SocialTech

Should you friend your students? The short answer is no

2009-11-30T20:14:01+00:00

Earlier this year I delivered a further cyberbullying guidance document on behalf of Childnet International for the UK Government's Department for Children, Schools and Families. The Guidance follows up (and designed to compliment) cyberbullying guidance, a comprehensive document that formed part of the Safe To Learn: Embedding anti-bullying work in schools suite of advice. While the initial document was really well received both within the UK & internationally, teachers unions and associations were increasingly being asked to deal with school employee cyberbullying cases - in which the staff member was the person being victimised. I welcomed the opportunity to produce further guidance which would both support employees in term of basic digital literacy information and encourage employers to meet their statutory obligations. The document set out, ambitiously, to encourage policy and procedure be put in place for preventing and dealing with cyberbullying as a whole school community issue - which includes meeting and recognising the specific needs, rights and responsibilities of employees. In no other area of harassment would it be acceptable for an employee to be expected to deal with cases that rose within the work place on their own - yet the reports from school staff included cases where cyberbullying was not taken seriously or understood, and where they had been expected to sort out situations for themselves.

Cyberbullying: Supporting School Staff was released in April this year (you can see the whole document online here). I've been talking about the document a lot recently, and I want to just explore in a little more detail the thinking behind the advice given to school employees regarding friending students in social networking services. The actual text is (with my emphasis):

‘Friending’ refers to the act of giving contacts permission to view information or contact you within web-based services. The terminology will vary from service to service – ‘Friends’ may be called contacts or connections, for example. Most social sites enable you to give different levels of access and set privacy levels on your own content and activity. These functions will vary from service to service but typically include:
•    Information that is only available to the account holder
•    Information that is accessible by contacts on the account
holder’s approved list, and
•    Information that is made publicly available, either within
the service or across the whole of the internet.

‘Friends’ does not necessarily refer in this case to people who are your actual friends, although you may choose to restrict your connections to that. ’Friends’ in this context may also be work colleagues, family members, and people that you have met online.

If you have a social networking account, do not friend pupils or add them to your contact lists. You may be giving them access to personal information and allowing them to contact you inappropriately. They may also be giving you access to their personal information and activities

So the text above outlines three basic levels of permissions granularity that can be found on most sites, gives a definition of friending, and very explicitly says don't friend pupils. This is explicitly prescriptive advice, based on the case studies reviewed during the document negotiations, and an implicit understanding that the school staff accounts referred to are either personal, or contain elements of personal activity (I previously posted on a definition of three basic online identities, characterised as personal, professional, and organisational).

The approach taken then - don't friend pupils - reflects the kind of boundaries between staff and learners that we'd expect to see in offline behavior. You wouldn't expect a teacher to give a school aged pupil their home phone number, show them pictures of their friends or regale them with the weekends social exploits. Obviously friending isn't the only issue here - managing publicly available information so that you are comfortable with what co-workers, learners and employers can access about you is also addressed in the document. The research and anecdotal evidence indicates that we operate within social network services as if we were in a closed, private world. This isn't naive - I think it's a necessary fiction which makes social networking services human spaces. The do not friend advice is there to reinforce the message that private online is typically back of a post-card private, especially if we are within environments where we're not entirely sure who has permission to see what (*cough*Facebook*cough). It also reflects the leakiness of our online identities, the way in which the personal is often hand in hand with the professional.

What the advice isn't trying to do is to put anyone off evaluating social networking services to see if they could support learning & teaching effectively. The advice goes on to state:

If you want to use web-based social networking sites for a class or for the whole school, use a service that doesn’t give contacts access to personal information and updates, or allows collaboration without requiring permissions.
Alternatively ask pupils to create new, work-focused accounts for themselves, and run them as they would an online portfolio or CV.
You can find more information and advice about Social Network Services at www.digizen.org/socialnetworking.

Death and the Social Web

2009-11-22T16:11:00+00:00

mikebutcher #svc2c #svuk Panel appears to have stumbled on fact that @ajkeen was right: if you're not on social networks you're dead

josiefraser: @ajkeen @mikebutcher Plenty of dead people on twitter, cf @Henry_Fuseli @Edgar_Allan_Poe @JDerridian & million Sigmund Freuds

josiefraser: obscurity maybe even more fatal than death within the social web

My Uncle John died this month, so I had a few more conversations than usual about death, and particularly it's relationship to the social web. Social Networking Services are developing policies and processes relating to the archiving and accessing of people's accounts after they die, and people who have significant digital presence are stating to think about bequest issues - will the sorting out of our online information, artifacts, accounts become an additional job for our relatives or friends, to be approached in the same way as clearing the physical shelves and sorting through documents? And what can explain the rise in popularity of dead celebrity fakesters, some of whom have many more followers than average users?

digital identity after death

an email i received, about death and facebook Ze Frank, September 9 2009

Identity, Memory, Death & the Internet Dave Cormier, September 18th 2009

Grieving Goes Digital NewsOK, May 25 2009

thinking ahead

What happens to your social network accounts when you die? makeuseof.com, November 16 2009

