SocialTech

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.

The problem with the mother

2009-01-08T23:07:49+00:00

Link love: This post builds on the case study I contributed to the Eduserv workshop on Digital Identities at the British Library today. Everyone's case studies are lodged over at the Pattern Language Network site, along with Yishay's Slidedeck pattern language tutorial on writing a case study. It also moves forward some observations I made in my post Pictures of Children Online a couple of years ago.

From the workshop intro:

"We use the term ‘digital identity’ to refer to the online representation of an individual within a community, as adopted by that individual and projected by others. An individual may have multiple digital identities in multiple communities.
Eduserv have recently funded three projects on digital identity as a result of our 2008 grants call. This workshop will help the projects gather case-studies about the ways in which digital identity is currently manifest in UK higher education.
This event is aimed at people who have an interest in the issues around digital identity in higher education including employers, HR staff, careers guidance staff, standards experts, students and academics.
Prior to the workshop we will be collecting a series of “stories” about digital identity from people attending the event. On the day, we will be working in groups to discuss and add to the series. Following this, we will analyse the stories in order to find reoccurring themes or patterns."

The group I worked with looked at two case studies, my own and Controlling Flickr Contacts, from Margarita Perez Garcia.

Case Study: other people's identities

Summary:
This study looks at issues of parental responsibility & identity disavowal
Created 08 Jan 2009 by Josie Fraser

Situation:
What was the setting in which this case study occurred?

Like most people working in the field of social media, I have a purposefully easy to find online presence. I belong to multiple social networks, for work, for research, and for experience. The social networks (& I’m using a broad definition here, as outlined in http://www.digizen.org/socialnetworking/ ) I use most frequently are typically those that I can also most easily repurpose and use to maintain a constantly updated pubic presence – Twitter, Fickr, my own blogs, Delicious. Probably more importantly though, they are also the ones that allow me to socialise, discuss, hang out and meet new people. I started using the internet about 12 years ago to socialise, prompted by the physical limitations of being a single mother, of being broke all the time and not having a social or family network. For me the experience of being online was an extremely positive and liberating one, & remains so.

Task:
What was the problem to be solved, or the intended effect?

The primary issue was wanting to protect my son from harm, in the broadest sense, and to act respectfully towards him.

I am used to belonging to self-determined communities of people who I like and respect, who I often know exclusively or primarily online. It might seem like an obvious extension of my friendship and relationship building to share stories and pictures of my son, and to model a sense of my everyday experience – which heavily features the joys and logistics of motherhood -online.

However, there are several reasons why I don’t do this. Firstly, there’s thorny the issue of consent, and how my son negotiates and understands this at different points I his life.

There are also ethical, or just straightforwardly thoughtful, considerations. My mum has a particularly embarrassing picture of me that haunted the whole of my childhood. As an adult, I’m ok with it (no, really). Thankfully my mum was mostly sensitive about my particular loathing of this picture and didn’t get it out at every available opportunity – if she’d have put it online I can imagine I would have been mortified. Maybe not at the time she put it up, but certainly a few years down the line, and especially if anyone from my school had come across it.

There's also the issue of digital presence. Is it up to us to contribute to our children’s digital presence? Would you have liked your parents contributing to what searches of you might return? Perhaps by now I would have loved that embarrassing picture of myself – maybe it would have come to mean something entirely different to me. But at different points in my life it certainly wouldn’t have been at all welcome.

The other obvious issues are internet related child abuse and bullying. I’m very much against a moral-panic approach to using technology, and I also think it’s very important that we evaluate and regard risks appropriately. While the vast majority of child abuse takes place entirely offline, and is typically perpetrated by the victims family or immediate circle, that’s also no reason to dismiss the chances of a child or young person we know coming into contact with someone who could harm them. We take steps to educate them about a range of strategies they can use to look out for themselves in their offline and online dealings. In the same way, we need to model good practice ourselves.

