The Ed Techie

A Twitter love song

When I did my talk on Twitter a few weeks back I said it was a love song to Twitter. Last weekend I had some spare time to myself, so what did I do: did I sort out the back garden? Did I finish reading The Alexandria Quartet? Did I go to the gym? No, of course not, I wondered what a Twitter love song would be like, so I spent the time messing about with Camtasia to produce one. And here it is:

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Also available in not so good quality on YouTube

Bush, digital scholarship and the price of reputation

Our Vice Chancellor gave a talk on Digital Scholarship the other day, a topic that is often on my mind (read: trying to legitimise all this messing around I do). Scholarship, or rather ‘having your scholarship recognised’ which is what people really mean, is all about reputation.

In the pre-digital world this reputation could roughly be pegged to other filters. Publication in journals, books, keynote appearances, research grants: all of these require other professionals to have filtered your contribution, so your reputation could easily be established by the quantity, and quality of these measures. Of course, it meant people learnt to game the system – how to get publications out, how to network so you got invited for keynotes, etc., but on the whole it worked reasonably well if you played along.

But the very nature of the digital world is about the removal of the filter. Anyone can blog, produce a video, podcast, and generally express themselves. So, reputation becomes much harder to verify. This is a problem if we want to start rewarding digital scholarship. Put simply, 100 peer reviewed journal articles probably means you are a decent scholar – 100 (or 10,000) blog posts doesn’t mean anything. So we need to find new ways of establishing someone’s online reputation.

Let’s take Tony Hirst as an example. I think we’d all agree Tony would qualify as a digital scholar. So how would we go about demonstrating this? There would be traditional contributions too, such as developing courses, giving talks, involvement in university projects, etc but let’s focus on the online element. Here are some thoughts:

• Quality of output – Tony, or colleagues, could be asked to nominate significant contributions (blog posts, videos, etc). Personally, I've always liked the Feedistan post.
• Appearance on independent rankings – e.g. Technorati, Jane’s 100+ Elearning Professionals to follow on Twitter, or the Wikio UK blog rankings. I take Matt Lingard’s point that, especially with Twitter, these lists don’t really mean much, but if we were trying to establish an overall ranking of reputation, then collectivelythey add some weight.
• Quantity, or variety, of output – maybe being able to show the range of online activity is important, e.g. blog posts, videos, mashups, etc.
• Impact – being able to demonstrate that what you have done has been used by others. For example, Tony’s work with the OpenLearn material inspired Jim Groom and David Wiley to incorporate openlearn units into blogs.
• Testimonials – quotes from others about your work, eg Jim Groom saying “over in Great Britain there is the legendary Open University, rich with an unfair advantage of knowledge and innovation represented by cats like Tony Hirst"

I think any one of these is easy to cheat or game, e.g. by getting into blog wars you can get your technorati rating up, or by publishing very small posts you can increase your quantity, but when taken overall they provide an indication of reputation.

Which brings me on to George W. Bush. Reputation, online or otherwise, is something that it takes a long time to establish, but only a second to destroy. Bush’s failure to twice get the Paulson agreement through congress seems to me less of a failure of the Bill itself (I have no idea if it’s the right approach, and let’s face it, no-one does), but rather a failure of reputation. Put bluntly, the Iraq chickens have come home to roost. Dave Winer first pointed this out, saying:

Flash back to the United Nations on 2/5/03. An impressive almost Presidential Secretary of State, Colin Powell, delivering some chilling news, not coming right out and saying it, but definitely leading you to believe that Saddam has nukes and chemical weapons and stuff even more horrible and is getting ready to use all of it in some unspecified horrible way. .. Well, I did what a lot of Americans did that day, I sucked it up and got behind my government. And they suckered me. And I'll never forget it. I got fooled, and used, and a lot of people died, in the name of freedom, and it was all a lie.

So Bush is suffering from having sacrificed his reputation in order to legitimise the war in Iraq. And if you are going to sacrifice your reputation you had better be sure that a) it’s worth it and b) you aren’t going to need it again.

An awful lot of what us online folks do is not very easily quantifiable. Exactly how does sending a joke message on Twitter contribute to our bottom line? In the long run what we are doing is establishing our own, and by association, our institution’s online reputation. Given Bush’s reputation collapse the next time someone asks you how much is reputation worth you can answer ‘ooh, about $700 billion’.

Twitter, microblogging and living in the stream

I hosted one of the technology coffee mornings at the OpenU (still trying that term) the other day, called "Twitter, microblogging and living in the stream". I talked about my use of twitter, and how we need to think of it as a different type of communication. My conclusion was that 'social is the new substratum'. A prize for anyone who can explain to me what I meant by that...

