As the eagles song Hotel California says - "You can checkout any time you like,But you can never leave!" Like so many services - proprietary services - like Google, yahoo, Facebook, etc. - they want us in but we can't get out - unless they say so - and they keep our luggage ! And they can, arbitrarily, as discovered by Robert Scoble - lock us out and just delete our account and data.
This should be a flag for all those educators espousing the use of third party social networks like Facebook in education. Alternatives, like Elgg, allow universities or educational foundations to run their own social networks, and not be prey to the whims of proprietary systems. As Robert also discovered the open ownership of our data and the portability thereof should be of prime concern! We are visitors to these sites, not seeking to become an inhabitant that is treated like a chattel. We own our ID and must be able to port our data whenever and wherever we want - see these principles espoused by the dataportability movement.
As Stephen Downes cites Steve O'hear " "the resistance of Facebook, MySpace, Google and most of the leading players in the user data space to offer easy data portability (I can't even backup my gmail with a simple one-click) is based on an old fashioned notion that lock-in is the best way to protect a strong market position." The whole promise of social software and open source was NOT to be locked in - that's why many of us in ed tech find the proprietary Learning Managment System as so much less than the grazing commons of the personal learning environment (PLE).
As a side note I am on Facebook and am also involved in an effort to search out our family roots. I found others on Facebook with the same surname and was sending them a message of introduction and inviting them to our surname site. The Facebook robots warned me that I was "spamming" and shoud desist. So much for a social site.
Further to Facebook cease and desist to Robert Scoble's scraping of his own data in Facebook -
1. Facebook doesn't play well with others. Facebook Open Like A Granite Wall Compiler from Wired.com: "As we’ve been repeating over an over again, Facebook doesn’t have an API. Flickr has an API, del.icio.us has an API, but Facebook doesn’t and that they would take legal action against code that allows what any self-respecting API is designed to do — import and export data — further demonstrates that Facebook just doesn’t get it."
2. We social members of innumerable social networks need an open social network protocol: Content access controls - the ability to make some content visible to everyone and at the same time reserve other parts of content only for those visitors I’ve designated as “friends.” Cross-interaction for existing Social Networks - Why can't I have all my social networks connected? Need: Incorporate your existing data while providing a way to define new friends without resorting to any specific social networking site.
3. Those connections I've made, that profile, those addresses, that content - it has no value unless I own it and can access it anywhere, anytime, across the web. So social networks! Be truly social. Play fair. Be nice. Share. Promotedata portability.
The Livescribe paper-based computing platform – a smartpen, paper, software applications, and development tools – will be available online beginning in Q1 2008. The smartpen will be less than $200. Additional dot paper will be available at prices comparable to standard paper products. As Alec Couros cites (where I found out about this) a smart pen combined with special (but inexpensive) paper that allows non-linear access to the sounds recorded when the notes were taken.”
Now this is interesting - Tipjoy is a widget you can put on your blog where folks can "tip" you if they find your posting of particular value. Tipjoy will keep a record of those tips and when and IF the tipper decides to put real value behing their tipping gestures - each click of the “tip this” button sends bloggers a small fixed amount set by the tipper (10 cents is the default). 96% of tip amount goes to the blogger (2% goes toward PayPal fees and Tipjoy takes a 2% service fee).
Bloggers currently have two options for “withdrawing” their tips. They can either donate tips to charity or “buy” an Amazon gift card.
An interesting slice of human psychology - if I click a tip, will I feel obligated to follow through with my gesture? I'm a litle leary of putting this widget on my blog - mainly because I'm not here seeking remuneration for my postings - others linking to and or commenting on is my compensation.
Just because you are part of a social network doesn't mean you want to be social. And maybe you do want to socialize but do so without sharing personal information. There are times you might want to engage in a conversation but keep your identity confidential. No, not just when you want to be represented someone you are not (like a dating service) but when anonymity keeps the interaction flowing.
One such request came through a listserve that I am part of where the individual is seeking a 'white brand" social networking software that can ensure anonymity yet promote social interaction.