Another reason for ‘protecting’ my son and not talking about being a mother was linked to financial insecurity. My career is on the way to being well established, and I’ve proven that I can manage to raise a child ‘alone’ (I moved closer to my mum and sister, so I have the luxury of a support network now) and so it worries me less that people might judge me and choose not to employ me because of my status as a single mother.

Actions:
What was done to fulfil the task?

Initially, I kept all pictures of my son strictly within private, friends or family only permissions on Flickr. This has changed – I have a couple of pictures of my son as a small child in public. I’m similarly careful about the rest of my young family members too – I posted a picture of my then 14 year old niece last year only to have it immediately favourited by a complete pervert. I removed the picture from public view, and blocked the pervy guy.

Similarly I don’t really talk about being a mother, although I’ve noticed this changing as my son becomes more independent himself.

Basically, I negated any public online identity that explicitly represented me as a mother for a long time.

Results:
What happened? Was is a success? What contributed to the outcomes?

Yes, it worked very well, since I have been consistent and systematic , had clearly defined rules about representing my son which I’ve stuck too. However, my son is getting older, his and my identities are both significantly shifting, and I’m wondering about ‘not having been a mother’. Was it just a handy tactic, or was it a cowardly disavowal of parenthood? Is ‘being a mother’ in this sense important? For me, or for others?

Lessons Learned:
What did you learn from the experience?

Protecting your children online is actually really easy; watch out for the political speculation.

As we worked through stories to patterns, a very strange thing happened - the role of motherhood disappeared. And this was very clearly another compromise on behalf of the child - in order to demonstrate the meta pattern/problem concerning the protection of the child, we had to make the troublesome issue of the mother go away. The problem of the mother turned out to be that she was the mother. The problem wasn't one that could be solved outside the context of wide spread social and political change. So our title became Others First Managing the tensions between identity & personal responsibility, where identity is enmeshed and shaped by, in this explicit case, the vulnerable other of the child. From this it's possible to extrapolate the pattern on to a broader context - for example, anyone who needs to manage their own or another's online identity or personal safety. If we had more time we could have extended the pattern to look at different kinds of identity management - for example the management of being gay within a homophobic society, the management of responsible friendship etc.

What really struck me today was how the solution to effective protection - that could be interperated as concealment, repression, or confinement to specific circles, mirrors and perpetuates existing social inequalities - making already under represented and less visible groups - namely children and mothers in this case, though I'd argue the same strategy can be applied to a lot of other troublesome identities/bodies - as shadowy in online public spaces as they are off line.

Random 7

2008-12-30T00:07:24+00:00

Kind of like high 5, but not. Thank you Mark Hawker for memeing me, & posting the rules (although feeling a bit Déjà vu on this one, wondering if black holes are really just meme collisions):

Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some weird.
Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

1. I love comics, esp. Los Bros Hernandez. This is a result of growing up on the fantastic UK girls psychological horror comic Misty, and the mighty booty of my step dads complete collection of Marvel's 1960s output.

2. My parents moved us to North Wales for several years when I was a child to escape the impending nuclear Armageddon.

3. My stepdad had a horrible accident while we were there, trying to fix the TV arial in the middle of a storm. He fell off the roof and lost his memory, but got a cool scar that runs front to back of his chest where lightning shot through.

4. My favorite Bette Davis film is Old Acquaintance

5. Max Ernst, Blondie & The Scarlet Witch were my childhood heros

6. I love working as a social & educational technologist, no matter how many times I have to explain what that might mean to people. I secretly fear the End Of Electricity but I'm always happy being with other people in face to face situations, so probably I could just switch jobs.

7. If I had to get a film directors name tattoed on my arm, I'd go with Jean Vigo

I'm tagging Michelle A. Hoyle, Sarah Horrigan, Rebecca Newton, Graham Attwell, Alfie Dennen, deCabbit, & number 10 Downing Street

Twitter allegiance

2008-12-24T00:47:46+00:00

In the spirit of passing time at Christmas, and following on from a heated discussion about the meaning and robustness of community in online environments, I invited 100 of my 1,276 current Twitter followers to fill in a quick survey cunningly designed to provide a fairly wonky measure of community allegiance. Of course I welcome critical feedback about the methodology employed, but I had two hours sleep last night and yes, I quickly realised the massive cultural bias implicit in most if not all of the questions.

