SocialTech

Digital Communities & Digital Identities

Most of my week was taken up presenting, hosting, and having a huge deal of fun at the Emerge project three day online conference, Digital Communities and Digital Identities. I lead on the programming for the event,& recruited many of the speakers, so it wasn't altogether surprising that I really enjoyed myself. The quality of the session content, speakers, and participant contributions exceeded even my high expectation though. I'm going to blitz through some of the sessions here, linking to resources on an ongoing basis (not everything is up yet) and inviting additional linkfo where people want to contribute them. Also, a quick reminder that following the ol Emerge tag convention, we went with jiscemerge0408. We used three primary environments: Elluminate (java based online conferencing software) for synchronous activities, Moodle (open source virtual learning environment) for asynchronous activity and conference co-ordination, and Second Life (multi-user virtual environment), for the conference social. We also used a host of other tools for specific tasks - twitter, wikis, media players, and the Emerge main site (a social networking platform), primarily for blogging.

You can see a visual record of the conference here. I tried to record as I went along, using screen shots of the presenters on cam. A very simple solution to creating a visual record of the online conference, but I can't say I've really seen it used at other online events.

What were my conference highlights? One of the big things that hit home for me at this conference was the definite sense of community belonging. Certainly, community members have a very diverse experience of and understanding of Emerge, and it's primarily (as Graham Attwell noted) a community of interest. Although the Emerge 'border policy' has been a semi-permeable and pragmatic one, our majority of our members are primarily associated with two funding rounds, designed to support innovation and user engagement in the UK post-compulsory education sector.   

However, the more important understanding that really hit home for many of us at this particular conference is the appreciation of Emerge as a community of cultural and social practice. Graham Attwell and Stephen Warburton will doubtless add to this far more graciously shortly. For me, the conference really highlighted the business of serious fun and how conductive and essential providing an relaxed, comfortable environment where people were able to express themselves, take risks and reach out. Knowing that you are part of a community which is interested in your work, sympathetic and alert too the problems and contexts you operate in, and basically on your side, can operate as a critical safety net, fostering creative risk taking and collaboration.  I'm not talking about blandly sycophantic  agreement here either. Meaningful friendship involves critical engagement - people who care enough and are interested enough to say things that might be challenging. It's difficult to have and engage openly in critical conversation - but ignoring it and hoping it will go away is a childish, disrespectful strategy which will eventually bite you in the ass.

A fun illustration of this was the revival of Frances Bell's community beard meme, originally coming from a funny critical post on the the prevalence of beards in the community  commenting on the gender imbalance of the visible community. Frances is an consummate expert in being a critical friend, and partly what I'd like to see actively cultivated in the community is  an environment that allows constructive criticism to be given and received non-threateningly.

George Siemens delivered a great keynote on Technology and Community as Identity, and raised a lot of themes which continued to resonate throughout the three days. So hats off George - you're a great keynote speaker!

Brian Kelly's session on Developing a sustainable approach to the use of web 2.0 was a masterclass in service design and management, summing up where we currently are in terms of institutional, legal and ethical terms regarding using third party services to support learners in formal education.

The Emerge Bizarre launch (mp3 file)- that went out as a live radio show - was a triumph of content and production values, and includes some interviews with a couple of our projects. Great use of CC licensed music and a big kick to us to used multimedia more effectively in future.

The ARGOSI and HABITAT projects community slot - presented by D.H. Lawrence and two ladyz also wearing rather fetching beards - The User experience of Virtual Worlds was very interesting and exciting. I'm particularly in love with the ARGOSI project which seems to be inspired by 80's TV programme The Adventure Show (which I loved! Please send me a link someone!). I'll add more detail and links to this shout out shorty.

What Not to Rez - our fashion show social on Second Life was something that I really enjoyed too - you can check out the Flickr show link at the top of the post for pictures of me in my monster-truck proportioned frock.

Signal vs Noise

Picture taken from Thomas Vander Wal's presentation, Granular Social Networks.

