The Ed Techie

Real friendship

As it's coming up to Christmas, a nice post about the value of friendship. Many of you will have read William Deresiewicz's article in the Chronicle entitled Faux Friendship, which decries the loss of 'real' friendship in the social networking age. I ought to say that compared with most anti-social media pieces of journalism, it's well written and coherent. But it's still wrong, and based largely on ignorance.

We get a sense of where the article is going early on:

"The Facebook phenomenon, so sudden and forceful a distortion of social space, needs little elaboration. Having been relegated to our screens, are our friendships now anything more than a form of distraction?"

The language is telling here - Facebook is a 'distortion' of social space, not an enhancement or a complement. Friendships are 'relegated' to screens, not elaborated through them. We then get on to the key question:

"If we have 768 "friends," in what sense do we have any?"

I think the nature of relationships and friendships and the way online activity influences them is fascinating, so I'm not saying we shouldn't ask questions like this, but you know we are going to have a 'camelot' type argument any moment, which will refer back to some golden age of friendship. Sure enough, it comes:

"Classical friendship, now called romantic friendship, persisted through the 18th and 19th centuries, giving us the great friendships of Goethe and Schiller, Byron and Shelley, Emerson and Thoreau."

This is the classic argument that things now aren't as good as they were, and look, I've cherry-picked some examples from the whole of history to prove it. This is akin to why other supermarket queues always seem to progress quicker than yours - you can only be in one queue while there are many 'other queues', therefore statistically, it is likely that at least one will progress quicker than yours. Because we are egocentric we interpret this in relation to ourselves. It's the same with history, we only have the present to look at since we can only live in one time - compared with all of history there will always be better examples in the past. So when he argues:

"no one in a very long time has talked about friendship the way Montaigne and Tennyson did."

No-one talks about anything the way Montaigne and Tennyson did because they lived in a different age. But to argue that people don't have close friendships now is absurd. Kingsley Amis and Phillip Larkin certainly had that type of friendship, and to choose some more recent low-brow examples how about David Bowie and Iggy Pop, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, Ant and Dec? Now they may not be Byron and Shelley from an artistic sense, but you can't deny this is friendship as any age would understand it?

Having set up a decline in the nature of friendship, he then gets onto social media:

We haven't just stopped talking to our friends as individuals, at such moments, we have stopped thinking of them as individuals. We have turned them into an indiscriminate mass, a kind of audience or faceless public. We address ourselves not to a circle, but to a cloud.

I agree, this is something new, and is certainly a tweak to friendship. But when you broadcast like this, you do so knowing that most people will ignore it, someone might pick up on it, and maybe an exchange will happen. It hasn't really cost you anything to do. I'd also add that when you form online friendships it's with people who do more than give you an account of what they are doing. The media's simplification that twitter is about 'telling people what you had for breakfast' is missing the point.

But what really irritates me about such articles is how condescending they are, as if we're all to stupid to understand and only the author has seen the light. For example:

The absurd idea, bruited about in the media, that a MySpace profile or "25 Random Things About Me" can tell us more about someone than even a good friend might be aware of

I don't know anyone who believes this, people are quite capable of having different types and ranges of friendships. Only for journalists does it seem to be a binary choice between online and face to face. They also speak from a position of relative ignorance usually. Deresiewicz seems to have used facebook, and that's about it. It maybe that Facebook does afford slightly shallow relationships, although I suspect we'd find a wide variety. When I think of my online friends most of the ones I would classify as friends I know through blogs, but not all, twitter (which he deplores for its brevity) is perfectly capable of creating and sustaining real friendships. So when Deresiewicz argues:

"when I think about my friends, what makes them who they are, and why I love them, it is not the names of their siblings that come to mind, or their fear of spiders. It is their qualities of character. This one's emotional generosity, that one's moral seriousness, the dark humor of a third."

I think 'yes that's exactly what I think about my online friends.' When I went to Alt-C this year I met some people face to face that I have regarded as friends for some time. Let's take Alan Cann for example, we hadn't met face to face for various reasons, but it was inevitable we would. When I met Alan at ALT-C it was great, but it was also kind of irrelevant - most of our interaction will remain via blogs, twitter, or whatever else comes along. Online friendship isn't 'face to face friendship in waiting'.

One of the common tests of friendship is 'would they lend you money?' and this is sometimes used to demonstrate that online friendship isn't real (Josie Fraser has a stronger test including "In the event of a zombie apocalypse, would you throw yourself between me and the oncoming brain-ravenous hoard?"). I kind of had this question answered earlier in the year when my wife asked for sponsorship for the half marathon. Lots of people who I have never met stumped up real cash. 