I love Twitter and I've spent an unhealthy amount of time hanging out there in the last year. It's a great site: friendly, open, sharing - sometimes even a little too sharing, but is it a community? Are online meeting places just a useful ruse to avoid the reality of community corrosion offline? Have social networking services taken the place of Baudrillard's Disneyland schema - are they imaginary communities serving to mask the absence of 'real' communities?

Obviously a handful of poorly conceived questions and a small random sample cannot hope to answer such weighty concerns. Maybe they can tell us something about how friendship and civic responsibility are reconfigured within new networks that run through and across geographic boundaries and levels of social contact. Or maybe not.

I invited 100 people to answer - this number determined by the ease of extrapolating percentages and the limit of free accounts over at PollDaddy. Unfortunately the service stopped working for some reason after 90 respondents so the following figures are taken from that final total.

Everyone spent approximately 6 minutes completing the survey, and those 90 nice people filled out the survey in about 3 hours from my initial call for help. Respondents came from Europe and the US, and from the rest of the unknown world. I'm in the UK and operating on GMT time, and most of the people I have met in 3D as well as on Twitter or online come from the UK, so no surprises that baring those 'there be Dragon' lands who represented the largest constituency of respondents.

Each question asked for a yes, no or maybe response to helping out @josiefraser in a variety of scenarios. All respondents were anonymous, although a bunch disclosed their answers to me over at Twitter.

Question 1: Would you fill out a survey for me?

OK - a pretty self-selecting answer since respondents had already clicked through a link asking them to do so, but given that they had no idea what they were being asked to fill out and only internet promises of 'a very short survey', still gratifying that there were no 'no' answers. I'm pretty easy to please and the survey could have finished there, however I pressed on in the interests of academic rigour.

Question two: Would you do a Google search for me, in response to me wondering about something that was obviously searchable?

This question was designed to find out if the respondants would be wiling to do something that took a more effort and thought than ticking boxes, but not too much more. Quite a high percentage (13.3%) said no. Given the amount of JFGI tweets & general annoyance at time wasting questions that flows through the social media den of iniquity that is Twitter, I wasn't that surprised. Given that I work in Social Media myself, I'd have actually thought the number would be higher. However I will regard the high yes figure (53%) as a sign of the generosity of my Twitter community and not as cynical commentary on my skills.

Question three: Would you step away from your computer and find out something that was in the same room, but not within reach of your computer chair for me?

The first real test of my respondents mettle! Would they be prepaired to help me out in a way that required actual physical effort?

80% of them would! Pressing forward:

Question four: Would you buy a pint for me?

Less success here than the standing up and looking around for something for me question, but still an impressive 68.9% said yes, they would buy me a pint. A pint of what wasn't specified, but it's still probably fair to assume that some of the 11.1% who wouldn't buy me a pint refused on religious grounds, because they look too young to get served in a pub, or in consideration of my health.

Question five: Would you lend me a tenner (£10)?

Knowing that my Twitter community isn't made up predominantly of very rich people, 52.2% of people who would lend me money is a huge result. Thanks!

Question six: If my house burnt down, could I come and live with you for a week?

OK - now on to the intimate questions. Would you let me come and live in your personal space on a temporary basis? An amazing 41.6% said yes, with a further 37.1% giving me an encouraging maybe - presumably some of them on the condition that I hadn't just burnt down my own house. This was one of only two questions skipped by anyone, presumably because of the level of moral complexity and lack of context. Interestingly, some people who wouldn't lend me money agreed to let me come stay with them.

Question seven: If I developed a really bad allergy, would you adopt my cats?