Thomas Vander Wal recently posted a great short presentation, Granular Social Networks. In it he tracks the complexity of relationships within and across networks, making interesting and important points about the overlapping of interests and following behaviours between connections. The only thing that I'd be keen to stress a little more would be the relatively haphazard relationship most followers necessarily have within social networking service relationships. While most of us have very few connections that we engage with across the entire range of their interests, activity and expertise (stalkers, the love lorn and private detectives aside). Similarly, even amongst those connections that we have an identifiable interest in - for example, I'm interested in your music consumption and recommendations - it's not usual to keep track of every single recommendation or playlist. There are just too many other things going on. So to a certain extent I don't believe that greater control - i.e. finer granularity within network channels - is the answer ( & you can check out my post on in service granularity here for further elaboration). While intellegent and sensitive service design, along with user digital literacy are important, a philosophical acceptance of serendipity and a kindly understanding of the human limitations for data absorption are also useful.  In the words of a Jaiku conversation I had with Terry Madley earlier today: "or maybe, only learn not to mind so much about the inevitable periods of disconnection. It's kind of good to not think about the info streams as if they were linear, let alone might constitute any kind of linear narrative. Maybe this is one of the reasons why lifestreaming is popular - the illusion that if you could somehow keep track of everything, there'd be a coherent story at the end of the rss rainbow."

The other issue that Thomas touches on is another of my current bug bears - signal v noise. I wanted to post here primarily to put on the (blog) record that both signal and noise are entirely subjective concepts. They aren't even stable.  What's noise to me on Tuesday morning might be be signal from heaven on Wednesday evening - when I might desperately be in need of an inspirational line of poetry, or the reassurance that all is well in someone's household, or a link to a resource or an idea that helps me think through a presentation I'm writing. The signal vs noise distinction often implies a judgement call. The reference Thomas makes is entirely free from this implication -in fact his presentation couches the distinction as personal definitions. I'm just keen to draw attention to the fact that what is signal and what is noise doesn't consist of objective content that we can necessarily pre-determine.

The psychogeography of the Twitterstream

In my last post I took a look at what permissions granularity was and how it might impact on user behavior. The short version of the conclusion that post made is: If permissions granularity is not transparent - easy to understand and easy to use - most people will fall back on whatever the site defaults are. Of course incentive to use restrictions in the first place is dependent on an understanding that 1. the stuff you are putting out is searchable and accessible to the general public 2. there are people in that category you don't necessarily want to see your stuff.

I remember an audience member in a conference I attended last year who was outraged that a potential employer might Google her and then base a judgment about her on her personal activity. And I've seen school kids squirm in horror as their Bebo and YouTube pages were looked at by teachers and parents. It's increasingly common for recruiters, universities, and other authoritative gatekeepers to use public social network information to fill in candidates 'other interests': goodbye fervent interest in hang gliding and byzantine pottery; hello getting drunk and pinching road signs.

It also seems fair to say that a large number of people depend on fairly flimsy strategies to avoid managing their data (or having to work out any permissions granularity). These include counting on the fact that your name is a fairly common one, simply playing the odds in the face of the sheer amount of information everyone else is putting out, and imagining your social networking service is one that no one you feel uncomfortable with would possibly use.

Way back in 2002 Katz and Rice describe the internet as a panopticon. Those of you who've flirted with Foucault or are interested in architecture will remember that the key characteristic of the Bentham's prison design is that people keep themselves in line, because the possibility of being observed is always present. The panopticon encouraged self-policing since inmates were aware they could be seen (and subsequently punished) at all times. While web 2.0 Community sites have no realistic alternative to encouraging self-regulation thorough a participatory panoptism, the internet has not turned out to be a hotbed of self denial and careful self regulation. One of the conclusions made by Pew's Digital Footprints report in December 2007 was that “Most internet users are not concerned about the amount of information available about them online, and most do not take steps to limit that information”. 

Partly this can be attributed to the charmed circle people believe themselves to be positioned in - the imaginary frameworks of space and place that allows for the fun interchange of information, the subjective psychogeographic environment alluded to in my title.