I'm not sure why people are so obsessed with the term 'friends' and whether one person qualifies or not. It's all a bit school playground. Are the people I regularly exchange blog comments with or tweets with 'friends'? What about those I only occassionally interact with? I think so, but maybe we do need more terms since being online has opened up whole new niches in 'friendship' which different people occupy.

But as it's Christmas let's stick with 'friends'. Here's my test for online friends - let's call it the 'George Bailey test'. If, through no fault of your own, you got yourself in a fix like George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life, and you really needed the help of your friends to get you out of it, would the online ones help? In my case, I'd say, absolutely.

How do you connect - the rise of serendipity

D'Arcy Norman has set up a project which asks the simple question 'How do you connect to people online'. He says we are free to interpret that how we want, and responses can be in any format. He is publishing the open responses as it goes along. Many people have chosen to respond in video format, and here is my offering:

There different ways of interpreting the question, so I gave four answers. There is the purely technical, practical answer - so I connect mainly through twitter and this blog, plus a bunch of other tools. But there is also a set of behaviours associated with connecting, so you do it by linking (and being linked to - I find a lot of people because they link to my blog, and my blog stats tell me this, hey presto, we're connected), commenting (on blogs, or in twitter), responding to requests, cries for help, etc, but really it's about sharing. There is the social element to connecting, so I engage in debates (which can be related to work but might are as often about tv, football, politics), making jokes, giving people answers or experience, and what we might call just chatting. And the fourth way of responding to the question is to think in terms of fundamental principles one operates on which I list as embrace serendipity and be open.

I've probably said lots on the latter, but the serendipity comment can probably bear a little more examination. In an earlier post about Science 2.0 I wondered if scientists struggled with the web 2.0 approach because so much of it was about unpredictability and this went against their scientific training. Serendipity has come to the fore in the socially connected world I believe. It's no longer an eccentric relation at the family gathering, who may give you a great song on the piano but equally may wet their pants and fall asleep at the dinner table. Two things have changed the status of serendipity: the number of connections and the ease of connecting. Now you can rely on serendipity - something will turn up which is relevant, you just don't know what it is. 

Here is Jim Groom also responding to D'Arcy's project, who makes the point that these technologies allow us to 'imbue our work with a sense of personality':

So, how do you connect?

Living in a twitter world

(The last in my trilogy of ALT-C related posts)

Two things brought home to me that we live in a twitter world (whether David Cameron or John Humphrys like it or not, and indeed, all the better that they don't).

The first was that I attended the ALT-C for the first time post the development of twitter. I have been to this conference (it's the UK's main ed tech conference) three times before. Usually my approach was to hang around on my own in a corner, maybe find a couple of OU people and stick with them, or stand on the edge of a group and hope someone notices me. But this time I went feeling that I knew nearly everyone there because we follow each other on twitter. Here is a list of people I know well on twitter who I actually got to say hello to face to face for the first time (and I've probably missed a load off, sorry):

Brian Kelly, Alan Cann, Josie Fraser, Graham Attwell, Steve Wheeler, James Clay, Stu Johnson, Sue Folley, Theo Kuechel, Haydn Blackley.

And then there were the people I have met only a few times but keep in contact with via twitter. I was practically high-fiving my way down corridors. Well, maybe not, but it was a distinctly different real-life social experience because of twitter (and blogs).

Given this it struck me that I need to work on some new social skills. What is the appropriate type of conversation when you are pre-introduced via social networks? I had a few good discussions, but often I would shake hands with someone and we'd both go 'good to finally meet you. Errrm...' So one upshot of living in a twitter world is that we need to tweak our social interactions to have a mode that is somewhere inbetween being introduced for the first time and being old friends.

The second twitter related moment was watching TV last night. I was watching something else when someone on my twitter stream said they were about to watch the Derren Brown 'event' on Channel 4. In this he 'predicted' the national lottery numbers live, see this clip:

I'm not particularly interested in how he did it (it's TV, he can make it look anyway he wants), but rather what it reveals about the changing nature of television. Last year I mentioned that for TV creating events that appealed to twitter users (or any network, obviously not limited to twitter)  and allowed them"to share the experience online may be the the thing that saves scheduling". This seems to me an example of a broadcaster attempting to do this. There are two key ingredients:

1) It is a live event so participation at the moment is crucial

2) It provokes discussion - the acid test is does it get to be a trending event in twitter? The answer for last night was yes:

 

I'm not arguing that it makes good television, merely indicating that this can be seen as an example of the impact of social networks on an existing broadcast behaviour.

