I store my knowledge with my friends

I'm at Colchester Institute on Friday to present a workshop entitled: Communities, Spaces and Pedagogies for the Digital Age. It's for a Learning and Teaching development day the Institute is holding where they will explore the theme of Transformational Learning and Teaching. I have spoken several times on transformation learning, and a few years ago actually brought out a book about the transformational power of ICT in education. It's not an easy subject to tackle, particularly in conservative organisations such as schools and colleges, where change of any kind is looked on either with horror (I don't like change) or a jaundiced eye - (yeah right, as if that's going to make any difference...)

During my workshop, which I'm running twice, I'm going to explore how Web 2.0 tools and new approaches to creating learning space might transform the learning experience of students. I'm going to draw on all I have learnt from my recent overseas trips to challenge the audience to think differently, and in so doing, explore what might be possible in both physical and virtual spaces. The notion of community too, will come under scrutiny - what is it that learning in a social world can offer, and how can we foster communities of practice and interest with our students, not only within groups but across entire continents? I'm going to touch on a number of theories, not least Social Constructivism, but also Connectivism, a theory for the digital age.

I have an excellent quote from Karen Stephenson on Connectivist theory: She says: "Since we cannot experience everything, other people’s experiences, and hence other people, become the surrogate for knowledge". In practice, if you put a number of people in the same room and set them a task, they will all apply their own individual knowledge and experience, and in so doing, the sum of the collective effort will be greater than that which each individual could bring to bear on the task - it's known as distributed cognition - that is, no-one can know everything.

Distributed cognition is a multiplier - as some of the exercises I will facilitate will demonstrate. Stephenson goes on to say: ‘I store my knowledge in my friends’ is an axiom for collecting knowledge through collecting people. Wow - this is just the kind of stuff I do within my own community of practice and it's the social web that helps me to achieve this kind of learning. Notably, on Twitter or other social networking services, we all now have the capability to build up and maintain our own personal learning networks (PLNs) which we can draw upon like a water well, when we need it, with specific questions, whilst at the same time, sharing our own ideas, knowledge and expertise, and in so doing, enriching the distributed knowledge of the entire community.

Applying all of this in practice in authentic learning and teaching situations is the real trick.

Image source

I store my knowledge with my friends by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Web feats 2: Slideshare

Yesterday I published the first of my Web feats - the social bookmarking tool Delicious. Today, I want to talk about another of my favourite Web 2.0 tools: Slideshare.

Sharing wasn't just something we were all taught to do as kids. It also has a place in professional life and in the spirit of the social webm, has become something I do naturally each time I create a new slideshow. I have even shared my slides before I present them (but usually only on the same day - I don't want to give too much of the game away!) I first discovered Slideshare about 2 years ago when I was looking for somewhere to store all my content. I quickly discovered that once my slide shows were posted on Slideshare, people came in to view them, and sometimes even commented on them. I found this to be a rich source of feedback from people who are equally as passionate about my subject as I am. The great thing about Slideshare is that if people are interested in your slideshow, they can show it in a number of useful ways. They can 'like' or 'favourite' your slideshow, download it for easier reading, or even embed it into their own blog or website using the coding the site provides for each individual slideset. Recently other widgets and tools have started appearing on the Slideshare site, including the tool that allows users to share a link on Facebook and Twitter, or embed it into a blog post if it's powered by Blogger or Wordpress.

As with all social web tools, Slideshare has a rich social dimension - you can create your own network using its tools by following people back who are following you or who leave comments. You can also find people who have similar interests to you and subscribe to their feeds so that when they post up a new slideshow, you will be the first to know. Slideshare is a very useful tool to guage the mood of the community - some of my slideshows have attracted 3000 views in a single day. When that happens you know you have hit a nerve. It's good to share.

Image source

Web feats 2: Slideshare by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Catching the mood

The current issue (June) of The Psychologist features an interesting article on research into the affective affordances of social networks. Social networks in the widest sense have been around since the dawn of civilisation, but with the advent of online social networks such as Facebook, and the vast populations of users who participate in interaction worldwide, social networks now take on a whole new dimension, and there is plenty of potential for research into their effects.

