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

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.

I'm delighted to announce that the Young People and Social Networking Services report that I have been working on for Childnet International, with the generous support of Becta, is now available from Childnet's digital literacy and citizenship site, Digizen.

It's a pretty comprehensive report, with the whole shebang available for download under a Creative Commons License on site, or from here:

Download fullReport.pdf

and weighing in at 37 pages. The online version breaks the sections up for your viewing pleasure - so you can just dip in to the sections which are of interest or use to you. The report was written from a UK schools and Further Education perspective, although much of the information will be useful to people working outside of these two contexts.

It isn't a completely introductory level document, but should be useful and informative for people who have a responsibility care towards children and young people - including governors, principals and senior management teams, Safeguarding boards and local authorities - people who are making decisions concerning  educational provision and resourcing.  It will also be very handy for anyone working within the sector and wanting to use internet based services with young people.

What's in the pack?

What are Social Networking Services? looks at where we are in terms of definitions, and  splits services up into six main categories: Profile-based services (eg Bebo, Facebook, MySpace); Content-focused services (eg Flickr, YouTube); White-label networks (although I could have written a book about these); Multi-User Virtual Environments (although some of these aren't necessarily social networks - particularly those designed for younger children); Mobile services; and Microblogging/Presence update services (Social Search engines & Lifestream aps also get a mention as adjunct services). The version that's on the site is the short one. you can download the 9 page PDF on site or from here:

Download social-networking-overview.pdf

Evaluating Social Networking Services comes in two parts: an evaluation chart which has an online version and an easier-for-me-to-read downloadable version:

Download Sns.pdf

That's designed to be printed off big (well, A3). The services which were kind enough to take part are used as examples to help people make their own evaluations of services. Big thanks to everyone at Bebo, Facebook, Yahoo!, MySpace, Ning, Taking It Global and Google who pitched in and gave permissions. There is also a checklist guide that accompanies the chart, designed to walk you through what to look out for when evaluating services for use with young people. This covers a lot of things, including profile privacy, moderation, customisation, security and access issues, data management tools, and interoperability.

Benefits & Opportunities is a section looking at the potential positives for young people  and organisations of using social networking services.

Barriers & Risks looks some of the issues preventing educators from exploring social networking services and some of the e-safety issues involved.

The Ideas and Examples returns to the different kinds of social networking services outlined in the first section and looks at what educators in the UK and around the world are doing. I'd like to continue to develop and expand this section so all  suggestions are welcome - and of course you can always enter your fantastic project for this years International Edublog Awards :)

So that's it! Except to again thank the fantastic advisory board who worked on the project, keeping an eye on how the research was developing and what the final report looked like.

   

 

This week, a bunch of us from the Emerge project were invited to contribute to the OSS Watch expert workshop on profiling communities. I was asked to present, and as part of my talk looked at the current state of Open Source social networking platforms and tools. I'm hoping to follow up with an evaluation matrix of the platforms, but in the meantime, I'm happy to pass on brief details of the sites and services I looked at. This isn't an exhaustive list by any means - I'm happy to report that there is plenty of choice if you are looking to invest time, energy and resources in using open source tools. This list represents  examples of what's currently available & is not an endorsement of any particular product or company :)

Open Source Social Networking Platforms

All in one solutions for community hosting, providing user profiles, tools sets & supporting collaborative activity. 

AROUNDMe  http://www.barnraiser.org/ -
Developed by Barnraiser a Swedish based registered not-for-profit organisation. AROUNDMe is suite of three social tools, designed to help users create their own OpenID-based services and tools for individuals and groups.

Elgg  http://elgg.org/
Social networking engine Elgg coming soon in two flavors - Classic Elgg and the soon to be released Elgg 1.0. Elgg, developed by the UK-based company Curverider.

Dolphin 6.1 http://www.boonex.com/products/dolphin/
One of a suite of tools from Australian based company BoonEx, who offer hosted options. A test platform is available at http://www.boonex.us/

Insoshi http://portal.insoshi.com/
US-based Michael Hartl and Long Nguyen's company, project and product Inoshi. The Insoshi open-source social networking platform grew out of RailsSpace.

LovdbyLess http://lovdbyless.com/
Like Insoshi, Lovdbyess is built with ruby on rails, by US-based developer team Less Everything, to provide a free, open source basic social network  platform that additional specific functionality can be added to.

Mahara http://www.mahara.org/
E-portfolio social networking software developed for the education community, and including a résumé builder/digital CV. The Mahara project is based in New Zealand, with partner organisations in Japan and the UK.

Open Source Social News

Stand alone and built to work with existing content management platforms, these tools allow users to share content published online, and comment on there own or others contributions.