There's a gap in perception between what many users believe to be the context and audience that they are writing for – a closed group of friends – and the numbers of people actually able to view their information. Many users are unaware that the information they have posted may be publicly available, and able to be searched for and read by a much wider audience than their group of friends. Acquisti and Gross (2006) characterise social networking services as "imagined communities" in recognition of the gap between users’ perceptions of a private, closed network and the reality of who can access their information

Additionally there is the issue of time. Embarrassing or inappropriate stuff may still be around in a few years' time. We don’t know the full consequences yet of a generation which has grown up online, or the future implications of new types of search - for example social search, which aggregates information from across a range of social networking sites by your name or email address, or of the development of facial recognition search software.

I've been working quite a bit around e-safety and digital literacy, so my thinking in this area is largely around presence issues - not just how we keep ourselves safe online but also how our online activity represents us to the rest of the online world. It's becoming increasingly easy to track peoples unprotected conversations, and the rise of social search pretty much demolishes any illusionary protection that acting within a silo might offer. The current tidalwave of lifestream apps further puts paid to this notion of the public internet being a series of discreet islands.

I agree whole heartedly with the argument that any good service should ensure members can get all of their data out both easily and meaningfully (i.e. in some useful format that can be recognised and repurposed by other tools and services). However – we also need to recognise that a lot of people who use the web don’t care about data portability. If fact, some of them even use services precisely because they seem closed and hard to get information out of, and when they do stumble across their data outside of its origional context, it sometimes comes as a shock to them. And recontextualisation isn't just about taking information from one place and replanting it in another - it can be about someone from outside of the charmed circle you imagain yourself addressing reading your stuff. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be pressing hard to open up services – it means we need to be mindful of the importance of context, and the value of closedness/closeness, to people using services.

Permissions granularity ABC

Picture credit: Peek-a-boo by Annie in Belziers, Lolcat title added

I'm almost sure that's my most boring title to date, but hey, please feel free to refrain from reliving any duller former glories.  Anyhow, I should have two fantastic launches to celebrate soon, both of which will be of interest to people using, providing or running social networking services, so I'm going to thrash out a few of the issues I've been mulling over recently, prior to whatever trumpeting heralds my blog budget will run too.

Granularity in this context refers to the degree of choice users have about sharing their information- the choices a site member can makes over who gets to see what information and data they upload or create on site. Most services offer basic permissions within broad friend categories - you can share all your information with no-one (private), with all friends (friends in this context meaning people who you have approved/included on your contacts list), or with everyone (the public - this may be the broader site membership but usually refers to the internet viewing public).

The more granular the service, the more flexibility members have over what is made available and to who. The level of permissions granularity for any given piece of social software can actually be expressed quite simply:

who can see stuff x what kinds of stuff they can see = level of granularity

Permissions granularity is made up of there two main sub sections: the who and the what.

As outlined above, the who baseline permissions extend to three broad categories: myself (private), friends (privileges), or everyone (public). Of course across sites and services there are variations on these permission sets – Flickr for instance provides you with two levels of people you have given permissions too, labeled friends and family. Some services allow you to divide your friends list into sub-groups of your own making, so that you can label them and, in theory, manage who gets to see what more effectively.

The what refers to your stuff – blog posts, audio visual files, status updates and activity logs. So how granular the permissions are in this respect refers to how finely you can control the size of bits that you want to make available or restrict access too. So at the chunky end of the scale, you may only be able to make every thing public, private, or available to yoour pre-approved list. In the middle, you’d be able to assign viewing preferences to all of the different categories of activity and assets. Very granular services would enable you assign permissions make each individual post, update or whatever.

However, life isn't this simple. Unless permissions are easy to understand, use, and change, most users will fall back on whatever the site defaults are, or to setting up their own defaults and leave permissions management at that. Any transparency about management is obviously further complicated by the increasing use of third party widgets and services into the mix.

Overly complex granularity, like an indiscriminate friends list, leaves users in the same fall back position – ignoring permissions controls because its easier.

