The Ed Techie

Disaggregated communication

I was chatting with Tony Hirst the other day and we were reflecting on how varied our communication methods were amongst the Facebook project team (Tony, Stuart Brown, Liam Green-Hughes and me). We sometimes use Facebook itself to have a discussion, or we might have an email exchange. I can't really see any reason for why we use one instead of the other at any particular time, but these tend to be discussions along the lines of 'have you seen this?'

Then there are our blog posts and related comments. Sometimes we will respond to each other's posts in our own blogs, other times we will add a comment, but mostly this type of communication is more ambient - I know what Tony is thinking about or working on, and just as importantly, he knows that I know it, so when we meet we have a shared foundation for conversation.

And then we have twitter - we all follow each other, and so will sometimes send replies or direct messages, but as with blogging Twitter really provides a background to more focused discussion. I will know what they are working on, but also it helps maintain a social bond which is vital in an informal team such as this.

Occasionally we need synchronous interaction, and will use Flashmeeting or Skype.

Lastly, we meet up for beers and cross paths at workshops and occasional meetings.

I've put all this is a compendium mindmap, shown above. It gets more social as you move from work meetings anti-clockwise round to the beer. So, at least from the point of view of this grouping, face to face is both the least and the most socially oriented.

What Tony and I realised was that we didn't really register that we had all these methods of communication. Using them and maintaining an overall track of the dialogue is not difficult, it just feels natural. The reason this may be relevant is that in education we worry an awful lot about communication channels with students and having only one main method. Perhaps this disaggregation of communication is not as difficult to manage cognitively as we once thought and actually allows each medium/tool to be used to its best advantage. This only happens if you're comfortable with the technology though.

The Economist debate - my 2p worth

As most people have blogged, there is a debate on social networking in higher education over at the Economist. Ewan Macintosh takes the pro side.

For what it's worth here was the comment I posted:

In some ways the argument is irrelevant - it's like asking 'is alcohol beneficial to study?' You could argue either way, but regardless of what we think students are going to use it anyway.

But, that aside, let's look at what SNS offer - a sense of community, peer support, enthusiastic users, engagement with technology, resource sharing, democratic participation - hmm, these are all things we've been desperate to have in higher education for years. We've largely failed in many of these (as anyone who uses a VLE can attest), so why wouldn't we look at what happens in SNs? It would be remiss of us not to do so.

However, there are some big cultural issues that higher ed will need to get over - in particular HE is based on a very hierarchical model, and is often obsessed with controlling the student experience. In a social network you have to let go. In short you have to accept bottom up over top down - and that will be tough, as it goes against 3000 years of educational instinct.

So, my conclusion - of course higher education should try and adopt principles of social networks and 2.0, but the question is whether it can.

The Facebook lessons

(avlxyz - http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=2077892948&size=l)

So, as I said in my last post, this will be the year Facebook fades away for many of us. It won't disappear - I'll probably have a Facebook profile still, but I just won't use it much, rather like I have a LinkedIn profile that I never do anything with. So, before it goes and we become all dismissive about it, here are some of the good things the Facebook experience taught me. I am focusing here on personal lessons rather than the more general business models, or social network success factors which have been widely commented on (e.g. having an open API):