The current article (Totterdell et al, 2009) speculates that online social networks may enable those who are connected together with very wide groups of 'friends' to transfer feelings across their networks. So, for example, if one member's close relative dies, and she shares that sad news to her social network, many of her Facebook friends might feel a personal sense of loss and may even join in the mourning, even though they may not have known the person who has died. According to the article, it's not just emotions (such as anger or fear) that could be propogated through social media, but also general moods (gloominess, calm) and more enduring states such as feelings of well-being and happiness can also be transmitted and caught by other members of a social group.

The authors further claim that the social ties don't even need to be very strong for this to occur. They cite a number of research studies including some in which feelings and emotions have been transferred between people through two identified psychological processes. The first is a cognitive inferential mechanism, where thinking and reflection is involved, and then there is something known as primitive emotional contagion - where subconsciously, we mimic the emotions and postures of those we are interacting with, especially if we wish to convey friendship. As I read this section, I thought of the 'postural echoing' I observe when I'm in the shopping mall, or waiting in the departure lounge. People sat or standing together tend to echo their partners postures, in an unconscious display of affinity (as in the pictures above).

If the speculation is correct, and we behave similarly in virtual worlds as we do in real life, online social networking is probably a great deal more powerful than many of us think - and can possibly transmit strong emotions and cause large movements of mood effects across populations. The more we are connected, the more we may be affected.

Reference: Totterdell, P., Niven, K. and Holman, D. (2010) Our Emotional Neighbourhoods. The Psychologist, 23 (6), 474-477.

Image source

Catching the mood by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 International License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

The Web 3.0 Social Network

I couldn't resist re-posting this article which first appeared exactly a year ago, on April 1st 2009. I hope you enjoy it... :-)

For many people the Social Web is simply far too complex to organise. Many of us have unwanted or unused Facebook, Myspace, Flickr or Bebo accounts 'out there' that we haven't visited or done anything with for a very long time. These stagnant accounts clog up the Web and use up valuable memory on someone's server somewhere. Messages, pokes and invitations for vampire food fights wait forlornly for an answer. Some complain that they find it difficult to follow Twitter, update their LinkedIn site and carry on blogging, because there is just not enough time in the day. Some people are completely confused over the whole Web 2.0 thing and simply don't get it. They fail to make optimum use of their social network because they don't know enough about its potential. Well, all that is about to change with help from the Semantic Web.

Software company Avinuon have just announced a new Web 3.0 tool that will give you more time by doing your social networking for you. Plonkr will not only organise all your web tools and services in one place, it will also regularly update dormant sites on your behalf using the latest, state-of-the-art intelligent agent software, even without being asked. Plonkr is 'intelligent' enough to send responses back to your network buddies in a manner that perfectly emulates your own style. Are you drinking in the pub when you should be working? Use Plonkr, and your boss will think you are still hard at work in the office. Using recurrence plotting and fuzzy measure analysis the software will be able to predict what you want to say even before you say it, or in some cases, according to its critics, whether you really want to say it or not. One critic of the new service, Dr Frank Lee, of the Paliamentary watchdog FIDO (the Federated Independent Digital Observatory), believes Plonkr may be a step too far. 'Call me a luddite if you like', he said, 'but do we really want machines doing our thinking for us? Here in Parliament we are quite capable of making our own mistakes without the aid of computers, thank you very much'.

Kurt Prilalofo, CEO of Avinuon, is clearly more positive about his new service. 'We are looking at the future of Web 3.0 social networking, right here, right now. This is a seamless, costless service that is at once both seamless and costless', he said. Prilalofo's new intelligent agent software algorithms are expected to break the mould of previously available systems, enabling people to 'literally be in more that one place at the same time' he said. Whilst this is neither here nor there, Plonkr seems like a great idea, and may well be the beginning of something truly monumental.

Bully 4 U

In a post earlier this month called 'Dangerous Liaisons' I posed the question: What is the greatest danger for children using social networking services? 160 people responded to this question, and a pie chart of the results can be seen on the original post. It clearly shows that over a third of all those responding (36%) thought that cyberbullying was the biggest threat. Only 22% thought that paedophiles were a threat, with invasion of privacy (16%) the third highest concern.