Greatly exaggerated rumors

According to Ewan McIntosh's feed reader, I'm apparently dead. Other than advising him to invest time in setting up a less enthusiastically morbid aggregator, I thought actually posting might be a good way to get people to stop nagging me let all of you who care know I'm still kicking. I have been (micro)blogging pretty much non-stop, but over at Twitter - where you can find me under the imaginative username josiefraser. The keen eyed amongst you will notice that I have a Jaiku feed tap on my home blog sidebar, but I'm resigned to using the far superior microblogging service that is Jaiku primarily as a lifestream service since Twitter is currently where the party is (and is likely to be so for a while: at least until Google bothers opening signup again. If you want an invite to Jaiku, let me know).

What else have I been up to? Lots of stuff around web 2.0 (whatever that's being defined as these days), including a bunch of projects on social networking and social media services for UK under 18 year olds. I've also been planning a three day online conference for Emerge around Digital Communities and Digital Identities, as well as speaking at other peoples conferences, and designing some workshops.

I've been over at Second Life quite a bit lately, I'm very excited about the fashion show I'll be hosting over there with Steven Warburton and Kisa - and astonished at the amazing work Kisa has has done building the catwalk and associated assets. The fashion show is partly a social event, partly a way of opening up discussion around identity and representation in virtual environments.

Anyway, I'm back now, clogging up the arteries of feed readers everywhere with my  buttery SocialTech goodness :)

Facebook: Neo-con social experiment?

The Guardian ran Tom Hodgkinson blistering critique of Facebook a couple of days ago. While I'm not in the business of defending any particular social networking site – I’m a platform neutral kind of gal - I do however see the value in social networking sites and I am interested in exploring their potential for social participation and for formal and informal education.

I’m going to ignore my lack of surprise that old media fosters and promotes attacks on new media, since what I’m interested in here isn’t the ongoing bun fight between sections of both, but in addressing some of the digital literacy and social participation issues that Hodgkinson's rant raises.

Some of the arguments are Facebook specific, many spill over to address social networking services and those who use them in general. Since the figures are pretty staggering - and aren't showing signs of slowing down, it may be more useful to look at how we can move the arguments and services forward rather than just advising people to opt out, or even worse, start banning stuff.

1. Facebook as a neo-con libetarian social experiment.

One of the main arguments is about association: because Facebook is bankrolled and directed by the Machiavellian neo-con Pay-Pal guy Peter Thiel, and others who can be regarded as ideologically dubious, Facebook membership supports a particular ideology and puts money in to the pocket of those who believe in it. Ownership and profit is a dilemma that most people have to face daily and isn't unfortunately restricted to a single social networking site. If I watch the Simpsons (which I do), however hilariously subversive it might be, I've got to accept I'm supporting the Fox Network and helping the people who make money out of the network make some more money.

Technology is not neutral. Services and products rarely get to be  big simply because they are really loveable/offer the best tool set. Tech development is funded for political/ideological ends and motives. Tech is generally designed to serve some non-neutral purpose. Technologies have social and political impacts. And in general, people who are funding stuff are not doing it just for a love of humanity. This doesn't mean that tech can't be used in subversive or in positive ways, just that non of us are operating in an ideologically vacuum. 

 

2. Technology alienates rather than connects.

Hodgekinson argues that Social Networking Services provide the spectacle of community, connection and collaboration whilst actually robbing humans of meaningful, real interactions. Personally, I’ve lost count of the number of people I know who have fallen in love on line, many of whom have gone on to have relationships where they do meet up and get married. Is their online interaction with each other somehow fake? No, of course it isn’t. Hooking up with and getting to know someone online isn’t a shoddy substitute for picking someone up in a bar on a Friday night. It’s just a different type of interaction. Relying on some notion of the real that involves only three dimensional interaction not only dismisses the history and role of information communication technologies (do love letters not count? Does finding our about a war not really mean anything if it’s from the television?), it ignores the fact that the internet and being online isn’t a separate space from 'real world interactions' – its just a different one. My son often meets up with his friends in virtual worlds and on gaming sites. Not only is he continuing and developing his existing friendships, he’s using and developing his social and literacy skills. Maybe not in ways that Hodgkinson appreciates, but certainly in ways which will help him get a job and manage the disperate groups that are typical of friend and family networks within industrial societies.