• Social networking wasn't just for teenagers - prior to about May 2007 I had a few accounts in various social networking sites, but none of them did much. I read about kids loving Bebo, MySpace etc but I could often be found spouting the view that if you were over thirty they were of academic interest only, ie we liked to research them, but not actually use them (see below). Then Facebook reached a tipping point in terms of the people I knew on it (and these were people I liked and respected), and within a couple of weeks I was using it daily, updating my status regularly and building up a network.
• The social dimension is important in a professional context - my Facebook network is consitituted from professional peers who I like. Whereas LinkedIn seems to be professional peers who are potentially good for business. So what I discovered through Facebook is that the intersection of the social and the professional is what is important in my network, not just one or the other. This doesn't mean I have to have met the people face to face, but usually through blogs we have some form of dialogue. This is of course something you know instinctively in a face to face work context - it's not just who you work with, but who you like working with that is important. But finding a means of extending this without it being intrusive has been something Facebook has given me.
• You only understand it by doing it - as many people have commented (e.g. Ewan), in order to understand web 2.0 you have to act 2.0. I think too many academics are guilty of seeing social networking, or any popular tool, as something to be researched, but not something to be experienced and used. This is both rather a snobbish attitude and also misses the point. Signing up for an account, dropping in for a couple of weeks, doing a survey and then disappearing does not gain you an understanding of how these things are really being used.
• Control of the student dialogue is over - if it was ever real in the first place. We can provide some official systems for students to use, but we can't make them use them. Through developing the OU Course Profiles app we've seen some students using Facebook as their preferred mechanism for discussion over the official VLE. They were doing this anyway without our app, so the question is whether you ignore it or support it (and what 'support' means in this context) - but controlling or denying it are not options. We have to accept this in higher education - it's a messy, disaggregated world now.
• Universities need to be more flexible organisationally - the OU Facebook app came about because Tony had a chat with Liam and Stuart and they did it in their spare time. When I got involved it was to get some buy out of their time. The problem is that the OU, like all universities, doesn't really have the right organisational units or structures to deal with this new world. We have toyed with the idea of setting up a Facebook project, which would need official recognition and funding, have deliverables, a timeframe and end point. But, if you accept my proposal in the last post that actually we need to get used to a continual stream of tools we love for a few months, then you don't want a 'Facebook project'. You don't really want a project structure at all, you want people to coalesce around a technology, play with it, then move on to something else. This is a very difficult approach to realise in a large organisation where people have to be accountable for their time.
• Fun is the killer app - a fact not only ignored, but positively treated with disdain by designers of educational software (at least in higher ed). Facebook was fun to use, your average VLE isn't.

I wonder if I'll be writing a similar post about Twitter in a year's time.

Facebook - the holiday romance

(Steve Sawyer - http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevesawyer/1443530999/)

One thing is certain for this year - it will be the year we fall out of love with Facebook. I know, I know, we only fell in love with it last year. As I've commented before, my Facebook use has dropped off considerably with the use of Twitter, and this week I've seen D'Arcy Norman announce his deFacebooking (as he put it in his status 'The ugly, it burns'), and via my Twitter stream Scott Wilson performing a kind of Facebook striptease, or deconstruction, as he removed the various apps, left groups, deleted his profile pic, etc.

Yes, Facebook will definitely fade this year. But before the real backlash begins and we mock anyone who uses it, I want to reflect on its uptake. In the next post I'll look at what it taught me, and in this one think about what this rapid adoption and then dumping means.

The first thing to say is that it isn't really because of anything Facebook has done. I think you can find logical reasons why you're divesting yourself of it - privacy, Beacon, spam/bacn, the very annoying feature of needing to install an app in order to see a message someone has sent you, etc. But really it's just that it's served its purpose and it's not as much fun anymore.

Now, a lot of people will be very smug about this, saying 'I told you so - I knew it wouldn't last and so I didn't bother.' This is to totally miss the point. We knew it wouldn't last either - Facebook was a holiday romance, not the great love of your life. And like holiday romances it was to be enjoyed while it lasted and approached with full gusto and enthusiasm - otherwise there is no point to it. One doesn't engage in a holiday romance cautiously (obviously I don't engage in them at all anymore, but we're in metaphor mode here), that's not their role. Their function is to be short-lived, intense, and perfectly encapsulated. And that's how many of us approached Facebook.

I predict that rather like holiday romances, when you get back to the humdrum of everyday life you become rather embarrassed by the degree of passion you felt. Similarly, there will be an unspoken competition this year to prove that you never really liked Facebook much anyway.

I blogged before that I think we are monoamorous with regards to type of software, rather like football teams, so you only love one social network, one VLE, etc. But maybe what the Facebook episode reveals is that while we may be monogamous within these relationships to types of software, they are shortlived and we are always getting ready to move. The modern day educational technologist needs to think of themselves as something of a Henry VIII figure - always falling in love then cruelly discarding the object of affection for the next one. But with less beheading.

Social objects - meaningful or meaningless

(Image 'Socializing' Noamgalai http://www.flickr.com/photos/noamg/218169158/)

This is a follow up to my earlier post on Social Objects in Education, and is an attempt to wrap up some of the discussion around it and the thoughts these have prompted.