This question was designed to test the long term commitment of my Twitter community. Actually, it was probably the most badly designed question here, since it doesn't account for other peoples allergies/aversions to cats, or their own personal and domestic circumstances. Also, I've previously tweeted about the feral cat I now grudgingly look after, who has invaded my house and regularly attacks or intimidates me.

However - this result conclusively proves that 1) there aren't a lot of cat lovers in the Twitterverse and 2) more people pay attention to your tweets than you suspect. 71.1% of respondents were not prepared to save my cats from a possible one way trip to the vet, and a further 11% would think about it.

Question eight: If I needed to stay in the country, and you weren't already married to someone else, would you marry me?

Really digging deep here, and asking people all kinds of ethically engaged questions about someone that they possibly only know off Twitter. There are legal barriers, bureaucratic nightmares, and questions of feeling and delicacy, as Dickens and Austin would put it. Additionally, considering the low figures of respondents currently likely to be living in countries where same sex marriage is legal would probably put some of my respondants off.

Even so - 7.8% of my respondants would marry me if I really needed them to and a staggering 20% were willing to negotiate terms before deciding either way!

Question nine: would you donate a kidney to me?

After mentioning beer, I might have had better luck with a less obviously alcohol damage prone organ, but with only two questions to go under the free account restrictions, I had to hit my respondents hard. We've all seen the scenario: If it was in your power to save someone (albeit someone off Twitter) with only serious but usually non-life threatening harm to yourself, would you do it?

Again, one person declined to answer all together, and 51.7% very reasonably turned me down flat. An amazing 48.3% of respondents either would or would consider donating a major organ! Humbled and astonished are the only words to describe how I was feeling by this point. In the UK, only 26% of the population are on the NHS Organ Donor Register, and have signed up to have their organs used to save a life after their death.

Question ten: In the event of a zombie apocalypse, would you throw yourself between me and the oncoming brain-ravenous hoard?

Given the total likelihood of this doing very little except stalling my inevitable demise, or at best, enabling me to reload my shotgun, I was expecting about no people to step forward for this one. However, my Twitter community is obviously far more heroic and selfless than the average street where people have to actually live next door to one another. Even given that a small percentage of the 11.1% who would cushion me from brain loss possibly have never seen a zombie movie, are feeling Moe Szyslak-depressed at the thought of getting the Mama Mia DVD for Christmas, or actually have a bit of a thing for zombies, this is a resounding victory for imaginary communities everywhere.

Happy Christmas & a fantastic New Year to everyone over at Twitter who has made being online in 2008 such a pleasure, and to all good Social Network Service providers everywhere :)

Edublog Awards 2008

2008-12-18T08:40:03+00:00

Its the Edublog Awards 2008! Dust off your party outfits and get ready to join us on Saturday night for the spectacular 5th awards show, celebrating the vibrancy of blog and social media practice to support learning.

Voting is still open across this years 16 categories, and every vote still counts since most of the category nominees are within spitting distance of each other. James is holding the vote doors open like a veritable Atlas until the last minute possible this year. Needless to say, the live online awards show will be well worth attending. The Edublog Awards team - me, Dave Cormier, Jeff Lebow, James Farmer, Jo Kay, warmly invite you all over to the multisite party.

When?

This years event is scheduled for:

GMT/UTC: 11pm, Saturday 20 Dec 2008

AEST: 10am, Sunday 21 Dec 2008

SLT: 3pm, Saturday 20 Dec 2008

Get your local time details here!

Where?
The fabulous team at EdTechTalk will be providing a web-based audio stream of the event. The landing page for web based listening and text based chat will be http://edtechtalk.com/live. Head over there if you'd like to listen in live (low bitrate audio-only stream for those with with slower connections), and catch the ustream of SL activities, and chat amongst the attendees.

There's also a Facebook page for those of you over there, and there will be live updating over at Twitter.

For the second year running we will also be meeting over at Second Life, thanks to the wonderful Jo Kay. The meeting point on the beautiful Islands of jokaydia will be the jokaydia Landing point (SLurl) for newbie support and pre-event hot chocolate. The ceremony will be held in our new auditorium (SLurl).

