Tim Hawes :: Blog

http://joanvinallcox.wordpress.com/2010/03/18/18-degrees-c-on-march-18/

Walking — joy, joy, joy, joy, — and 2 geese in George’s Square!

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

http://benwerd.com/2010/03/digital-economy-bill-open-lette

I’m interrupting my scheduled series of posts about social messaging, because this is important. (The final part should appear tomorrow.)

Here in the UK, the Digital Economy Bill looks like it’s set to be rushed through Parliament:

There’s plenty to oppose in the Digital Economy Bill, it gives the government the ability to disconnect millions. Schools, libraries and businesses could see their connection cut if their pupils, readers of customers infringe any copyright. But one group likes it, the music industry. In a leaked memo a few days ago they admitted the only way to get the bill through would be to rush it through without a real parliamentary debate. Let’s stop that happening.

According to the Open Rights Group, there have even been questions about the Bill’s compatibility with the Human Rights Act.

The following is a letter I wrote to my MP, Andrew Smith. If you’re a British resident, I recommend you do the same (Boing Boing has a sample letter, but generally it’s a good idea to avoid form letters if you can).

Dear Andrew Smith,

I’m very worried that the Government is planning to rush the Digital Economy Bill into law without a full Parliamentary debate. Despite claims made by the BPI and others, I believe it will have dire consequences for British businesses, and therefore for the economy as a whole.

In short, the Digital Economy Bill provides the mechanism to arbitarily remove anyone’s freedom to communicate – their Internet connection, and potentially access to their website or servers – without due process. This will immediately put us on an uneven footing with countries such as the United States, who are already well ahead of us in terms of digital business. If Britain is to remain competitive in the digital world, this must not go ahead.

This is not to say that piracy should be allowed. It is undeniably a criminal act. However, for an issue that has become so culturally ingrained that it requires precise tactics to undo, these measures are unsubtle and counterproductive.

At the very least, a proper Parliamentary debate must be had.

As a constituent I am writing to you today to ask you to do all you can to ensure the Government doesn’t just rush the bill through and deny us our democratic right to scrutiny and debate. As a digital professional, I would be delighted to help with any questions you might have.

Kind regards,

Ben Werdmuller

ben@benwerd.com

Want to read the Bill for yourself? Here it is.

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http://joanvinallcox.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/early-spring-march-15/

Unseasonably warm, teasing plants out before their time.
Lovely day!




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

http://joanvinallcox.wordpress.com/2010/03/14/rainy-highway/

Taken out the passenger seat window —




Joan Vinall-Cox, PhD, Social Media Consultant

http://benwerd.com/2010/03/activity-streams-and-oauth-a-so

My previous post was a response to Gartner’s prediction last month that social networking would replace email as the “primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.” In it, I named some properties that would need to be held by any social networking system that would successfully replace email.

• Ease of use


• Ubiquity across devices


• Platform, service and infrastructure independence

My argument boiled down to the following statement:

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

Email is useful because just about everybody has an email address. I can get in touch with my clients in London, my friends here in Oxford or my grandfather in Austin, Texas, with equal ease, even though all of them are using different infrastructure and software provided by different companies. I use Gmail, but there doesn’t need to be any kind of formal agreement between Google and whoever’s providing my grandfather’s email, say. It just works; nobody owns email as a communications method, and anyone can set up an email server. The same is true with websites: anyone can set one up, and nobody owns the web.

For social communications to be as popular and ubiquitous as email, there must be one social web, and it must be owned by nobody. That means that each socially-aware site or application must implement the same social communication standards.

The best standards aren’t dictated: they evolve through common usage. If you look at HTTP (the protocol that the web relies on), SMTP (one of the protocols behind email) and file formats like RSS and HTML, the common thread behind them is that they’re simple. It turns out that through excellent work at companies like Google, Plaxo, SixApart, Twitter, JanRain and – perhaps incredibly – JPMorgan Chase & co, we already have a number of technologies that collectively embody the properties I listed above.

