Author: Clint Lalonde

by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Social Networks

Delicious – the place I got it

Delicious is dead.

Er, sorry. Delicious is in the sunset column.

I don’t know if I could write a better eulogy to Delicious than Marshall has at ReadWriteWeb. He hit on so many points and ways in which the service was so valuable to so many people. Me included.

I started experimenting with Delicious in 2005 after hearing a hallway conversation between Scott Leslie and another of my BCcampus coworkers at the time. They were talking about these things called folksonomy and tagging. I was intrigued.

Delicious was the place where so much of the Web 2.0 world first made sense to me. With Delicious, I got it. I got the power of networks. I got social learning. I got tagging. I got the cloud. I got transparency. I got open. I got web as tool. I got what a “social” network was, even though I was still years away from joining Facebook or Twitter. Delicious armed me with enough conceptual knowledge of what a social network was that I was able to scaffold that knowledge and easily “get” the value of Facebook and Twitter when they arrived a few years later.

Today I kinda feel like when AOL announced they were killing Netscape; a kind of melancholy sadness at the passing of something that was once so great.

But what makes this different from Netscape is that Delicious is still great and remains one of the most valuable tools in my network. It did what it did extremely well. Sure there was the convenience of storing your bookmarks on the web and having them accessible from anywhere, but that wasn’t the real value of Delicious for me. The real value is its transparency in that I am able to see what my network is bookmarking. Delicious gives me a glimpse into what they found important on the web. What they bookmarked helped me focus my attention on what was important. It helped me learn. Delicious was a small piece of social learning in action. I was observing skilled practitioners in my field through their bookmarks, and was able to follow their links and find out why they felt this article or this link was important to them.

Oh sure, there is that Twitter thing where links are shared all the time.  But Delicious is different. Beyond the realtime stream of what my network is bookmarking at the moment, I also had access to everything they had ever bookmarked in the past. Through the Delicious search engine, I was able to search through hundreds of  thousands of links curated by the members of my network. The people who I connect with in Delicious are dealing with the same problems, questions and challenges that I do. When I needed to recommend a new tool for a job, I would go to my Delicious network first and search what my network had squirreled away there. Being able to have access to this collected archive of links vetted by people I trusted? Invaluable.

Rarely did a conversation happen “on Delicious”. It wasn’t that kind of social network. It was a lurkers paradise. Not that I didn’t contribute. I bookmarked and annotated, passively adding to the collective knowledge (so I hoped) of my network.

Yeah, I know Diigo is there. That is probably where I will end up. But I always found Diigo too heavy, too feature rich. In Delicious, there was simplicity. It was the journeyman of Web 2.0 tools. Dependable, gets the job done, no nonesense. But yet flexible enough that you could mash it and collaborate in numerous ways.

In some respects, Delicious is just a tool. I mean, I still have those connections, and I can and will recreate them in other venues and services. My network will survive. I’ll find ways to continue doing what I do. That’s what distributed networks do. Survive thermonuclear bombs to rebuild and thrive again. But it was this tool (and, more specifically, the architects of this tool) who taught me so much about how the web works that calling it “just a tool” seems cheap and demeaning. It deserves more respect from me than that. A shovel is a tool. Delicious was disruptive and changed my view of how things worked.

Sometimes it IS about the technology. And I can’t give it much higher praise than that.

 
by Clint Lalonde on For Fun, Teaching & Learning

See, this is why I can't do ds106

#ds106. I am sure that is going to be a trending hashtag in the new year as Jim Groom’s MOOC  (Massive Open, Online Course) on Digital Storytelling gets underway in January. And looking at the participants who have signed on so far (or are contributing without actually jumping into the course), it is going to be a heck of a fun ride.

So many people in my network are participating (including one of our Art instructors) that I am feeling quite bummed about not being able to take part. But this winter/spring will see me finishing my Masters thesis, and, after the time I spent putting this together last night, DS 106 would just be too compelling a reason to not transcribe that 90 minute interview.

Here is the gist of a potential DS 106 assignment (suggested, I believe, by Tom Woodward)

Make an animated gif from your favorite/least favorite movie capturing the essence of a key scene. Make sure the movement is minimal but essential.

So, here is my contribution.

From Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. This captures the moment where Alex, sitting with his droogs in the Korova Milk Bar, hears a woman singing opera. As that sly smile creeps across his face, we are fooled into thinking that he has nothing but scorn and derision for the older group of well dressed people sitting in the bar, and that he is about to call his droogs and go all malarky on their asses. But, what becomes clear a few moments after this, is that smile is not a smile of wicked delight at the thought of going ultra-violent, but a smile that revels his love of music. It is this moment that reveals both a weakness and a humanity that is ultimately both sympathetic and repulsive.  And, if you know the movie, that love of music becomes a key plot device later on when his behaviour gets modified.

I did this using the frame capture feature of the VLC player, and then created the animated gif in Adobe Fireworks.

This is the reason why I can’t do DS 106. As I beavered away on this in the basement last night, 20 more invitations to participate in my thesis research didn’t get sent out. Too…much…temptation.

What I find really interesting about this (besides the subject and the delivery method) is how Jim has taken the Instructional Design of the courses out into the open. Jim is certainly at the helm here, but he has asked his network for ideas. What kinds of assignments should this course include? How does one go about designing a MOOC?

He is crowdsourcing instructional design.

@jimgroom another #ds106 idea, 3 degrees of wikipedia competition see who can come up with most obscure wikiP “triple” (from @sleslie)

I’d like to see someone write a story/poem with a “googlewhack” in each line #ds106 (from @twoodwar)

5 Card Flickr #ds106 Story: Life is Like a Barrel of Pandas Add to pool tag ds106 in flickr Play (from @cogdog)

Maybe a good idea to use in #ds106 “Tim Burton’s new project: Storytelling with Twitter fans” http://ow.ly/3nVzz (from @jtcf)

It’s a conversation that not only are his network of educators contributing to, but also potential students for the course.  This course is being designed, at least in part, by the crowds, led by a trusted network of educators that Jim has invested the time and energy in to developing relationships with.

It is a testament to the benefits of educators being open and engaged in social spaces, and taking a long term approach to developing relationships. If Jim had just started blogging or had just started using Twitter a month ago, this type of collaboration would not be possible. The network effect would not be there.

For me, a learner trying to understand the process of designing engaging learning experiences in a technology mediated environment, this type of transparency of process is invaluable, as it is to Jim, who builds on the successes and challenges of those who came before him. Standing on the shoulders.