A part of this argument includes Hodgekinson’s problem with people constructing overly flattering artificial representations of themselves. Again, he hasn’t looked at as many profiles as I have because a lot of them could do with advice in how not to represent yourself to the world. Presenting a more flattering picture of yourself to people you haven't previously met doesn't make you a lier, it makes you normal.

3. Friendship is a universal, unwavering category

Hodgekinson seems to only have one definition for the word friend. ‘(insert social networking service) friends’ – are not necessarily your real friends (unless that’s how you work your connections). They are more often than not a badly thought out disperate set of connections, made up of people you really do know and like, people you went to work or were in formal education with, family members and complete strangers. 

4. Facebook as an all encompacing data-leech monster

Actually this would make a great horror movie. Not about Facebook of course - any of the named services would sue. But just some generic social networking site. If any South Korean film producers are reading this – I’m up for scripting. We could launch a brand off the back of it - it would be like Death Cigarettes all over again. Hodgekinson's line “The US defense department and the CIA love technology because it makes spying easier” is going in there. 

People should, of course, think about what data they submit to services. Read the privacy policy and the User Service Agreement. You don’t have to be a passive consumer of services. If your data is going to be sold - and most services make money through selling or renting data and/or through advertising - don't fill in data you don't mind being sold on to someone. If you really object to the terms and conditions, look for another service, or join the service and launch a protest.

5. “Facebook is profoundly uncreative”

Social Networking Services and social media tools provide platforms across which users create and deploy their own selection of content. Hodgekinson argues that they aren't providing services of any real value, since users are the ones doing all the hard work. You may as well argue that swimming baths and playgrounds shouldn’t be funded. Does the whole web 2.0 revolution boil down to virtual republics of idiots who donate their labour and data not only for free but in order to be exploited? My guess is that people are pretty much the same offline as they are online, in terms of their interests, intelligence levels and willingness to be exploited. There's no doubt that the internet can be used to support creativity, play, communication, and community building, and offers unprecedented opportunities for social participation and collaboration. Throwing your hands up in horror and going off to plant seeds in your back yard is one way of responding to services and practices you don't like. Or you could actually try doing something about them.

Endings 2007

Well, that was 2007.

I've been very busy, mainly working on resources for schools and colleges around using Social Networking Services (to be released soon) and traveling around the UK talking about cyberbullying and the guidence I helped produce for the UK government with school teachers, parents, leaders, local authorities, the police and social services - what it is, how we can prevent it and how to deal with it effectively when cases occur. I just wanted to post a catch up note commenting on a few end of year events.

We held the 4th International Edublog Awards slightly early this year - the most ambitious event to date. I'm really happy to say that the amazing international team - social website and community expert James Farmer (Australia – & the legend who who set up and ran the first awards, and rejoined us this year) webcasting pioneer and audio supremo Jeff LeBow (US), EdTech luminary Dave Cormier (Canada) and Second Life guru Jo Kay (Australia) - carried it off with aplomb. Huge huge thanks to them and to everyone else who pitched in.

& if you haven't already - check out Cormier's annual top ten EdTech stories of 2007.

What else? The last time I posted was just after the Eduspaces disconnection notice. I'm happy to report that after a flurry of dismayed activity, some kind of agreement was reached with TakingITGlobal.org who have now stepped in to begin the process of (hopefully) fixing the technical issues brought about by the shutdown activities and continuing the community with greater involvement of the members. The threatened closure raised a lot of issues for educators around community development, risk management, data protection and the use of third party web 2.0 services in education.

I also got asked to talk about Social Networking Services at the Bazaar European Conference on the 14 December 2007 in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and I was delighted to be able to hang out and talk shop into the wee hours with such smart and passionate company - including Helen Keegan, Steve Wheeler, and Bazaar supremo Graham Attwell.   