Drupaligg http://drupaligg.com
A Digg clone built over Drupal

Newscloud http://www.newscloud.com
Newscloud is an OS Media Platform, designed to support communities around news and discussion. Information about downloading and developing can be found here.

Pligg http://www.pligg.com/
An OS content management system providing an interactive website for users to submit, vote and discuss web-based content.

Open Source Social Bookmarking

GetBoo http://www.getboo.com/
Scuttle http://sourceforge.net/projects/scuttle/
Unalog http://unalog.com

Open Source Video Sharing

Plumi http://plumi.org
Showinabox http://showinabox.tv/ For creating WordPress video blogs
FilmForge http://filmforge.koumbit.net/ Video for Drupal

Open Source Microblogging

Identi.ca http://identi.ca/ Open Source federated microblogging
Laconica http://laconi.ca/

Open Source Virtual Worlds

OpenSource Metaverse Project http://metaverse.sourceforge.net/
Croquet http://www.opencroquet.org/
NMC Open Virtual Worlds Project http://www.nmc.org/news/nmc/nmc-launches-open-virtual-worlds-project Extension of Sun Microsystems’s open source Project Darkstar and Project Wonderland

Open Source Lifestreaming

Mugshot http://mugshot.org/main
Sweetcron http://www.sweetcron.com/
SimpleLife http://kierandelaney.net/blog/projects/simplelife/

& many more at: http://lifestreamblog.com/create/

Projects to watch/Upcoming 

Buddy Press http://buddypress.org/ Open Source project creating plug-ins to turn Wordpress Multi-User into a social network platform.

Identi.ca http://identi.ca/ Open Source federated microblogging

SocialLearn http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/socialearn/index.php The Open University's project is already picking up fans, and leaning towards OS. Fingers crossed.

Wikia’s Social Profile extension for Mediawiki http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SocialProfile adding social elements including profile pages and friending to the popular wiki software

 

I'm delighted to announce that the Young People and Social Networking Services report that I have been working on for Childnet International, with the generous support of Becta, is now available from Childnet's digital literacy and citizenship site, Digizen.

It's a pretty comprehensive report, with the whole shebang available for download under a Creative Commons License on site, or from here:

Download fullReport.pdf

and weighing in at 37 pages. The online version breaks the sections up for your viewing pleasure - so you can just dip in to the sections which are of interest or use to you. The report was written from a UK schools and Further Education perspective, although much of the information will be useful to people working outside of these two contexts.

It isn't a completely introductory level document, but should be useful and informative for people who have a responsibility care towards children and young people - including governors, principals and senior management teams, Safeguarding boards and local authorities - people who are making decisions concerning  educational provision and resourcing.  It will also be very handy for anyone working within the sector and wanting to use internet based services with young people.

What's in the pack?

What are Social Networking Services? looks at where we are in terms of definitions, and  splits services up into six main categories: Profile-based services (eg Bebo, Facebook, MySpace); Content-focused services (eg Flickr, YouTube); White-label networks (although I could have written a book about these); Multi-User Virtual Environments (although some of these aren't necessarily social networks - particularly those designed for younger children); Mobile services; and Microblogging/Presence update services (Social Search engines & Lifestream aps also get a mention as adjunct services). The version that's on the site is the short one. you can download the 9 page PDF on site or from here:

Download social-networking-overview.pdf

Evaluating Social Networking Services comes in two parts: an evaluation chart which has an online version and an easier-for-me-to-read downloadable version:

Download Sns.pdf

That's designed to be printed off big (well, A3). The services which were kind enough to take part are used as examples to help people make their own evaluations of services. Big thanks to everyone at Bebo, Facebook, Yahoo!, MySpace, Ning, Taking It Global and Google who pitched in and gave permissions. There is also a checklist guide that accompanies the chart, designed to walk you through what to look out for when evaluating services for use with young people. This covers a lot of things, including profile privacy, moderation, customisation, security and access issues, data management tools, and interoperability.

Benefits & Opportunities is a section looking at the potential positives for young people  and organisations of using social networking services.

Barriers & Risks looks some of the issues preventing educators from exploring social networking services and some of the e-safety issues involved.

The Ideas and Examples returns to the different kinds of social networking services outlined in the first section and looks at what educators in the UK and around the world are doing. I'd like to continue to develop and expand this section so all  suggestions are welcome - and of course you can always enter your fantastic project for this years International Edublog Awards :)

So that's it! Except to again thank the fantastic advisory board who worked on the project, keeping an eye on how the research was developing and what the final report looked like.

   

 

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 Edublogger Summer Picnic: June 15 2008 at Hyde Park, London. 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

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.

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.

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 :)