SocialTech

EdTech - mobiles, sunnies, sarnies

Picture credit: Mom & Mrs Pat Butcher by virgo200745

Grab your floppy hat and sun screen and head out to the bright new day that is the Edubloggers Summer Picnic: Hyde Park 15 June 08. This one's in honor of Instructional Media Analyst Stella Lee who's on loan to us from Athabasca University, Canada, for a week:

It's been a while since we had a proper meetup. So why not come to London's Hyde Park for an afternoon of great company and the finest food and wines known to mankind?*
Sign up now!
And don't forget to help spread the word!

Who?
Anyone working in educational technology, or in formal or informal learning & interested in geeky stuff. This is an ideal day out for for learning technologists, IT people, teachers, librarians, cultural workers, researchers, or people interested in talking about how tech supports learning & learning communities. Relations, friends, loved ones and offspring are all welcome.

Where?
Hyde Park: Meet by the Serpentine Gallery (check back for updates/rainy day alternatives)

When?
2pm - later. There will probably be an early evening pub move. I'd be pretty amazed if there wasn't.

What?
Bring food, drink, footballs, frisbees, blankets... activity ideas welcome - we may have footie & rounders matches depending on the relative fitness of attendees.

*You need to provide these yourself unfortunately

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.

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.

 

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.

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.

4 bloggers blogging

Blogged already by James, Steve & Hayden, but I can't resist posting this photo from David Bryson's bloggers blogging slideshow - it's of Simon, me, Frances and Helen blogging after the Web Slam. Ah, happy days.

Shout out for social networks in education

As some of you know I’m currently working on a project for Childnet International that looks at young people’s use of technology, specifically social network services (SNS).  One of the strands of this work is designed to help educators and carers in making informed decisions about using social network sites. The work will provide an introduction to what are new kinds of sites and practices for many people, outline potential risks and things to keep a look out for, and provide strategies to address these.

The project aims to

•    Look at how children and young people can use the internet safely to change the world for the better;
•    Recognise the huge positive potential young people have and the vital role they have to play in shaping the world; and
•    Celebrates the unprecedented opportunities that web 2.0 affords children and young people - to develop a voice, to collaborate, to organise, to debate, to create, to share, to learn, to develop essential skills, and above all - to participate. 

I’m putting a call out for help with two specific sections of the work:

1.    Examples of SNS currently being used to support education both big and small projects – from setting up your own social network platform to examples of students using flicker to organise a presentation.

2.    Ideas for using SNS to support education – perhaps your school blocks a lot of social network sites but you have some great ideas for how you would like to see students making the most out of these kinds of sites.

You can send your gems over to sns4ed@gmail.com
Please get them to me before the end of August!

Questions (please do add any others to the comments!)

What do you mean by social networking services Josie?

Part of the work of the project will be in addressing the thorny issue of definition. There’s a reasonable indicative list of social network sites over at wikipedia

As well as services like MySpace and Bebo, my definition would include all of those other services that support users to create content (including commentary and criticism) within a networked environment.  & Yes, I am counting virtual worlds and multi-user gaming sites. I’d also throw in social book marking services (like del.icio.us), microblogging services (like Twitter and Jaiku), and of course I’m interested in multimedia sites like Flickr, YouTube and other services that utilise mobile phone functionality.

I’m not focusing on freestanding blogs or wikis – not because these aren’t important, or don't allow people to create networks – but because of the scope of this project and also because I already run the Edublog awards which does a lot to recognise stuff going on using those tools. So if you have a great example of practice, why not enter this years awards?

What age range are you looking at?

I’m focusing on UK school aged children, that is, 11 – 16 year olds. However, if you’ve got a great example of practice with older or younger learners – please do send it in!

Are you only interested in UK based examples?

The work is primarily addressing UK education issues, but I’m happy to take examples and ideas from anywhere!

What will you do with my fantastic contribution?

Some of the entries will be featured on the website. I’ll release all of the ideas and examples as a separate CC licensed download to benefit all of us. I’ll be giving link credit to every contributor who wants it – so please remember to include your name and the site you’d like to link to.

I don’t have any ideas or examples :( What can I do to help?

Let people know about this call! Pass on the word! Huge thanks!

Women, Blogging & Business

I spent a great day on Friday at the Women, Blogging & Business conference - the first European event to focus on women and social media. The final programme offered a great line up, and this is the first conference I've been to since the early 90s that had an all women speaking cast, and certainly the first tech conference I've ever been to where the women clearly out numbered the male delegates.

It was a fantastic day. The first keynote was Meg Pickard (Head of Communities and User Experience for Guardian Unlimited) who delivered a great analysis of the web 2.0 transformation of the consumption, interaction, curation and creation of content.

Next up was Eileen Brown, Microsoft Technology Evangelist, who gave us the low down on the strategic use of employee blogging within Microsoft and outlined the impact it has had on humanising the public perception of the company, as well as on influencing policy and practice at Microsoft itself.