Rock on, my droogs. I’ll be lurking along the sides and look forward to seeing what you all come up with.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Camosun

Gratitude

I usually don’t write highly personal stuff about my work, but felt I just had to say this. Yesterday I had a reminder of how wonderful the people I work with are.

Yesterday at 2pm I had my first interview for my thesis. I was planning on taking a late lunch and doing it over my lunch hour. Naturally, I have been nervous about this new phase in my thesis beginning. This was the guts of it – collecting the data. Do I have the right questions? Will Skype work? All those niggling little things that keep you up at night and make you wring your hands all day.

The office was quiet. I was the only person providing D2L support. Our 3 ID’s were working on the other campus, and our regular D2L admin was taking a holiday day. I was holding down the fort, providing support and admin functions for our LMS.

At 1:15, I was just about to begin setting up my computer in our meeting room for the 2pm Skype interview. I wanted to test everything out well ahead of time. I saw an instructor walk into our office area. He came over to me and reported that D2L was slow, and he had a group of students writing a test in the lab next door. I popped onto D2L to take a look and it was slow. And getting slower. Suddenly an email popped into the support inbox. Were we having problems with D2L because this person could not log on. Then another. And another. Students began coming into the office, reporting problems with D2l. The Learning Commons was full. D2L was going down. I was alone, and in 30 minutes I had to do my first interview for my research. Anyone reading this who has ever done research, especially research that involves long form interviews, knows how tough it can be to line up a participant. I did not want to reschedule. I began to feel a pit forming in my stomach.

A quick call to my team leader at the other campus confirmed they were having problems, too. She immediately got it. She knew what was coming up for me in 30 minutes, and what it meant for my own personal development – my first thesis interview. And how did she handle it? She told me to walk away.

She told me to go for a walk, clear my head and get into a good space for my interview. She talked me down from my rising panic, and told me that what I needed to do at that moment was focus on my research. Our entire LMS was falling apart (not a usual occurrence I have to say. Of all the criticisms one may have of D2l, reliability is not one we often face), I was the only person around, and she was telling me to put my research first. I felt like a tremendous weight had been lifted, and I literally got some kind of warm chemical rush up my back as I heard her voice at the other end of the phone telling me to go and prep for my interview.

So I did. I walked away. Went outside. came back 10 minutes later, went into the meeting room and set up my computer. I closed the door. It felt a bit like that NFB film The Big Snit, where thermonuclear war is a-raging just outside the door of the house. But I went ahead and shut it out and did my interview. And it went very well.

Later when I emerged I found out D2L had come back fully online around 2:20, and all was quiet. My team leader had triaged the emails in our support email box while I was busy. All was well. Some co-workers had come back into the office and were hanging Christmas decorations. Sanity had been restored. And I was reminded once again that, when it comes to work, I am incredibly fortunate to be surrounded by supportive, caring people. Years of working in commercial media has meant I have worked for a lot of horrible bosses in my time. I can’t begin to express how my team leaders actions yesterday made me feel, other than to say it spurred me to spend the morning writing this post, as a small way of thanking her for what she did yesterday.

Thanks, Susan.

 
by Clint Lalonde on All the rest, Multimedia Tools

PageFlakes – a cautionary reminder that free comes with a price

This morning Alec Corous tweeted a crowdsourced call for tools for a workshop he is presenting. I responded and suggested a couple of aggregators in Netvibes and PageFlakes.

I am a big Netvibes user & fanboy – it is one of the web tools I could not live without as it is my central dashboard for my online life. PageFlakes is a tool I have used in the past, but hadn’t touched for awhile and when Alec went to check the PageFlakes site, it was down. I started poking around and asking a few questions and discovered that it does look like Pageflakes is gasping it’s final breath. It’s probably not a good sign that the official company blog hasn’t been updated since July 2008, and most of the comments posted on it these days are for male enhancements.

It served as a good reminder for me – a message that I forget until something like this pops up. Not that I am going to stop using these tools, but every once in awhile it’s a good thing that something like PageFlakes dies as a cautionary tale that many of the tools I use and, in some cases, have come to rely on are just a single bad quarter away from disappearing.

Which is why data portability is such a crucial issue, and one that I pay much more attention to when I sign up for a new tool these days.

The other thing I have been paying more attention to when signing up for free services is what is the business plan? Is there a way that this service is making (or can make) money? And is there a way I can pay a few dollars for those services that I have come to rely on. I do this with the wiki service I use. I also pay for my own web hosting for this blog. If there is a way I can pay, then I don’t mind kicking in a few dollars for a service that I truly find valuable. After all, everyone has to make a buck, and I am not adverse to paying for something if it means it has a better chance of surviving in the long run.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Social Networks, Teaching & Learning

Network vs Community

A post by George Siemens on PLN’s earlier this week has really pushed my thinking about legitimate peripheral participation, lurking, and the differences between a learning network and a learning community with respect to social expectations and identity.

I don’t like to think of myself as a ‘taker’, yet I do often consider myself a ‘lurker’. I do not equate ‘lurking = taking’. Sometimes I lurk, sometimes I take. Sometimes I feel I don’t have anything to add to the conversation, so I just like it as a way to acknowledge that I have been there and send a signal to my connection to keep those weak ties bound. Sometimes I contribute something back.

I still find myself uncomfortable. The dialectic nature of learning does not always come easy to me. Even posting my response to George made me uncomfortable, to the point where I was almost apologetic to George for bringing the whole issue of lurking up in the first place as I felt that it distracted from the important point he was making about the need to act by contributing something to all these connections we are busy making.

The reasons why I felt uncomfortable are complex and personal, primarily centered around my own issues of often feeling like I am an imposter at the table. It’s a feeling I have often, even in f2f social situations. I don’t bring this up as a way to exercise my own personal issues as some sort of angst-y therapy blog post, but rather to highlight the complex and highly personal nature of why we may choose to contribute or not contribute (and while reading comments like “Lurking in the physical world is done by thieves, spies and ethnographers” makes me smile, it also doesn’t make a self-proclaimed lurker feel anymore comfortable about contributing). I still feel like something is at risk when I post something. It is a barrier for me, and one that I can’t (or choose not to) always overcome.

I think the fact that I “sometimes” feels like a lurker illustrates the fluid nature of our own personal identity on the web, a point underscored for me when I read George’s reply to  Tannis Morgan’s comment in which he was articulating the differences between identity in a network, and identity in a community.

