Lynne Wolters :: Blog

http://joanvinallcox.wordpress.com/2010/03/07/signs-of-the-season/

The sidewalks are crowded and the coffeeshop patios are filled. The motorcyclists lean on their bikes and watch the walkers parading past.
The spot of red (against the cream-coloured house, in the leafless branches) is the first cardinal I’ve seen this season.

Joan Vinall-Cox, PhD, Social Media Consultant http://jnthweb.ca






[...]

http://joanvinallcox.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/winter-diminishes/

It feels like spring!



Joan Vinall-Cox, PhD, Social Media Consultant http://jnthweb.ca

http://joanvinallcox.wordpress.com/2010/02/23/social-media-makes-a-small-w

Two weird social media things have happened to me this morning. In Twitter, I have a new follower who, when I checked her or him out, was following only people with the name Joan, including several Spanish-speaking ones with distinctly masculine avatars. A strange way of selecting people to follow!

The other, and much more [...]

http://joanvinallcox.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/snow/

Joan Vinall-Cox, PhD, Social Media Consultant http://jnthweb.ca

http://joanvinallcox.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/hamilton-harbour-from-the-hi

Looking at the industrial area.


Joan Vinall-Cox, PhD, Social Media Consultant http://jnthweb.ca

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/csessumscom/~3/zFao7-l920Q/

This is article is written in response to Trent Batson’s essay As We May Learn: Revisiting Bush in Campus Technology.

Batson argues:

“We lack a coherent and comprehensive way to study media and learning that would help us make wise enterprise decisions instead of the constant lurching we’ve sponsored during those 20 years. Where to turn for this new knowledge and wisdom?”

My contention is that this is both near-sighted and patently untrue. Batson himself, a former professor at a large university, clearly suffers from what many at large and small higher education institutions suffer from: individualism. Given the comforts of tenure and the lack of sociality and intra-college mingling that can be documented in one institution after another, it’s hard to see what is going on in college classrooms much less know who is using what digital media to enhance teaching and learning or to what end.

Batson asks:

“But where is the field of media and learning that encompasses all this scattered inquiry?”

In my college and many others like it, it is in the educational technology department. One that is often parked in a remote region of an education college or psychology department. One that you would easily overlook given the culture of  individualism that dominates the institutions. (Perhaps this isolationism and individualism is a leadership and policy issue which should be re-examined by those at a much higher pay grade. Yet, I digress.)

While I agree educators and college professors need to spend more time reflecting on how we, as practitioners, conduct the collegiate enterprise, the chances of this happening are slim on a large, continuous scale. And while this may sound at first like a bad thing, I have come to realize that this is actually a wonderful thing. Let me tell you why.

This thing that we call a call a college education is about to implode. And it will happen in our lifetime. I have heard this over the past decade within the halls of academia, in journal articles, editorials, and blog posts. But now I am hearing it from the students themselves. They see that to succeed in life and develop the requisite knowledge and skills to support a nimble civilization , they do not require university professors. And I could not agree with them more.

As an educational technology professor in a higher education institution, I see it as my job to train and educate the next generations of teachers to make inquiry and participatory intelligence the norm thereby rendering the ivory towers useless (or at least rendering them into wonderful Smithsonian-like museums showcasing relics and antiquities of “what used to be”).

Sure colleges can still offer researchers a place to conduct studies of the hard and soft sciences, but it will no longer be a knowledge accreditation agency or a ticket to future success. We will have all that we need at our fingertips and at the touch of a screen. Teachers in secondary institutions will be equipped and available to model the skills necessary for practical and creative living. At least, that’s my goal and the goal of many educators I know and practice with.

Several months ago, James Gee came to my college and shared an insight with us. He remarked that in the future, colleges of education would become obsolete. That instead, those of us that specialize in pedagogy, androgogy, and technological pedagogical content knowledge, would serve the other colleges and departments on campus by teaching these professors how to create robust, engaging, and media savvy learning environments. This would serve both the hard and soft scientists, educators, and students well by deepening each subject matter experts’ ability to serve up the skills and knowledge necessary for students to become the best, brightest, and most creative stewards on the planet. Not a bad vision.

So while “media and learning” could serve as a new department or enterprise, as Batson suggests, it could instead become a part of every subject area’s enterprise. How’s that for a solution: Let’s work ourselves out of our jobs.

Remember, it was not that long ago that universities employed a Dean of Electricity.

Image: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2530/4110558590_6596cbe4f6.jpg

http://joanvinallcox.wordpress.com/2010/02/12/googles-design-sense/

I love Google's sense of design and current events! And am enjoying using Chrome, even though I use Firefox for certain things. Joan Vinall-Cox, Social Media & Learning

http://joanvinallcox.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/at-toms/

Joan Vinall-Cox, PhD, Social Media Consultant http://jnthweb.ca

http://joanvinallcox.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/presentation-of-the-self-on-

I have been, as they say, “active on the web” since the late nineties, and have really enjoyed the social aspects of it since at least 2005, earlier if you count social bookmarking. I have a strong sense of the differences between the public, private, and deeply private aspects of my life, probably because [...]

http://benwerd.com/2010/02/how-social-networks-can-replace

The analysis firm Gartner just released five key predictions for social software:

1. By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.


2. By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.


3. Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.


4. Within five years, 70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.


5. Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.

Social networks replacing email. Really?

I broadly agree with all of these, but that first prediction needs a little more analysis. Let’s think about why email has succeeded:

• Ease of use


• Ubiquity across devices


• Platform, service and infrastructure independence

I access email from my Dell PC, my iPhone, and have in the past used Blackberry phones, Macs, Linux boxes, etc, all the way down to Windows 3.1, using a combination of software that’s included Eudora, Thunderbird, Phoenix, Turnpike, and many more. Right now I use a combination of GMail, Google Apps and self-hosted email addresses; in the past I’ve used Microsoft Exchange in various guises, Yahoo Mail, and so on. No matter which provider or hardware I used, I could email anyone else with an email address, no matter which provider or hardware they used. Email is a completely open, interoperable standard.

Social networking anything but an open, interoperable standard. If you use Facebook, you can communicate with other people on Facebook, full stop. Even networks based on open source solutions like Elgg are essentially social islands.

What needs to be done?

I strongly believe that social messaging can be significantly more useful to both enterprises and individuals than standard email. Proof-of-concept applications like Google Wave are beginning to show the way: you can make resources available to whoever needs to see them, rather than the current, inherently insecure practice of making copies and sending them out. Whereas email takes inspiration from letters and faxes, the social messaging paradigm is based more closely around conference calls and conversations.

Nonetheless, in a business situation, you need to be reasonably certain your message is going to reach the recipient, and the current platform constraints – only being able to message someone using the same site as you – are untenable. Let’s look again at those email success factors:

• Ease of use


• Ubiquity across devices


• Platform, service and infrastructure independence

Social networks do currently have ease of use. They may approach near-ubiquity across devices only if they create a developer ecosystem around their proprietary APIs, as Twitter has done, but this requires a lot of faith in a single third-party service.

No, I think it comes down to one principle:

Email has succeeded because it’s open, standard and decentralized; for social networks to replace it, they must also be open, standard and decentralized.

In my next post, I’ll suggest real world, technical approaches to this that can be implemented today.

Related entries

• Social networking: beyond the silo (1)


• Using game dynamics to drive participation (1)


• Charging for software in the age of web apps (2)