ever heard of participant observation? Gotta be in it to view it...

I noticed one thing right away - students seem to prefer to communicate using FaceBook more than standard e-mail. They can say more, add their own views without fear of censorship, and embellish their comments with pictures, profanities, voting, interest groups, etc. On the University of Plymouth FaceBook network there were 6,890 members earlier this week. I checked again today and there are 7,012. About a quarter of the student population at Plymouth. Astounding growth. Let's watch and see what happens....