There are limits on the number of visitors to a Second Life Island (& this isn't entirely to do with how big my dress will be this year, so do get your seat early! There will also be an overflow area with chat bridge and audio streaming at the jokaydia Meeting Hall (SLurl) for those who don't get a seat but would still like to hang out inworld.

We are all very excited abut this years chat bridge - connecting Second Life attendees to our web-based participants. You’ll be able to access the chat room here just prior to the event!

The fabulous residents of jokaydia have also lined up a post event beach party and celebration of yet another year of great blogging. The party will start right after the awards ceremony: Meet at jokaydia Beach! (SLurl)

2008 Edublog Awards Nominees Display!

Dont forget to visit the 2008 Edublog awards Nominees Display which celebrate all 210 nominees and their achievements this year. The display is a permanent structure on the Islands of jokaydia and serves as a great resource for educators. You can visit the Edublog Awards Display at jokaydia (SLurl).
Those nominations in full:
1. Best individual blog

Mobile Technology in TAFE
Education Investigation
Learn Online
Teaching Learners with Multiple Special Needs
Bionic Teaching
SCC English
Nadstar’s Blog
Teachers at risk
John Connell
Doug - off the record
Mathemetics Learning
The Scholastic Scribe
Newly Ancient
Chrisina’s Classroom Early Childhood blog
Cliotech
ICTlogy
Theology in the Vineyard
Computer Science Teacher - thoughts and information from Alfred Thompson
Darcy’s blog
The Edublogger
Teaching and Learning Design
The Bamboo Project
All teachers are learners - All learners are teachers
Sarah’s Musings
Using Blogs in science Education
Learning with ‘e’s
What It’s Like on The Inside
EFL20
Generation YES Blog
Betty’s Blog
Teach42
Creating Lifelong Learners
Always Learning
The English Blog
David Truss: Pair-a-dimes for your Thoughts

2. Best group blog

Salford University Occupational Therapy Education blog
SCC English
WorkLiteracy
The Stratford Sentinel
Mortarboard Blog
Pontydysgu
Brandon Hall Research Workplace Learning Today
Scholastic News Blog
Digital Learning Environments
Tomorrow’s Trust
The Chancellor’s New Clothes
ECO group
360
Leader Talk
PortablePD.CA
Youth Voices

3. Best new blog

Fled: Flexible Learning Education Design
Yuichi’s Games
Angela Maiers
Huzzah
Dkzody’s Weblog
2JE Shining Stars
Chrisina’s Classroom Early Childhood blog
Journeys on the road
Human
Teaching in Second Life
Fiona’s Journey
Christy Bowman
Technology in The Classroom
Thumann Resources

4. Best resource sharing blog

Free Technology for Teachers
Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day/
Mobile Technology in TAFE
Videoconferencing Out on a Lim
Woodchurch Science
Teach J: For Teachers of Journalism and Media
Langwitches
Edina Publich Schools NUA Program
What’s New @Scholastics.com
ZaidLearn
Teaching College Math
Around the Corner - MGuhlin
Stephen’s Web
meta-ot
Discovering Biology in a Digital World
Thumann Resources
Creative Teaching
Welcome to NCS-Tech
Jane’s E-learning Pick of the Day
Learning technology teacher development blog

5. Most influential blog post

Becoming a more reflective Individual Practitioner
Why Can’t Inner City Kids Learn/a>
The Glass Bees
Planning to share versus just sharing
The Time is Now
Be an elearning action hero
President-elect Barack Obama
The truth is Out There
The New Digital Divide?
Order for Closure
Getting our Knickers in a twist?
The Macgyver Project: Genomic Dna Extraction And Gel Electrophoresis Experiments Using Everyday Materials
Monkey Business
Ten Tips for Growing Your Learning Network