Yes, I know that this was a simplistic survey, and I acknowledge that the question could have been better presented. But I did it because I am genuinely interested in e-safety and I wanted to provoke some kind of response to gauge whether others were as equally concerned. Judging by your responses, people are very concerned, some with the dangers children face when using social networks unthinkingly or without full awareness of the persistence of the medium. Others were more concerned about getting the semantics correct. Some thought that the problem was too complex to be addressed as a single problem. We need to acknowledge that there are problems when we use social networking tools. There are many questions. Do we behave differently when we use Facebook or Myspace? Do we reveal too much personal information? What do we do about the dangers children (our childen) face when they use social networks? (and they will - there is no stopping them despite school bans).

Yet the most interesting outcome of the survey was that cyberbullying emerged as the biggest concern. Bullying of any kind is destructive and can ruin lives, but cyberbullying may be the most insidious form. The pseudo-anonymity of the perpetrator is disturbing in itself, but cyberbullying is often very intrusive too. Children can escape from the school playground bully, but they find it harder to escape from the Facebook bully who invades their home, their desktop, their mind. Similar problems have emerged with mobile phones. Cyberbullying it seems, can affect almost anyone. What are your experiences with cyberbullying? Have your children or students been bullied through text? How did you handle it? Who can offer advice on how to address the problem of the cyberbully?

Image source

Is Twitter the Semantic Web?

Saw a blog post from Alan Cann over at the University of Leicester this evening which got me thinking. His post was entitled 'Twitter drives traffic to blogs and social networks', and in it he claims that Twitter is the semantic web. He has a great poem on his site called 'The Semantic Web will not be Televised' which expresses this idea perfectly.

Although the Semantic Web (Web 3.0?) is still somewhat ill-defined and there are disagreements over exactly what it is, or what it looks like, most people agree that elements of it at least, have been with us for some time. The key presumed attributes of the semantic web are its psuedo-intelligent predictive and filtering capabilities:

Back in 1999 Sir Tim Berners-Lee declared: "I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers."

This is a grand architectural design of course, most of which is not completely accessible to the average computer user. What we do understand however, is that 'intelligent agents' in software will enable computers to filter out what we don't want and push to us what we do want, based on our previous use of search engines, network transactions, etc.

In this context, Alan Cann is probably correct because Twitter can act as a network filter - still under the control of the user, with little intelligence built into it other than the choices of the user - but never-the-less possessing a form of filtering capability beyond that of the average user. We are still some way off from truly intelligent agents that predict accurately what you want, when you want it, delivered to your current location. But Twitter is much more than the glorified e-mail system many claim it to be. Twitter is certainly a huge step toward semantic predictive filtering - it allows you to lock directly into and maintain your own personalised community of interest, where you can follow or un-follow who you wish, communicate across boundaries and push/pull information as you require it. It employes a number of simple and abbreviated filtering features such as #hashtagging, @names, RT (Retweeting) and DM (Direct messaging) which many social networking tools do not have. It is only a small step from here to automated versions.





Image source

Seven deadly spams

OK, so it was pure irony and I was having a laugh. My last post 'Twitter made my head explode' was just me letting off a little steam (the picture was a subtle clue). My head didn't really explode, and I don't really believe that overuse of the Internet leads to ADHD or autism, or that prolonged use of screen technologies might lead to diseases such as cerebral vascular accident (CVA or 'stroke') or the big 'C'. I was just having some fun at the expense of a few pompous scientific types who maybe should think more carefully before they commit their unsubstantiated ideas to press. But seriously, there are some potential dangers out there in the social network world. They are more social than physical though...

We have all heard about the employees who have lost their jobs for badmouthing their employers on their blogs. The case of the 'Petite Anglaise' - British worker Catherine Sanderson, who was sacked from her Paris job - is a classic one. She eventually won a court case against her former employers for wrongful dismissal. We don't often hear though, about those bright young things who have left university looking for high flying jobs, yet who cannot find good jobs. We don't hear how their potential employers trawl through Facebook and find images of them engaged in dubious or colourful activities. And then there's the thing we are all affected by: the spam that increasingly invades our e-mail accounts and social spaces. Patricia Wallace once said that the act of daily deleting spam is the psychological equivalent to 'weeding the garden.' It's annoying but necessary. Last month we all suffered a Twitter attack (keep taking the pills), where targeted users had their accounts hijacked, spam messages were sent out in their name, and others lost personal data.