He wants to develop an invitation only community that allowa participants to enage in discussion under "Chatham House Rules" environment. Under these rules, "When a meeting, or part thereof, is held ... participants are free to use the informationreceived, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s),nor that of any other participant, may be revealed." The idea is to allowfor frank, in-depth discussions without concerns of having such remarks attributed to individuals and/or making their way into the press.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_House_Rules)
Now elgg can accomodate this - to a degree - through the user access controls and the ability to create anonymous profiles. I'm interested in how this can happen and have offered to assist this poster. I'll let you know if more comes of this.
Jeremiah Owyang has an extensive list (continuously updated thanks to a barrage of responses) of scoial networking software that can be use to create your own "white label" network. I note that one respondent advised him to add elgg - so I don't have to - also that Ben Werdmuller responded as well touting elgg.
Also see this techcrunch posting where Mark Hendrickson took Jeremiah's initial research and created a review of 34 of these toolsets (alas elgg was not among them).
Elgg won't ship with any features. Why not? Elgg 1.0 won't ship with any end-user features; think of it as a social application engine that can power all kinds of different sites and applications.
Who are "we" to tell you what features you need? The original Elgg codebase came with profiles, a blog, a file repository, communities and an RSS aggregator. The classic Elgg will still be supported.
That's good -serving two audiences (shell for programmers; classic for out of the box non-programmers) and ultimately allowing free form development.
I think Elgg has a lot of potential - I have a number of Elgg sites running now - from a community of practice to reserach spaces to course and program delivery spaces. It is a many splendoured thing, with multiple applications and a capacity to evolve as your "users" evolve from students to researchers to professionals.
Personal tasers with an MP3 (in red, pink and even leopard print designs), mining student records, scholarships and curriculum for homeland security, watching foreign students/faculty (hidden camera surveillance and watchlists), target dissidents, armaments to campus security, privatize security - these are the steps being used to create Repress U - the new university for today's climate of fear. So much for open learning, open education and the pursuit of knowledge.
NITROREV: Virtual Wake As I see Eduspaces - a social network I am part of - about to die and untimely death - I was wondering how to mourn the loss of those connections I made through this network. Then I encountered Stephen Taylor's blog entry where he muses about an actual incident of cyber friendship loss. It caused me a moment of thought. When I physically die, my cyber identityt continues on. The data remnants of my cyber activity exists - how will those I never met physically, yet socialized with electronically express condolences and grief? What happens to me cyber properties - do they revert to my heirs who have no interest in maintaining my blog entries and other data? Are they parsed out to my cyber friends? Further to this discussion I have a number of social software sites I maintain for educational institutions. Students post comments, reflections, artefacts and compile eportfolios. If a student does die, what is to be done with their entries? Do we just arbitrarily delete their account or maintain it in a condolences area? The expressions of grief, condolences and maintenance of cyber properties upon one's earthly death - these are issues we are yet to grapple with.
Dave’s Educational Blog Dave Cormier lists his top ten tech ed stories of 2007 - number 10 is connectivism, number 1 is the action of one hacker to remove filtering software - what permeates all selections is openness and freedom and the need for effective education on the safe and efficient use of that openneness and freedom - kudos to Dave - always insightful
Techcrunch tells the story -social software and social gaming - social network site Meebo opened their platform last month to third party developers and is now open to game startups.
Twenty games launched so far - from chess and checkers to Texas Hold ‘em. Launch Meebo chat, click on a friend and start a game.
Invite friend, play together and chat together real-time. Synchronous, real time events within your social network.
From Virtual to Real: online football fans buy up a team and get real
"Found this via our good friend David Cushman's blog Faster Future. There is an online football (soccer) community called My Football Club in the UK. They have collected together some very seriously fanatical football fans and joined together to buy a real football club. For just 35 UK Pounds (50 Euros, 70 US Dollars) any fan can join and become part-owner.The fans then decide how to run the team, ie which players to buy and sell, etc. Its the virtual "fantasy league" football enthusiast idea jumping from virtual to real. And sure enough, now My Football Club has collected enough money and have done negotiations with the English professional football club Ebbsfleet United FC, and are buying the club. This is in the lower tiers of the English system, in the "Conference" and ranked 9th within its peers, but a team that now might get a chance to improve as the new owners bring in new money and will start to use collective wisdom of the fans to run the team. "
Can fans be better owners, make informed decisions? Here's an example of how social software is not truly allowing everyone to be part of the game.
