Technology

information & communication technology

Learning and micro-blogging

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I’m presenting on Twitter and its uses for education and learning later today, as I noted in my last post. During the past few weeks I’ve been looking at my own uses of Twitter and compiling a list of resources on the subject. There are lots of how-to presentations on Twitter, and I would recommend the CommonCraft videos (available in multiple languages) for starters. After that, Jane Hart’s slideshow on specific steps to get going is very practical.

For Twitter in (higher) education, the video and accompanying commentary about a university History course at UT Dallas is the best I’ve found so far. Nicole Melander’s Why I Hate Twitter and Why I Love Twitter posts about a Social Networking and Business class are also of interest to educators.

I think that Twitter used only inside a course is quite constrained. My experience has shown that the “course” is not a good model for the Internet, and is best-suited for the classroom, from which it came. Without walls, courses and curriculum become rather messy. That may make Twitter, like blogs, best suited for personal learning environments (PLE) in academia, so that learners can use it for several courses and connect to their non-academic networks as well. As educators experiment with Twitter, it will probably be at the course level, but that should not be the final limit.

One of the greatest aspects of Twitter I’ve noticed is its asymmetry, or the fact that I don’t have to follow people who follow me. This lets me tune my network to get better signal and less noise. If you find Twitter boring or useless, then you’re following the wrong people. Blogs allow this asymmetry but social networks like Facebook don’t. Dave Emmett shows on this graphic the difference between what Seth Godin describes as tightening & broadening networks. Twitter & blogs foster broadening networks.

My own focus is using Twitter as another tool/process in personal knowledge mastery. Twitter can be  used as a collaboration tool, performance support or knowledge management application. I’ve integrated Twitter into my sense-making process with Friday’s Finds. This helps me synthesize the various threads over a week and addresses one of Twitter’s weaknesses; long-term archiving. In addition, synchronous events like #lrnchat, held each Thursday, may take a little to get used to but are fun, informative and help build community.

The mechanics of micro-blogging, like blogging, are rather simple. Of course Twitter is now being hyped, much as blogs were a while back. But what’s the bigger picture?

Charlene Croft provides a sociological perspective on Twitter:

“Twitter is a social networking site predominantly used by individuals who are high-level communicators and organizations/businesses who want to reach those communicators.   Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point is a good lens through which to view Twitter users.  He talks about the Connectors, the Mavens and the Salesmen as being the three types of individuals which start and spread what he calls ‘social epidemics.'”

One conclusion you can draw from Charlene’s post is that Twitter, like blogging, is not for everyone, especially if you’re not a Maven, Connector or Salesman in your work. That doesn’t mean that you can’t be a passive participant (lurker) or use Twitter as a search engine or information gathering tool.

I will leave the final and most important words from Howard Rheingold, who says that Twitter, like most social media, requires a certain level of skill and literacy in order to be understood and used [my emphasis]:

Nielsen, the same people who do TV ratings, recently noted that more than 60% of new Twitter users fail to return the following month. To me, this represents a perfect example of a media literacy issue: Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively. Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet. The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it – on knowing how to look at it.

Twitter for Faculty

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Image by Matt Hamm

I’m giving a presentation on Twitter for Faculty in collaboration with the Learning Resources Network (LERN) on Wednesday 24 June at 3:00 PM EST (cost $35):

Discover new Twitter tips for faculty in research, networking, and professional development. Whether you are on Twitter or not, you’ll discover new ways of communicating with implications for the classroom and your work.

My presentation will focus on folks new to Twitter, so it’s introductory, and I will leave time for comments and discussion. Most of my resources have been tagged and are already published on my Delicious account and I’ll post the final presentation on SlideShare.

Friday’s Finds #1

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In an attempt to make my finds on Twitter more explicit, this may be the start of regular posts on some of the things I learned this past week (weekly seems better than monthly).

Numbers & Measurement

From Charles Green at The Trusted Advisor:

If you can measure it, you can manage it; if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it; if you can’t manage it, it’s because you can’t measure it; and if you managed it, it’s because you measured it.

Every one of those statements is wrong. But business eats it up. And it’s easy to see why.

…

The ubiquity of measurement inexorably leads people to mistake the measures themselves for the things they were intended to measure.

More on meaningless numbers used to measure things, from Dave Snowden.

We face the challenge of meeting increasing legitimate demands for social services with decreasing real time resources. That brings with it questions of rationing, control and measurement which, however well intentioned, conspire to make the problem worse rather than better. For me this all comes back to one fundamental error, namely we are treating all the processes of government as if they were tasks for engineers rather than a complex problem of co-evolution at multiple levels (individuals, the community, the environment etc.).