Legacy Locker "The secure way to pass your online accounts to your loved ones"

dead celebrities on Twitter

25 Dead People of Twitter Soulellis Studio, March 1 2009

Dead People Twitter List, Boston.com News

Tweeji "Follow dead people on Twitter"

reusing the stream

2009-11-19T10:32:04+00:00

OK - so this is my first attempt at selectively re-purposing content from my twitter stream. There are a bunch of export tools, but what I'm interested in is panning the stream to provide content that it's easy to miss within twitter, and difficult to access outside. Haven't decided where this will go yet, so I'd appreciate feedback (feel free to be as critical as you like - is this just pointless?). I'm also not entirely happy with the army of avatars - I've included the originals of people I've retweeted during the time frame I've taken the content from (yesterday) to stop it from being quite so Josie-scary. I'm thinking this might work better in smaller chunks - just a hand full of links or a thread. I've left out a lot from yesterday - a brief discussion with @rliberni about the politics of fruit and vegetable taxonomies, conversations about virtual learning environments and informal learning (although have left some links in), and a chat with daveowhite and @mweller about the dark side of interoperability and my future as a writer of sports stars autobiography titles. The conversations and broader context stuff that makes twitter a fun place to hang out. Maybe all this needs to be is a row of pick of the day links?

josiefraser 'Human flesh search engine' http://u.nu/7z8w3

palmer_eldritch I thought it was about librarians - RT @josiefraser: 'Human flesh search engine' http://u.nu/7z8w3

josiefraser . @palmer_eldritch if we called librarians 'human flesh search engines' most would never get past their own internet filtering software

josiefraser RT @josswinn: Read, comment, discuss. The Future of Universities in a Knowledge Economy http://j.mp/ThQDx #writetoreply

josiefraser RT @GrahamAttwell: New blog post and video on User Generated content, user generated contexts and learning http://is.gd/4XSe4

josiefraser Checking out Hyperwords for Firefox http://www.hyperwords.net/

josiefraser Andrew Keen on the simple joys of homophily RT @ajkeen: how Sarah Palin made me love the Internet http://u.nu/9s9w3

josiefraser & fr those of you who haven't installed hyperwords, homophily : http://retwt.me/13RfW

Eingang @josiefraser I thought we already had a term for homophily -- Balkanization?
josiefraser @Eingang Balkanisation useful - emphasises geo, social & political. Homophily more personal/granular? both good terms

Lawrie: @josiefraser good tools for tweeting into and out of Powerpoint here: http://bit.ly/33BYeB

josiefraser RT @freecloud: Streams of Content, Limited Attention - & Twitterwalls http://bit.ly/2R2cQM (Thoughts on @zephoria 's #w2e paper)

josiefraser RT @Documentally: "Even if you are a complete psychopath you can earn an A+ in your citizenship exams." Proff Richard Pring #ukyouth

josiefraser RT @markchilds: Hhhmm counted tweets for @allthecheeses and @beatles. Lennon was wrong. the Beatles aren't bigger than cheeses

josiefraser 1st herald of the tech apocalypse: IBM's supercomputer can think like a cat http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=27507

adfig The Creator of Wikipedia Turns to Education Videos. http://bit.ly/31BOSw

josiefraser All the tweets - including souvenir trend spam! RT @manojranaweera: twitter event report - #140conf http://bit.ly/QBv0M

josiefraser Narcissism: the new shark in social networking pool. With obligatory Greenfield quote RT @amcunningham: http://bit.ly/2XRTR7

socialtechno "The unicorns don’t look realistic enough." Clients From Hell http://bit.ly/431d0Q

markbullen Net Gen Skeptic: Conference Board Study Warns Against Generational Stereotyping: http://bit.ly/4slFaW

Interesting 09

2009-09-14T09:00:29+01:00

Really delighted have spoken at Russell Davies's Interesting this year. It's easily one of my favorite conferences - entertaining, educational, creative, unpredictable and inspiring.

My topic was psychological violence in late 1970s/early 1980s girls comics, & here are the notes. Enjoy!

During the 1950s - 1970s children's comics were an important part of the UK cultural landscape, with individual titles typically selling 200,000 - 300,000 copies per week. Following a dip in sales figures in the mid 1970s, a group of predominantly male writers, including UK comic legend Pat Mills, were brought in by IPC to rework content away from catatonic tales of foreign princesses and posh schools, and into the twilight zone, via some evident concerns with environmentalism and interests in paganism.

Girls comics up to 1970s can be pretty much placed on the spectrum of the history of conduct literature, a genre that appeared in print in the UK as early as 1475. Conduct literature promotes and aims to reproduce acceptable moral, domestic and social behaviour, and particularly concerns itself with the souls and reputations of young women and wives. Piety and virtue are typically valued above all other attributes. Modern day equivelants are still popular, and every so often someone will knock out another best seller that instructs insecure women how best to conform in order to get some loser to date them.