The long-awaited 'education as fruit' metaphor

I have just returned from the ALT-C conference in Manchester, where I held a workshop with Brian Kelly called 'Realising Dreams, Avoiding Nightmares, Accepting Responsibilities'. My role was to present the future, and then for us to discuss what the obstacles were to realising it, and the related issues for educators, learners and IT services. Here is my presentation:

Dreams of future learning

View more presentations from mweller.

In my talk I decided to use an extended (tortuous some might say) fruit based metaphor. It begins to get rather pained towards the end, but stick with it, I think it comes to fruition (ahem). It goes something like this:

Current higher education is about selling apples (the basic undergrad course). We have different types of apples, and they vary slightly in size, colour and taste. But it is still just apples.

If what we do is sell apples, then our current concerns are: Better apple packaging (the VLE may or may not be dead, but it's really just better marketing for apples); the costs of growing, distributing and selling apples; the quality of our apples; growing new varieties of shiny apples (someone is trying to grow a blue apple to appeal to kids). But it is still just apples.

Now if we consider the future of education, the key word is variety. It is not about perfecting one's apples, but accepting the whole range of possible fruits. With this comes a set of issues:

• It comes in different sizes - not just the slight variation we have around apples (eg tweaking a three year undergrad course to be two years or four years), but the whole range of sizes ranging from the tiny Wolffia angusta to over-sized pumpkins, so we need to recognise and facilitate learning that takes ten minutes or involves extended participation in a community over a number of years.
• It has many different types - obviously we're not dealing with just apples now, but kumquats, kiwi fruits, oranges, melons, etc. So this means recognising different types of learning and different content. We no longer determine the curriculum but it is now varied and open. It also has blurred boundaries, instead of the very definite ones we have now - the classic 'tomato, fruit or vegetable?' argument could also apply to learning. Is hanging around in a forum learning? Is game playing learning? The key is that we accept that the boundaries are now blurred and we seek to recognise different types of learning.
• Any time - we don't just sell our apples during opening hours, but offer home delivery any time of day. The old dream of 'just in time' learning was something that was touted around when learning objects were new, and SCORM was being pushed. The difference this time around is that then it was based on automatically assembly of content, but now it is based on a human network. And it's not just a dream - any of us who have put a call out on twitter know how quickly you can get a response. But this could be extended further - access to a marketplace of accredited mentors for example.
• Assembled/mixed/aggregate how you want - now we don't have just apples, we can all mix our own fruit salads, and with the full range to choose from, few salads will ever be the same. As a party host I can create my own fruit offering, just as an educator I can create a 'course' on any subject I want by mixing together resources, tools and adding in my own elements. Or as a learner I may have a core set of resources (a base fruit bowl) and can then add in from a wide range of selected content to create a partially personalised course.
• Based around easy sharing - we all have access to so much free fruit now, we share it easily and without question. Sharing is now the default action online - we share jokes, content, links, views, activities, ideas. Any vision of future learning should have sharing as the basic action and build from that. I would go as far as to say that teaching our students how to be good sharers within their subject community is the number one aim for education.
• Range of tools - we're not limited to tools that only apply to apples now, we can have the full range of tools and cutlery available. Whether we believe the VLE is a stepping stone to a world of wide-ranging tools, or should be abandoned now, surely any dream of future learning would embrace the growing panoply of tools.

So there you have it? I'm sure you'll tell me where the metaphor breaks down, but what I really want is examples of how we can extend it to a ludicrous degree. Metaphors are only fun when you really stretch them.

Bless my cotton socks I'm in the news

(yes, I have been waiting a long time to use that title)

A couple of weeks ago, a journalist from The Guardian contacted me to talk about how a tweet from Stephen Fry had sent over 10,000 visitors to the OU's Devolve Me site. The angle was initially the power of new media, but quickly morphed into educational use of new twitter. I stressed the importance of one's personal network and new forms of digital scholarly activity. I didn't really have a single message though, and journalists like to have something to hang a report around, and it seemed clear that she wanted to go beyond the Fry story.

So she spoke to Brian Kelly, and in the meantime the CLex report of the use of new technologies in higher education came out, and the piece became about more general use of web 2.0 and higher education. It was published today in the Education Guardian. After all the hype and scare stories around twitter, it's a good, well balanced piece.

It was interesting to see the piece develop. I wonder though if there isn't a little hypocrite dwelling at the bottom of my heart: I praise new media, talk about the death of traditional news, and then get a little flush of excitement when a national newspaper prints my name. Is therapy required?