Hi Tanis – identity and positioning are very different things in networks than they are in community. I don’t want to get into the whole community/network debate here (we do that annually in CCK courses), but networks have different social structures than most communities do. A community has general rules, guidelines, and soft social pressure. We get these in networks to a lesser degree. In networks, for example, we can have parallel conversations where I follow you, I know what you’re writing and thinking about, it forms my development, but I don’t have to focus explicitly on what you (and others) say. Conversations are abundant, diverse, fragmented, and complex. In a community, stronger protocols exist. For example, in a virtual community, if everyone is blasting out random thoughts and ideas, we conclude there is no engagement. On Twitter, I can contribute, create a few resources, post them…and maybe people will respond. Or maybe they won’t. But it’s ok, in a network, to contribute and not be explicitly acknowledged. In a community, contribution has stronger social norms – i .e. it needs to be acknowledge, discussed, and so on. As a result, the identity of individuals in social networks has a different impact than it does in communities. But I need to think a bit more about what exactly that difference is…at this point, it seems to me that identity is more fluid in networks and therefore has less requirements of expected behaviour or roles than we find in communities.

Reading this was a bit of an aha moment for me (and a duh moment as well). A learning network is not a learning community. There are differences, both subtle and profound, between the two.

Which brings me back to Wenger & Lave’s legitimate peripheral participation, and how my thinking got shifted by this post. LPP is a concept that is very much tied to communities, specifically Communities of Practice. But, as George points out, a network is not a community. They are two different entities, and the social expectations for involvement in both are different. In my attempt to understand the nature of networked learning and PLN’s, perhaps I am transferring too much from the Community of Practice model, and not fully acknowledging that there are fundamental differences that exist between learning in a community and learning in a network.

Which makes me wonder at what point do our models of thinking – models that have served us so well over the years – begin to get stretched too far? At what point do our models begin to hold us back instead of give us the foundation to move forward? At what point does our scaffold begin to fall down and need to be rebuilt again?

Finally, this all makes me think that we do a disservice to both the terms “lurking” and “legitimate peripheral participation” when we use them interchangeably (guilty). They are different things, and I sometimes think the (undeservedly) pejorative nature of the term “lurker” often gets dressed up with the much more acceptable term of legitimate peripheral participation. Legitimate peripheral participation may begin with lurking, but there is an expectation that this is the first step in a continuum for a learner in that they will eventually move out of the lurking phase and take a more active role in a community.

 
by Clint Lalonde on All the rest, Social Networks

Academics work around the paywall

Academics are finding ways around paywalls to provide access to academic research for colleagues. That’s one of the findings of research conducted by Jason Priem and Kaitlin Light Costello of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on how and why scholars cite on Twitter.

In the research, Preim and Costello analyzed the links tweeted by academics. They  broke the tweets down into 1st and 2nd order tweets. 1st order tweets were tweets that contained direct links to peer reviewed resources. 2nd order tweets were links to a web page (like a blog) which contained either a link or description of a peer-reviewed resource. The tweets analyzed were almost evenly split between 1st and 2nd order links (52%-48% respectively).

What is interesting about this is the reasons why academics link to 2nd order resources. Some found that it fit their workflow better. But others said that it helped them get around paywalls to articles.

That second point bears repeating. It helped them get around paywalls to articles.

[Armando] I’m much more likely, if I see an article that I think is really interesting, to blog about it myself and post a link to that or to link to someone else’s blog about it. Because you can provide a little more substance that way, even to people who do not have access to it behind the paywall.

The quantitative data support this interview finding. While 56% of first-order links were open access, only 25% of second-order links were free to access. This significant difference (p < .001, ?² = 12.86) suggests that scholars may prefer to link directly to the article when it is open access but will resort to second-order links to bypass paywall restrictions. Participants were attracted to open-access articles for Twitter citations; Ben said “I would certainly be much more likely to link to things if they were more readily available.”

Now, I am no academic. I am clueless about how the inner machinations of academic publishing work. But something tells me when academics are finding ways to work around the restrictions put in place to prevent access the research they are creating – well, that tells me something is not quite working with the current system.

Thanks to Tom Fullerton for sending this article my way – via Twitter – a first order citation of the highest order.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Camosun

On the episode of The Office where Dwight was in Second Life and his avatar looked EXACTLY like him

I changed my identity this week. Like some Cold War secret service agent, I was able to slip off my old face and replace it with a new one. On Twitter I went from:

to:

I made the change because I am taking part in the prostate cancer fundraiser Movember, and thought that people who have donated to support me should see exactly what it was they got for their money.

Well, the change prompted one of the most enjoyable and interesting days I have had on Twitter. I was at work, laughing out loud in the office at the banter going back and forth, triggered by my sudden moustached resemblance to a circa 1977 Burt Reynolds.

But mixed in with all the frivolity was something else. First, people who I had never connected one on one on Twitter with were sending me messages, and engaging in conversation. It sparked this blog post (and another one from Helen Keegan as we are sharing our thoughts on this subject as a bit of a blog-off), and a deeper realization of just how important these little symbols of us are and what messages they send about us to others in our network.

Lately I have struggled with how to represent myself online. Little Clint has been my primary online avatar for years. It has become my calling card. It’s my gravatar when I post comments on blogs and leave my mark around the net. It’s how I have always identified myself on Twitter, and was my default Facebook avatar for years. The little guy has become my online stake in virtual ground; something of a marker for others in my network, which is part of the reason why I struggle with changing it. As Helen said in her tweet,

it’s difficult coz consistency (icon) easily tied to ID/reputation, yet in reality ID can be so fluid…

For all intents and purposes, Little Clint (in all his 8 year old retro hipster cuteness)  is me. When someone in my network comes across something on the web that I have already left my mark on, it is a signal to them that someone else from their network – someone they presumably trust – has been there.

Case in point, last week I visited the site Academia.edu for the first time. Had never been there, somehow stumbled across it from some link somewhere. What was the first thing I saw on the page? Well, because I was logged into Facebook, and because Academia.edu is integrated with Facebook Connect, I was greeted by the smiling avatars of two people from my FB network – two people in my circle of trust who I recognized immediately. Now, this doesn’t mean I see their images on this website as a personal endorsement, but it was certainly enough for me to determine that this site was something I might want to dig into a bit.

As more and more services become integrated with the Internet Holy Trinity (Twitter, Facebook and Google), a simple change in avatar on one social network service can have ripple effects far down the line.

Over time, we all change. Our physical appearance, the way we think about things, who we are is constantly in motion, sometimes from day to day. So why shouldn’t our avatars change to reflect who we are at that moment in time? Why shouldn’t we be able to use whatever symbol or photo or image to represent us? But when we are in an environment where trust and reputation are hard to establish, do we run the risk of weakening those signals of trust to our network by undertaking the simple act of changing our avatar?

