SocialTech

OMG It's the all new Edublog Awards!

It's back! & it's embiggened!

This years Eddies are up and running. We have a new home, new feed, new logo - and a ton of new categories! I'm also delighted to welcome back James Farmer to the conviner bench. For those of you who don't know - James pulled the whole thing together back in 2004 & then went off to concentrate on his mighty edublogging empire - I guess having  a community of 100,000 at your back leaves you with a ton of time :)

He'll be joining the rest of the core team - Dave Cormier, Jeff Lebow and me, in pulling together this years edublog extravaganza - the most glamorous event of the edublogging calender. This year you'll actually get to see our frocks - thanks to the support of the lovely Jo Kay we'll be hosting the ceremony in Second Life. If you haven't yet had a look around, why not take advantage of the CSI:NY peoples generosity and check out their easy entry package. If you're allergic to MUVEs or just don't have the time, hard drive or inclination to join us there, we'll be providing off world audio & back channel facilities.

The ceremony is currently scheduled for Saturday 8 December your time, so please put it in your diaries now.

What hasn't changed is the  awards ethos and aim. We are still an independently run, community-based awards programme which recognizes and promotes excellence in the educational use of social software. We're committed to  celebrating the achievements of  the international community, and to rounding off another hard working year with  a great excuse for us to all get together and build a fantastic resource to inspire and support educators everywhere.

So what are you waiting for? Start reviewing your blogroll, sending in your nominations  and spreading the word so that we can make this years awards our most successful ever.

Those categories are:

1. Best individual blog

2. Best group blog

3. Best new blog

4. Best resource sharing blog

5. Best designed blog

6. Most influential blog post

7. Best blogged research paper or project

8. Best teacher blog

9. Best higher-education student blog

10. Best librarian / library blog

11 Best educational tech focused blog

12. Best elearning / corporate education blog

13. Best educational use of audio

14. Best educational use of video / visual

15. Best educational wiki

16. Best educational use of a social networking service

17. Best educational use of a virtual world

18. Best educational use of open source

19. Digizen’s 14-19 competition - note, this award is not run by the Edublog Awards, we are  delighted however to be promoting it and supporting young peoples participation.

20. Conveners award

Please get in touch if you or your organisation would be interested in sponsoring any of our categories!

The Byron Review

The Byron Review is an independent report into the risks posed by inappropriate web and game-based content for children and young people, supported by the UK's Department for Children, Schools and Families (formally the DfES), and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

Shiny Shiny, a gadget site aimed at women, has a couple of interviews that focus on gaming within the review: with Dr. Byron, and with MD of Electronic Arts and London Gaming Festival chair Keith Ramsdale.

The two consultations are currently live over at the DCSF's web site, one for children and young people under the age of 18 (closes 17 December 2007) and one for adult groups and individuals (closes 30 November 2007). The report is scheduled to be delivered March 2008 and seeks to "identify measures that will help all parents feel confident that their children are using new technologies and are playing video games in a way that’s appropriate for their age and development."

The framing seems pretty even handed at the moment, recognising the positive opportunities  the internet and video gaming can offer young people, and approaching the risks in an identify-and-manage style.  It'll be very interesting to see what comes out of the review - in terms of  advice and guidance, but also in terms of any longer term strategic cultural and economic actions. I for one would love the Government to recognise catch-22 of gender bias in gaming production and support some positive incentives around involving more women in game development and design.

Show that you Share! In Utrecht!

I'm delighted to have been asked to lead a workshop on social networking services and social search at the forthcoming Bazaar European Conference, 14 December 2007 in Utrecht, the Netherlands. For those of you who don't know, Bazaar is a European funded project seeking to support the development of a community around Open Source Software in education and open content development or Open Educational Resources (OERs).  The line up so far looks excellent - including Helen Keegan, Steve Wheeler, and Bazaar supremo Graham Attwell.

Main themes are data security, privacy and sustainability; social software, tools and content creation; Open Educational Resources (OERs) and the culture of sharing; Interoperability, matadata and OERs; Personal Learning Environments, ePortfolios and informal learning.

The conference has been designed to foster dialog and support the participation of everyone attending - opening with a scoping session so that attendees can decide how best to structure the event (Graham's taken a semi-structured unconference approach - the best one I think for these kind of events - otherwise every session turns into a debate about structure vs structurlessness. Check out the flyer for further details.)

On top of all this it's a free event! Blimey. Hope to see some of you there.

Download conference_flyer_bazaar.pdf

When communities collied

I'm not a massive fan of the CSI franchise (although my mum is, and I play Horatio signature poses bingo with her sometimes) but I was interested to see what CBS and Cisco had set up around episode #405, "Down the Rabbit Hole", which aired last Wednesday in the States (also streaming from the CBS site - I can't view it however, either it's not open outside of the US or it's way busy). There have been mutterings from the Second Life community about the show's extensive use of the (newly introduced and not universally used) voice chat. My feeling is you wouldn't expect a realistic portrayal forensic science from an episode of CSI, so surely asking for Second Life in all its lag, rezzing, getting bumped and getting ruthed glory is a bit much.

You can find the virtual CSI:NY home here, and if you already have SL set up you can you can find the slurl (= Second Life URL) here. Will newcomers be able to overcome both the excessive use of acronyms, the notoriously un-web 2.0 entry (ie it isn't the most intuitive environment), and the fact that SL is going to run your computer ragged if it isn't big and powerful?

Well, to get you started there's a bunch of video tutorials. If you have no interest in CSI whatsoever but are working in SL or helping people work in that environment, these are worth a peek. They've also got a quick start avatar creator (far better shape, hair and skin than the SL defaults). Helping lower the entry barrier is the first commercially licenced viewer, designed to make accessing and navigating SL simpler. There are a couple of in world greeters hanging around the main location to help people out as well, so if you do have any looming SL inductions CBS could potentially be doing you some big favors.