Open Source

David Eaves discusses how being open, like embracing open source software, is becoming important for economic development:

Vancouver is not broken – but it could always be improved, and  twitter confirms a suspicion I have: that programmers and creative workers in all industries are attracted to places that are open because it allows them to participate in improving where they live. Having a city that is attractive to great software programmers is a strategic imperative for Vancouver. Where there are great software programmers there will be big software companies and start ups.

Via @SoulSoup is the story of DimDim (free, open source, web conferencing platform) [dead link] making CNET’s Webware Top 100 for 2009 [dead link]. Open source is moving up the software stack, first with operating systems, then general applications and now richer applications. Software vendors have to be continuously moving into higher value applications to remain relevant. This is a natural industry evolution that few purchasers, especially in government, understand.

Learning & Working

Rob Paterson:

In 1996, aged 45, I was on a train with Fraser Mustard. We were returning from a trip to Queens University in Kingston,  where he had been giving a master class to  a group of senior people in the Canadian Government service. I had been working for him as an adviser for about a year. Working with him was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. I asked him if he would consider taking me on full time.

“You are an adult now Rob. Time to go out on your own.” He paused and then added. “I am tired. You cannot rely on me for your life.”

The greatest advice I have ever had given by the greatest man I have ever encountered.

Via @changedotorg –  “In fact, if you look at what’s really happening right now in the nonprofit sector, you’ll find several reasons NOT to go back to school and focus on what organizations are really looking for in potential candidates.” When a Degree isn’t enough [dead link]

Charles Jennings:

There’s enough evidence now to show that Instructor-Led Training is not effective as an approach for the majority of employee development. ILT may be helpful for some change management and big-picture ‘concept’ development, but it is demonstrably the least effective and certainly the least efficient approach for most learning that’s required.

Nine Shift in Saint John

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I’ve written fairly often about Nine Shift, both the blog and the book, since 2005. Tomorrow evening, Bill Draves, Nine Shift author, will be speaking at the Faces of Fusion networking dinner in Saint John and I have the privilege of attending.

Nine Shift
Nine Shift

The basis of the book is that in the next decade what we do during 75% of our waking day (nine hours) will drastically change. In Chapter One the nine shifts, described several years ago and taking place at this time, are [my comments]:

Shift One. People work at home. [like most of my colleagues]

Shift Two. Intranets replace offices. [and maybe cafés replace offices too]

Shift Three. Networks replace pyramids. [same for the training department or the leaking organizational pyramid]

Shift Four. Trains replace cars. [ I already enjoy train service as often as possible]

Shift Five. Dense neighborhoods replace suburbs. [on the changing suburbs, from The Atlantic March 2009]

Shift Six. New social infrastructures evolve. [new forms of structures are already being developed]

Shift Seven. Cheating becomes collaboration. [collaboration is a required skill for the networked workplace]

Shift Eight. Half of all learning is online. [in spite of New Brunswick’s drastic reduction to its distance learning budget]

Shift Nine. Education becomes web-based. [is there any doubt?]

I’m looking forward to finally meeting Bill and hope to have more to add to this theme.

Twitter potpourri

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I’m still figuring out how best to integrate Twitter to my personal knowledge management processes. I post some things I find directly to Delicious and others I mark as favourites. Here are some of my recent favourites, a follow-on from a related post last month [I’ve added some letters and words to make it more coherent]:

@davecormier RT @arvind: @davecormier Hard core social network research: danah boyd

@c4lptnews Leveraging Human Networks to accelerate learning | CLO magazine

How to opt out of cookie sniffing and trading – painless – via Seth Godin

Shai Agassi: A bold plan for mass adoption of electric cars (TED) Inspiring, Hopeful, Fantastic!

The movement from a public service that is opaque by 21st Century standards to one that is transparent is going to be gut-wrenching – David Eaves

RCMP and Vatican: The downfall of the hierarchical and opaque organization – David Eaves

Via @neternity Try 2-3 low-cost approaches instead of one big (expensive) project – that way you can afford to fail #learntrends

Via @neternity The biggest cultural change was breaking down organizational walls. This is an emerging “wirearchy” says @jonhusband #learntrends

@KathySierra Cut a few prime-time ads, use the money to hire fabulous usability & instructional design team to craft/implement a spectacular user learning “strategy”.

Composing Twitter messages using only brainwaves #learntrends – The Future?

On calculating ROI for human activities (economics, learning, marketing, etc.)  from a Nobel laureate

@nickcharney 17 Things we Used to Do (before Twitter): Andrew McAfee

Community Portals

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Looking back at lessons learned from community portals (2005) I would say that the transactional portal is the only one that still makes any sense to me:

Transactional: sites which are accessible, complete, thoughtful, and coherent; and with more than one type of on-line interaction (e.g. payment, application, consultation, bookings).