In my Twitter stream John Connell said he wondered if there was something of a tautology around social objects. I think I know what he means, and it relates to a point I'll come to later on definitions. Put simply the argument goes something like 'what's a social object?' Answer: 'It's an object that's social.' Something is a social object if it acts as a social object - the danger with this kind of circular definition is that it doesn't really get you very far. (I have similar reservations about deep and surface learning by the way). For now, let's park this objection (hope that's okay John) and hope it will work itself out if we continue to explore the concept.

Josie Fraser commented that

"Profiles ARE social objects. They're not a real person - they're a constructed representation around which interaction takes place - a specific kind of social object. They are artifacts which connect and make visible networks."

This extends the definition of a social object beyond the 'mere' content I was considering. Your user profile in Facebook, say, is itself a social object since you choose what information to display. I think this is true, if one considers FB, by choosing what applications to install on your profile you are creating a social object. In essence, you are throwing out a number of social hooks to the community to see which ones catch. For instance, if I install the LastFM application then presumably it's because I think the information about the last music I listened to is of some social value to my FB friends, however small that value is (I know most people's waking thought isn't 'what's Martin been listening to?'),

My colleague Andy Lane  argues that  content can be seen as a mediating artefact, which  reminds me of the work of Grainne who argued that

Mediating artefacts help practitioners and students to make informed decisions and choices in order to undertake specific teaching and learning activities. By using this concept of MAs and grounding this in relevant socio-cultural literature it is possible to begin to identify which MAs are appropriate for particular users in particular circumstances.
(Conole, G. (2005), ‘Mediating artefacts to guide choice in             creating and undertaking learning activities’, presentation             at CALRG seminar, Open University, 1st November 2005)

She argues that models, narratives, learning designs can form this function. Does this mean we should bundle them in under the social object umbrella too?

Stephen Downes says he doesn't agree that the network is built around the object (Hugh MacLeod's conjecture), instead arguing that

these so-called "social objects" - images, videos, and the like - constitute a vocabulary that is used by members of a network.

Let's say the social objects in this case are some academic pieces of content for now, e.g. some AV, articles, books, etc on a particular subject. In the sense that the objects inform the dialogue between the participants, and they talk about the objects, then yes, they do constitute a form of vocabulary. For example, learner1 might say 'but we saw in the Wisdom of the Crowds that the mass can make immediate judgements that are better than any single member of the group.' Here 'the Wisdom of the Crowds' is part of a shared vocabulary, the book is the social object, and that is used by the members of the network as Stephen suggests.

However, also imagine this scenario - learners with an interest in, say Ancient Greece in a social network share content resources (through something like the visual bookshelf) and then decide to come together for a discussion on, say, the role of Themistocles in ancient Greece, around a wiki article on him. In this sense,  it is more than a shared vocabulary they are using (although they need that too), but the social object (the resources and the wiki article) are the social objects which are igniting and focusing their discussion.

Lastly, David Wiley links us back to the work on learning objects, and in particular the metaphor he proposed then of the campfire - ie the social glue that brings people out of their tents:

Without a campfire all you have is a bunch of tents setup and people wandering around disconnectedly. The campfire provides a place for people to congregate and interact. The campfire appears before the singing starts.

That last point is significant - the campfire appears before the singing starts, not the other way round. In the comments I replied to David saying that the link to learning objects occurred to me also for two reasons:

i) Are social objects just learning objects that you deliberately create with social interaction in mind (lots of work on LOs seemed to be about interaction with the LO itself, ie they were conceived as multi-media objects)

ii) like with LOs the debate around social objects quickly becomes bogged down in one of definition. Almost every discussion I had about LOs started and ended with ‘but what is a learning object?’

I'm not entirely sure where this leaves us regarding social objects. Part of these blog posts is to help me think it through in a social manner, as all the above comments demonstrate. Rather like terms that become popular in academic circles the debate is often about whether they really add anything. Affordances was another such term, which once it moved beyond the strict Gibsonian interpretation became too loose for many people to be comfortable with. I take a fairly pragmatic stance on the use of such terms - don't get bogged down in an exact definition, if you have an intuitive take on what they mean and it helps stimulate thought, debate, development or research then that's good enough. And that's where I am with social objects at the moment.