Cloudmark is a company that services the social networking industry, policing its clients servers for spam. They recently released "the seven deadly sins of social networking spam." One of my favourite bloggers Robert X Cringely has expanded it a little in his own inimitable style. It's a real hoot, so I hope you enjoy it as much as I did:

1) Dating spam. Sorry to break it to you, but "Sultry Svetlana," that 23-year-old hottie from the Ukraine who thinks you're fascinating, is really Ugly Ivan, a 46-year-old scammer from Minsk. Take a cold shower and forget about her.
2) Profile and IM lures. Suddenly, you're Mr. Popularity -- only your newfound friends want to lure you to a fake profile page or IM conversation, where they can steal your information. The moral: candy + strangers = bad news.
3) Redirection to dangerous sites. Uh oh, somebody has posted naughty pix of you at an external site -- better go look. No, you won't find naughty pix (at least, not of you), but you might get a drive-by malware infection.
4) Nigerian attacks. That same deposed foreign minister who wanted to share $35 million in embezzled funds with you on e-mail now wants to do it on Facebook. Let me know how that works out for you.
5) Fake jobs. A fantastic job opportunity awaits you. And if you're lucky, your new "employer" will only clean out your bank account and not steal your identity and/or get you arrested along with it.
6) Competitor social network lure. Lesser social networks may try to steal you away by posting comments on your page pretending to be from your friends. Is that pathetic or what?
7) Religion-based spam. Have you accepted the Alien King Rondelay as your one and true savior? Spammers may use social networking sites to convert users for various religions. God help us all.

Wow, who ever thought social networking could be so exciting?

(Image source: http://blog.smithsonianchannel.com/2008/09/19/spam-tastic/)

Twittering about - part 2

Here's the continuation of the report on my recent survey on about Twitter uses. I asked people what their top three reasons were for using Twitter. Yesterday's post carried some of the responses, and here are the rest. If you use Twitter yourself you may follow some of these notorious microbloggers....

@cristinacost (Cristina Costa, England) uses Twitter because she gets useful links and connections, meets great people and indulges in a 'bit of chatter.' She says it is also important to have fun when using Twitter. @vaughany (Paul Vaughan, England) says it's all about the networking, conversation and distraction. @Pettsvaldo (Kristian Petterson, England) uses Twitter to get help from his peers, for amusement and to gain access to 'the most contemporaneous news one can get'. @karynromeis (Karyn Romeis, England) locks into a network of likeminded individuals, gets links to interesting things she might otherwise have missed and uses Twitter to make up for the loss of office chatter since she 'went solo'. @andypiper (Andy Piper, England) likes keeping up with news, enjoys the ambient intimacy and says that Twitter gives him awareness of his friends, and helps him extend his network.

Downunder, @suewaters (Sue Waters, Australia) says she enjoys near instantaneous connections with extremely diverse groups of people who willingly help and share, and likes the ability of Twitter to provide quick help and assistance to others and similarly receive, increased ability to achieve deeper personal connection to people in your PLN compared to normal blogging. @ljloeffler (Louis Loeffler, USA) says it is easy to discover new Web 2.0 ideas, network and meet, improve and learn. And there's more...

@SarahStewart (Sarah Stewart, New Zealand) says access to broad range of info and people is important as is access to synchronous and serendipitous events. She says that Twitter gives her more of a personal insight into the people she follow through blogs. @ctscho (Carmen Tschofen, USA) says she appreciates Twitter's constant flow of excellent links, a sense of the exchange of dynamics among like thinkers and thinks that it is an excellent place for interaction for introverts. @Quinnovator (Clark Quinn, USA) likes to track what is going on, obtains responses to questions and issues he poses and finds Twitter useful to interact with his colleagues.

@MtnLaurel (Laura Little, USA) finds Twitter useful to connect with her colleagues too, discovers local information, and can share her knowledge and experience within a community of interest. Finally, @torresk (Ricardo Torres Compen, Spain) uses Twitter as a pedagogical tool to support his students and promote discussion. He uses it to keep up-to-date and for networking with colleagues.