6. Best teacher blog

Teaching in the 408
Mrs Cassidy’s Classroom Blog
Science Of The Invisible
The Cool Cat Teacher
Practical Theory
dy/dan
Web.Cad.6abc
Kevin’s Meandering Mind
Creating Lifelong Learners
Teaching College Maths
Bald Worm’s Blog
Betty’s Blog
Songhai Concept
Bellringers
Science Teacher
Sliced Bread
The Journey
Reflections on Teaching
Cliff’s Notes
Endless Forms Most Beautiful
OllieBray.com
Nashworld
Box of Tricks
Mysterious Teaching
The Why of it all
Always Learning
On an e-journey with Generation Y
ICT in my Classroom
Educating Alice
Kenneth’s ESL Blog

7. Best librarian / library blog

Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog
UoL Library Blog
Paul Walk’s weblog
Hey Jude
School Library Journal
Blue Skunk Blog
TechnoTuesday

8. Best educational tech support blog

The Edublogger
The Clever Sheep
The Wired Campus
UK Web Focus
Geeked
Tech Tutors
Teach42
Teacher in a Strange Land
Off on a Tangent
efoundations
JoeWoodOnline
Teachers love Smartboards
Langwitches
Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org

9. Best elearning / corporate education blog

Britannica Blog
eLearning Technology
Presentation Zen
Windows to Open Source
Making Change
Tech Tools
Laurel Papworth
TechnOT
Andy’s black hole
Janet Clarey

10. Best educational use of audio

Wicked Decent Learning
Project Xiphos
Twenty Minutes for Tech
Teachers Teaching Teachers
Parents as Partners
Bildum im Dialog
Integrating ICT
Bit By Bit
Secondary Worlds
Ed Tech Talk

11. Best educational use of video / visual

Digital Ethnography
Tamaki Intermediate School
Geography at the Movies
Flick School
Video 2 Zero
Steve Spangler blog
Moving at the Speed of Creativity
Murdoch University Island in Second Life
Qik MAMK
TEFL Clips
The Common Craft Show

12. Best educational wiki

eToolBox
The 2008 Comment Challenge
Kidpedia
Educational Origami
WikiEducator
S.D.Public School, Pitampura
Learning in Maine
Digitally Speaking
Clif’s Wiki
Miss Baker’s Biology Class
F-ALT
Salks Periodic Table
Flat Classroom Project 2008
School AUP 2.0
Classroom Displays
Digital Media Across Asia

13. Best educational use of a social networking service

EFL Classroom 2.0
Fireside Learning
Classroom 2.0
Maine Holocaust Education Network
Youth Voices
MACUL Space
Principles of Biology
Ed Links
Teen Second Classroom
My Learning Space

14. Best educational use of a virtual world

Jokadia
Discovery Education Second Life
Drexel Island
Edunation
Oh! Virtual Learning!
Literary Worlds

15. Best class blog

A really different place
Risley Roarer’s Blog
Learning Area 20
Al Upton
Extreme Biology
English Advertising Class
Mr. Kootman’s Class
Remote Access

16. Lifetime achievement award

Stephen Downes
Scott Leslie
Will Richardson
Nancy White
David Warlick
Chris Lehmann
Graham Wegner
Michele Martin
Jay Cross

Notes towards Digital Literacy

2008-10-19T20:26:24+01:00

Anyone who has talked to me for any length of time over the past couple of years will have been hard pressed to have avoided my growing preoccupation with the UK's digital literacy agenda, or rather, lack of one. However, while I've been talking about this a lot, I haven't made many written remarks outside of policy contributions and consultations. Hopefully this brief post will act as a marker of progress rather than just a register of the current limitations of the UK education system.

A lot of progress has been made recently in terms of the e-safety agenda, for example with the publication in March of Dr. Byron's Safer Children in a Digital World, and the approval of all the reports recommendations by the UK Government, and the establishment of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS) at the end of September this year. Additional moves toward modernising our Duty of Care towards pupils and staff, both providing and signposting support and in building awareness, responsibility and resilience in using technologies, has come in the form of e-safety provision within the QCA'a new curriculum and in the Department for Children, Schools and Families Cyberbullying Guidance that I was fortunate enough to be able to contribute to.

However, while it is a critical area of development and resourcing, e-safety alone is not enough. To regard it as anything except a critical element within a wider digital literacy framework, and to attempt to teach it alongside an antiquated, generally programme-specific ICT education is to short change our learners, and to fail to recognise the technological, social and economic shifts that have take place globally. To not integrate and model good practice in digital literacy has huge social consequences - from potentially disadvantaging individuals and communities in terms of social and economic opportunities, to the society-wide disadvantage we risk by not ensuring that everyone is in a position to make their voice and opinions heard within the law, and to engage technology as a way of bringing about community facilitation of all kinds, social organisation and change.

So what is digital literacy? Currently, it is a discussion that isn't happening, but which needs to be taking place nationally and publicly amongst the major organisational stakeholders (across government, industry, and education), informed by the local conversations of learners, parents, education sector workers, and employers.

Digital literacy then refers to a set of knowledge and competencies (including social skills and cultural competencies) required by technological, social and economic changes in society. It should covers a range of areas; skills and understandings that ensure everyone can get the most out of their engagement with technology. It includes e-safety and wellbeing, but also includes collaboration and communication skills, rights and responsibilities, ethical and environmental issues, commercial practices, privacy and security issues, digital identity and citizenship, along with finding, evaluating and applying information.

Some of these skills can be highly complex. However, there are ways of supporting even very young learners to understand important and relevant concepts, such as keeping oneself safe and helping others when using technologies. Conceptually, skills and behaviours supported within the framework of digital literacy should share the same ambitions as those outlined in Every Child Matters - being healthy, staying safe, enjoying and achieving, making a positive contribution and achieving economic well being.

These last couple of years have seen the establishment of an evidence base and a public recognition of the huge personal, professional and social impacts of new technologies. What many edtechs have been involved in is describing new social realities, practices and opportunities. What I'd dearly like to see now is a push forward from the work done by Ofcom, Childnet, and Becta (amongst many) in establishing the current state of play and an active engagement in developing new models and frameworks.

Being There

2008-09-24T22:48:50+01:00

Photo credit: Invasion by Henryleelucas

Dave White's recent post, Not 'Natives' or 'Immigrants' but 'Visitors' & 'Resident' slipped by largely without comment, which is a huge shame. It's a must-read post because it does what a lot of people have been trying to do and not managing that well - move us beyond Prensky's seminal dichotomy of Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. Prensky's metaphors powerfully explain differences in approach and experience between users who have grown up with technologies (the natives) and older users who find difficulty in accessing new technological cultures and practices (the immigrants) as not just a cultural but a neurobiological one. Prensky's arguments are easy to knock down, particularly if you happen to subscribe to a more fluid account of development. What they haven't been however is easy to replace or move forward from. Dave's work probably succeeds in taking the argument forward precisely because it's user-centric, looking at how users engage with technologies. His research points up the importance of 'being there'; the distinction between users who inhabit a space or place online, and users who don't view themselves as having any kind of non-functional engagement with online environments and tools. Dave calls these visitors and residents (as you may have gathered from his academically typical unwieldy title), and if you haven't gone blind already head over to his post to see the initial sketching out of these roles. These are far more granular distinctions, robust enough to cut across socio-cultural differences, and agile enough to encompass a wide range of behaviors and belonging. my initial thoughts on seeing the post still stand:
"I think this is a big improvement on the native and immigrant dichotomy, I really look forward to seeing how it moves forward. It seems very possible to be a resident on a specific social networking service or site, but a visitor to other services and in all aspects of web engagement. I think 'being there' is a useful concept to explore, & possibly some strait forward measures of engagement. I also think that peoples conceptions of privacy & being online are worthwhile exploring in terms of their immersion levels. The Pew data from the end of last year suggested that the majority (60%) of internet users aren't worried about how much information is available about them online - I'm suspicious that if true, this is because the people who are worried stay off line/confine themselves to visitor-type behaviour."