In world attractions include the props area & store (pretty interesting actually, but a shame they didn't throw in some poses for photographs - the huge advantage SL has over regular displays is that you can crawl all over the exhibits); some of New York; a crime lab; and a cool looking detective game that I haven't had the time to check out properly.

Speculation about somewhere in the region of a million new people checking out SL on the back of the episode are yet to be confirmed - it will be interesting what the final figures are, and also what happens to the percentage of the CSI fan community that end up sticking around.

On the fan-culture cross over theme, of course Henry Jenkins has already got it covered with an interview with two of the producers of the project for Electric Sheep, Damon Taylor and and Daniel Krueger.

2-Way API Action

Rumors currently flying about Google's plans for social networking development & I'm as interested in the next (ok, fairly geeky) person to see how they plan on expanding their Empire. The potential for creating a new kind of social networking service - one that sits on top of a range of distributed activities - formalising (and making easier? Certainly easier to bank data) the kinds of cross site activities and networking we internet monkeys already get up to sounds awfully tempting. The strength of the model is not that the vision is anything new - what's new is that the fact that an internet Goliath is (allegedly) seriously pursuing this kind of open door policy. It's huge strength - that it'll be built on Google's stable of services - is of course a mighty advantage, and an obvious potential limitation to how any one company manages to string our disparate interests, preferences and activities together. I'll be interested in how Maka-Maka manages or accommodates relations across other service providers and locations.

UPDATE: Google OpenSocial info up now

The BIMA Facebook debate, & Chris Kelly's announcement today

I had a blast as one of the debate panelists at this week's BIMA organised Facebook Debate (Yes, I was there, despite not being included on any of the speaker lists) at the BT Center in London. I'm not a huge fan of the debate format - for and against arguments always kick against the pragmatist in me,which is why I love the slam concept, but it was fun to go all out for a specific side. My team (me & the endearingly grumpy Robert Lock) were pitched against Damien Mulley and Sam Sethi on two audience selected topics - Facebook's decision to open up its interface to all developers was a mistake (we were asked to argue for) and friend requests from your boss are best ignored (against).

I'm not going to run through all of the arguments, although some of them I suspect are well on the way to near legendary status (Sam's statement that Boss stands for bag of shit, for example) and I'd also like to publicly thank Damien since his arguments were all of huge help to our team  :)

I'll call out a couple of points that I made that may be of interest to readers over here. Firstly (and this turned out to be the most contentious thing I said all night) I suggested that one of the problems with opening up the Facebook platform to external apps was that to the extent that third party apps were interesting/useful (& I'd like to think that some are useful, as opposed to just entertaining), many just expanded the Facebook sink into a black hole - eg - more information that I can't get out. Although the management of distributed presence was clearly a theme that ran across the evening, data portability seemed to be  largely regarded as a matter of choice - in the sense that if you want it - go to another  platform. 

Secondly, I talked about having your boss included in your contact list as a good excuse to finally get to grips with Dante's 10th circle of hell - aka the peculiar granularity of FB permissions. I asked for an audience hands up on who in the room felt really confident about setting up and using permissions, and about five people did. It'll be interesting to see whether the introduction of friend categories makes permissions easier, harder, or no different to navigate (& just in case anyone involved in the coding of it for FB is reading this - please make sure you can assign individual friends to multiple groups).

UPDATE: Adam Tinworth has posted a really great report of the event over at One Man & His Blog. I'm sorry he couldn't stay to the end and talk!

In other related news - so this doesn't become the FB blog - Chris Kelly, Chief Privacy Officer at Facebook, posted today on a range of e-safety activities, including a commitment to address complaints concerning certain categories (nudity, porn, harassment, unwanted contact) within 24 hours - as far as I know the first social network service to specify a customer service level agreement response time (please do let me know if I'm wrong!).

Google buys Jaiku

Full press release over here. Congrats to the Jaiku team on their speedy acquisition.

The limits of homophily

Thanks to Frances Bell for drawing my attention to this article, and to a really useful word. I've been talking about the issues of homophily within social networking sites and practices for some time now, but without having an actual word to describe what it was I was getting at. So cheers Frances!

Homophily in this case was sourced from the article Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks (2001). McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Cook stitch up the concept in the abstract:

"Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people's personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics. Homophily limits people's social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order."

There's no doubting the fact that social networking sites are built around the facilitation of  homophily - whether its of general or specific interest (liking 'film' or liking 'Korean cinema', or 'Choi Min-shik', for example) , geographical location, institutional affiliation etc etc. The rise of social search makes this even more explicit. In particular, people search engines which mine social networking sites - (e.g. Explode, Squidwho, Wink, & more each day) - are built around the idea that you can find friends who share your interests across locations, not be bound by your network-flavor affiliation.

The current reality is a bit more hit and miss - blame it on the relatively small volume of white-label social networks, or closed houses, or  the lack of tag savvy amongst the general population,  but it's going to be easier for a while to find someone with very broad interests (for some reason, sex springs to mind as a popularly listed one), rather than your specific long-tail requirements for some time to come.

The question I was asking is what we miss by reinforcing homophily as the prime directive online. To give a pretty flip example, I don't have a huge amount of friends over at last.fm, but I certainly don't want to make friends with anyone who listens to exactly the same music as I do. What would be the point?  I want friends who listen to things I've never heard of, and am unlikely to stumble over by myself. I like to listen to new stuff, even if I only very very rarely fall in love with something.