The Ed Techie

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.

Crowdstatus and filtered twitter

In my Twitter stream I saw that Dan Taylor had created a crowdstatus page for BBC people. Crowdstatus basically takes public Twitter streams and compiles them on a page with some nice graphics. I had a go and did the same for OU people I know on Twitter (if I've missed anyone off, let me know, or if in fact you're not an OU person and I've put you in).

Firstly, a couple of things in crowdstatus I'd like: the ability for anyone to move the order around; automatic refreshing; can anyone join a crowd, or can only the originator add them in?; the option to have most recent updates near the top; an RSS link; an iGoogle plug in (that's it for now).

Next on to the broader aspects. I like this because subsumed in my Twitter followers are a number of different networks. Even within my OU people there are OU Staff, IET, Students, etc as sub-networks. So it is good to be able to filter these. And this then really opens up the potential for community building or even (whisper it) knowledge management by Twitter.

For example, you get all your students to sign up to Twitter and then create a crowdstatus page for them. You can see how this filter of other Twitterers and aggregation in one space adds a social/peer working element to the course which could be quite powerful. And when the course has ended, it still persists (or goes in to the course alumni crowdstatus page).

Another example, everyone I work with in IET signs up to Twitter, and I create a crowdstatus for them. Then when we move into our swanky new open-plan office building, the wall mounted networked screens display the crowdstatus page. When you're making a cup of tea then you will notice that X is in a conference in Valencia, Y is struggling to write a JISC bid and Z is mowing the lawn. By osmosis almost you would have a better understanding of what your colleagues are up to and interested in than any number of scheduled meetings. It's the future of organisational dialogue I tell you!

Inward and outward facing technology

Stephen Downes recently argued that we could classify communication as inward and outward facing, saying:

a technology like Twitter is, in my mind, 'inward facing', because it reinforces communication with the group - 'running with the herd,' as I commented on Noon's post, while I tend to favour 'outward facing' communications, those that look outside the group.

And he has this diagram to sum it up:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephen_downes/2379258809/

I'm not sure I agree with this analysis, as I think it comes down to your usage of the tools. Here is my reasoning:

1. I don't think many of us are outward facing in terms of the blogs we read. For instance, my GReader doesn't have many subscriptions to intelligent design blogs, or pregnancy, or snowboarding blogs, because these aren't things I'm particularly interested in. The blogs I subscribe to tend to be educational technology ones. So in terms of what I read blogs are no more outward facing than Twitter.
2. I could argue Twitter is outward facing since I tend to adopt a 'I'll follow you if you follow me' strategy. Thus potentially I am exposed to different types of people than I might be through the blogs I read. This would be even more the case if I were one of those people who followed 1000s of people in Twitter.
3. I accept that writing a blog is more akin to broadcast while Twittering is more akin to conversation, but even that distinction is blurred if you consider linking and commenting in blogs (which make them more like conversation) and the posting of links in Twitter. One could argue that because it is less effort to Twitter then people are more likely to post links to a range of things, not just those related to the subject area. In this respect then, Twitter becomes more outward facing.
4. The social interaction on Twitter adds a different element, which you don't always get on blogs. This means that, again, you may discuss topics or be pointed at resources which are outside of the group's normal discussion.

I'm not arguing one is better than the other, just that I don't feel the inward and outward facing distinction is appropriate to my use of the tools. Or maybe I've misunderstood what Stephen was saying - if so, just shout Stephen!

Twittershow - I don't know if I want it but it's fun

Tony has gone all mashup in the head and developed an app for Twitter that takes your (or someone else's) tweets and presents them as a slideshow, called Twittershow. I've had a play with it - I think this link will take you to my tweets as a slideshow.

To use it you need the RSS url of your Twitter feed - to find this,  go to your public Twitter page (e.g. http://twitter.com/mweller). At the bottom is a link that says RSS - this then gives you a page with a URL like this: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/7127162.rss

Slot this into Twittershow and away you go. Doing it made me laugh, because I'm convinced that for all the careful preparation I put in to my presentations, it would be just as meaningful if I just stuck up my, or someone else's tweets and talked around them. That aside though, I still don't get when I would actually use it, but I'm often slow on this kind of thing. What it does evidence though is that openness releases creativity - I'm pretty sure an app to do presentations would never have come up on the functional spec of a closed Twitter system, but release the API (and of course, release the data through RSS), and look what happens. Sure, it may be pointless, but then again it may be something really cool...

Tweetclouds

I love tag clouds - I quite often type notes in a meeting and then pass them through a tag cloud generator and show them back to people. 'This is what we've been talking about apparently'.

I'm never entirely sure whether they offer some profound insight or are just a fun thing to do. So I was intrigued when I saw (via D'Arcy) that John Krutsch and Jared Stein had developed a clouder for Twitter. Simply enter your twitter name and it generates a tag cloud of the terms.

Here is mine: http://www.tweetclouds.com/user_pages/mweller.html

What does it tell you? Well that Tony is probably the person I do most replies to, that 'meeting' and 'watching' are two of my most common words, so I am usually either in a meeting or watching a film. That is largely true.

Like most tag clouds, it could probably do with some more filtering e.g. run and running are separate tags, so the prominence of the topic isn't accurately reflected. And if I was being really fussy, it would be nice to link to the tweets when you clicked on a word (although it does very usefully show you how many instances of that word were used currently). But it's another Twitter tool, and makes more sense to me than TwitterBlocks, which is pretty, but I don't know what it means.