Bearing in mind that only 22 people responded to the survey, it would be foolish to make generalisations from such a small sample and this is merely a snapshot of current uses. However, I hope that you can appreciate that trends are indicated here, even in such a superficial study. Statistics are calculated on the basis that each respondent had 3 reasons to give and that each reason was placed into categories as follows: Social interaction/maintaining network, Sharing own knowledge, Entertainment and fun, Getting responses to questions, Finding new links and information, Immediacy, and 'Other'. Percentages were calculated from each column based on the sum divided by 22. I didn't perform any inferential statistics due to the small sample, but there is scope for a larger study.

By far the most important reason for using Twitter was to maintain social and professional network of contacts (82%). This was followed closely by the desire to keep up to date with new trends and technologies (72%). 32% used Twitter as a means of entertainment and fun. It's obvious that Twitter is being used to connect and engage, but interestingly, only 2 respondents (9%) used it to 'share their own knowledge'. I suspect more actually do this, but didn't report it (I follow them all and often learn from their twittering). All in some way or another wanted to keep in contact with their colleagues and peers, and wanted contact with those working in the same area of interest, and to maintain their networks. Twitter then, is seen by users as a multi-purpose social networking tool which has possibilities at several levels. No wonder it is growing exponentially, possibly at the expense of other Web 2.0 tools. As always, any comments are welcome. (Image source: Cyndygreen.wordpress.com)

This time it's personal

Today turned out to be a Personal Learning Environments sort of day for me. Firstly, I read a cracking blog by D'Arcy Norman on PLEs which showed some nice diagrams and conceptual maps of his take on PLEs accompanied by some neat explanations. D'Arcy refreshingly takes a connectionist view that the connections to people are more important than the technologies that connect.

Secondly, I joined a new site which has been set up by Cristina Costa over at Learning Journey. It's a Ning site focused on Personal Learning Environments and Digifolios (read e-Portfolios) which as I write this post, already has 48 members. It looks very exciting and seems well worth joining in. The site hosts a workshop which will be delivered on 12 January. The blurb reads:

We live in an era of individual “personalization and customization”. The read and write web has helped develop a new concept - “do it yourself and your own way” . The phenomenon has had implications in our society at different levels - from the way people learn to the new, emerging jobs and employment needs. The workshop aims to help members become aware of the way the web can empower the individual not only to learn, but also to present what, how and with whom he/she learns.

The target audience for the workshop (which spans 6 weeks) is teachers and trainers who know a little about Web 2.0 tools and maybe are using them in real teaching situations. Join up here if you would like to take part.

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...

FaceBooking our future...

Social networks will change the way we look at world issues claims a new article. The independent journalist Bill Thompson (Bill Board) has just posted a very challenging piece on the BBC technology news site. In a nutshell, Thompson describes a world in which the (so far) unconnected citizens of our planet suddenly discover how to FaceBook or Flickr using mobile phones. Says Thompson: "What happens when the photos on Facebook and Flickr show devastated crops and starving families - and these people are not just faces on the television but old friends, people whose likes and dislikes and reading habits and favourite films we know and share?"

Thompson puts it a lot more eloquently than I can, so read his article entitled: 'Social net offers new perspective'.

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 ....

MyFace or SpaceBook?

So it's official. Apparently your choice of social networking site indicates what social class you belong to... A recent US research project (by a PhD student mind you) has reported that users of FaceBook are generally toffs from wealthier homes and are more likely to study in further/higher education than that great unwashed working class lot who like using MySpace. Well, fancy that. I guess the fact that FaceBook organises its regional networks on the basis of the colleges or universities its members attended might have something to do with it...? And what about those who use Bebo - are they part of a particular social class, or are they just little oiks who couldn't design a tasteful personal space to save their lives?

Anyway, I'm not so sure about this report. I used to have a MySpace, but abandoned it because FaceBook was easier to use. I subsequently found out that more of my friends were using it than MySpace, so it made social networking easier. The fact that I'm working in a university didn't sway me either way. The two are very similar in what they do, but for me FaceBook has the edge because I can upload my 'orrible little photos a bit easier. In the UK, incidentally, being wealthy and attending college are not necessarily synonymous, so the data in the study may not generalise to a British context.

What do you think? Oh... and not so's you'd notice, but the links above have been swapped for effect.... doesn't really make that much difference, does it?

Here is the link to the University of Plymouth elearning site and also back to the Learning with 'e's blog where you will find loads more on social software...

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....