This has great applications in marketing and learning development. This is a simple widget maker with great opportunity - let's say I want to create a learning object, embed an RSS feed to my wbeiste/institution and have it posted throughout the web, and when I make change they flow out to all locations at anytime?
Further to Stephen Downe's discussion on trust and communities. Eduspaces, a free elgg powered community space managed and hosted by two entrepreneurs (Ben and Dave), fostered an active environment of educators discussing the use of and demonstrating the use of educational technologies. Eduspaces is being used by faculty, individuals and institutions for a variety of purposes - learning delivery, research space and respository, personal blogging, community creation, resource sharing, touchstone for learning, community of practice.
Now, seemingly out of the blue, the site is going down in mid January and folks are being advised to port their data elsewhere. Understandably, criticism has followed the surprise of this announcemnt. It is untimely. It is abrupt. It is unexpected. But is it a callous disregard for those who have invested data and time into developing their own spaces in Eduspaces? Have Ben and Dave, as Graham Attwell suggests, broken a bond of trust - a necessary component for community building - and impacted on the future acceptance and adoption of social software environments?
But it is always risky to have your activities housed on an external host. Eduspaces was a free service, hosted and moderated (without compensation) by two individuals interested in the advancement of free, open source software for use by the educational community, we should be a little thankful.
Many schools and faculty are making use of proprietary web services - like Facebook. If it should shut down I doubt there would be much chance of retrieving data. Were Dave and Ben great communicators? That's debatable. Were they funded and supported by those who benefitied from the use of Elgg and eduspaces? Hmm? No. And Elgg isn't suffering as an environment simply because Eduspaces is shutting down. Heck, even if Elgg shuts down we will continue to use the elgg installations we have on our server, and we will continue to add functions as required. Dave and Ben have established a platform, and made it available for personal customization. They have also left a legacy by contributing to the demise of proprietary learning and content mgmt systems and adding social components to authentic, reflective learning, and the creation and development of learning communities that thrive within and without and beyond the confines of program length and institutional membership. Lifelong, lifewide learning and the integration of formal and informal learning is now a true possibility thanks to advances like Elgg.
I agree that their actions are rushed, and they didn't 'discuss" with the community. And the optics aren't good - especially since eduspaces was a demonstration site of Elgg - Elgg may suffer as a result.
But the real question, as Graham rightly points out is that there was no organization to the comunity. We talk about organic development of free and open learning space like elgg, (eg. eduspaces) yet we often don't put an organizational framework around it (not management framework). What are the roles and responsibilities of site managment, moderation and of community members?
What the actions of Dave and Ben have demonstrated is that organic growth should not mean a hands off laissez-faire approach to community development. Organic Communities need cultivation. Trust must be earned , but it cannot be assumed. We trusted that Eduspaces would always be there for us, even if we as part of that community never contributed to its management. perhaps dave and Ben never saw eduspaces as their community - it was ours. maybe we are the ones who never established trust. Inevitably, all things come to an end. Even free, open, organic spaces.
Just another set of facts to indicate higher education better get it's shared space, social networking act together -
A new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project shows that the next generation is switched on and producing content. 59% of all (U.S.) teenagers engage in at least one form of online content creation. Of those 35% of all teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online boys, and 54% of girls post photos online compared with 40% of online boys. Boys however like their video, with 19% of boys posting video online vs. 10% of girls. 39% of online teens share their own artistic creations online, such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos 33% create or work on webpages or blogs for others, including those for groups they belong to, friends, or school assignments 28% have created their own online journal or blog, up from 19% in 2004. 27% maintain their own personal webpage 26% remix content they find online into their own creations
Students will want to be active learners, dealing with authentic, relevant content, and dynamically collaborating in the development of new content. And they will want personalizable learning spaces where they have access control.