Jory des Jardins,  Media Consultant & Co-founder of BlogHer wrapped up the keynotes with an overview of women bloggers as producers and consumers.

Technorati here, Flickr here.

Bad practice in social networking

I'm sure you'll have your own examples, but here are two which have recently annoyed me:

Tagged: Spam Network

Tagged.com is apparently

"a premier social networking destination and an ideal place for advertisers to reach their target audience. Tagged provides a fun, safe, and exciting environment for people to showcase their personalities and talents, and to connect with friends and meet new ones.
Tagged is experiencing dramatic growth Advertisers love Tagged because they get clear, uncomplicated access to our audience. Our team is dedicated to making every advertiser successful and can develop and support any type of ad campaign."

So, tagged is a social network for people who enjoy their data being passed on to ad agencies. Fine - a lot of social networks have done well out of this model. What bugs me is the spam invites I keep getting:

What really annoys me is the explicit emotional manipulation - say yes or you might hurt someones feelings. Say no, and (surprise, surprise) you get redirected to Tagged's registration page. Who knows what happens if you dare to press the unsubscribe button. I'm guessing that your first born gets put into a weekly draw.

More complaints about Tagged here

Next up, citypixel.

Citypixel is a social networking site for lovers of pixel art - it's an online city made up of over 600 blocks of Isometric buildings, with a population streching from 8 to 48 years old. Its a nice looking site, and the visual representation of a distributed community is interesting (and obviously also provides plenty of space for advertisers). Members are invited to take up residence in one of the apartment blocks and work cubes. The main activity seems to be checking out other peoples apartments - everything is public - and leaving messages about what you think. Leaving aside how creepy I personally find the replication of offline life in online environments (why do I need a toilet in my apartment?) I find the complete absence of online safety advice exasperating. There's no lower age limit  for membership, no inappropriate content/contact mechanism (there is a generic email the site admin function), and no privacy or friends-only options for your profile and contact info. It's almost as if the designers had completely overlooked any issues to do with children and young people using the site...

Spring Meetup! London, 17th April

Picture: Centre Point Fountain

I’m loving the sunshine at the moment, and relishing the opportunity to be able to have breakfast in the garden. What could be better? Mojito’s after work with some likeminded, geek-friendly company? If this sounds good to you then why not come along to the next edublogger meetup kicking off at Jrinks in Soho, London, on Tuesday 17th April, around 6.15pm. You don’t need to be an educational blogger – an interest in technology and learning will do.

Guest of honour is Barbara Dieu, a São Paulo-based teacher, researcher, EFL/ESL and edtech luminary. Barbara is runs Dekita, blogs over at Wide Open Spaces and has been involved in international collaborative and exchange projects for the last decade.

Let me know if you can make it via the comments here or by email.

Google map here, nearest tube Tottenham Court Road

Christopher Lightfoot

Programmer and internet firebrand Christopher Lightfoot died aged 28 in February, and his life and achievements were celebrated by some of his friends on Radio Four's  Last Word programme yesterday. You can listen to the broadcast at the site or the repeat which goes out tomorrow night at 20.30 GTM:

"Chris Lightfoot saw the internet as a powerful tool for encouraging greater participation in democracy and civic society. For the charity ‘mySociety’ he developed websites which enabled voters to gain more direct access to their MPs, including ‘writetothem’, ‘hearfromyourmp’ and ‘pledge bank’. He also helped to develop the 10 Downing Street e-petition site which recently attracted more than a million people to protest against road pricing."

The Times also published an obituary. Its a loss we can't really afford.   

In Real Life

I’ve just been checking out Thomas Ryberg’s draft paper on Networked Identities, which in a very fitting way I found via a comment Thomas had left over on an Explode comment wall – he’d posted it over at his site in response to an Explode ‘friends nudge’ (basically, messaging to people on your friends list) from Stan Stanier asking for suggestions on explaining the benefits of social networking sites and practices to teaching/academic staff.

Well, here you go Stan, one example of the usefulness of semi-structured networking within and across networks on a plate ☺

Thomas’s article raised exactly the issues we’ve been tackling over at the Emerge project, particularly the limitations of community of practice theorising around online activities and associations, and the current turn towards thinking through network identities.

So far, so useful. However – I’m wrestling with one particularly (to me anyway) sticky related issue at the moment. I was at NESTA’s Uploading Innovation event (co-ordinated by Policy Unplugged) and in one of the breakouts one of the participants pointed out the futility of distinguishing between online and offline in terms of young peoples activity, since for many of them the two were perceived of and experienced as interdependent. No argument from me. However, I have a similar problem to Stan, in that I still need to articulate fields of activity to people whose experience of the internet and technology may be very much less network, or community, or socially based. I’ve been using ‘online’ and ‘offline’ as indicators – but I’m aware that this is a very geek-centric approach which may not sit well with people who don’t spent as much time online as I do. I really have a problem with (and so won’t use) the ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ (real world, real life) as a distinction – even though the popularity of the acronym IRL (in real life) is notably on the rise. I’ve occasionally fallen back on referring to offline as 3D.