We can find lots of examples of prescriptive behaviour tracts thinly disguised as quizzes and not so thinly disguised as articles on what being a proper girl involves in the three titles I'm focusing on: Tammy, Misty, and Jinty.

Make friends with your MIRROR! Is the title of one piece from the 1981 Jinty annual - less of an article and more of a manifesto for self regulation: "Let the mirror be your best friend! It will never lie to you! Don't forget, if you haven't got a double or triple mirror, you can get good views of your back by holding a small mirror and using this to look into the reflection in your long mirror."

Obviously written by someone irretrievably harmed by reading Discipline and Punish while on acid, the annual also contains specific advice on the correct way to sit in a chair, as determined by body shape. The illustration above shows three women who's incorrect chair occupation means that they will never get married. Advice to Di, who enjoys sitting backwards astride a chair despite being otherwise normal, includes "She should really remember that, although she's got a nice shape, leaning forward in close fitting jeans is stretching the point! She'd feel just as dashing, and look less hippy, sitting around the other way, an maybe resting the heel of one shoe on the chair seat while circling her knee with one arm. Try it!"

Mills et al's involvement in late 1970s and early 80s produced some of the most interesting childrens' comic book writing, ever. During this period, the repetitive moral lessons that constituted girls comic book content - the inevitable punishment and comeuppance of vanity, selfishness, and slattern like behaviours, the Cinderella-miraculous ending and reward of sacrifice, hard work, and humility - didn't disappear. The boarding schools, ballet classes and horse fetishism were still there too, although new scenarios involving science fiction and horror settings emerged. Under Mills's stewardship, IPC girls titles wholy perverted the existing tropes by taking them to their hysterical, nightmarish conclusion. The horror, punishment, and suffering of the innocent was totally amplified by the new story lines, for example in the notorious Tammy story Slaves of Orphan Farm, where every week the writers attempted to outdo Gods testing of Job. In The Slave of Form 3b, a domineering student discovers she can hypnotize a weaker classmate into doing her evil bidding. The unsuspecting dupe eventually wins the respect of her school and even a medal for bravery, but not before falling off the roof while hypnotized and becoming crippled. A Life for A Life, a short strip from Jinty's 1978 annual told the story of two London hospital employees - nurse Celia and Doctor Josef, marrying. They had previously met years before when SS Officer Josef had been taking Celia out to shoot her, and Celia sacrificed a chance to escape in order to save Josef (presumably not his real name) after he bungled the job and accidentally shot himself.

Alan Moore, commenting on that period:

"...Pat Mills and John Wagner had previously spent eleven years working on the British girls comics. They had grown cynical and possibly actually evil during this time. I think it was John who used to write a script called "The Blind Ballerina" and as the title suggested it was about a ballerina who was blind. John would just try to put her in to increasingly worse situations. At the end of each episode you'd have her evil Uncle saying, "Yes, come with me. You're going out on to the stage of the Albert Hall where you're going to give your premier performance" and it's the fast lane of the M1. And she's sort of pirouetting and there's trucks bearing down on her."

The huge success of Tammy, which ran from 1971 to 1984, was partially based on some actual research by IPC magazine into what girls enjoyed reading about. Apparently they liked to be made to cry. Vulnerable amnesiacs who avoided multiple, mysterious attempts on their lives to discover their parents had been killed in some kind of transport 'accident' sent sales figures of up to a quarter of a million a week, along with stories which included:

Alison all Alone - Alison has been kept prisoner by her foster parents for reasons unknown.

Roberta's Rebels - Roberta Russell decides she will do something about her hierarchical school system where the "Serfs" slave to the sporty "Supremos."

The Ice Girl- A girl must keep her ice skating secret from her father, who was crippled in an ice-skating accident.

Sadie in the Sticks - an exploited girl whose only refuge is her talent for making objects with matchsticks

Lights-Out for Lucinda - Lucinda becomes trapped in a district where people still think it is World War II, due to her father drugging them so he may use them as slave labour.

Cora Can't Lose- Cora Street goes on an obsessive binge to win as many sports trophies as she can, in order to win her parents' respect. Danger looms when Cora suffers a head injury which will kill her unless she has an operation, but she is so obsessed with winning trophies that she ignores the warning signs.

Becky Never Saw the Ball - aspiring tennis star Becky Bates is making a comeback after going blind.

Particularly hilariously, and never really explained, was the way Becky had her entire head bandaged.

Jinty, which ran from 1974 to 1981 before being incorporated by Tammy, introduced science fiction, adventure, and horror to the girls comic market.

Battle of the Wills - a girl discovers a scientist with a duplicating machine that enables her to continue with her gymnastics while her double is forced to do ballet.

The Human Zoo - twin girls and their classmates are kidnapped by telepathic aliens to whom humans are mere animals. The treatment the humans receive parallels the treatment meted out to animals on Earth (zoos, circuses, slaughterhouses, bloodsports, vivisection and beasts of burden).