I do love Lil Clint, but I don’t know if he really represents who I am. This is especially noticeable when I go to a conference where I am going to meet people in my network f2f for the first time.  I often think I should buy a bunch of t-shirts with that avatar plastered on it, and wear it on the first day of a conference just so people can attach that image to me.  Like the importance of using your own name on social networks, I am beginning to think it is time to retire Little Clint.

But I wonder what I might lose by suddenly abandoning him and replacing him with a more generic photo of myself. Little Clint is pretty distinctive. Big Clint is just another face in the crowd. It’s not those that I have strong ties with in my network that I think about. They’ll catch it. But will those who I have weak ties with even recognize that I am the same person? Will they connect the two? Will they even care?

Maybe I worry too much. After all, changing my avatar this week did result in some great new connections and a couple of gut-busting howls. But I wonder how many people in my various connected networks are now wondering who this new face is, and is it someone they can trust?

The title, in case you are wondering, comes from the American version of The Office and is in reference to this scene. Maybe Dwight was right?

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Social Networks, Teaching & Learning

PLENK2010

I’ve signed up for Personal Learning Environments Networks & Knowledge, a Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) from Stephen Downes, George Siemens, Rita Kop and Dave Cormier. I am not sure how much I will be able to participate, considering I am already in the throes of a thesis, but the topic is so perfectly aligned with my thesis research on PLN’s, informal learning and the role of microblogging that I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to participate at some level.

Conceptually, there is a pretty clear distinction in my head between PLE’s and PLN’s. In very broad terms, I think of PLE’s as the technology, with the PLN being the people. The PLE enables me to build a PLN. Not that everyone who is part of my PLN requires technology to connect with, but technology has made my PLN much richer, more diverse, and instantly available.

Personally, I am more interested in the PLN than the PLE. Considering I am primarily a technologist in my day job, this is probably a bit off-kilter, but while I use a PLE (built primarily in Netvibes and good ol fashioned, still alive and kicking butt in my little world RSS) and find it invaluable to my learning, I realize I am not a typical user. I do wonder how viable the idea of learners constructing their own environments really is within the context of higher education, which is one of the things I hope this course will help me come to terms with.

But the PLN – I am much more interested in the PLN as a learning construct, both formally and informally, and how it is similar or different to other learning constructs, such as networks of practice and communities of practice.

About a year ago, I wrote about my casual search on trying to historically define the term Personal Learning Network, and came across a 1999 article by Dori Digenti called Collaborative Learning: A Core Capability for Organizations in the New Economy (pdf) in which she noted that reciprocity and trust are two crucial elements in constructing a PLN. I have thought about, and referred to, this article a lot in the past year, specifically when speaking about the idea of reciprocity and how it manifests itself in a network enabled PLN. The more I have thought about it, and the more I examine my own use of a PLN, the more I realize that the reciprocity in a PLN is not so much between myself and individuals within the PLN, but between myself and the PLN itself. I find myself both answering and asking questions to a relatively anonymous group of people whom I have weak ties with, with whom I have developed a certain level of trust with, based primarily on the ambient exposure I have to them and their ideas as a result of them being open and transparent on the web. How did I get to trust these people? Why do I think they know something that will help me? And what are the expectations of me of the people who choose to include me in their PLN? What are my responsibilities? Or are there even any responsibilities?  Oh, the questions.

The other point on PLN’s that I am interested in is a bit more grounded, and that is whether people who use PLN’s use them as a general tool, or segment them to professional development. In my view, a PLN is a general learning tool regardless of what I want to learn, yet I often see PLN’s used primarily as tools for professional development. But I realize that I only get a small glimpse into other people’s PLN’s based on who I am and the role they believe I play in their PLN, so this is probably not the case.

Okay, I need to wrap this up. Hopefully I’ll be able to articulate some of this more clearly in the coming weeks, and be able to contribute to your PLN’s in a meaningful way. At the very least, I am happy to be along for this PLENK2010 ride.

 
by Clint Lalonde on My Masters, Social Networks

An Amazing Story of Openness

More reading for my thesis lit review has uncovered a story that would fit nicely into Alan Levine’s growing collection of Amazing Stories of Openness; “personal stories that would not have been previously possible, enabled by open licensed materials and personal networks.”

This one involves Twitter, and comes from a research paper called How and why people Twitter: the role that micro-blogging plays in informal communication at work.

The open subscription feature in Twitter not only allows users to find interesting people to follow for exchange of information and thoughts, but may also help to establish valuable personal relationships for future collaborations. Tom told us an amazing story about such an experience. A while ago, he tweeted about a book that he was reading and liked a lot. Natasha, a social constructer, was reading the book at the similar period of time. She found Tom’s tweets about the book very interesting and they started following each other on Twitter. Natasha worked on a project with the Kenyan government working to pull Kenya people out of poverty through ICT. Several months later, Natasha sent Tom a message on Twitter asking whether she could talk with him to learn more about Tom’s company before her meeting with executives of the company about the Kenya project. After the meeting with Tom, Natasha invited him to the executive briefing and also invited him as a representative from the company working on the Kenya project. In Tom’s words:

“So, that’s the type of relationship that can be built simply through Twitter. I never knew Natasha, and haven’t been knowing anything about Kenya. She finds me because our common interests and developed a positive relationship that I am very proud of and very interested in continuing.”

Later in the paper, the researchers elaborate more on this relationship.

In the story that we have described previously about Natasha inviting Tom into her Kenya project, Tom told us that this collaboration opportunity not only came through a personal relationship built between him and Natasha, but also because she was able to get to know him from his Twitter updates.

“One of the things that I said to [Natasha] is that I am not an executive and I don’t have any related to executive pool. She said, yeah, I know, I have been watching you for 4 or 5 months now, I understand who you are and I understand your position, but I still want you to be part of this conversation because I know you understand [the technology]. She didn’t care whether or not I had any executive poll, she knew from following me on Twitter, what I was interested in and she knew how I could help her.

Would this type of opportunity come about for Tom BT (Before Twitter)? Perhaps, if Tom and Natasha were in fairly close proximity to each other, and had the opportunity to interact on a fairly regular basis in such a way that Tom could showcase his expertise in an area that Natasha was interested in. But the fact that Natasha was able to follow Tom’s work for such a long period of time, and observe, in such an unobtrusive, ambient way, the level of Tom’s abilities and understanding on a topic Natasha was interested in says to me that there is a different form of relationship building happening here. And, more importantly, a different measure of how we determine who the “experts” are who can provide us what we need when we need it.