Notes and server architecture for one possible social web

These are my ideas about how these standards might be used. These aren’t intended as replacements for existing social networking platforms or services; rather, they could easily be added as additional features both to those and to many other types of application. The ability to share isn’t a uniquely required feature of social networking software – think about its usefulness in applications like Word or Google Docs, for example.

With email, you use a software client (Outlook, say, or the Gmail web interface) that speaks to an email server which does the hard business of sending and receiving messages to and from the wider Internet. Here, I will be describing a system where everyone has their own node on the social web, which effectively acts as a client and server. Mine might be here at benwerd.com, for example. It’s my website – my profile on the social web – and it’s where I send social communications. That’s the server side. However, it also acts as the client when I’m accessing resources stored on other peoples’ servers.

Establishing connections and granting permissions

Let’s say I want to make a resource available to my clients. With email, I’d send them each a separate copy. This is both insecure and inefficient: I have no control over what happens to that copy, and each time I send it I create a new version. With some back-and-forth, there could easily be ten or twenty individual copies of a document floating around. (I often bounce software specifications – typically Word documents – around with my clients, and this is something that happens to me regularly. Google Docs is probably a better solution, but not everybody has a Google account.)

With the social web, only one version needs to exist, which I own. If my clients have established a connection with me, I can restrict that resource so that only they may see it. The tricky bit is that in order to know if it’s really them, they must be authenticated in some way.

In monolithic systems like Facebook, where everyone uses the same website, that’s easy: my client must be logged in, and we must have established a friend connection. In a decentralized system, that’s a much harder problem, but not insurmountable. Two technologies will help us:

• OpenID: the open, decentralized authentication standard, which currently uses a website address as a kind of universal username


• OAuth: an open protocol that “allows users to share their private resources (e.g. photos, videos, contact lists) stored on one site with another site without having to hand out their username and password.” OAuth provides a secret token to applications that they can use to access authenticated services and resources behind the scenes

Specifically, we’ll need OpenID Connect (or, until that’s up and running, the OpenID / OAuth hybrid protocol), because we’ll be using OpenID to authenticate, OAuth to power our decentralized access permissions, and a number of other protocols and endpoints along the way. It’s much neater if these are all established at once.

Making friends and getting updates

The process would work in the following way. Let’s say I want to make a connection with my friend Marcus Povey.

1. I visit his site, and see that he is displaying a “connect to me” icon, indicating that it is a node on the social web. Later on, perhaps my browser would detect that this was a social web node in the same way that most browsers detect RSS feeds today, and light up an icon. Chris Messina has started a five part series on the browser as a social agent, which is worth a read.


2. Either way, I click on “connect to me”. Marcus’s site prompts me for the address of my profile, which I enter. (Later on, my browser does this bit for me.)


3. My profile address is an OpenID, and through the authentication process my social web node receives an OAuth token from him. No further authentication is required.


4. On his social web node dashboard, Marcus sees that I’ve established a connection with him. He can ignore it, in which case nothing happens, or he can mark me as a friend (or any other arbitrary designation, which could be unique to the software he’s using).


5. My social web node periodically checks for activity updates from Marcus’s, signing each request with that OAuth token so it knows who I am. This may be at my direct request; through repeated polling, RSS-style; or the update may be pushed to me through a PubSubHubbub ping.


6. Depending on the assignation he’s given me, Marcus’s node either responds with just a feed of public activity (if he’s ignored the request), or with additional activity he’s allowed me to see, in Activity Streams format.


7. Marcus can change my assignation or withdraw my OAuth token at any time from his dashboard. (Of course, throughout all this, the OAuth token mechanism is invisible to both users: it’s simply presented as a social connection.)

Embedded content and interacting directly on other social web nodes

Activity Streams is based on Atom, so content for items like blog posts (and resources like photos, using Atom Media) can be embedded directly in the activity feed. (Rob Dolin from Windows Live has some great examples.)

However, not all content is standard enough to be embeddable. In those cases, I can simply click through from Marcus’s activity update to his site, possibly log in again using OpenID, and interact with the content there. Additionally, by allowing users to log directly into his site via OpenID, Marcus can show selected people restricted content even if they don’t have the full range of social web software.