Worlds Apart, written by Pat Mills and drawn by Guy Peeters, was my personal favourite and still a classic of science fiction: six schoolgirls find themselves in a series of strange worlds governed by their main characteristics: greed, love of sport, vanity, delinquency, intellectualism, and fear. Jac Rayner loved it too:

"Worlds Apart, where six girls find themselves trapped in a series of worlds which are distorted versions of their own desires, and can only escape through the death of the girl whose mind they're in… Any story which starts 'The day began like any other. A road tanker carrying highly dangerous chemical waste left a government research establishment' has got to be good, but as we journeyed through the fatty, sporty, vain, criminal, brainy and scared lands, we not only got the girls' staples of peril and adversity (with some handy moral lessons), we got a superb adventure story"

Misty only ran for two years before being cannibalised by Tammy. Focusing on horror and

mystery, Misty is probably the title that had the most impact on it's readers, and retains a huge fan base. Mistycomic.co.uk, a fan site archive and community hub that's now been officially recognised by current Misty copyright holders Egmont. Classic strips included:

The Four Faces of Eve - Eve Marshall is trying to unravel her true identity, but she seems to be the bits and pieces of four dead women.

Winner Loses All - The lead character has a horse called Satan. She has sold her soul to the devil in order to help her father, who subsequently died anyway.

extra link love:

Pat Mills interviewed by Jenni Scott at Oxfords CAPTION convention

Creating Tammy: A True Story

Some of the story descriptions in this post were taken from Wikipedia - you can see the originals by clicking through the linked title names.

Anonymity & the carnival of the fakesters

2009-08-11T16:59:34+01:00

Many of my readers have a fairly 'meh' approach to old media - they'll read the Metro if they find it on their bus/tube seat, they may enjoy the weekend deforestation editions as an excuse to lounge at the weekends - they're mostly too connected to actually just chew over their toast & stare into the distance - and fill up their recycling boxes. They'll happily hijack the odd Daily Mail readers poll. They'll follow their favorite tech writers & journalists in Twitter. Mainly they get their news from their network - which means in practice a mix of online newspapers & services, across a range of sites where people may be paid to research, reflect & write, but mostly aren't.

Who do I know that reads the Telegraph? Off the top of my head, no one, although there must be a couple of you who have. New Telegraph tech bloggers Paul Carr & Andrew Keen have been link/troll baiting this week with a couple of posts about the undesirability of online anonymity - Carr's takes massive chunk of Schopenhauer out of historical, cultural and technological contexts, And Keen's verges on Brass Eye territory so much (110%, in fact) that all that's missing is the poll made up of foxes heads on sticks. It doesn't take a genius to work out that effectively removing internet anonymity, even if that level of authentication was remotely possible, might cause a few more problems for everyone than it solves for a couple of disgruntled tech journalists.

One of (the many) objections to the Ministry of Anonymous but Authenticated Names approach is that one of the best things about the internet has always been the opportunities it provides for play. Mediation through avatar, text, and all the other internet props can obviously be misused, but it also enables a creative exploration of identity, representation, engagement. When I first started hanging out online in the 90s, in the days before meeting up and eventually marrying people you met online was the norm, I just assumed that everyone I met was probably a mustachioed Texan cop or a retired librarian, pretending to be a hot and overly intelligent seventeen year old boy.

Then blogging took off, and the internet as playground began it's transformation into the internet as factory. The early insistence on transparency has been adopted by nearly everyone who has a professional stake in their online presence, and what has been variously named the link or reputation economy is critically an economy of trust - trusted connections defined within a dominant aesthetic of a particular kind of authenticity.

While I'm not arguing against the numerous benefits of accountability and responsibility, I do also miss the old internet, and I look for trusted connections with people who haven't let the factory rob them of their sense of wonder, and even mischievousness.

It's in this vein I've been on a mini-crusade to support the fakesters in my neighborhood, which at the moment is primarily Twitter. 'Fakester' is a broad term, covering any account pretending to be someone they aren't. They could be pretending to be another living or dead actual person, or a fictional or personally created character, or the incarnation of a place, thing, time, organisation etc. So it includes historical, religious and cultural figures, as well as alternative persona, marketing scams and campaigns, God (well, a bunch of them) and the Mars Phoenix, NASA’s celebratory robotic lander.

Following complaints and a proposed lawsuit Twitter recently began to introduce verified accounts for the Twitterati & the popularly impersonated celeb member, "people who deal with impersonation or identity confusion on a regular basis". However, their Terms of Service only disallow users to impersonate other Twitter users. This doesn't help Kanye West out much, but it does encourage him to sign up to twitter & I bet it gets the Twitter staff a fair few celeb lunches too.

Personally, I'm not that interested in following celebs via Twitter, although I can understand that there's a lot of (potential) money and (actual) publicity at stake. I'll also be clear that I am obviously not in favor of illegal or malicious impersonation, a topic which I've engaged with quite substantially in terms of my work for the UK government on cyberbullying. I'm keener on those more imaginative misuses of twitter, many of which have educational potential and application, but regardless of that, make life more interesting :)

danah boyd wrote a defence of fakesters way back in 2003 - about a hundred years ago in internet terms. Her early work tracked the presence of fakesters on Friendster, drawing attention to the blurring between the authentic-inauthentic-constructed lines fakester accounts throw non-fakester accounts into, the way that fakester accounts challenged social (network service) norms, and the fact that the fakesters were often the most interesting accounts to connect to.

So who's faking it on Twitter?

One of the most beloved of the Twitter fakesters has to be @darthvader, self appointed Evil Orphan Annie and geek magnet. Recent #imperialedicts have included "Open more Starbucks" and "Continually raise the price of stamps without warning".

@MarsPheonix, NASAs account for a mission to land a robotic craft at the North Pole of Mars was so popular that Wired ran an epitaph contest for the lander.

Many fakester accounts basically just publish the text or quotes of the persona they assume. The ultimate fit-for-purpose example of this has got to be @JennyHolzer, the American conceptual artist who is most celebrated for her public displays of aphorism, perfectly suited to her anonomus Twitter account, where HABITUAL CONTEMPT DOESN'T REFLECT A FINER SENSIBILITY and MONOMANIA IS A PREREQUISITE OF SUCCESS.

Jenny Holzer isn't on Twitter, although if she were I'd like to think she was @fakejennyholzer - shouting SUFFERING IS CAUSED BY ATTACHMENT AND NAIL GUNS and THE CAPS LOCK KEY IS REALLY STUCK ISN'T IT at us.

One of my favorite fakesters has got to be @palmer_eldritch, a title character from the Philip K. Dick novel. as well as Phil Dick related comment & content, Palmer has recently transformed into a veritable mecanical turk of an auto-bot, selectively re-tweeting related content from around the twitterverse, including "@tanuki0: I've read too much Philip K Dick, I'm starting to doubt the nature of reality." and "@FatherRoderick: Getting ready for Mass. Still very sleepy. Shouldn't have watched that Blade Runner documentary late last night."

Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom, Data Sharing Czar, aka @sirbonar and his Whitehall musings on the surveillance society pretty much leads the field in fakester political satire. "It seems some hobbyist suffering from Aspergers has done a stunt for the news media in which he appears to clone a British ID Card" and "If only we could achieve total fusion of all possible data, I think we could at last feel secure. I wonder how much data that is?" are amongst his recent musings. You can also catch a video of him addressing Open Tech 09 on Data Sharing here.

I'm a big theory fan, so I follow a bunch of would be swafty-philosopher fakesters, including @zizekspeaks, who purports to be Hegelian philosopher and Lacanian psychoanalisist Slavoj Zizek. "Interested in Deleuze & Twitter? If so, you're probably misreading Deleuze." Is he real or not? Perfectly, for a Lacan follower, it doesn't really matter.

Personal - Professional - Organisational: three basic online identities

2009-07-20T22:34:57+01:00

There are three main ways we can characterise most peoples online internet and mobile activity and presence. Let me state up front that these distinctions are purposely blunt, but do act as effective and critical distinctions, especially when talking to people about how and why they can manage their online identities. They're also very indiscreet, leaky categories, although it is of course possible to find examples of people who's online identity is confined to or dominated by a single category. Why are these differences important? Because they provide us with the building blocks to talk about and actively reflect on our online activity. How we represent ourselves, and how we are viewed online, is increasingly a part of daily social and economic life. Critically, for people working within social media or supporting digital literacy, they provide a robust framework within which to talk about key issues: privacy, data ownership/mobility, representation and voice.

The three main categories I use then are personal, professional, and organisational.

Personal use might include using dating sites, having a social network account to connect to friends and family, uploading your family photos to a photo-sharing site. Personal use is most likely to be the category where attention to social network service permissions - who is able to see what - is particularly important to users.

Professional use could include the use of a professional networking site, or the use of a social network, a blog or other website to showcase and record work, develop connections and contribute to national and international professional networks. It includes a public facing CVs, publicly accessible parts of a personal learning environment, or an e-portfolios, conversations across mailing lists or social network services. Typically, these activities are public facing, so the most pertinent issues are typically about voice, representation, reputation and trust,

Organisational use would involve the employee using tools or platforms on behalf of their employer or in the line of their work duties. For example, an employee may run a blog as part of their role, maintain a social networking profile in order to make information accessible to students and parents, deliver assignments using a Virtual Learning Platform or set up a group account for learners on a video sharing site. Organisational use may be public, promotional and conversational, or operate within walled garden environments, or, indeed, a mixture of the two.

ReTweet & other micro-conventions

2009-07-08T00:10:55+01:00

picture credit: kenworker 推友團在世界遺產吳哥窟前示範「銳推」Taiwanese twitterers showing us how to "retweet" in Angkor Wat

Warning: If you haven't used Twitter or other microblogging services before, this post which focuses on citation issues will likely put you off completely. It deals with only one aspect of microblogging activity, albeit an important one, but it is quite possible to lead a happy and healthy life without ever retweeting (RTing) anyone, or being an RTer, ever.