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

The reciprocity economy

<image Reciprocal roof decking by Ziggy Fresh http://www.flickr.com/photos/smallape/2943537392/>

In my talk on digital literacies I mentioned a 'reciprocity economy', and just wanted to expand on the idea. We are accustomed to the idea of the attention economy - it's getting eyeballs that counts online. As each person develops their PLN online it seems to me that it's not attention that is significant, but establishing reciprocity.

I have come to believe that your personal learning network (it probably doesn't need the 'learning', it's just your personal network) is increasingly the most valuable asset you will have. And that's valuable as in 'adds value to your life', not economic value. It will help you with work, socialising, personal life, interests, hobbies, entertainment.

To deploy probably the most over-used analogy around, it's like a garden - you've got to sow, tend and weed it to get value from it. But it's more of a country garden, a bit organic and unplanned rather than the highly structured garden. It takes time and effort and you have to give something of yourself to it.

Think about how your PLN is constructed. It probably centres around twitter, a blog, your blog reader, delicious, Flickr, a few wikis, and maybe some other tools where you follow people (eg Slideshare). There will be different types of reciprocity in this, for example most of the people whose blogs I read also read mine.  Similarly in twitter, I tend to follow people if they follow me. This is fairly standard reciprocity - do unto others as they do unto you.

But can we extend the notion of reciprocity? Continuing with the examples of blogs and twitter, I will give you my continued readership if you give me interesting and regular updates. We can then build on this notion of reciprocal, but not identical, activity for more subtle interactions, let's call it shifted reciprocity. I can put out a lazyweb request on Twitter if I have either responded previously to such requests (standard reciprocity) OR I have given enough of myself to twitter, such that people feel well disposed towards me (shifted reciprocity).

If you're still with me and have accepted the proposal that your PLN is significant and reciprocity underpins it, then we can begin to think of an economy of reciprocity. This isn't something we make hard calculations about, it is probably what we do in most social relations all the time at a subconscious level. In this economy, the more you give online that is of value to those in your network then the more 'credit' you establish.

This allows us to see that, obviously, spamming is bad - you are not establishing a reciprocal relationship. But also if we look at, for instance, Sarah's list of following behaviour in Twitter, we can see that most of them relate to establishing reciprocity. If someone doesn't have a profile, or doesn't update then their reciprocal currency is diminished. It also helps us frame our behaviour in any new tool, for instance setting up auto-follows and direct messages in Twitter is devaluing the reciprocal nature of following - I know you'll follow me back if I follow you, but that means that decision isn't based on any assessment of my value to your network. Therefore we're unlikely to have much reciprocal value to each other.

It seems to me that what we're discovering is that like any economy (and economy doesn't have to mean money, natural selection arises because of nature's economy) establishing any 'wealth' requires effort, time or innovation. How this economy sits alongside the other, fiscal (broken) one will be a key question for social media.

Organisations may have to live with 'Cisco fatty' moments

In case you've missed this one, there was another of those inevitable '[New technology of choice] gets person fired' stories. In this case a Cisco employee with the id theconnor tweeted

"Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work"

Inevitably, someone else picks up on it. The strange thing is that it then goes viral. There is something of a pack mentality then. Helen Popkin gives a good account of the unfolding story here. She describes how:

"Before the work day ended, Web sleuths revealed "theconnor's" true identity. "Theconnor" was lampooned in a popular YouTube meme. And thanks to Google Cache, the deleted content of "theconnor’s" homepage resurfaced on CiscoFatty.com, a Web site erected to commemorate this cautionary tale."

It's not clear if this has caused the individual to lose (or not start) their job. The incident raised a few issues for me. Firstly was the sad inevitability of it - Brian Kelly asked last May when we'd hear the first such story. I think people will gradually learn how to handle these types of online conversations, and develop an appropriate online persona, but we'll have these stories for the rest of our lives (except they'll be so commonplace no-one will report them).

But how bad was theconnor's crime? Most of the response has been barely disguised schadenfreude at how could someone be so stupid. But while most of us wouldn't tweet something so obviously compromising, if we want our tweets to have any interest then you have to add in some element of the personal. Simply tweeting a corporate message isn't going to be of interest to anyone. I don't think I've tweeted anything sackable (maybe saying I didn't like presenter Neil Oliver counts?), but equally I wouldn't want a communications officer to track through all my tweets and advise me on their suitability vis a vis my professional status.