Presuming it’s not just me who has an issue, can I ask what everyone else’s thinking is? What your preferred or grudging used terminology has been? Is my dependence on dichotomies a bit pitiful? What do you use?   

Team Elgg Explode

The Elgg guys have been launch-tastic at the moment: the Elgg support community for the developmentally-minded has had a makeover,  Elgg 0.7 has been turned loose, there's a new documentation wiki (using the Elgg-MediaWiki integration plug-in which Dave has been busy making pretty) and (although currently also only over at the developer community site) there is a new forums plug-in.

In addition they've been working on Explode! over the weekend, a new social networking ap/hack which is currently in pre-widget form, but still around a thousand times more useful/fun than a lot of other social network projects. Explode currently "allows you to create a friends list, wherever they might be, and display them on your website, a sort of distributed friends network". Basically a very cool ap that lets you hook up with friends across a social networks. I'm betting on some pretty swift developments.

You have to set up an account over at the main site, and then paste a line of code into your blog/site. I managed it pretty easily with Typepad (although you have to use an advanced template until the widget becomes available) and Blogger, which was a breeze. I had no luck at all (surprise surprise) with MySpace While I've been typing this the boys have just released their first MySpace-friendly graphic widget! Once on your site, the widget enables people to click-to-add you to their network.

YouNiversity in the open

Henry Jenkins has posted his recent article From YouTube to YouNiversity over at his own blog, which is good news because the Chronicle of Higher Education (where the piece was previously only available from online) is walled off to non subscribers. I previously received the whole text via an unauthorised email list posting - so it's nice to have it in a form I can pass on.   

The article discusses the shape and impact of networked culture, and looks at how its recognition could be used to transform academic design and organisation - zoning in on Media Studies.

Christopher Sessums has also been focusing on this theme a lot recently, try checking out Read, Write, Mix, Rip, and… Burn, Baby, Burn: Notes on How Social Media Affects Conventional Teaching and Learning Practices and The Future Begins Now: School 2.0 Manifesto

EdTech activism

The recent Florida Educational Technology Conference blogger meetup seems to have stirred up some hi-octane interest in edublog lobbying to  “make education and read/write technology a social/economic priority”, and for working towards the political mainstreaming of educational transformation which embeds new social technologies and practices (software, networks, media production and sharing).

Christopher Sessums outlines the US edubloggers embryonic manifesto in ‘Why the future needs us: educational reform, collaboration and social action”, and co-conspirator Will Richardson pitches in with A Call to…?

Focusing on the next US election is an interesting strategy, and one that might well provide some useful models and lessons for other countries. I’m interested in what a US-wide organization is going to look and work like, how it might influence and collaborate with other emerging social and educational tech associations, and very much looking forward to hearing more info on the planned June Stateside edubloggercon.

A whole bunch has happened since last June, when we held the UK’s first edublogger conference. There will be a formal announcement shortly about the new grass-roots, independent UK organization, Future Learning Online (FLO) which has emerged from a series of on and offline events, meetups, and conversations taking place over the past few years between educational bloggers, technologists, developers, IT support staff, librarians, consultants, researchers, teachers, post-grad students, trainers and many other people who don’t fit easily into these, or any single, role. We’ll be holding our next annual conference in June as well - so it’s shaping up to be an interesting summer. 

Emerge

As George Roberts posted earlier today, the Emerge project JISC bid to support the Users and Innovation strand of the capital programme was successful.

I went along to the formal interview with George (Oxford Brookes), Chris Fowler (Essex), Michael Gardner (Essex) and Steven Warburton (Kings College London) on Thursday, where we had a really productive discussion and got very excited about the project again. 

My role will be focusing on supporting JISC's community of practice by providing appropriate infrastructure and tools, and ensuring that support and training is designed around the needs of group members. 

I'm very much looking forward to working with Team Elgg, since we will be using an Elgg network to support the community members as appropriate (a lot of the flesh of the project, including tools and services, are going to depend on user need and preference) and as a base for the project management. Elgg was the obvious choice for me for a bunch of reasons, but in particular:

• It's open source and supports a number of open standards. The January to June roadmap points up a lot of interesting new developments, including OpenID.
• Elgg has been designed to support distributed practices and user choices. This means that people in the group can choose to work where and how they want to, in small or large groups, or as individuals. We'll be able to support the connections they want to make using the platform, and provide a great entry point into networks of practice.
• Relational granularity/Smart networking: posts, resources, and even elements of profiles can be public, shared amongst groups of any size, or private.

Entirely appropriately, while I was over at elgg.net checking out George's post, I stumbled over another just-up post from Sam Rose, which pointed in the direction of a very interesting piece by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze, Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale.