EdVentures in Technology
teaching, learning and change
Archive for Social Software
April 18, 2008 at 11:39 am · Filed under Social Software, TechTalk
Twitter is a pretty simple mechanism. In 140 characters or less, tell the Twitterverse what you are doing, what you’ve been doing, what you plan to do or what is holding you up from doing what needs to be done. Got it?
First, create your account
Twitter is free, but you do need that digital identity so folks can find you. So visit Twitter.com and sign up.
Second, start posting
You really don’t need to do a whole lot if you just want to sample the world of Twitter. Once you are logged into your account, start dropping your Tweets into the What Are You Doing? box.
Third, find folks to follow
Now you will want to build out your network. This is done by finding folks to follow. You may want to find those in your local area or in your industry. You may want to find those who share your interests. Or you may just start picking folks at random. There are a couple of ways to do this. One is to use Twitter’s Search feature to find folks by name or by location. 
Once you find someone that you wish to follow, take a moment to see who they are following. You can quickly and often times effectively expand your network in this fashion, growing geometrically rather than linearly. 
Another recent resource is TwitterPacks. Twitter-ites are adding themselves to this wiki and self-sorting by field, location, and interest.
Fourth, find a good Twitter app
Once your network starts growing, you will likely find that constantly refreshing your Twitter page gets old quick. Once you hit this point, you will want an application that displays your Twitter activity in near real-time. Finding a good Twitter app, or client, is sort of like finding a good pair of shoes. You have to try a few on before you’re happy with the fit. I’ve tried Tweetr, Twhirl and Snitter. I finally settled on Snitter as it had most of the features that I needed/wanted in a Twitter client.
Fifth, manage your network
Your network is organic and I would compare it to the art behind the bonsai tree. Like the bonsai, you need to nurture your network. It requires care, fertilization and sometimes, pruning. There are a number of tools you can use, but that is a topic for a future post. Managing your network is an art form and it deserves greater attention than a few lines can deliver.
Sixth, have fun!
When it comes to Twitter, if you’re not having fun then you are doing something wrong. Twitter is kind of like Cheers, where everybody knows your name. Spend some time Tweeting and responding to other Tweeters and pretty soon, when you come online, your Twitterverse will treat you just like Norm (minus the beer)!
There is a wealth of information out there but I’ve found the Twitter Wiki (http://twitter.pbwiki.com/) to be an incredible resource for all things Twitter.
Tags: twitter, how-to, community, collaboration, network
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April 18, 2008 at 9:36 am · Filed under Social Software, TechTalk
Ellen Paxton (@epaxton) asked a question on LinkedIn, Are You a Twit? A few weeks later, Allejandro Reyes (@successfool) at Successfool.com asked the same thing. Here was my response.
My LinkedIn Answer
“For me, Twitter is my professional development, late breaking news and support system in one tool. It enables me to ask and answer questions from my network and has led to more than one “A-ha!” moment. While some are quick to point out it’s rather unstructured nature, it is that very characteristic that makes it so valuable. The lack of structure has led to some unique and effective community generated processes, such as the open but specific response (
@edventures) and the TwitterPoll. Twitter does take on a life of its own and regular users will find that they will develop a sense of community with those they follow and those that follow them. The sense of ownership is strong and has led to the development of real world networking and collegial opportunities that might not have otherwise presented themselves.”
It’s been over a year since I first heard about and chose to dabble with Twitter. I’d long been frustrated with the one to one limitations of the majority of Instant Messaging services and had longed for a means to collaborate with a number of folks simultaneously. Twitter was the answer to my needs but it took nearly four more months after I used it for it to become the tool I desired.
You see I wanted a network that was a stripped down version of the Facebook/MySpace wall. I wanted a community of contacts with whom I could converse on a variety of topics without all the extraneous chrome that surrounded Social Networking sites. The problem was not with the tool as Twitter was designed for this very thing. The problem was adoption. It wasn’t enough for me to be online, I needed colleagues and contacts to adopt this tool as well. As it turned out, it was simply a matter of time. By last fall, Twitter had, for me, finally reached a critical mass. This was identified not only by the number of Twitter users, but by the number and variety of tools that sprung out of the needs and desires of the community to communicate and collaborate in different ways.
Now, a year later, my very own personal and professional network has grown. I have 421 followers and am following 352 Twitterers from all over the world. Nearly every day I add someone new to my network and as a result I have a steady stream of information flowing through my Twitter client, Snitter. Which begs the question…
How do you keep up with the flood of information?
There is a literal ocean of information that floods through our processors every day: e-mail, RSS feeds, Tweets, IM, SMS, the list is endless. It is impossible to keep up with the torrent and foolish to even try. So rather than spend one’s time trying to consume it all, try a different approach. One of my colleagues (can’t remember who, so drop a comment and I’ll make sure to give you proper attribution) had an analogy about a river and fishing. Mine is quite similar.
When I was stationed in Pensacola, I used to head to Johnson Beach as often as I could to escape back to nature. One of my favorite pastimes was to throw a cast net and see what I caught. I could spend hours casting just to see what I could find, or I could spend just a little time fishing for a specific critter. And as with every endeavor, the more your refine your technique, the better you become and the more efficiently you use your time.
CC Flickr Image by jaredb
Throw a cast net and see what you catch. Sample bits and pieces and if you find something of interest, follow up. Or you can refine your technique by automating the process of searching on a specific keyword that you can identify.
Tags: twittercommunication collaboration community practice
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December 6, 2007 at 8:00 am · Filed under EdTech, Higher Education, PSU, PSU E-Learning Blog, Social Software, TechTalk
Updated to include August through December 2007 releases
Educause has a series that highlights specific current technologies and boils them down into a mini-sheet that tech coordinators and advocates can use on their own campus. Unlike some of the Educause resources which require membership, this series is open to the general public which means that K-12 folks can access them as well. New brief sheets have followed a monthly publishing schedule with the latest being the Twitter brief posted just this month.
The series can be found here, but the individual links of papers (in PDF format) posted as of 19 July 2007 are listed below. I find looking at the timeline of releases interesting from an anthropological perspective as it illustrates where the edtech interest was focused over the past two years that these briefs have been published.
7 Things You Should Know About:
[tags]educause, 7things, technology, edtech, briefsheet, whitepaper[/tags]
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March 26, 2007 at 8:33 pm · Filed under Random Thoughts, Social Software, Web 2.0
No I don’t mean porn, I mean the dark recesses of the web inhabited by those whose sense of what is right and decent has been abandoned and replaced with God knows what. It is this part of the web that makes educators cringe and lawmakers pass legislation that hurts everyone but their intended audience.
Kathy Sierra is one of my favorite reads. I’ve been inspired by and have learned so much from her blog and although I do not know her personally, her writing and passion have painted an image of her in my mind. Apparently, her writing has painted other images in the warped and twisted minds of a number of individuals who cower behind their anonymity as they post the most appalling things to a number of sites whose sole intent is to bully others. My own personal sense of decency has led me to choose not to repost the links to those sites here. It is one thing to disagree with someone, but it is something else entirely when your disagreement devolves into death threats and terrorism, as was so sadly demonstrated in Kathy’s case.
I admire Kathy for having the strength to write about her experience. I’m outraged that there are individuals who feel that it is o.k. to terrorize others. What Kathy is living through goes far beyond the pale, to the point that law enforcement is involved and legal action quite likely. To the point where she feels that her life is truly endangered. What sort of example does that set for our youth? It sure doesn’t help our efforts as educators as we attempt to break through the barriers which bar our students from active participation in the community of the web. I’d even like to treat this as a teachable moment if it weren’t for the fact that I wouldn’t willingly expose any student of mind to the viciousness and criminality of this series of events.
My thoughts are with you Kathy. You are stronger than they are. The best I can offer is the fervent belief that the best thing for us to do is to shine a great bright light on the dark side of the web and expose it for what it really is.
[tags]kathysierra, blogging, darkside[/tags]
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February 22, 2007 at 11:25 am · Filed under EdTech, Social Software, Teaching & Learning, TechTalk, Web 2.0
UPDATE: The full text of this bill is now available here.
As if Senator Stevens and Representative Lamar Smith’s bills weren’t enough, now there is yet another bit of proposed legislation in the House to
…amend the Communications Act of 1934 to require recipients of universal service support for schools and libraries to protect minors from commercial social networking websites
and chat rooms.
On Friday, February 16th, Representative Mark Kirk of Illinois introduced House Resolution 1120, the full text of which has as of this post had not yet been entered into the Thomas database although it’s placeholder can be found during a search.
According to a CNet News blog authored by Anne Broache, this bill is nearly identical to last year’s DOPA proposal. Broache quotes Kirk’s floor statement:
“I believe this is an entirely appropriate action to help parents determine
what their children can and cannot do online,” Kirk said in a floor statement
introducing his bill. “It seems foolish for the taxpayer to subsidize what
amounts to a loophole by which children can circumvent their parent?s wishes and
unwittingly expose themselves to Internet predators.”
And as expected, library, education and civil liberties proponents are again objecting to the bill.
[tags]dopa, internet, predator, privacy, safety[/tags]
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February 17, 2007 at 8:00 pm · Filed under Connectivism, Social Software, Web 2.0
It appears that Mr. Internet himself, the esteemed Senator from Alaska, Ted Stevens, is at it again. He has introduced into the Senate a new bill entitled “Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act (S49).” But this post is not so much about this proposed legislation as it is about you and I.
Danah Boyd brought this latest version of DOPA to my attention in her post from February 9th. Danah was active in speaking against the first version of the bill and is feeling that another battle may be brewing. Her frustration is summed up in this quote:
“…i spent the bulk of the fall talking to politicians about this issue. I spoke twice in DC to rooms full of Hill folks and FTC people. I spent hours with AGs who were unwilling to listen to anything that i said. I talked with congresspeople and senators, aides and state officials. I talked to hundreds of reporters. Perhaps it is immature of me to wimper on my blog about my exhaustion with this topic but i am most definitely heartbroken by having to face this bill again. It took up the bulk of my fall and i felt very alone in that fight. Politics is not my world and i don’t know how to engage with it productively without it tearing me apart.”
I was compelled to comment on her blog and I’ve included the text below but the bottom line for me is this -
For all our talk about how Web 2.0 changes everything, we still have neither cultivated nor mastered the ability to come together as one and become our own political action machine. Yes, there are paid lobbyists whose sole job is to sway the vote of our elected officials. But what prevents all of us from becoming an even larger voice? What prevents us from creating the next evolution of the Read/Write web - the Read/Write/REACT web? Reading and writing is critical for personal and collaborative reflection but what we need now and will need in the future is to harness that and turn it into ACTION! Seems to me that we should be cutting our teeth on smaller issues so that we are better able to address the larger ones.
Food for thought…
My comment to Danah:
Danah, I can definitely understand your frustration although I admire the passion and commitment that it took on your part to see it through the first time.
It strikes me that perhaps some of your frustration stems from the feeling that you are a lone voice in the wilderness. For all the talk I hear in the edublogosphere and elsewhere proclaiming that the wonderful world of Web 2.0 is bringing people together and shrinking the world, we aren’t necessarily walking the walk so to speak. NCLB, DOPA and its progeny are just one example of what can occur when the best of intentions are co-opted by the political machine. Rather than going it alone, what would it take for us to combine and bring to bear the consolidated efforts of our library professionals, education professionals, and affected individuals from around the world. Rather than speaking as individuals, could we instead create a community of practice that cultivates a voice, a very loud and voting voice? Let’s make the web our tool, rather than being tooled ourselves.
Sorry for the rant but I hate to see someone with the passion you possess succumb to despair. The world requires balance - when the scales tip to one extreme, it is up to us to bring them back around.
Cheers!
John
[tags] dopa, internet, legislation, danahboyd, tedstevens [/tags]
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February 5, 2007 at 2:31 pm · Filed under Connectivism, Higher Education, Learning Theory, Social Software, Web 2.0
The opening session to the 2007 Online Connectivism Conference
just concluded and my head is spinning (In a really good way). There was so
much investment in this room, over 190 participants in the Elluminate session.
The message board was rolling, the discussion thought-provoking (even if,
especially with the differing opinions), and my hands couldn’t keep up with my
thoughts!
I came away with a number of things that I need to think more about:
- The importance of the relationship of context to
information, knowledge and learning.
- The continuing geometric explosion of information in
both pace (sum of knowledge doubling every 18 months) and breadth means
that we need to puruse less linear perspectives on how learning and
what knowledge mean to those of us involved in education, but more
importantly what it means to our learners both present and future.
- Monolithic institutions such as government and higher
education require large forces to affect changes in their culture. Are the
changes that are presently occurring in these areas a result of our
connected culture?
- How we facilitate bidirectional communication across
distances has changed dramatically in the last century in both modality
and in speed.
letters -> telegraph -> telephone -> radio -> cell
phone -> Internet
- Impact on authority – This is changing our concept of
trust (verification, digital savvy) and requires an approach using a
critical eye as opposed to open acceptance.
- A sea change from knowledge as product to knowledge/knowing
as process
- Our current web environment is cultivating an architecture
of participation powered by network effects (the strength of the
community).
- And yet the sheer abundance of information creates its
own problems – we’re drinking from a fire hose!
- George identified three means to accommodate the flood
of information:
- Increase human capacity (evolve bigger brains)
- Increase technological capacity (via bio-augmentation)
- Increase procedural capacity (employ network
intelligence)
The driving question for many of us
attending the Online Connectivism Conference is:
What is
connectivism and how does it apply to education?
Please check it out. Better yet, join the Moodle
and dive into this community of practice! We look forward to learning with you!
This is food for thought… And I’m starving!
[tags]occ2007, connectivism, siemens [/tags]
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January 28, 2007 at 3:33 pm · Filed under Social Software, TechTalk, Web 2.0
I’ve been thinking a bit more since the Kathleen Gilroy post about the idea of a single profile and realized that something like the beginnings of this idea had been tried before in FOAF, or Friend Of A Friend. FOAF is/was an RDF/XML specification that tried to formalize the process of how we present ourselves, in a format which enables machine reading and processing. Although technically it still floats around, it does not appear to be a prevalent force. But it may have just been ahead of its time.
