Lost in the crowd?

In his 2004 book 'Distraction', author Mark Curtis argued that our sense of self - or personal identity - can become confused or challenged when we habitually use digital technology. He made several interesting points about the blurring of boundaries between public and private (think of webcams and Facebook status updates for example) and that technology tends to distract us from 'who we are'. There has been some debate over whether or not people should combine their personal and business social media identities.

Curtis argues from the position that identity is malleable, rather than fixed, and that we learn from a very early age that we can be someone else through role playing, imagination or masquerade. Our immersion in media, he argues, provides us with a myriad of alternative role models we can adopt or adapt. By the same token, social media also give us endless opportunities to engage with others, including sports stars, entertainers, politicians and other celebrities. The Curtis position is that other people's lives are more glamorous than our own, and therefore we wish we could be them to escape from the mundane, if only for a while. All very well, but I'm not convinced that this argument is applicable to everyone. Does wishing to be someone else mean that you actually adopt their identity? I think not.

Curtis also seems to be implying that people are often unwilling or at least unconscious participants in the digital obfuscation of their identities. Again, this is a far from convincing argument, but even if it were true, would it really so much of a bad thing that we are able to engage in multiple online identity performance? What dangers might there be? Also, do we really find ourselves forced into performing multiple identities against our will?

Those who follow this blog or my Twitter accounts (yes, plural) will know that I am very willing to experiment with multiple identities, because I am fascinated by the possibilities and intrigued by the psychology behind personal use of social media. However, I engage with this through choice, and I feel fully in control of what is broadcast/published.

Immersion in environments such as virtual social worlds (Curtis uses Habbo Hotel as his example) are also argued to be a means where the boundaries of identity can be blurred. He makes a useful point that in such environments you don't necessarily know the people you are interacting with, because they often hide behind pseudonyms and always represent themselves as avatars. This does not necessarily mean though, that your identity is being changed or that you are 'losing control' of who you are. It may mean though that you open yourself up to identity theft or manipulation of your public facing image by others. Curtis also makes a useful point that managing multiple identities can demand a lot of effort and therefore becomes a distraction. I have discovered the effects of this personally, because I maintain six Twitter accounts. I therefore need to be very careful especially when using Tweetdeck that I check carefully which account I'm using before I hit the send button. Do you have any thoughts on this?

Reference
Curtis, M. (2004) Distraction: Being Human in the Digital Age. London: Futuretext.

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Lost in the crowd? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Twitter: Le triple filtree

I've been discussing the merits of Twitter as a professional social network recently in conversation with colleagues. One of the regular objections to using Twitter professionally is that there is too great a noise-to-signal ratio. In other words, people are reluctant to get too deeply involved with Twitter because they think they will be swamped with people talking about what they had for breakfast, how their cat was sick on their auntie Bessie, or other niff naff and trivia. Professionals don't have a lot of spare time, and want to maximise the time they do have. I don't blame them. But they should also realise that Twitter can actually save them time if used in an appropriate manner.

I admit that whilst some people do natter on about irrelevant or self indulgent stuff, I tell them that there is also a lot of good content being tweeted daily on Twitter and also an occasional nugget of gold - a link for example to a must-see resource. The answer to effective Twitter use, I point out to them, is the manner in which you use it. The potential is there for it to be used as a very powerful Personal Learning Network (PLN) if it is employed appropriately. PLNs can help professionals by providing solutions to all kinds of problems. Follow the right people, and you will always have food for thought. Ask the right questions of the right people, and you will get very useful answers, pretty damn quick. The answer to finding your own powerful PLN in Twitter is simple: It's all about filtering, and Twitter can be filtered on three levels at least.

Firstly, see Twitter as a fast moving stream. You can choose when to dip your toes in the water and when to let the stream flow past. You don't have to be online all the time, and you don't have to have Twitter on all the time. Use it when you need to, to learn, discover, share, connect and communicate.

Secondly, filter by choosing to follow the right people. There are at least three ways to choose the people you should most likely follow. 1) Go on the recommendations of people you trust. If they have been on Twitter for a while, they will know the ropes and they will know the dopes. Ask for their advice, or simply trust them and follow the people they recommend in their Twitter lists. 2) Choose to follow people on the basis of their content - look at their profiles and the Tweets they post, and you'll soon see whether or not it will be worth your while following them. 3) Don't forget that you can also discover people to follow on Twitter through serendipity. This may be because someone else you follow has retweeted them or simply because you spot them online. If they look interesting, follow them - you have nothing to lose - and you can always unfollow later if it all gets a little too tedious.

Thirdly, you can filter your Twitter stream by using keywords to search for specific content. You can also be very specific by following hastags for say, events such as conferences, or breaking news stories. Keeping an eye on trending topics can also be useful occasionally, especially if you want to lock into something that is breaking news. These three levels of filtering should enable you to enjoy Twitter as a useful PLN, without you being swamped with spurious content. Third party tools such as Tweetdeck can also compartmentalise content and make it manageable. You can choose what each of your columns contains, including your own mentions or DMs (Direct, private messages to you from friends). Happy Twittering!