Item: non-profit music group Richter Scales create mash up video to present with their new song "The Bubble" - a parody on making it in the next big net bubble
Problem: after a million views on YouTube, video taken down because photographer Lane Hartwell objected to the unauthorized use of one of her photos in the video, then put up again with the offending photo replaced and a list of credits at the end for all the images used.
Real problem: the norms of the offline world and the emerging norms of the Internet are in conflict. People communicate on the web by sharing - reshaping images, audio - if you make it available expect it to be used. If you want to be part of a community - expect to share.
Solution - Payback: think of other forms than buying rights - maybe licensing - maybe trackbacks, leading to paid work
P.S. I just mashed techcrunch text - even stole straight lines. Copyright issue?
New MA program in Online Communities at USCUSC's pioneering Charles Annenberg Weingarten Program on Online Communities (APOC) is the first master’s program in the world to recognize that online communities are the future of our economic, political, and social lives. They are the most successful application of “Web 2.0” concepts, and are increasingly popular as well as critical to the success of a wide array of industries. APOC students learn, gain firsthand experience, and then create an online community, attaining a master’s degree in just a single year.
I have repetitive stress injury, and need to investigate a new mouse and keyboard that can help with my condition. I went to Google, searched on ergonomic keyboards and received a number of hits - websites, mostly corporate or trade journals with reviews (paid for? promotions?) - extremely limited and not very helpful. So, I decide to search on blogs - and my first hit is a real Hit - Amy Hengst who maintains a blog devoted to home treatment for RSI . And lo and behold she has a comprehensive, informative list (and up to date) on ergonomic keyboards.
So here is my opinion drawn from this search experience. Websites are primarily corporate, designed to deliver a message leading to a sale, and often dated. The weblog - personal ones - can be corporate and sales driven but then there are also gems like Amy's where the message is up to date and more important than the sale. She as a blogger wants to share information and experience, not generate a sale. So for this trust test I side with the weblog.
I had an interesting dichotomy erupt during a conference presentation -attended by faculty and sessionals (grad students). When speaking about the use of social technology (OK people are social not technology but still labels are useful), anyway, a student stood up and asked "Why don't we use the tools we already use? Why not Facebook and IM or SMS chat or Ipodcasts?' To which an instructor responded (first year instructor) and said "Why should we have to use their tools - why don't they have to use ours (eg. Blackboard, Elluminate) if they attend our schools?" The discussion that ensued covered a lot of ground - from privacy to control issues, to autonomy, to freedom, to opportunity, to technology burdening to copyright issues and learning ownership.
I also had a slight mutiny in a course I TA'ed. (I spoke of this before) I established an internal installation of Elgg for the students to use as for personal reflection, project planing, collaboration and resource maintenance. Howeverthe day I demostrated and registered them to the Elgg environment our server sucked big time and it was slow and painful. By the next day all students had exited to the tools they know - Facebook, SMS and IM. Of course I blustered and countered with a posting about Facebook security and copyright issues, and of the CIA involvement - but it fell on deaf ears.
So another question to ponder. Do we build and support a series of loosely connected tools (eg. Elgg environment? Are we just creating another LMS? Should students use their own tools and networks? Why shouldn't their space be a learning space? Mind you I'm not sure the students really want their private world (Facebook) merged with their academic world.
Institutionalized education has erected a series of walls around what was supposed to be an exercise in flexible and open learning accesss - that is the use of web based interactive communications technology to deliver distance learning. The predominant tool used to date has been the Learning Management System which primarily just recreates the controlled, enclosed learning environment called the lecture hall. Consider the terminology -LMS is a learning management tool designed for the institution not the learner. It is a confined space where learning events occur, assessments are submitted and grades assigned. The learning events have no "life" beyond the box of the LMS. It serves a closed audience - students interact with a few other students, and a teacher and a few TAs and a limited amount of prescribed content. There is no linking to the world wide web, no connections to the world beyond the instruction in question. There is no continuation of learning. You register for a course, you get access to the LMS, you exit the course. No artefacts leave with you, no connections made are maintained, no history of learning is preserved, no eportfolio. Informal and nonformal learning, workplace experience, internships, cooperatives are not accommodated. We are at the juncture where the promise of continuous learning, learner directed learning can be met. But not with an LMS, nor any other closed environment designed to aid the university in confining and controlling learning.