RSS has blown up the content-only portal funded through advertising but the wide adoption of Twitter is giving content publishers a new push mechanism to get eyeballs to their sites. I don’t follow anyone on Twitter who only publish their recent blog posts, that’s what a feed reader is for. However, some people may prefer getting updates via Twitter. I wonder if this will significantly change the use and utility of RSS?

Back to portals. I’ve found that checking out the various portal/community sites that I belong to is rather tedious and am consciously avoiding requests to join more communities. Not sure if community portal overload syndrome is widespread but I think there’s a sea change happening. Are central portals dying, seeing a resurgence or best left for internal organizational use? I’ve noticed that proprietary portal software is still being sold for lots of money and there are several strong open source projects available too.

Are portals old tech or still a solid way to support communities and various types of online transactions?

Photo by yewenyi

Protesting infringement on privacy and free speech in Canada

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Ontario Court Orders Website To Disclose Identity of Anonymous Posters

Protection for anonymous postings is certainly not an absolute, but a high threshold that requires prima facie evidence supporting the plaintiff’s claim is critical to ensuring that a proper balance is struck between the rights of a plaintiff (whether in a defamation or copyright case) and the privacy and free speech rights of the poster. I [Michael Geist] cannot comment on the postings themselves (and I recognize that Warman has been a frequent target online) but I fear that the high threshold seems to have been abandoned here, with the court all-too-eager to dismiss the privacy considerations associated with mandated disclosure by not engaging in an analysis as to whether the evidentiary standard was met.

We need very high thresholds before our rights can be trampled.

It’s time to black-out in protest.

Catching the Zeitgeist

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From SocialCollider.net (via @gsiemens):

With the Internet’s promise of instant and absolute connectedness, two things appear to be curiously underrepresented: both temporal and lateral perspective of our data-trails. Yet, the amount of data we are constantly producing provides a whole world of contexts, many of which can reveal astonishing relationships if only looked at through time.

This experiment explores these possibilities by starting with messages on the microblogging-platform Twitter.

And here is what I found when looking at @hjarche on Twitter for the last week:

This visual shows that what we post (tweet) can take on a life of its own in the network and that we may not always consider this. We are not in control of our information once it’s on the Net.

Can social media bring about real change?

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Nicola Avery commented on my last post on changing the structure:

How do you bring everyone together though – we do it in learning through various networks and initiatives but don’t know with this – who would be interested, how to connect them up ? It would be great to start an economic education initiative – but who to involve – as well as individuals – would it be organizations like World Economic Forum as well as the alternative World Social Forum – just some thoughts.

So is it possible to use “frivolous” social media for real change?

Vinay Gupta thinks so and has written a visionary essay on The Future of Poverty. Vinay sees social network development, coupled with the billions of people who have cell phones, as the necessary change infrastructure for the developing world.

“By the time I retire in 20 years, I believe that poverty that people die of will be a thing of the past. If you do not think that is possible, I ask you to think on this question: if the Linux nerds had needed to learn to grow food and build wells, do you think they could have cooperated to figure it out and implement it everywhere it had to happen?”

From tweets, to blog posts to pictures and videos; statistics can become real people. Events like Charity Water can make a difference. Take the time to read the entire article or at least go to the bottom and find out what you can do.

Moving down-scale

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Jim Kunstler spoke to a packed audience at Mount Allison University last night, covering much of the material in his book The Long Emergency with updated data. You can watch his 2004 TED Talk on The Tragedy of Suburbia.

Kunstler opened with a most informative graph developed by C H Smith:

Yes, that’s right; sometime in the near future, oil will trade for $1,000 per barrel. In this post-peak oil period, Kunstler’s basic conclusion is that the age of continual growth (2-7%) is over. He showed how the US economy was based almost entirely on suburban development and that has now come to a crashing halt. He also predicted the collapse of the aviation industry in the next 48 months. Dwindling oil supplies and higher costs will affect every sector of society, and we will see major changes in:

  • how we inhabit the landscape as our cities & towns adapt
  • how we grow food as we are forced to be more local and use animal power once again
  • how we do business after the collapse of the industrial retail model (e.g. farmers markets vs Wal*Mart)
  • how we will make things on a more local level
  • how collector schools premised on cheap transportation will disappear

There will soon be a major down-scaling of everything we do because we will no longer have the energy to continue with our current system. Kunstler’s suggestion for a pragmatic North American project to get society motivated to tackle these huge issues is to restore our passenger rail service. It’s feasible, much-needed, requires no new technology and will employ many people. Cars (and suburbia) are dead, no matter how many hybrids we buy.