If however you get to the end of this post thinking, blimey Josie, you haven't begun to scratch the surface of this fascinating and vital issue, then why not treat yourself to the even more detailed danah boyd, Scott Golder and Gilad Lotan review paper Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter.

As anyone who's spent five minutes thinking about publication and referencing styles will have concluded, while format is important, constancy is critical. Twitter and microblogging are still very much environments in process, with Twitter in particular currently having a kickass impact on the social web, from blogging practices to social network service functionality to real time reporting. Like any online community, what is acceptable, in terms of all kinds of behaviors, is negotiated between and within networks of users.

Linkage is emerging as an important currency and network tool amongst microbloggers - especially since Twitter removed users ability to view the posts people in your network direct to people not in your network, aka #fixreplies

so for example, if

@kalamishere posts: @yiannopoulos Singing along yet?

It won't appear in my twitterfeed (the stream of posts I get from the combined posting of everyone I'm following), unless I am also following @yiannopoulos.

Obviously an rss feed, or a twittersearch by name of an individual users twitter feed, like the one in my left hand sidebar, will reproduce all posts regardless. However, unless you are stalking or otherwise have a special interest in a particular user, the likelihood is that you'll never see links to and conversations outside of your network, even though these may be some of the most valuable to you.

The way around this, for people who want to make conversational posts public within Twitter or within Twitter readers is to use any character before the @ symbol, the most elegant probably being a full stop, ie:

@josiefraser posts: . @menjivar Reviews of Free - take yr pick @Gladwell http://bit.ly/1rUoVn @ajkeen http://bit.ly/jwm7A @gapperblog http://u.nu/4evh

Some Twitter readers have problems converting .@ into links, so you'll notice in my example I leave a space between the full stop and the @, since I can afford the extra character. The value to the network isn't in the recognition - simply the giving of the name - it's in the link - the ability to click straight through to another users twitter stream, quickly review their content and interest, RT their content or add them to your follower list.

However, 140 characters - the limit of an individual post on Twitter, only accommodates so much kudos. What happens when you stumble across a post with more RTers than you can fit? For example:

@flash_ahah posts: RT @mattlingard RT @josiefraser RT @timbuckteeth: Most important issue in e-Learning, final version including all comments: http://bit.ly/14S989

The convention I'm using in this example is to put RT in front of everyone who has retweeted the post so far. This clears up, for example, someone in that chain who may have been addressing themselves to one of the others. For example:

RT @mattlingard @josiefraser RT @timbuckteeth: Most important issue in e-Learning, final version including all comments: http://bit.ly/14S989

could imply that @mattlingard sent the RT to @josiefraser. I'm also using : to indicate the origional poster. Again, there are a lot of different ways to retweet, and I'm not suggesting my preference is any better than any other. But suppose I now want to retweet the whole message:

RT @flash_ahah RT @mattlingard RT @josiefraser RT @timbuckteeth: Most important issue in e-Learning, final version including all comments: http://bit.ly/14S989

Or - about 20 characters too many. There are four ways around this (probably more - please let me know).

1. Don't RT, just favorite. This will show up in your followers twitter stream, although not yours - i.e. it won't be non-manually exportable but it will be saved to your twitter favorites for later reference. I don't tend to do this, since I'm kind of mean with my favorites.

2. If the same story/link has turned up across several different groups of people you follow, I tend to give up and just put "lots of people are posting about x today," or words to that effect. I figure once more than ten people have posted the same link, and unless there is a clear origional poster, it's best not to spend too much time worrying about on it.

3. edit content. Sacrifice pithy comments or indications of content for names and links. With cunning use of one of the internets many url shortening services, you could probably credit six or seven people. on the downside, this is going to look like a very boring and inexplicable link, so people probably won't bother clicking on it.

4. Cut out some of the RTers. I posted an intention this morning kickoff a new convention for posts with multiple RTers, roughly based on accepted academic practice, which is to use the et al as a heads up that other people were involved in getting the information to you. Obviously the main difference is that unlike an academic citation, where you can actually go somewhere and find out who the other contributors were, you can't necessarily do that on Twitter so you may well be consigning some people to the black hole of anti-kudos. I suggested that the person that I got the RT heads up was the last person to tweet, and or the person I read the information from. This is important, because although I might be following several people in the RT string, the serendipitous nature of twitter - the large amount of people followed, posts made, combined with ad hoc access (like most people I guess, I tend to dip in and out of my twitter stream) means that even though I might follow one person, I might not necessarily get the information directly from them, but via a third, fourth or fifth party retweet. So my amended RT would look like:

RT @flash_ahah et al: Most important issue in e-Learning, final version including all comments: http://bit.ly/14S989

Immediately the academics and information professionals in my stream objected to this, and quite rightly so, pointing out that the important person in terms of referencing should be the originator. I broadly agree with this, although it's often not so clear cut, since people bring information into twitter typically without referencing external sources. This means I may well have several independent citations or comments from unconnected sources. However, this isn't supposed to be a hard and fast rule, but a useful convention to fall back on where appropriate.