Here is the slidecast, and you can download the Powerpoint from Slideshare:

Twitter, microblogging and living in the stream

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: twitter microblogging)

Twitter events

The other day I mentioned that I like to Twitter when I'm watching football on TV. My wife doesn't watch, and if I'm not in a pub, it's a way of sharing the experience. Then on Saturday it was the Eurovision Song Contest. I started to watch it, but put a DVD on, then when I looked at Twitter it was awash with Eurovision comments. It struck me that Eurovision was in many ways the perfect Twitter event. It is, in fact, quite boring (none of the songs are any good), so there is plenty of time to Twitter. At the same time, it is quite enjoyable and provokes comment, so there is a desire to share. And you know that it is a communal event, so others will be watching too.

There's not much broadcasters can do with this, except maybe set up a Twitter id (e.g. Woganesque commentator during Eurovision), but this ability to share the experience online may be the the thing that saves scheduling. Sky Plus and the iPlayer have pretty much destroyed the notion of scheduling, but for programmes and events you want to share, then it has to be done at the allotted time. This obviously applies to live events (sports mainly), but also to any programme people might congregate around. It could be The Apprentice (AJ likes to tweet about this), or Eastenders.

Gapingvoid may have been dismayed by the Brits twittering about Eurovision, but in this respect his talk of social objects is correct. The future of television is not in it being a solitary experience, but in being a social one.

Think of these as 'flash social networks' - Jyri Engestrom argues that "social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object.” Around TV we may see these social networks form for the duration of a programme and then dissipate. The key challenge for broadcasters is to facilitate this without stamping all over it, or going creepy treehouse on it.

[Update - Darren Waters had beaten me to it on this]

Twitter meltdown?

It's not been a good week for Twitter. Most of Tuesday it seemed to be down, and then most of Wednesday evening too. One comes to expect short outages in Twitter, you almost regard them with affection, that bespeak of its cottage industry status (I guess they've gone to put another dollar in the meter). But these outages have been very frustrating. Last night I was watching the Champions League Final, and I often Twitter with other people who are in that narrow cross section of ed tech/football fans/in my twitter list, so I'm not watching alone. But no luck last night, apart from a few brief windows of opportunity.

The Twitter guys don't seem to know what the problem is. Some Twitter fans have become angry and organised a Twit-Out, a 24 hr boycott of Twitter. The danger for Twitter is if you start using another service, you'll stick with it. There's nothing really in the design of Twitter over Jaiku, Friendfeed, Pownce, etc that makes me use it - it's just that it's where my network is, and I can't migrate without them. But if they started to go, the infamous tipping point might be reached very quickly. The only warning I would add is that if we all migrate to another service, then that will likely have problems too. I'm not techie enough to know what Twitter's problems are (hell, if they don't know, why should I), but I'm guessing it relates to scale. They've become a success-disaster. It's likely the same fate would befall the next micro-blogging service we all jumped too - then we'd go back to Twitter which would now seem reliable.

All this might be grist for the 'stick with institutional services' mill, apart from the fact that there isn't an institutional Twitter and if there was it'd only connect me to people in my institution. Those boundaries have gone, and  we need to find tools that support this. It might also be grist for the 'web 2.0 free business model has burst' mill. There may be something in this - like many people (including one suspects Twitter themselves), I find the business model of Twitter a mystery. Except I don't think these problems are related to money or capacity, ie throwing more money at it wouldn't solve it. They seem to be arising from the complexity of the number of posts and how these are handled. Maybe the solution will require more money, but my feeling is that it hasn't arisen because they lacked investment, ie it could have easily happened to a company with paying customers if they had this type of traffic.

So we'll have to wait and see. What's certain is that this won't be the first of these type of problems for web 2.0 services. This is still relatively new ground in terms of technology and more importantly, user behaviour. And with scale comes unforeseen complexity. And that's the fun of it - we get to see the new paradigms being created.

When is a creepy treehouse a community of practice?

Chris Lott coined the term 'creepy treehouse', and John Krutsch defines it as "a place online that adults built with the intention of luring kids in." Jared Stein has an excellent post on defining a creepy treehouse further:

n. Any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally formed environments, or by force, through a system of punishments or rewards.

n. Any system or environment that repulses a target user due to it’s closeness to or representation of an oppressive or overbearing institution.

n. A situation in which an authority figure or an institutional power forces those below him/her into social or quasi-social situations.

None of these commentators is suggesting that we shouldn't exploit new technologies for learning, but rather warning of the way in which you do it, to avoid Creepy Treehouse Syndrome.

I think it's an excellent term, but I have a couple of reservations about it. Firstly, it could be used as a justification for not engaging with any social networking tools in education. You can imagine someone saying 'I've heard students think you're building some kind of creepy treehouse if you go near that stuff. What they want from us is distance, authority and lectures.'

Secondly, it suggests that all learners are young (I know that is explicit in the definition  of luring kids in, but it could be extended to all uses of social networking in education). In the States and many other countries the number of higher education students older than the traditional 18-22 year old range now exceeds those in that range. There may well be different needs and different uses of technology for the adult learner. They don't see it as a creepy treehouse, or even a happy playground, because those are not meaningful metaphors. These are people more concerned with a peer or a professional network.