The virtual learning environment or personal learning environment is the next phase. How that environment is configured and presented is open to question. There will be greater autonomy. less instructor control, less institutional control. There will be continuity and persistence in learning. One example of this approach is the Elgg tool (see elgg.org or eduspaces.net).
Elgg is a persistent user controlled personal learning environment that can be linked into WebCT or Moodle but can also exists by itself, beyond the course, beyond the program, beyond the institution. It's an environment with a set of tools and a a file repository designed to meet a students' needs as they move from course to course, to instituion to institution, to workplace to workplace, to community to community, etc.
I'm researching a number of applications of this tool - as a course delivery system that will morph into a community of learners; as a community of practice for in service teachers; as a community of reseachers for reserach activity; as a virtual home for 3rd age learners to share, connect and communicate. I see a lot of promise here that requires us to really reevaluate how we teach and how students learn - and this time we have to recognize that we are not in the business of confining learners, nor are we the owners of their learning experiences - it is our dutyto be stewards of the process and to free them up to explore the world with us and without us.
The Elgg environment that I have been making extensive use of is essentailly a buffet of technology - with personal profiling, blogs, wikis, group creation, access restrictions, folksonomy tagging, notification, eportfolio and soon openID - I'm trying to model it as a course tool that morphs into a community as required and dips into formal and informal situations like a spaceship docking at a space station, taking on connections and resources and readying for the learning flight to the next waystation but carrying its own connections and resourcese throught the connectosphere.
I have three projects going on now - as a collaborative/group work course tool for a distance course, which hopefully will evolve into a cohort community, then a community of practice as the students graduate and continue/go back/begin worklife and can then dip back into formal or informal learning; as a community of practice for career teachers working grades 9-12; and a lifelong learning community for 3rd age learners taking educational vacations.
But you know of course that if you build it, they may not come, or they may go elsewhere. My Elgg install was slow, so of coure my students flocked over to facebook - a social netwrok thay are already on and are familiar with. Of course privacy issues, content ownership and who's watching your entries (CIA, etc)didn't deter them. For the career teachers I've held workshops at their conference, even had a list of teachers supplied by the faculty of Education and had workshops and pizza ready to go - total show of 4 people over all 3 workshops. And this is just to get the people familiar enough with the toolset to join in and become a seed group.
Bent but not broken I continue on. Issues still keep plaguing me beyond actual membership (even if no one shows up I need a plan). I'm still grappling with a number of pedagogical issues - control vs. autonomy, organic growth or planned growth?, user experience vs. user autonomy, stewardship vs facilitation/moderationx, am I creating communities of practice or "communities for practice" as Christopher Sessums describes. More questions - when time allows I'll expound on these.
I am looking to incubate a web-based community of practice where educators share a common identity, shared and reflected ideas, feedback, models, and concepts that leads to a "becoming" - of enhanced individual and collective learning.
View blogging photos as they are posted - Susan Sedder at Adventures in Educational Blogging introduces Blogger Play - an application that displays the photos being posted to Blogger accounts in real time, in a slide show format. It is a little voyeuristic - you're observing personal, professional, intimate and odd photos that bloggers are posting to share. there is no orer, no categorization - just random displays of photos as they are being posted to various blogs that have been developed for a myriad of reasons. It's like being given license to enter other people's living space and observe their everyday activities.
Sign up for FriendFeed, list the social networks/peer sites you belong to, and it tracks what you are doing on those networks, aggregates it all and provides you and your friends with a personalized feed of the data. That feed can be accessed on the FriendFeed site, or embedded via a widget into another website. (like Elgg)
While FriendFeed will probably become a social network itself, this is a great tool for those niche social networks - like elgg - so Facebook and the other giants don’t have to be everything to everyone! This is great news - we have been having students arguing with us to "come to their network (facebook)" and not implement Elgg (they having to come to ours). Now they can be everywhere wherever they are - and we can create our elgg social network for continued learning - they can be here, or there and still be apprised of what is going on.