Image source by Sarah Gallagher

Twitter: Le triple filtree by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Web feats 4: Twitter

This Web 2.0 tool is probably the last one I would get rid of if I had a gun to my head (which I don't). When Twitter first appeared on the scene it was hailed as a 'microblogging tool', but it patently is a lot more than that. OK, so it's restricted to 140 characters, and a longstanding criticism is that you can't be deep and meaningful with such a constraint on your writing. And yet, as millions of users everyday discover, Twitter is extremely expressive, and it is amazing how much you can convey in such as small writing space. I guess you only have to look at Haiku poetry or the book Twitterature (140 character summaries of some of the classic works of literature) to catch my meaning. Twitter also has a number of filtering tools, including DM (Direct Messaging), Lists, RT (Retweeting) and mentions to name a few.

There have been whole conferences dedicated to Twitter, and indeed the networking tool has been used extremely successfully as a conference backchannel. There are already several thousand third party applications that lock into and exploit the power of Twitter, including Tweetdeck, Echofon, Twitpic, Twitgraph and Tweetreach (this one tells you to what extent your tweet has spread across the network). Twitter is gaining in popularity as a tool to build your personal learning network, and also as a viral marketing tool, as well as a guerrilla teaching tool (see my post on Teaching with Twitter). Teachers are waking up to the possibilities of using the Twitter as something more than a simple communication tool. Some even see in it early evidence for a semantic social network, whilst others use it as a personal research tool. Twitter is also a useful tool to use in tandem with other services, but as I have recently argued, most people who don't get Twitter tend not to persist with it, and fail to build a critical mass of follows/followers and therefore miss out on the true power. The ability to connect and communicate with people of like minds all over the globe. My opinion is that Twitter is still emerging, and will build a head of steam in the next year or two as it continues to grow in popularity and increases in functionality. Twitter is definitely a tool I would find difficult to discard.

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Web feats 4: Twitter by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Twittering birds and headless dogs

An old friend of mine, Carol Daunt (Brisbane, Australia) has single handedly turned me on to Plurk. Plurk, despite its silly name, is a microblogging tool that is at once both jolly good fun and strangely addictive. It got me thinking - as I clumsily divided my time between Twitter and Plurk - about the potential learning and teaching affordances of the two tools. How do they differ and how can we leverage (if we should even attempt to) these tools into pedagogy. I also implied the question about splitting time between the two, because as everyone knows, men aren't allowed to be multi-taskers! - it simply isn't credible to at least half of the population. As these social networking microblogging tools grow in popularity and users build up huge followings which make them even harder to cut loose from - how can we harness their power for better communication, collaboration and smarter learning?

So I posted this question on my Twitter stream - "Anyone using either Twitter or Plurk with students for real learning/teaching? Or are they inappropriate tools for those kind of purposes?"

Drew Buddie (The Digital Maverick from Rickmansworth, England) was first to respond within a few seconds. He reported that he had used Twitter to show his students the power of social networking in an instantaneous way - with live answer coming back from his Twitter followers. As I have done the same thing with my students recently, and also during a workshop in Austria last month, I agree that this is a powerful demonstration. Kim Gaskins (Cambridge, Massahusetts: USA) felt that the choice was clear - some of the online discussion groups she had experienced were 'a mess' and Twitter did seem a lot cleaner. This was due to the ability for users to folow specific people, choose what to respond to, guided by clearly defined icons so that they could identify who is who on a preserved feed. Ann Steckel (California State University Chico, USA) said that some of the nursing faculty there use Twitter with their students to enablen them to connect when they are working asynchronously, and that the tool is incorporated into BlackBoard.

It was brought to my attention by Michelle A Hoyle (London, England) that A J Cann (Leicester, England) is using a combination of Twitter and Friendfeed with his students with some success. Michelle herself believes that Plurk is a better collaborative tool because it is threaded and these threads can be bookmarked/archived. I admit it does seem to be more difficult to follow particular threads on Twitter, particularly when you are following 151,475 Twitterers like some people do. She advises using Tweetdeck which allows you to define groups of people and easily follow threads of Tweets. Without this kind of bolt-on tool, the signal to noise ration can be impossible to cut through. Jose Picardo (Nottingham, Ehgland) has used Edmodo.com to rationalise use of Jaiku, Twitter and Plurk.

James McConville (Vancouver, Canada) tried out Plurk after reading my tweets and declared that it seemed addictive. This is an issue I think can be attributed to the immediacy (the synchronous chat boxes) and also the 'Karma' feature which makes Plurk almost game like.

So this was an interesting conversation with about a dozen people from all over the globe, in just a few minutes. It has yielded some interesting ideas, some of which I intend to follow up on when I get a break from all the marking I am doing at the moment. If anyone else out there has any comments, views or tips on using either of these two tools, or anything related to them, please comment below. See you on Plurk. Or Twitter. Or if you are able to multi-task .... both. (I may faint).