Zhao, D., & Rosson, M. B. (2009). How and why people Twitter: the role that micro-blogging plays in informal communication at work. In Proceedings of the ACM 2009 international conference on Supporting group work (pp. 243-252). Sanibel Island, Florida, USA: ACM. doi:10.1145/1531674.1531710

 
by Clint Lalonde on My Masters, Teaching & Learning

An interesting dichotomy in formal and informal online learning

More lit review reading for my thesis, this time an article called “Exploring the Role of ICT in Facilitating Adult Informal Learning” in which an interesting dichotomy emerged from the research. It’s one that I have heard before which goes something like this.

The researchers conducted a survey of 1100 people in the UK on the role that ICT (information and communication technology) plays in learning, both formal and informal. Among their findings was the tidbit that people who might never use ICT for formal learning use it regularly for informal learning. That is to say, they would not consider taking a web-based college course in, say, photography, but yet they are likely to use the web to learn about photography.

Interesting. And raises some questions. The first one is why the hesitation to take a formal online course in a topic they are interested in? Here is the first response, from a 38 year old woman who owns her own web development company, who the researchers suspected would be a prime candidate for an online learning course.

Researcher: But have you been tempted by all the online courses you can take, never actually having to leave the comfort of your front room?

Interviewee: I’ll tell you what puts me off those—I’ve had scan through the leamdirect courses—and it’s the feeling that they’re trying to teach basic skills without teacher interaction, and I personally like classroom interaction. And I don’t think you can get the same buzz doing it online. I chat [on the Internet] quite often to friends in the States. In chat rooms the difficulty is that it becomes very disjointed and you lose threads very easily and you lose the interaction that you get when you’re face to face. And I think that’s the disadvantage of it…if I wanted to learn maths or something I think it would be great. But I think if you were learning something that required a bit more interaction, I would treat it with a bit of distrust.

Distrust. Strong word. So, not only does she perceive that there would be a lack of interaction with classmates in an online course, but she also goes so far as to say she would approach a course that didn’t offer interaction with a “bit of distrust”. Her preconceived notion is that a formal online course would lack interaction. Granted, this research was done 6 years ago and I suspect her perceptions were probably closer to truth in 2004 than in 2010, but it is surprising how often I hear attitudes like this in casual conversations with people, especially those who have been away from formal learning for the past few years.

What about that photography example from earlier? Here is the response from a 63 year old male:

Researcher: Would you consider doing a formal photography course on the Internet?

Interviewee: Yeah, there are camera courses. I’ve thought about It, but I’ve probably got to the stage now that I don’t want to be bothered. I think I’ve learnt enough, but I pick most things up. I can sit down and read something on the computer and I’d have the gist of how to do the job.

Now, there is no explanation as to why he can’t be bothered (maybe it’s too expensive, or he considers this “just a hobby” and does not require a formal course – his incentive to attend isn’t great), so this speaks as much to learner motivation as it does to the perception of the quality of an online course. Seems to me, however, that his response is an endorsement for his perception of the quality of open educational resources and open communities available on the web. Not that he thinks they are better than what he might find through an institution, but they are good enough to satisfy his learning needs.  If a learner is getting what they need from the open sources on the web, then does that reduce the motivation for them to attend college or university? Is their learning itch being scratched by the availability of open resources on the web?

According to the authors, these two examples are not isolated responses in their study, and “these attitudes towards ICT-based formal learning permeated our interviews.”

Neil Selwyn and Stephen Gorard, “Exploring the Role of ICT in Facilitating Adult Informal Learning.,” Education, Communication & Information 4, no. 2 (May 2004): 293-310.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Teaching & Learning

Pragmatic Collaborative Autodidacts

There have been many posts and accounts of the One Week | One Tool project in which a group of twelve digital humanists from diverse backgrounds got together and created something from scratch; the wonderfully useful Anthologize WordPress plugin that will turn your blog (or collection of feeds) into an eBook. The project was coordinated by the Center for History and New Media.

One of the participants, Douglas Knox, has written a post that examines the project from a pedagogical perspective.

The pedagogy of One Week | One Tool was grounded in tacit values that are recognizably characteristic of people who are drawn to Digital Humanities, and yet much of that culture is not necessarily overtly tied to technology at all. There is a kind of geeky communitarian anarchy, a tropism toward the values captured in the phrase “rough consensus and running code,” that lends itself to a paradoxical kind of pedagogy: self-taught lessons in group dynamics for a team of pragmatic collaborative autodidacts. With the right group, or the right expectations and balance of uncertainties, twelve people can all be simultaneously service-oriented and capable of exercising leadership, flexibly and as needed in pursuit of a common goal.

I love that phrase “pragmatic collaborative autodidacts” as a way to describe the characteristics of the people involved. Collaborative autodidact does seem like a paradoxical term. After all, when you think autodidact, you probably think of someone who places a high value on personal autonomy, rather than someone anxious and eager to collaborate with others on a project. But it feels like an important term when you start thinking about a world that places increasing importance on collaborative skills, and where the ability to continually learn what you need to know is crucial, as the half-life of skills continues to decrease.  To me, pragmatic is the key here, and what binds the other two concepts into something powerful. Pragmatic is important because it suggests a humbleness; a willingness to know when to let go, when to step up to lead, and when to fall back and follow, all in the name of getting the job done. Not an easy mix to find, and one that Knox himself wonders if it is reproducible in other contexts with other participants.

However intensely production-focused One Week was, and however use-focused its resulting tool, as a pedagogical intervention it raises some important questions for which the answers don’t seem at all obvious yet. Was this a pioneering laboratory experiment under exceedingly rare, carefully prepared conditions? What would it take for its lessons to be replicable in other contexts?

It’s a good question, and I wonder if we can get a clue from the subtitle of the project: “a digital barn raising“. A traditional barn raising saw members of the community come together to create something tangible for other members of the community. Some groundwork was established ahead of time, and the more experienced members of the community coordinated the on site work, alternatively leading, training others, and constructing. A contemporary model might be the Sustainable Living Arts School in Vancouver, where small groups of neighbours gather for a  learning party centered around the theme of sustainable living. One week you might be the teacher, the next the student. These might have analogies to, or commonalities with, the One Week | One Tool project.

At any rate, the end result is a useful tool that will benefit many in both the academic and non-academic world, and will perhaps inspire others in academia to take on a project like this to create useful digital tools for academics, something not manufactured by Google, Apple or Microsoft. And, as Douglas notes with a nice riff on Margaret Mead at the end;

There is power in the premise that there are many latent groups of a dozen people ready to imagine themselves into existence to get something useful done.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Teaching & Learning

Are these threats to institutional higher education?