For instance, I asked all my post-grad students to sign up for Twitter. Some have stuck with it, some haven't, but for me it has changed the dynamics of that educator/student relationship and made it more peer like. I was pleased to see that one of my students, Manish, is now doing the same with his students. I don't see anything creepy about this (of course, the students may disagree!), because of the different nature of learners involved.

Twitter Tales #1

This one starts with Stuart Brown reading the Broadcast Strategy Review, and I remind him there is a website. It then goes on to to prove the adage that 'if man can describe it, Hirst can mash it.'

stuartbrown -  reading the ou broadcast strategy review

mweller -  @stuartbrown - don't you mean 'viewing' (ie the intranet site). Reading is so 1700s

lauradee -   @mweller what if 'viewing' isn't your learning style? :) I'm all about reading... am getting some Paperchase "tattoos for librarians"

nogbad -   @lauradeeDo "tattoos for librarians" say "Shhhhh!"?

lauradee -   @mweller @nogbad they say things like I love books (instead of I love Mum) over pics of hearts, I'd show ya but their website isn't great

nogbad -   @mweller @lauradee I'm sure @psychemedia will do something exciting with Yahoo pipes to show where most librarians have tattoos

psychemedia -   @nogbad @lauradee oh if you insist...... http://tinyurl.com/656wz5  ok?

nogbad -   @psychemedia Awesome! We now know that librarians have tattoos on their shoulders :-)

lauradee -   @psychemedia you are a Geek God

Twitter Tales

I know lots of people don't get Twitter and last week Will accused me of having a Twitter addiction. Part of my response to Will was that as I work at home a lot, Twitter really gives a lot of that peer/professional/social interaction you get at work. I'm not addicted to Twitter, but I might be addicted to my network.

Anyway, I thought I would start collecting series of exchanges on Twitter that over time will show this variety of interaction. So I'm going to start posting 'Twitter Tales' here. My approach is apart from a brief intro to let the tweets do the talking themselves and just list the interchange. I hope that over time I'll have enough Twitter Tales that the next time someone asks me why I do it, I can just point them at my Twitter Tales anthology. I would be interested in hearing other tales too, so blog yours.

One point - all of the exchanges are public, so I won't explicitly ask people's permission to list them here - I'm assuming that's ok?

We're all Canadians now

Happy Canada Day by Our Enchanted Garden http://flickr.com/photos/enchantedgarden/178563428/

A tweet from Jennifer Jones the other day made me reflect on the prevalence of Canadians amongst my favourite bloggers/twitterers. In response to Dean Shareski tweeting "Now I've got colleagues saying to me, "Can you ask your twitter network.......?" Ask them yourself! I didn't say that but I should have", Jennifer responded 'Mine say 'ask your Canadian friends'. This is much the same for me - I have a blog rule that goes something like 'if one of the Canadians hasn't blogged it, then it can't be important'.

Here are the Canadian bloggers that form the core of my blogroll:

D'Arcy Norman
Brian Lamb
Scott Leslie
George Siemens
Stephen Downes
Dean Shareski

Then there are the 'Honorary Canadians', those who seem associated with the above, to the extent I probably thought they were Canadian at some point (indeed, since it's often hard to gather info they may well be for all I know):

Alan Levine
Jennifer Jones
Chris Lott
Jim Groom
Jared Stein

This is a semi-serious question: why do Canadians seem to take to blogs and Twitter so well? Is this a genuine observation, or just my perception? Is there something about the environment, education system or culture that might make it so?

I'm not sure Europeans can become honorary Canadians, but Tony would definitely qualify.

Turning to Twitter in a crisis

Jim Groom has an amazing account of how a group of people at a presentation at the University of Richmond were suddenly told to turn off the lights and be quiet as a suspicious character with a gun had been spotted on campus.

After the initial moment of fright, he relates how a number of them turned to Twitter, and how this turned out to be both soothing and useful:

"I found the act to be really soothing. People at UR were information and advice to one another, while the larger network from around the world was sending regards, prayers, questions, and their well wishes. I had a very powerful sense that those “others” were there with us from beyond that lab, or even the UR campus. I can’t fully explain why that felt so good, someone even offered a Safety dance from abroad, nothing like laugh during a moment of untold strangeness"

I've wondered about this before - is Twitter only useful or interesting if everything is going okay and it remains fairly frivolous. I'm sure there would be life events that I wouldn't Twitter about, but Jim's experience shows that it isn't just for discussing ed tech or making jokes.

As an aside, following Jim's Twitter stream and that of others at Richmond yesterday (eg Andy Morton), as well as those outside (e.g. Jennifer Jones) begins to look like a new literary form. I await the first Twitter novel with eager anticipation. Maybe we should write it?

PS - I am having a great blog comment discussion with Jim and Scott Leslie over on Jim's blog about No Country for Old Men - I love that this has nothing to do with ed tech.