Now I readily admit that I am a player when it comes to web technologies. I subscribe to many things just to see how they click and if they have potential (for me or my clients) as learning technologies. Here are a few services to which I have subscribed:
Each of these services required that I replicate specific personal and/or professional information. Often times, these fields even use the same descriptor. All of this is information which could easily be standardized and then stored in an XML file.
If a file is in a machine readable format such as XML, then it would follow that it would be a simple matter to process that XML so that it becomes your virtual representation to other sites. As I mentioned in my last post, it seems rather foolish and redundant to have to re-enter our profile information to whatever application/social software tool we choose to subscribe to. The value of mySpace, Facebook, elgg, LinkedIn and other similar services is in their ability to not only present our information but to also make connections as a result of those virtual profiles. If we subscribe to one or many Moodle courses, or are filling out forms, why not expedite the process by enabling those services/apps to automatically parse information available from our FOAF file? Now if this is to be the case, then it would be extremely important to have a strong authentication mechanism that the FOAF file does indeed belong to the subscriber. I could see PGP filling this gap.
One other area to consider is the “opt out.” If your FOAF file was formatted in such a way that it flagged items that you wanted to be prompted to allow to be read, then it would provide a level of awareness over how deep an application was searching your information. A nice feature would be for the service to provide a checklist of the profile features that they were culling from your file or better yet, for your file to report back to you a list of the requested items for your approval.
This, in my mind, is step one for the evolution of social software. Step one in that it is still simply copying data from one location to another. Step two would be for each individual to have a profile which is centrally managed and used as a synchronization point for a netizen’s various social software services. No longer would you have to manage each of your profiles independently, this mechanism would allow for the author once, publish many aspect that the web is beginning to recognize.
[tags]community, profile, identity, foaf, social_software [/tags]
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January 26, 2007 at 11:18 pm · Filed under Social Software, Web 2.0
Over at the Otter Group, Kathleen Gilroy’s post “Where oh where does my profile reside?” got me thinking about the convergence I see coming between persona, identity and social networking tools.
In thinking about building second generation web communities, I have come to believe that the online profile is at the heart the new web. In the search economy, you need a dynamic digital identity. It is the means by which the right people find you and then connect with you.
What I need is a place for my profile that can be plugged into any web service I join. And by plugged in I mean can dynamically draw text, bookmarks, images, and videos from all of these services and build them into a dynamic view of what’s going on now. And I’m not dealing with the issue of residing “inside” an enterprise.
I left this comment:
You’ve touched upon the next evolution that will likely happen to further social networks - the convergence between our own personal and/or professional profile information, our electronic portfolios and federated identity management. What will happen when we create a social network tool that allows you to create a single profile that you could then use to present yourself in other spheres of your practice: when commenting on the blogs of others, when joining and participating in communities of practice, when presenting yourself in virtual environments. Similar in theory to single sign-on, we would now have single identity, not in the sense of authentication to a service but in the sense of authenticating your persona.
Why should I need to create and re-create personal profiles when I log into a new Moodle host? Why should I need to worry about juggling multiple personas when I only want to manage one?
MySpace and Facebook started with the right idea, that each of us has a voice and that we find it important to be able to represent ourselves. But as netizens we now know that we need to make our voices heard and that it is time for social software to take the next step.
[tags]identity, profile, community, social_software[/tags]
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January 26, 2007 at 10:12 pm · Filed under Social Software, Web 2.0
A number of folks have already blogged about the upcoming Northern Voice 2007 which runs from Thursday evening, February 22nd through Saturday, February 24th. Held at the University of British Columbia in beautiful Vancouver, Canada, this year’s conference kicks off with a spaghetti dinner and opening night party on Thursday, with Moosecamp on Friday and Northern Voice running on Saturday. The full schedule of events for Saturday has been posted.
I’ve wanted to attend Northern Voice since its inception three years ago. Many of the folks whose blogs I’ve come to know and respect have made a conscious effort to not simply be present but to participate and help shape the development of our virtual voices. Who are these voices who shape my own practice? There’s Brian Lamb, who spoke with great enthusiasm and passion for his work at a NERCOMP SIG on social software in October 2005. There’s D’Arcy Norman, who’s dogged work on Drupal and advocacy in the areas of open-source software amazes me.
Unlike so many of the corporate conferences, Northern Voice is not a commercial venture. It is built upon the work of, and remains true to, those who contribute to this community of practice. It is a grand social experience. I have to say that the thought of being surrounded by so many passionate and creative individuals is exciting, yet intimidating. I am struggling right now to find my own voice although I’ve been blogging for over a year now. It would be an amazing and enlightening experience to be able to share with and learn from this dynamic and passionate community.
[tags]northernvoice2007, blogs, blogging, ubc [/tags]
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