As my thesis research continues, I find myself getting increasingly drawn into the world of informal learning, autodidactism and self-directed learning, and the role that the web plays in facilitating this type of learning. Thinking about these topics makes me think about the future of the formal higher ed institution, which, incidentally, is not a topic of my thesis, but seems to naturally flow into my thoughts when I start looking at this type of learning.

More and more I wonder about what post-secondary institutions will look like in the future as a result of the increased availability of not only high quality educational content, but also ready built communities of experts that learners can tap into and interact directly with. With a little know how and motivation, the sky is the limit as to what a self-directed learner can learn on the web IF you know how to learn.

Some things that I have come across this week that have made me go hmmmm about this particular topic.

The example of Ryan Genz, a fashion designer who, along with his partner Francesca Rosella, came up with CuteCircuit, a clothing design company that creates wearable technology – intelligent clothing that integrates technologies like LED lights and cell phones into fashion using smart textiles and micro electronics.  According to Francesa, when they first started the company and approached engineers to realize their designers, they found that engineers couldn’t get past the idea that they wanted their circuits to look a certain way.  They were dismissed by the engineers, and Francesa felt like the engineers thought “they were insane” for wanting them to design a circuit board that looked like a heart. So, rather than getting rejected and packing it in, Ryan – a fashion designer with a background in Anthropology – decided to teach himself how to build circuits. It took three months for him to learn, but in the end he taught himself how to engineer electrical circuits to build clothing like this, and go on to forge a successful company in a highly competitive field. (via the Outriders podcast from the BBC)

The recruitment practices of Zoho. Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho, a well known tech company that develops online collaborative and productivity tools, recently gave a talk called “Alternatives to College” in which he outlined Zoho’s recruitment and talent development process. Sidar is a PhD from Princeton, but yet looks away from academia when hiring for his company.

Based on a few years of observation, we noticed that there was little or no correlation between academic performance, as measured by grades and the type of college a person attended, and their real on-the-job performance. That was a genuine surprise, particularly for me, as I grew up thinking grades really mattered …

Over time, that led us to be bolder in our search for talent. We started to ask “What if the college degree itself is not really that useful? What if we took kids after high school, train them ourselves?”

Bill Gates, is also publicly questioning the idea that young people have to go to university to get an education. Now, granted, Bill is perhaps one of the worlds most famous autodidacts and university dropouts, but having someone with his cachet publicly question the role of the university as it is currently structured will engage some people, and might spark more debate on exactly what the role of higher education institutions will be in the future.

Finally, there is the example of James Marcus Bach, who refers to himself as a buccaneer-scholar and has written a book on the subject called Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar: How Self-Education and the Pursuit of Passion Can Lead to a Lifetime of Success. The book is his account of how he “found success in a highly technical field without the benefit or burden of a conventional education”. Now, I haven’t read the book, or know much about the methods he talks about to help others become buccaneer-scholars, but the point being is that here is a person who has no formal training or education in a field (software testing), and, through self-directed methods and with the help of the web, forged a successful career.

Now, I am not ready to espouse a view that learners are going to become self-directed learners in the future and flee screaming from a formal higher education and the public institutions that provide them. I still think many students, especially at the under-grad and college level, will want the structure and guidance that an institutional education offers. Heck, I want it, and I do consider myself as someone who is a self-directed (if not always highly efficient or focused) learner.

And then there is the whole idea of the value, both perceived and real, that comes from having an institutional accreditation stamp of approval next to your name. This will continue to provide incentive and motivation for students to attend a formal post-secondary institution for their education. But I am left with an uneasy feeling that, in an age where learners are going to have so much choice as to how they get “an education”, post-sec institutions are going to come under increasing pressure to maintain their relevancy, beyond being the place that merely provides “the papers”. Because someday soon, someone will figure that out that piece or, perhaps, just stop caring so much about it.

Photo: Threat Level updates by opacity used under Creative Commons license

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Teaching & Learning

Over 70% of faculty feel they are not proficient using online web space to teach

Going through some lit for my thesis this evening I came across this study on higher education faculty self-perceptions of technology literacy and how it relates to their pedagogical practice. Not surprising, the research shows that faculty who perceive themselves as technology literate are more likely to integrate technology into their teaching and learning practice.

What I did find interesting about this study was that 71% of faculty do not feel proficient enough to publish content to the web.

Perhaps the most overlooked area of software use has been in website/web page construction and/or personal web spaces. According to the survey results, only a mean response of 2.18 (16.5% of faculty felt that they were proficient in creating learning-based websites/pages, and 19.9% of the faculty felt that they were proficient with the integration of word processing software and websites/pages). Using online web space to teach or add breadth to a course ranked even lower, registering a mean response for faculty self-perception of 1.61 (71.2% not proficient).

It’s not that this is a particularly surprising result, but given how important the web is these days it does feel like a bit of a clarion call. After all, if faculty don’t feel like they have the necessary technology literacy to do something as trivial as post content onto the web, then having them move beyond this relatively basic function and onto more engaging models of pedagogy is going to be a big ask and, as the researchers note, a missed opportunity.

This may be a missed opportunity for faculty; students are working with learning-based web spaces from the time they enter elementary school until the time they graduate from high school. It may be time that faculty became more familiar with technology tools in order to better facilitate student learning.

David A. Georgina and Myrna R. Olson, “Integration of technology in higher education: A review of faculty self-perceptions,” The Internet and Higher Education 11, no. 1 (2008): 1-8.

 
by Clint Lalonde on My Masters, Social Networks, Teaching & Learning

How students benefit from open networked learning

Helen Keegan is a Senior Lecturer in Interactive Media and Social Technologies at the University of Salford, UK, and recently wrote a post outlining one particular experience in using social media with her grad class. Working with MSc. students, Helen had the students blog and use Twitter as part of an exercise in developing a digital identity. She goes on to describe “the eureka moment” for the students on how powerful these tools can be in connecting and engaging with people who are working in their field of study. For some context on the excerpt below, Jeremy Silver is (among other things) the acting-CEO of  the Featured Artists Coalition in the UK and a prominent figure in the UK music industry.