The Twitter commandments

(via Alan Levine) Phillie Casablanca issues some Twitter commandments, which are worth looking at. Some people have objected to the term 'commandments' - it's a stylistic device folks! He doesn't really mean them to be obeyed absolutely, it's just that it's meant to be a bit of fun and calling it 'Some practical suggestions on Twitter behaviour' doesn't allow for the same punch really.
Anyway, I particularly like:

1. Thou shalt not tweet more than 20 times a day. This has a detrimental effect on everyone else's ambient intimacy with their group.

3.Thou shalt not tweet more than 10 times in an hour*. That's what blogging is for.

and

9. Thou shalt type people's usernames correctly (e.g. @Casablanca); otherwise the 'replies' function doesn't work.

I'm not so keen on:

6. Thou shalt not forget that the question being asked is "What are you doing?".

I think this is the way in to Twitter, but its use has evolved beyond this. For instance, Ewan Macintosh was giving a presentation to some people at Oxford yesterday and put a call out on Twitter to a) say hello and b) give suggestions for use of Twitter in learning a foreign language. This was during his live presentation I gather. This was a very good use of Twitter, but isn't really answering the question 'What are you doing?'

I'd also add these two commandments:

11. Thou shalt not follow more than 1,000 people (unless thou art Scoble)

12. Thou shalt not use Twitter as a broadcast medium for your website or business - it's about conversation (yes that means you Guy Kawasaki)

Social objects in education

There's been lots of talk about social objects over the past year. A social object is something (it can be real or virtual) that facilitate conversation, and thus social interaction (Hugh MacLeod gives a good overview of them). Hugh argues that social networks are built around social objects, not vice versa. This may not be true of ego-centric networks, but certainly is for task-centric ones such as Flickr. Hugh's take on them is from a marketing perspective, but as someone who's interested in applying web 2.0 to education, the question I'd want to answer is 'what would a social object be in education?'

On campus that's probably pretty obvious - it can be the lecture or workshop, a book or an article. Online I guess the answer is 'content'. This may seem obvious, but it's significant because poor old content is often shoved to one side in the unseemly scramble to praise dialogue, interaction, community and collaboration. If we take the social object line however, content isn't a nice add-on, it's the starting point for any successful social network (or read community if you prefer).

So this reinstates some of the significance of content, but content-producers shouldn't feel smug because there are a host of implications to this. For a start, it suggests that content only matters to the extent that it acts as a social object. This means that your content has to be good social content - this is not necessarily the same as what we usually think of as good academic content. For instance, content that may be imperfect is often good for encouraging others to participate, or content that is contentious may be better at stimulating debate. The very hard lesson for academics here is that the educational value is not in the content itself but the social interaction it begets.

It also means that content has to exist within a framework of appropriate tools which have the right affordances for the type of social interaction, and within a network of users who use the social objects as nodes.

So, to summarise we need three things for a social object driven mode of education:

1. Content that acts as a social object
2. Tools that facilitate social interaction around these objects
3. A community of learners who find the social objects engaging

Getting that mix right won't be easy, but my guess is that if you do, it'll take off.

Twitter business models - a modern day case study

(Image courtsey Bootload, via diy.despair.com)

Over the New Year there was some discussion about Twitter's business model (naturally I found out about it through my Twitter stream). This isn't particularly new, David Chartier suggested six ways Twitter could make money back in April. Allen Stern started this round of discussion, asking is Twitter F'ed? He argues that the Twitter client, Twitterific makes money by charging for the software, while Twitter hasn't made any money. Given that Twitter is chewing up bandwidth they'll need to find a viable business model soon. Stern argues that going for the approach of eyeballs first, business model later may backfire.