Friends lists and commenting

Further standards help us add extra functionality. If Marcus gives me permission, I might be able to download his contacts via Portable Contacts. Salmon is a protocol for commenting on distributed resources and allowing those comments to find their way upstream to the original, which is compatible with Activity Streams. Using this, I might be able to comment on Marcus’s activity items from within my dashboard and have them show up in his. Through this mechanism, all his friends could have a conversation on his activity stream items.

Reliability

So far, so good: we have a simple technological basis for permissive social communications. But if the social web is really going to replace email, we have to address one of the most important features for enterprise users: reliability. Businesses will not accept their critical communications being subject to fail whales.

In my next post, then, I’ll discuss person-to-person messaging and the thorny issue of guaranteed delivery.

Related entries

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/csessumscom/~3/WtV3ifjZP98/

Escape from IDEO on Vimeo.

Here is a video developed at IDEO imagining “a future shaped by electric power dependency – where schoolyard play offsets the cost of fossil fuel and kids take an active part in their powering their world.” What I found most disheartening is not the kids taking an active part of powering their world–that would be kind of cool, actually. What I found most disturbing is the depiction of the classroom of the future. Clearly, a dystopian future is one where students still sit at neatly aligned desks listening to lectures and taking notes. Pedaling to power your laptop is one thing. Sitting at a desk listening to a sage on the stage, frack!

Oh, IDEO! I was hoping you might have a brighter future envisioned for us. Luckily, the good people responsible for designing our future ask that we tune in next week when they will offer us a shinier vision. Let’s hope so. And let us hope that the classroom of tomorrow looks nothing like the classroom of today.

Stay tuned!

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/csessumscom/~3/GIDR9j8FclA/

First, I want to thank the editors at the New York Times Magazine for featuring an article that focuses on teacher education (Elizabeth Green’s “Can good teaching be learned?” 7 March 2010). Since most of us attended school at one time or another, teaching and teacher education are always hot-button topics in which most people have an opinion. This opinion is often based on what one researcher dubbed an apprenticeship of observation, that is, we think we understand teaching because we have watched it happen to us and others for many years.

The truth is, effective teaching is a complex art that requires the practitioner to be part subject matter expert, part psychologist, part instructional designer, part expert communicator, and part performance artist. While teaching and wisdom do seem to come more naturally to some than others, what is important to consider is that good teaching ultimately happens by design. The trouble is this design sense is often implicit in teachers. Many good teachers know how to effectively work with their students without being able to describe what it is that they are actually doing. This is turn sheds light on the trouble with many teacher education and staff development programs: teachers are not educated explicitly to be designers.

Thinking and acting like a designer involves more than the ability to teach students to work with graphing calculators. It requires an awareness of one’s belief systems, an awareness of the classroom culture, the social norms and subject matter norms. It involves an awareness of how instructional sequences impact learning and an awareness of the instructional tasks necessary that can lead to the transfer of knowledge and understanding on the part of students. It requires an understanding of assessment and the various ways one can assess student learning. Finally, it requires an understanding of the ways in which people learn.

Ultimately, Lemov’s taxonomy may be quite useful. From a design perspective, the taxonomy should not be considered a set of recipes for success, but instead they may be thought of as a way to help teachers select and apply the most substantive and useful procedural knowledge for specific tasks in their own learning ecologies. From a neuroscience perspective, it is important to consider that the taxonomy in and of itself can only be of limited use. Research has shown that the brain is good at interpreting information, not simply memorizing it. What might work best with such a taxonomy is an iterative cycle of learning, application experiences, and reflection repeated over an extended period of time to enhance long-term memory processes as well as the potential deepening of the practitioner’s understanding of how effective teaching and learning can be designed.

Teacher education will always present us with numerous challenges. Yet, it is important to remember how important this education process is. Teachers are the marrow of our society. They are responsible for inspiring and guiding learners and families that in turn act, guide, and inspire generation after generation. The more research and attention we can bring to this topic, the more we as a civilization will gain.

Reference:
Green, E. (2010, March 7). Can good teaching be learned? New York Times Magazine, pp 30-37, 44-46. Retieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html

Image:

http://csessums.tumblr.com/post/308197313/school-greenbelt-marylan

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 [...]