There were some hugely influential and heart-warming examples of the benefits of students developing a professional online ID. One of these took place after our IP/Digital Rights week, when each student was asked to write a post in response to Jeremy Silver’s blog. Silver had found this post (pingback?) and left a really positive comment. That was a eureka moment for all – the idea that they could write a post, and one of the industry’s leading figures value their perspective, treat them as peers, and take the time to enter into conversation with them. This was soon followed by one of the group telling me how he’d tweeted his Audioboo blog post, and ’this guy retweeted it, said something really positive about my post – think he might actually work for Audioboo’. It was Mark Rock, the CEO…

When Jeremy Silver and Mark Rock took the time to read the student blog posts, comment positively and re-tweet, they added so much to the learner experience and i’m pretty sure they won’t have realised just how influential those acknowledgements would be – not just to the two students, but to the whole group. They were the missing link between our students seeing themselves as apprentices and professionals, the whole ‘linking education to industry through social software’ idea, which although we have been focusing on for a few years now, has never been experienced in such a potent way.

As a student, I have experienced moments like this. It is an exhilarating feeling to see that your words and thoughts have moved someone you admire or respect to action, and provide a response. It is a highly validating and motivating moment as you begin to realize that you are moving beyond being a student of a subject to being a practitioner in a field.

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Social Networks

Will Facebook Questions mainstream crowdsourcing?

Facebook announced a new feature called Questions this week that might be the tipping point that makes technology mediated crowdsourcing a commonly accepted everyday occurrence as a way for individuals to find answers and solve problems.

Now, crowdsourcing is not all that new, but for most people I suspect crowdsouricng as a personal activity with a large network isn’t really on their radar. Sure, when you look for information, you might ask your friends or family for advice or post a question in a forum on the topic somewhere, but I suspect for most people harnessing the network effects of a large distributed mass of people isn’t really something they take part in.

Questions just might change that. Post a question using Questions (you can add a photo or a poll to the question – nice touch), and not only will your friends be able to answer it, but you can also send the question out to the FB network. Further target your question by tagging it with a subject keyword, and only people who are interested in that subject (I assume because they have declared it somewhere in  their profile) will get the question, giving you access to a bunch of people who have some (granted self-declared) skill and expertise in this area.

I haven’t seen the feature yet (it is being rolled out by Facebook as a beta to some users), so I am not going to speculate much more on it. And I am not sure how the questions will be posed to the network in an unobtrusive manner. If unsolicited questions just start popping up in people’s news streams, I suspect there will be a few upset users complaining about the added noise. But at first blush, it seems like the kind of feature that a social learning enthusiast can get behind.

EduDemic has an early look at how Questions could be used in the classroom.

Image: Share your ideas by Britta Bohlinger used under Creative Commons license.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Teaching & Learning

What research has to say for practice

This looks like a really useful set of online learning resources. Created by researchers with the Association for Learning Technology in the UK, What research has to say for practice is a wiki containing nine guides on various topics related to online learning. The topics are:

  1. Tutoring on-line – Gilly Salmon and Mike Keppell
  2. Web-based course design – Robin Mason and Frank Rennie
  3. Learner acceptance of on-line learning and e-learning – Allison Littlejohn and Brian Whalley
  4. Learning objects and repositories – Allison Littlejohn and John Cook
  5. Learning using mobile and hand-held devices – Mike Sharples and Agnes Kukuluska-Hulme
  6. On-line communities – Frank Rennie and Mike Keppell
  7. Technology-supported assessment – David Nicol
  8. Learning environments – Bob Banks and Gilly Salmon
  9. Using social software in learning – Frances Bell and Frank Rennie

Not only do the guides provide a strong overview of the topics, but are well referenced and (being that it is a wiki) editable by anyone who creates an account.

via Stephen Downes

 
by Clint Lalonde on Camosun, EdTech

Integrating Tech Tools: A Practical and Peer to Peer View

I had the great privilege of being invited to talk to the faculty of the Justice Institute in Victoria last week and speak with them about a few of the projects I have been working on with our faculty at Camosun this year. The talk focused on some practical ways faculty at Camosun have integrated technology in their class to solve specific problems or achieve specific pedagogically based outcomes, hence the “peer to peer” part of the title with me acting as the proxy for our faculty (although they did have a direct voice as I interviewed a couple of them about their projects).

The faculty and projects I picked used Skype, Twitter, YouTube and Posterous as the tools. Scope of the projects ranged from fairly small and discrete (using Skype to bring in a virtual guest speaker) to fairly ambitious (using YouTube as a platform for student created video projects, which involved 5 sections of Nursing students).

This was the first time I used Prezi as a presentation tool and enjoyed having a reason to use it. Before doing the presentation, I tweeted out asking for potential gotcha’s on using Prezi and got some good tips back, including to go easy on the zoom and pan as it can be nausea inducing on the big screen to have things continually spinning and flying from corner to corner, and to download a hard copy of the Prezi to my local machine along with any external resources I might have embedded in the Prezi, like YouTube videos. The one tip I can add to that from my own experience is to test the presentation on a projector beforehand as the projector will tend to lower the screen resolution and could change your layout when displayed on the big screen as a result. I noticed that spacing of my text was altered from the widescreen view I had on my laptop to the narrow projector view when plugged into the overhead projector.


JIBC on Prezi

 
by Clint Lalonde on EdTech

re/evolution

At the recent ETUG conference at UVic, I suddenly found myself pulled in as an unprepared participant for the final event of the conference. It was a friendly debate between the green team, arguing that  “technology is an evolutionary change to traditional campus based classroom teaching and learning” and the orange team arguing that “technology is a radical change to how teaching and learning are delivered”. Midway through the debate, Grant Potter had to rush off from the orange team, and called me up to take his place. I suddenly found myself in the midst of arguing the radical side with comrades Scott Leslie and Amanda Coolidge, to whom I extend my sincerest apologies to. Of all the really smart people in the room who could have helped argue this position, you got stuck with me. Blame Grant.

My contributions to the cause consisted of a single glib quip in which, in true revolutionary fashion, I denounced the entire monetary system. I also might have said something about someday students choosing to revolt in their own way by not showing up at our institutions because they found them irrelevant, but other than that I was pretty well seat warming. Like most of my life, I am often a day late with the point. So let me try to extend the conversation and make a few ill-informed points I wish I had made while I had a mic in front of me.

Scott carried the bulk of the argument for the orange revolution. When asked about the higher ed alternative learners might begin to seek out, Scott said he believed we might see a growing importance in the role of guilds and professional organizations within a particular field, and I agree. While this has been traditionally centered around crafts and trades, there is no reason to believe this guild model couldn’t work in almost any field, where a learner who exhibits knowledge in a specific area is acknowledge by peers within that field, completely bypassing a third-party institution like a university or college. Expertise of the learner becomes recognized by the very people who are involved in that field. Why have an intermediary institution involved at all?