I put the three most plausible conventions to the vote, along with an open field for other suggestions. You can go vote yourself and check out the current wisdom of this particular crowd, but at time of writing the preference, given some mitigating factors, is clearly

RT @(origional source) via @(my source) or, as I'd interpret it

RT @flash_ahah et al RT @timbuckteeth: Most important issue in e-Learning, final version including all comments: http://bit.ly/14S989

with RT @(origional source) or

RT @timbuckteeth: Most important issue in e-Learning, final version including all comments: http://bit.ly/14S989

Favored in case of minimalism or if there really wasn't enough room. Not entirely happy with this last one, since it still doesn't indicate multiple posters.

Thanks to @jont @goatgirl74 @encratica @Eingang @sarahhorrigan @RecordedBooks @timdifford @shirleyearley @traceymadden, @paulbrichardson, @MarkRussell, @lyndsayjordan, @amcunningham for taking time to talk about this with me over at Twitter today. & cheers to everyone fr the RTs!

Facebook, MI6 & basic digital literacy

2009-07-05T18:50:03+01:00

Despite the neo-con conspiracy theory accusations, despite even the threats of Facebook The Movie (the specter of which I'm absolutely delighted about btw), Facebook continues to go from strength to strength in terms of empire building. According to recently released user & engagement stats, Facebook is currently the equivalent of the worlds fourth largest country, with around 240 million individual accounts. It's reporting a growth surge recently too - adding an incredible 700,000 to 750,000 new users per day.

The latest scandal to hit Facebook - and let's face it, one that isn't going to do their user stats any damage at all, is the tabloid and broadsheet friendly story centering on the British Secret Service, popularly known as MI6. Although MI6 has been recruiting on Facebook since September 2008, apparently their social media strategy hasn't stretched to the kind of employee guidance increasingly seen as critical in other industries. Recently recently appointed intelligence chief, John Sawers, ('C' as he will be codenamed in proper James Bond tradition), takes up his post in November. In the meantime, The Daily Mail are baying for Sawers blood (Daily Mail), following their crack investigation in to Mrs. Sawers completely unprotected Facebook pages.

Way back in October 2007, I asked the 200-ish audience members of the BIMA's Great Facebook debate - predominantly social media and related industry workers - to raise their hands if they felt 100% confident they understood who could see what on their Facebook accounts. About 4 hands went up, and mine wasn't one of them, despite the fact that I'd spent a year working on social networking service privacy settings. Since then, the third party application explosion has continued to muddy already the unfathomable waters of overly granular permissions settings. By January 2008, if came as little surprise to anyone working in the social networking service and privacy space that Facebook was being investigated by the UK's Information Commisioners Office for potential Freedom of Information Act infringements.

Currently, Facebook is rejigging it's operation model, simultaneously moving towards a more open platform and trying to make user permissions more understandable, including jettisoning it's regional networks in favor of sharing information between groups. All this is good news, and I look forward to tracking Facebook's progress. In the meantime, the best advice I can offer anyone is if you are using any service and aren't clear about who can see your content or how the permissions work, act as if the service is completely public. Don't post anything you would mind your mum, boss, colleague or local Daily Mail journo seeing.

The real story in the Sawers fiasco is, once again, is the one that research in the area has consistently pointed up. In general, people do not read terms of service or privacy statements. People like social networking services because of the warm glow of friendly, trusted association (some would say homophily) they submerge themselves in. Security and permissions settings are only as good as people can immediately or at least easily understand, leaving children, young people, vulnerable adults & MI6 potentially at risk.

Within increasingly connected societies, where the online is commonly integrated into our everyday social transactions, we need to be smarter about the implications of how we use services, and ensure that everyone has access to basic information. There was a huge fuss made when an leaked draft of the Rose Review mentioned a service - Twitter - as the kind of platform that digital literacy may support. Although there are obvious limitations in teaching platforms and applications rather than a focus on skills, competencies and understanding (and it only takes a cursory look our current Microsoft heavy curriculum to see the problems of this approach) - what the MI6 debacle demonstrates is the importance of recognising how and why people use services, and equipping them to use the social web in ways that don't compromise personal, or international, security.

The Information & Privacy Commisioner/Onterio has a recently updated PDF on How to protect your privacy on Facebook.

You can find basic information about online identity management relevant to people in all work places in my recent work on behalf of Childnet International for the UK Government's Department for Children, Schools and Families: Cyberbullying, supporting school staff (PDF)

If your organisation doesn't have a current employer and employee social web strategy in place, get in touch and I can help you design and implement one. I do special security service rates.

Related posts: ABC of permissions granularity

Digital Literacy Debate

2009-03-16T18:40:30+00:00

Picture credit CollaboraiveSociability by vaXzine

I've put up a wiki to help organize attendees, resources, schedule and outputs from the Digital Literacy debate that will be taking place online, in Elluminate, on Friday 27 March 2009, at 1pm GMT.

The event arose from conversations on Twitter, around the meaning and definition of digital literacy, and frustration about getting it on the national agenda. I firmly believe that we need to be equipping our learners - whatever age they may be - with the skills to not only take advantage of the information and opportunities offered by technology, but to take an active role in shaping and creating those opportunities - social, educational, political, civic, and economic.