Speakers were asked to encompass the conference themes in their topics: data security, privacy and sustainability; social software, tools and content creation; Open Educational Resources (OERs) and the culture of sharing; Interoperability, metadata and OERs; Personal Learning Environments, ePortfolios and informal learning. For me, one of the huge things to come out was the lack of up-to-speed digital media literacy resources across the UK and Europe, for adults, children, young people and educators (particularly around data protection and management). I'm a huge fan of Henry Jenkins US based New Media Literacies project, and I'd like to see more action from both the UK's Media Literacy Taskforce, Becta, and Ofcom this year.

Eduspaces says goodbye

Just got the email from Curverider announcing the Eduspaces closure:

Hi All,

We would like to inform all users 
of EduSpaces that we will be shutting 
down the service on Jan 10th, 2008.

We have provided a mechanism 
for you to export all your blog 
posts in either an RSS format or 
HTML. To do this, go to your blog 
and select the submenu option 
you require. For those of you 
with files, you might want to 
download those as well.

Thank you to everyone 
who has supported EduSpaces 
over the last three years.
 
Best regards,
 
The EduSpaces team

It's no huge surprise (amongst other indicators Dave and Ben both moved out of Eduspaces a while ago), although I had hoped they would find someone to take the site over, and I can't say that I'm not sad to see the site go. Eduspaces and the Curverider team have provided a really important service, and an even more important model for the international education sector - demonstrating how web 2.0 and social technologies can be used to support learning and teaching, and showing the world what a learner-centric system might look like.

Edublog Awards - come celebrate!

Come and celebrate all the hard work that everyone has done this year:

• exploring and demonstrating how social media can make a real difference to the effectiveness of our learning and teaching
• battling restrictions and insecurities about new technologies and pedagogic practices
• putting the learner at the center of formal and informal learning
• making sure education is a creative, playful, enjoyable and worthwhile experience for all

The International Edublog Awards is now in it's fourth year, celebrating and highlighting excellence in the educational use of weblogs and social media, drawing attention to the vast amount of cutting edge educational practice out there and making friends on the way.

The awards party is upon us: Saturday December 8 2007 @ 21.30GMT. For your local times please click through. We're currently sorting out the hosting issues - the event will be taking place on the Island of jokaydia in Second Life.

Not able/wanting to join us on jokaydia? Why not keep track of all the action at one of our delightful  alternative locations? ;)

• EdTech Talk supremo & long time awards partner Jeff Lebow will be hosting Ustream Simulcast and text chat at EdTech Talk   - You'll be able to watch and hear whats going on at the SL location without risking anything, and join in with the party from there. You can find the audio only listen link are there as well.

There'll be a two alternative SL spaces setup for people to meet and listen to the webcast of the event if we get too full on the Island of jokaydia:

• Worldbridges Webcastatorium on Info Island. Special thanks to the World Bridges Team for sharing their space.
• The Island of Terra Incognita. Special thanks to Decka Mah for sharing her space with us for the event.

• Use Twitter to read/post about the awards - follow 'Eddies' to join in the conversation

• There's a Flickr pool for you to add your pics to - we'd love to see what you look like while you're at the awards, on or off line.

• There's a Facebook event listing up for those of you who have Facebook accounts

• For those of you busy doing your own thing, the tag is 07Eddies - please stick it on your awards related goodness!

Award recipients who would like to give an audio acceptance speech can either skype 'worldbridges' (or be skyped by worldbridges) or speak up in SL.

See you there!

Voting open

Heres your JF heads up that the finalists are now posted & the voting is now open for this years International Edublog Awards (aka the Eddies). HUGE thanks to everyone who took the time to publicise we were taking nominations and/or to nominate.

A couple of headlines: Unsurprisingly, Second Life was the platform that swept the virtual worlds category - there has been a lot of investment and interest in exploring the educational potential of SL this year. Slightly less predictably, Ning has swept the Social Networking Sevice category. Well done to all the finalists in that category for their excellent work - I'll be posting about Ning more shortly. However: is nothing interesting going on on other platforms? Did people defining SNS as just the profile based services, a la boyd, when it came to nominating? I find it hard to believe that there are no noteworthy eduprojects going on over at Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, etc etc.