To bring technology into this, one of the ways in which this expertise can be determined is through the use of a digital tool, like an e-portfolio/blog, published openly on the web. Learners document their own journey of discovery and provide open evidence of that journey in the form of personal publishing, creation, and active participation within the community. You want to prove you know something? Then connect with the experts in that field and engage with them. The Internet is facilitating connections between those that know with those that want to know. People become practitioners in a field not because they earned a paper at a university, but because they are actively engaging with others who are involved in that field, and get recognized as a valued member of that community by the community.

Scott also talked of the role of the itinerant scholar as another way in which students may begin to forge ahead on their own. Smart teachers are already beginning to do this; to figure out how to pave their own way and realize they don’t need institutions to teach, they can do it themselves. The ones who have figured out how important it is to be open, public, authentic and engaged, pushing content out into open spaces and developing their own digital identity will become sought out by learners. When the learners start looking, the itinerant scholar is already there, waiting for them. Easy to find because they have been openly and actively participating and are recognized by others in the field as an expert.

This is happening already, where reputation and expertise is being converted into learning opportunities. Look at people like Salman Kahn and the Kahn Academy. The work of George Siemens and Stephen Downes with their MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) , where expertise and reputation built by being open and online is translating into thousands of learners wanting to take their course, sans any type of institutional credit.

Another example I came across recently was from Sitepoint, an Australian company that haas developed a strong reputation as a leader in web development. Recently they offered a commercial version of a MOOC on web development technoloigies. For $10 a pop, students could take a course on JavaScript development from experts in that field. 3000 did. 3000. It was so successful, they are developing more courses.

These are the models that will win in the future. If I am a music student and want to become the best funk bass player in the world, do I take the music program at my local community college, or do I enroll in Funk U and get taught online by the greatest funk bassist in the history of music, Bootsy Collins? If I am a student and want to learn how to manage a professional sports team, do I enroll in a 4 year sports management program at my local uni that will cost me tens of thousands of dollars, or do I plop down a few bucks and buy shares in the English soccer club Ebbsfleet United, a team that is run by a self-organizing group who came together on the Internet, kicked in £50 each, and now own and run their own professional soccer club? Decisions about the club are thrashed about in their forums, and owners of the team are distributed around the world. What could give me more real life experience than running the entire club?

Finally, let’s not steampunk* ourselves and believe the technology in use today is the technology that we will use tomorrow. For example, there was a great deal of talk about how important physical presence and the importance of reading physical cues human beings give off during interactions. Well, true, but the advancements in visual communication has grown leaps and bounds, even in the past 5 years. You can’t buy a device these days that does not have a camera in it, and free tools like Skype make those sci-fi video phone calls of 50 years ago reality today. Already I can augment my reality with my cell phone. How much longer will it be before I have the ability to interact with people in a virtual reality space and have it feel like I am physically present with them? If the most valuable selling point of a higher ed experience is the ability to physically bring people together, then higher ed is truly in trouble. That crazy holodeck thing is pretty damn close.

I don’t know if any of this supports the point that “technology is a radical change to how teaching and learning are delivered”, but I needed to do a post-session brain dump of things that were rattling in my head after the debate. If you made it to the end, thank you. And I should end by saying there were lots of laughs in the debate and it was a fantastic way to cap off what was a really wonderful conference – one of the best ETUG’s I have attended. The videos from the sessions will be posted any day now.

* I am not sure if this is the correct way to use the term “steampunk“, but the Robida steampunk I learned about at Northern Voice a few weeks ago seems to fit this use – the shortsighted belief that the dominate technology of the day (in Robida’s case, steam) would be the dominate technology of the future since no other alternative (electricity, gas, or nuclear power) could even be imagined.

Photo credit: I am here for the learning revolution from Wesley Fryer used under Creative Commons license.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Social Networks

I'm not ready to commit Facebook harikiri yet

There is a lot of talk right now about quitting Facebook in response to concerns about privacy and how much personal information their recently introduced platform Open Graph releases to other websites. Concerns over privacy with Facebook are nothing new, but there seems to be quite a bandwagon developing this time as some people contemplate deleting their Facebook accounts. I’m not quite there yet.

Far be it for me to provide a defense for Facebook and their practices, but part of me wonders if Facebook opening up the data stream might actual have some positive benefits. I mean, isn’t openess generally a good thing? Isn’t this the kind of stuff that we in education want to see happen? Doesn’t this mean the walls around this garden are falling?

Take instant personalization for example. Imagine as part of my profile I list that I am interested in education and I go to a site that might have this kind of information on it. Wouldn’t it be useful for the website to automatically be personalized to present the specific information that I am looking for?  Perhaps I go to the CBC site and am greeted with all the most recent articles about education from that site. If I were a student studying a topic, instant personalization may be yet another guide  that helps me find the information I am looking for.

And what about my network as my filter? I like the idea of my network as my filter, and appreciate it when I go to a website and see the comments my Facebook network have left there, just like I appreciate the comments Diigo users leave with their annotations. It helps me validate the information I am reading. By having access to their opinions about what I am seeing, I learn. Vetted comments from my network, even something as simple as a like or dislike, are observational learning and useful pieces of information for me.

Finally – and a bit more technically – one of the principles of Connectivism that intrigues me is the idea that learning can reside in non-human objects. Whenever I read this, I equate it to (among other things) the semantic web where structured data can help create connections between pieces of information. To me, what Facebook has done with Open Graph is take a big step towards making these types of interactions happen. Granted, their intent is primarily for commercial gain, and there is questioning by those who know much more about this than I do about  how “open” Open Graph really is,  but Facebook has gone a long way to illustrating to the mainstream the concept of the semantic web. As someone who believes that semantic technologies have potential for learning by assisting us in making connections, I can’t help but feel that what Facebook is doing with Open Graph is a positive thing that will enable me to make connections with people interested in the same things I am. The problem is many people are getting pissed off about it, which makes me worry about how this could impact public perceptions of future high profile applications of semantic web-like technologies.

Now, I get that this is a precarious position to take, especially considering how fast and loose Facebook has been with the default privacy settings as the site matures. And there are many very good valid reasons to seriously consider your relationship with FB. But it seems like so much of the Facebook discourse is weighing in on the negative (which I do not want to downplay because they ARE serious issues), and failing to take into account some of the potential positive opportunities that could emerge from their work and the effect it could have on the social learning landscape. For that promise alone, I am willing to keep my Facebook network alive and well. At least for now