At the end of January 2009 the UK Government published the Digital Britain Interim Report consultation. One look at the official site (more PDF's than you can shake a small wood at) and the accompanying discussion site - basically a blog post and a lot of comments - may be enough to convince many that this is a timely debate.

Fortunately the UK's social media credibility was ably defended by two user-generated projects - Tony Hirst and Joss Winn's Digital Britain Interim Report site, which enabled users to reply paragraph by paragraph to the consultation text, and then the dynamic duos Fake Digital Britain Report, which allowed users to collaboratively write their own, alternative document.

Although the Digital Briton interim report does outline a commitment to actions to "ensure fairness and access, with universal availability and promotion of skills and media literacy", the practical debate tended to focus on and stall over the technical issues of universal internet access and minimum speed (aka the 2Mbps debate).

The purpose of this discussion is to try focus on and move forward on issues surrounding Digital Literacy. The focus of the debate will be the UK education sector, but international attendees and contributors are more than welcome. Recently, Digital Literacy has gained a lot of traction within academic and educational technology discussion within the UK, and is generally thought of as A Good Thing. However, some important questions have yet to be addressed.

Is Digital Literacy the right term to be using? What are the alternatives?
What is Digital Literacy? can we agree a succinct and useful definition?
What are the constituent parts of a robust and meaningful Digital Literacy education?
How is Digital Literacy currently being addressed in the UK, with in the schools, Further Education, Adult, Community, Life Long & Work Based Learning, Higher Education and other learning sectors?
How do we support a national discussion about Digital Literacy?

These aren't all the questions that need addressing. Please feel free to add those you think are missing over at the wiki, so that we can draw up the agenda to best reflect the interests of attendees.

If you haven't used Elluminate before, you'll need to download Java and make sure your speakers work with the platform! It's pretty easy, but needs to be taken care of in advance. If you'd like to speak (rather than just listen and use the text chat) you'll also need a microphone. A webcam would be great & will let us see you. Instructions, Java check and download available here: http://www.elluminate.com/support/index.jsp

More very soon. In the meantime, please do head over to the wiki, sign up, and feel free to add suggestions and resources.

ThoughtFest 09

2009-03-09T23:21:30+00:00

Last week I was fortunate to be one of the attendees at the fantastic Thought Fest 2009 conference, held at the University of Salford's Think Lab. Organised by organized by Pontydysgu with the support of the JISC Evolve network and the European Mature-IP project, the event attracted top class learning technology researchers and practitioners from across Europe. Potential attendees pitched for place prior to the event, submitting their ideas for outline sessions - Dave White from Oxford University & I formed a digital literacy tag team and were lucky enough to snaffle two of the highly prized places.

About 30 delegates (most of whom are on Twitter) attended the two day event designed to bring together researchers in Technology Enhanced Learning in an open forum to debate the current issues surrounding educational technologies. Within a semi-structured (and pretty mobile) framework that was negotiated by delegates, we particularly focused on theory into practice: how and where research impacts on practice and where practice drives research.

The whole event was excellent, but I'll share some of my highlights.

Our (the red) team came a respectable third in the diabolically evil ViolaQuest, which was masterminded by Nicola Whitton and Rosie Jones, a couple of the UK's leading Alternative Reality Game (ARG) researchers and designers. The game involved unraveling mainly geographic and environmental clues. They also managed to include the Emerge bearded lady meme:

Photo credit: Rozberry redteam

There were some great show and discuss sessions, including Maria Perifanou on using Wikiquests in language Learning, Pat Parslow on Digital ID & Kathrin Kaufhold on the Awesome project.

I missed out on Jen Hughes's digital cartoon workshop, taking part instead in the podcasting workshop led by Andreas Auwärter. Dave & I picked the travelogue assignment, and produced a gonzo journalism piece on The Salford Lift Experience, inspired in part by out experience of the Maxwell Building lifts. Unfortunately, half of this masterpiece was lost to the random gods of audio, so the world will never hear Dave's very informative description of the up and down buttons, nor believe there was a student who felt the lift experience in Salford had drastically improved over the last two years, various other lift based interviews or the toilet on the stairwell incident. For those of you who can be bothered, the last part is here:

Listen to The Salford Lift Experience (mp3)

There were some excellent recordings produced on the day, notably a advert for online identity management cleaning services, which I'll link to as soon as they go up.

The award for most awesome presentation has to go however to the SAPO campus team, who will be rolling out the worlds first institution wide supported PLE this September. You can see their presentation slides here. Basically, The University of Aveiro are moving away from the managed learning system model and providing a supported Personal Learning Environment (PLE) service linking in University functionality with member selected and supported web 2.0 distributed activity. Why is this amazing? The global edtech community have been talking about how institutions can engage with learner-centered PLEs for a while now, but Aveiro and the SAPO team are putting it into practice. Campus wide. In September. You can find out more and ask questions over at the Though Fest site.