The ever reliable Dave Winer responds succinctly, arguing that Twitterific reaches only a very small percentage of Twitter's overall audience. If you had to choose, you'd want the big free audience over the small fee paying one. He suggests they could make their own client, but more importantly:

there are lots of ways for Twitter to make money once there are enough users. And right now their business is to grow and their first priority is to stabilise their service

Stowe Boyd suggests another method, that of reusing Twitter's social stream in other applications:

if third parties wanted to build other apps that use a twitter-esque social stream, they might make an agreement to reuse the twitter pathway. .. As long as I could push stuff through the pipe, I would be willing to pay a per message bulk deal. And I believe that the notion of a common social stream -- being reused by many apps -- is a big chewy idea.

Whatever the model is, the discussion is a case study in modern day economics. There are a number of interesting elements to it I think. Firstly, it seems that normal economics doesn't seem to apply. As is often stated, economics is the study of scarcity, and we are dealing with abundance. So what is the pricing model that works here? It may be that old school economics triumphs, you can't beat the old dogs, but it does seem here is a service that is hugely popular and useful. If it can't be made to work economically then there is something wrong with the structure of the market and our theories, not with the product itself.

Secondly, it is the ideal representation of the get the eyeballs approach to new businesses. This may be restricted to the US, I think Twitter would have struggled to get funding from UK venture capitalists. The conversation would have gone:

Twitter - "We've got this great idea for a service, we've trialled it and take-up is phenomenal. Here are the projected usage figures" (Shows graph with big staircase jumping off the top of the axis)

VCs - "Woooh, we like it! And so, what's your business model? How do you monetise all those users?"

Twitter - "We haven't figured that yet. Don't worry, we'll come up with something later."

VCs - "Bye"

Lastly, I like the way the community itself is chipping in with suggestions for what would be a good business model. In David Chartier's post he quotes Evan Williams (one of Twitter's founders) saying that "Our top concern when it comes to monetisation will be to do so in a way that does not negatively impact users."  And it seems that the Twitter community is willing to help them do that.

If I was an academic in a Business School, I'd be looking at Twitter as a test bed for how the new economics pans out.

Songs for a funeral

AJ has a post about using lettermelater (a means of posting future emails) to send a message about your funeral preferences. He limits himself to 3 songs, so here are my choices:

1. Pyramid song - radiohead. Get 'em all weepy and reflective.

2. Dress sexy at my funeral - Smog. C'mon, you'd have to go for this.

3. Bankrobber - The Clash. Leave 'em humming, and because there are no songs about being an educational technologist.

Reminds me of an idea floated over at the half-bakery a few years back for the Fatal Auto Collision Song that would detect when you had been in a fatal crash and would play your pre-selected choice. You would thus be spared the final insult of spending your last few minutes being forced to listen to Britney on the radio.

Logyourrun quick review

My running rather tailed off towards the end of last year (in favour of mince pies and beer) so for the new year have a new schedule set up. I came across a 2.0 running site - logyourrun. Here's a quick review:

• The ability to share training schedules is useful. I created my own, but as is often the case, used others for inspiration.
• Having all your running tools in one place is really useful. I used to use gmap-pedometer to plot my routes, but logyourrun has Google maps embedded so you can create a set of routes to choose from. When you come to log your run you can then select the route you took and it will add in the distance and calculate pace, etc. There are also blogs, forums, etc.
• It has reasonable graphing functions, showing your pace against your schedule.
• The syntax for the running schedule you create is rather limited. It only recognises 'miles', 'rest' (I'm good at this one) and 'cross'. So if you use any other terms it doesn't add the distance in. As a runner I'd want terms such as hills, race, fartlek, pace, tempo and easy to be available so I could create a more sophisticated training plan.
• It doesn't allow goals to be set in terms of time as far as I can see, only distance. If you are aiming for a race goal, then it's not that you ran 6 miles in a training session that is important but that you did it at the required pace.
• It does have a blog widget - this was my main reason for signing up (although I've since found out Nike+ does this now as well, but my iPod Nano suffered an ignoble death when it was washed along with my kit). This is great, a while ago I blogged about shaming yourself into action (after Kerry Buckley's visible belly graph). Making my running log public is a motivating factor. I know that no-one else really cares, but having it public makes you less likely to skip sessions (or more likely to lie about it). One has to be careful about this public display of all actions however - the default setting when creating routes is to make it public, but as most of mine go from my house, this is potentially dodgy.