NSBA survey touts social networking for students. The National School Board Association and Grunwald Associates have released a report Connecting and Creating: Research andGuidelines on Online Social - and Educational - Networking.
The study was comprised of three surveys: an online survey of1,277 nine- to 17-year-old students, an online survey of 1,039 parents and telephone interviews with 250 school district leaders who make decisions on Internet policy."
The report recommends that school districts may want to 'explore ways in which they could use social networking for educational purposes' — and reconsider some of their fears. "Many schools initially banned or restricted Internet use, only to ease up when the educational value of the Internet became clear. The same is likely to be the case with social networking."
Social networking technologies have significant educational potential. However social/commercial social networking sites - eg. Friendster, MySpace should not be the focus. It is the functionalities of these sites that are important, not the commercialization - and other non-commercial tools are available - see elgg for example.
Young people must safely gain the ability to use these social networking technologies just as they must learn how to effectiveley "network" in real life - getting together with friends, physical activities and athletics, arts and music, social service.
Educators and educational insitututions must learn to do their own honest risk assessments - and refrain from demonizing all social internet activities and trying to block students from social networking technology. If we model and teach the safe, effective use of these technologies, we wouldn't resort to knee jerk censorship.
NoSo - No social. Tired of networking? Don’t want to be linked to possible friends? Don’t want to share and contact? Want to disconnect, in silence? Now, there is a void for you on the web and off line. Artists Christina Ray and Kurt Bigenho, and web developer Gilbert Guerrero, have created NoSo (short for No Social Networking)
No So is an anti-flash mob - a non-experience. A network that is there but also is not there at the same time… “a real-world platform for temporary disengagement from your social networking environment. The NoSo experience allows you to create No connections, by scheduling No events, with No friends. When you're not podcasting, you're Skyping, texting, IM-ing, dating, trading, sharing, subscribing, downloading, updating, linking, approving, adding, checking, sending... Sometimes, you need a break. Sometimes, you need NoSo.”
When you attend a NoSo event, you are treated to a group of people sharing a cone of silence. Much like standing in an elevator with strangers - yet people have chosen to come to the NoSo event to sit together, in silence, in respect of each others desire not to socialize.
Next will be NoSho – the anti-social networking phenomenon for those who don’t want to gather together.
Not my text - but my intent - worthy of reposting.
Many of today's new dot-com corporations, like Facebook and LinkedIn, make money by building "walled gardens" and programs that conduct "data mining" to take advantage of casual users surfing the web who are signing up in their millions for the numerous popular "free" social network sites. (Facebook refuses to reveal its profits but is rumored to be worth $15 billion.) (A walled garden refers to a media strategy that compels users to one stay on their service. Data mining is the practice of collecting large amounts of personal information on website users by the site itself.) While Apple's iPhone unabashedly locks users into using AT&T cell phone service, sometimes the strategies are more subtle. FaceBook, the popular social network site, restricts the functionality of their site so that it is easy to remain on facebook.com, while making external linking and emailing difficult. LinkedIn, another social network site, doesn't allow users to delete their profile without contacting customer service. All of these tactics seek to make it easier for companies to collect information on individuals, with the sole purpose of creating consumer profiles for targeted advertising. The reason is simple: they make their money from the advertisers who will pay to get a captive audience (the kind they were once guaranteed on newspapers and TV) who might buy their products. It is possible that these companies will soon sell their inventions for vast profits in the same way that YouTube and MySpace did, by taking advantage of ordinary people who would probably not pay for their services unless they were completely free. But activists say that the the Web has enormous potential to be a digital commons, if we assert our rights to use it for purposes other than buying and selling. An activist group named Freespeech.org has put together a video that they are using to promote their "It's Our Web" campaign. The video, which spoofs the Transformers, is pretty entertaining, and manages to fit some complicated ideas about Internet user freedom into an accessible format. The underlying message of the video is a good one: the Internet is a medium that is best if it remains free. Restricting access to information is a taboo among Wikipedians, Slashdotters, bloggers and Gnubies alike because the free flow of information is what has driven the collective production responsible for the Web as we know it.