Sure, it's a bit embarrassing for Cisco, and you might want to know if someone hated their job, but realistically, how many people have said similar things in a pub to a fellow worker? At least they're hiring someone who's engaged with new media.

What would worry me more was if one of the people who took such delight in outing theconnor was on my team. What does it say about them and their values that they'd want to reveal the person's identity and attempt to get them sacked? So, if we're going to play the 'the internet can get you sacked' card, then maybe that should include unpleasant and unprofessional behaviour too, not just indiscretions?

Learning to have perspective on these type of incidents, knowing what constitutes a serious offence, and most of all understanding the medium, is going to be a big challenge for all organisations. Personally I hope theconnor is fine, and has maybe learnt a bit of a lesson, but nothing more.

[Update: The woman in question has a very reasonable and balanced post on it here (thanks to John Connell). In the end she has come out of it looking quite good I think, she seems thoughtful, reflective, non-judgmental - all the qualities you'd want in an employee (she had decided not to take the Cisco post when she did the tweet, so it hasn't 'lost' her the job). On the other hand, those who pursued her with a kind of rabid ferocity have come out of it rather tarnished. So, there's a moral in this somewhere - beware the righteous meme.]

Celebrity as social object

<image: Flowing Systems by exper http://www.flickr.com/photos/exper/2016537402/>

Having bemoaned the influx of celebrities on to Twitter and the manner in which it warps dialogue, this post is about a more positive impact of celebrities. I've noticed that a few celebs seem to act as a focus around which conversation and dialogue  concentrates. The ex-England rugby captain Will Carling is one such. During the rugby people who follow him on twitter use his tweets as a backchannel and counterpoint to the official commentary.

I've seen a similar effect with ex-footballer, Stan Collymore, (I didn't say the celebs were nice or anything), and during Comic Relief one of the few places for discussion was at Robert Llewellyn's twitter page (ex Red Dwarf actor).

One thing to note here is that these are middling celebrities, real megastars probably have too diverse an audience. Another factor is that their twittering doesn't seem to be related to direct commercial activity (Collymore is a talk show host, so his twittering can be seen as a related activity, but not for the others, although I'm sure they're happy for any work which arises from it).

In these cases it is very much about interacting with an individual - these celebrities are not broadcasting, but engaging in conversation. They are utilising what I suppose we must refer to as their 'personal brand'. In essence, their celebrity status acts as a social object around which the rest of us congregate.

Maybe this is okay for sport, but what about in education? Perhaps a similar model would work around particular subject areas, with popular academics. For instance, I quite like Brian Greene's books on string theory, if he had a twitter account (I don't think he does), it might usefully act as a sort of Great Attractor for ongoing educational debate. If we accept the personal brand theory then, what universities (or any organisation) needs is not a corporate twitter identity but a few of these social object personalities.

Things from Twitter I'd like in real life

I'm sure someone's done this before, but was thinking the other day about the raft of 'online interaction is killing real interaction' type angst we've been having and wondered if we should look at it the other way, ie why real life isn't as good as online. Here are a few things I wish I could transfer from Twitter to real life:

Hashtags - how many times have you found yourself half way through a conversation with someone when you realise you are in fact talking about different things. It then becomes too embarrassing to admit your mistake, and you realise some of your previous responses may now look a bit odd. Hashtags would avoid this so at the end of your opening sentence you would set out the appropriate tag eg #conversationwehadlastweekaboutgardenfurniture

Block - oh yes, we'd all like to block. In a physical environment you can only do this by removing yourself, or asking the other person to shut up, neither of which is desirable or advisable at times. So, when some bloke in the pub is voicing his opinion on, say, asylum seekers, you can simply block, and carry on with your own conversation.

Direct messages as back channel - again, there are times when you would like to communicate directly with only one other person in the group. We try and do this in face to face situations by adopting contorted facial expressions, which can be misread or just missed. How much easier it would be to have direct messages? eg 'I disagree with what my father is saying here, but if I argued we'd be here all day.'

@replies only visible to followers - this is quite a subtle feature in Twitter. If I send a reply to someone, then even if you follow me you won't see it, unless you follow that person too. This allows some filtering of interests. For example, if I follow someone because they are a Spurs fan, then we can have a discussion about a game (eg how we were robbed by Man Utd at Wembley because of an iPod). If you follow me as an OU person, then it's unlikely you will follow the Spurs chap too, so you won't be bored by this. If you are a Spurs fan you might follow both of us, and so join in. In real life there are times when you want to have a conversation which might be dull to some, but feel restricted from doing so.

140 character limit - come on, we we all know people who would benefit from this restriction.