The Ed Techie

Becoming a multi-blogger

One of the (vague, ill-defined, unstructured) tasks I set myself this year was to see if my blogging/social networking activity could be bent some way to a more focused institutional benefit. I can make lots of (unsupported, wildly inaccurate, ego-driven) claims about the benefit of this blog to the Open University, for example it acts as a form of staff development, it forms part of an institutional dialogue, it raises the university's profile, it demonstrates the university's engagement with new media, etc.

But I also feel that my blogging activity has been well supported without any specific aim, and it has now reached a reasonably robust state where can I make the above claims without everyone in the room laughing (only some of them). So, I wanted to investigate whether this practice could become more central and foregrounded in what I do and in its institutional benefit.

One result of this has been the initiation of the digital scholarship work at the OU. We have created a site as a part of this activity (knocked together very quickly at our 2-day hackfest). After another iteration of this, I may propose to senior management that it is open to all (in the spirit of things), not just OU staff, but it may be that it only really works with the specific OU focus. One element of this is that it has a central blog for news relevant to digital scholarship. This is rather like my tumblr blog but with a bit more comment. I am also taking over some blogging duties over at the SocialLearn blog.

It is going to be interesting to see whether I can blog effectively for these different audiences. I started this blog as a separate entity from the OU, and although it is obviously related, I have never really had to worry about a very specific intention behind the blog. Hence I can spout half-formed ideas about music, football, elearning and general bobbins. This isn't going to cut it in my new (on-brand, suit-wearing, performance criteria achieving) role. It will also be interesting to see if I can spread my already meagre intellectual jam thinly across three blogs, and whether it impacts upon this one.

I guess what this really comes back to is identity again and the personal-professional tension. I believe a bit of the personal is essential to give a blog meaning. I created this intellectually challenging graph to illustrate my point:

(Graph produced at crappygraphs.com)

So this mini-personal experiment will examine whether I can blog to a different audience, and still retain enough personal element to make it meaningful for me and the reader.

Riffability and MPO

Couple of quick terms for you to play with, and no apologies for butchering the English language, it likes it really.

Riffability - the potential for a resource or idea to generate quick modifications, for it to be riffed upon by others.

Riffability is one (but not the only) factor for how memes, ideas or social objects work. If something has a high riffability rating, then it means others will modify it, suggest alterations, or explore ideas around it. Not everything that spreads is riffable - some ideas/outputs are just perfect as they are and you just want to share. Others promote debate and discussion, but that's not the same as riffing.
A few examples: one of my Cardiff twitter contacts, Sianz, produces food/object based visual puns in twitpic. These are very riffable I think, and thus the photos themselves act as social objects around which others congregate.
The discussion I had (particularly with Andy) on metrics is an example of something that isn't riffing, it's debating (or just plain arguing). But had I couched the original post in the sense of 'here's some metrics I'd use', then it might have been more riffable, in that others could have pitched in with their suggestions. When Scott Leslie was preparing his Educator as DJ talk, it was a riff which some of us could work with.
So I think some ideas have more riffability than others, and you can pose your idea in a manner that has greater riffability. If your intention is to get input from others, then learning how to inject a bit of riffability may be a developing skill (when HR consultants offer courses on 'Improving Riffability' I'll know the term has made it).

MPO - Multiple Personality Order (as contrasted with Disorder). Following on from my last post, comments from Pete J and Jim G, questioned whether we only had one online personality and whether we weren't all a bit schizophrenic. I think they're right, my final conclusion that 'your academic identity = your online identity' was too simplistic. Your online academic identity will be a subset of your online identities. I follow a few people on twitter for instance who have a professional and a personal id (you know who you are). Sadly, their professional one is, well, a bit boring compared with their personal one. But I think this reiterates what I was trying to say in my talk on identity - we're still at the beginning of all this.
Increasingly people (particularly teenagers) will develop and cultivate multiple personalities online. This is an astute, and dexterous, thing to do. It allows them to have a pseudonym which might be the identity where they can mess about, swear, talk rubbish and connect only with trusted friends and like-minded people. At the same time they can have at least one other personality which is a more public facing one, which is closely allied to the real identity.
Of course, many people do this very well at the moment, and some environments (virtual worlds in particular) actively encourage a separation of 'real' identity and online one. My conjecture is that it will become the norm, and take place in more publicly social spaces. And it is likely people won't stop at two identities, but have many. When you add into this that people find you in different spaces and so may have one facet of your personality exaggerated (eg if you follow someone in LastFM but not twitter, you would have a different impression of them), then defining what exactly is 'your identity' becomes increasingly difficult.
But this is a good thing and just a natural adaptation (I'm not doing a Greenfield and arguing social networks will cause MPD). I've always found the sort of person who prides themselves on only having one aspect to their personality rather odd, those people who declare 'I'm me, take me or leave me, I call a spade a spade' etc. Being able to nuance your behaviour to a given environment (without being completely false) is a skill. And online, when stuff hangs around forever and can be spread globally in an instant, being adept at doing this will be increasingly significant.

I'm aggregating, aggregating (a shiny show special)

Image: Different uses of tools from last post, created in Gliffy

Following on from my last post, I have been looking at tools which allow users to collect together different online resources for sharing. What I'm interested in is aggregating and sequencing content together so you can distribute your sequence to others easily, a kind of flash mini-course creator. Scott Leslie twittered the other day, asking a similar thing and pointed me at the wiki scratchpad for his upcoming educator as DJ talk. So I worked through some of these, and here si my experience:

Tumblr - as I mentioned in my previous post, I've rather taken to Tumblr. It's real selling point is the ease of use, simply install the toolbar button and you can easily add anything into your Tumblr blog. It is thus ideal for harvesting all the web paraphernalia you encounter in any one day. I see it more as a personal record, like Liam I see it as a kind of digital scrapbook. But it seems a very personal, slightly anarchic tool, so not really suited to my aim of sharing a defined sequence of resources. Here is my version of Tumblr.

Posterous - AJ Cann is a fan of Posterous, and like Tumblr it's easy to use and ideal for instant sharing and harvesting. Functionally there isn't much to use between the two, I could try and justify my preference for Tumblr but it would be post-hoc rationalisation. Maybe it was the aesthetics of the themes in Tumblr, I'm a shallow kind of guy, but it's often an emotional 'decision' between similar software. Here is my Posterous.

Suprglu - this is a site for aggregating the various social data elements you create in other sites and presenting them in one nice package, sort of like your Facebook/MySpace profile, but prettier. So you can add in RSS, your LastFM tracks, Flickr, delicious, etc. It generates some tags from your content also. It's easy to use, and if you are active with different tools and what an easy to create central hub to represent your identity, it works well. It isn't about sharing a sequence of resources as such, but I guess you could create a suprglu page for a project or subject, and not an individual, which would create a dynamic set of resources. Here is my suprglu page.

Glogster - I covered this in a previous Shiny Show. It lets you embed various resources into a multi-media poster. This is probably closer to what I was after, but you can't get a sequence from it.

SecondBrain -I signed up for SecondBrain ages ago, but didn't really get it. Like suprglu it is a self-aggregation (definitely not to be confused with self-flagellation) site, but rather more extensive with password authentication agreements across a number of sites so you can pull in your content from everywhere. My initial confusion over it remains however, I'm still not quite sure what it's for. While suprglu gives you a nicely presented site, SecondBrain seems to be offering too much, it is partly a conversation and partly a resource share, and I'm not sure it works as either. But it may work for some as an archive of your online activity. Here is my SecondBrain site.

FriendFeed - again, I've not really taken to FriendFeed, although I know some people swear by it. Initially I viewed it as a twitter rival, but it has become more of an aggregator, pulling in various streams from yourself and others. The use of FriendFeed 'rooms' which allow you to gather together several streams may go some way to providing the sort of dynamic content around a particular subject, but it doesn't provide the predetermined, shareable sequence I was after. Here is my FriendFeed.

Trailfire - this lets you create shareable trails across the web, with associated comments, so on each page a trailfire link is added, allowing you to read my comments, add those of your own, and then move on to the next resource. This is close to what I want, although the interface definitely needs a bit of work, and I'm not sure how robust it is. Like most tools it has an easy to use toolbar button, so I can quickly add any site into a particular trail. I'd like it to be exportable as embed code, but this is the closest to what I had in mind, so have a look and see if it works for you. I created a trail for the sites in this post.

I'm disaggregating, disaggregating

I had a play around with different sites for aggregating together different resources and social profiles recently (see next post for comparison). As a result I have started using Tumblr quite a bit. As a result I have found a new slice of my online identity which a) I didn't know needed expressing and b) is distinct from other parts of my online identity which are currently satisfied mainly by this blog and twitter with a bit of Facebook, LastFM, delicious, etc thrown in.

So how am I using Tumblr? Pretty much as you'd expect, it's my online dump for anything interesting I come across, any half thoughts I have, things I may want to use later on, stuff to share, etc. I never became a big social bookmarker, but I am using Tumblr partly for this function.

The thing that differentiates Tumblr from this blog is the close-to-zero threshold. My blog has become the place I think things through. This means I rarely post straightforward links, or comments. There are lots of mini-posts, half-formed ideas then that never see the light of day on Edtechie. I know what you're thinking: if this is the stuff that gets past his quality filter, I'd hate to see what doesn't make it - well now you can at Edtechie Dumbr! And what differentiates my use of Tumblr from Twitter is that Tumblr is more about resources, compared with social interaction.

To summarise: Twitter is where I tell people I am going to the cinema and discuss it, Tumblr is the place where I share a clip of that film and Edtechie is the place where I build it up into a laboured analogy for elearning.

The reason I prefer Tumblr for sharing resources over delicious is that it mixes in more ingredients and elements of the personal. But that is only a marginal reason, and others prefer to use Twitter, Facebook or their blog in the way I am using Tumblr (or to use Posterous instead of Tumblr). So here's my five 'duh well of course' conclusions:

1. Your online identity continues to evolve
2. There is overlap between different tools to achieve this
3. There is no 'right way' to use a tool
4. Share, share, share.
5. Embed, embed, embed