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I have moved to newlyancient.com and will be writing regularly there! Content on this domain is no longer updated, but will be maintained as an archive in its original form.

Tag Archive for 'social'

The 140 Character Lesson

1 year, 1 month ago 24 Comments

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Brain

There is a reason Twitter asks “What are you doing?” instead of “What are you thinking?” and I learned it today. Twitter is good for many things and I find it to be an invaluable part of my day, but its greatest flaw is also its greatest strength: Twitter is simple. By being so incredibly simple, great innovations and conversations can be built on top of it. Unfortunately, its simplicity can also mask the nuances of language and humanity. I discovered this the hard way: through trial and error.

Yesterday, I made the regrettable mistake of reading far too much into an innocent tweet:

@arthus Play with Group and Search. Then read about how the program works technically.
Adobe AIR

Upon the excellent suggestion of ijohnpederson, I had downloaded TweetDeck, an excellent app built on top of the AIR platform, and informed my followers of the fact. Upon reading the above tweet, I saw it as a lesson plan in 140 characters.

Summer is a time when I like to avoid being taught. (Though I do love learning during the summer.) Almost every twit I follow is an excellent teacher, with ijohnpederson being no exception. In my opinion, a hallmark of a great teacher is seizing upon teachable moments, until it becomes a subconscious process. Unfortunately, this is in direct conflict with the desires of a student during the summer. This was one lesson which came at the wrong time, with the wrong content. Considering the informal attitude of Twitter, I think both students and teachers need to adapt by seeing each-other as fellow learners. In this enviroment, passive learning should be encouraged, but I believe actionable teaching should be avoided—both teachers and students and teachers benefit from having time away from the classroom, whether it is virtual or physical.

Regardless of percieved and undesired lessons, I over-reacted. I could say I was being a whiny teenager, a influenced by hormones, or a little boy in a grown-up’s word, but the fact is that I simply misjudged the situation and reacted in an unacceptable way. By continually digging myself deeper into a pit of miscommunication, I irrationally exacerbated the problem. What should have been a quick conversation spiraled into an embarrassing and, frankly, pathetic display of my own immaturity. For that, I apologize to all involved.

Of course, this situation is not new: for ages, teenagers and adults have miscommunicated and been in conflict. The difference is that the entire conversation, every mistake and every response, is indexed and searchable for all of eternity. As Ryan Bretag rightly points out, this entire incedent (and the oh-so-mature responses of my elders) has become a part of my digital footprint:

Is this fair that this will forever be part of his virtual footprint? I understand he chose to be part of this so my point is a bit different than I’m describing here. My point is what about all the things teachers have students doing online where it isn’t a choice but the teacher’s mandate that some, most, a little, whatever of their learning, risk-taking, mistakes, failures, and success are public by way of the Web 2.0 tools we hold so close.

Honestly, I’m not here to attack participatory media. I’m simply expressing something that I’ve been pondering of late and it is something that I would say needs to be discussed. Are we doing our students a disservice by wanting so much of their learning to be shared through the tools provided by today’s Internet? Should this be a choice made by each student? Do they truly understand the gravity of such a decision? Will anything in their future be impacted, positively or negatively, because of this public display of their learning?

Footprint

In response, I believe that it is valuable to have this conversation as a part of my digital footprint. Learning done in a vacuum is not nearly as valuable as participatory learning. Just as I would pay more for a meal that I can see being cooked in front of me, I believe people will grow to value knowledge and wisdom which has a backstory. Who people are now and how they got to this place is becoming intermingled: the past is no longer shrouded in mystery. I believe this is a good thing, because it has always been so: a person is made of the sum of his past, his present, and his plans for the future. The crucial difference now is that someone from the outside looking in can now see the past as well as the present, while before they could only see parts of the present. Plus, I think it’ll be fun to laugh at my own immaturity in 40 years as I bounce around the galaxy.

Actually, it is somewhat heartening that such a simple exchange between a student and an adult has generated so much controversy and discussion: now, more than ever, students are being listened to and, yes, rebuked when they deserve rebuking. I certainly don’t think this should reflect upon the other members of Students 2.0, as I am certainly the craziest (read: immature) one of them.

I apologize to all invovled for my immature communication and behavior.

  1. Photo by Gaetan Lee on Flickr
  2. Photo by Joachim S. Müller on Flickr

Global Villages

1 year, 8 months ago 2 Comments

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This has been cross-posted from the new Students 2.0 blog. Please write your comments there, not here.

In The Sun

I live in two small towns. One, in rural Vermont, fits the classic definition of a small town: a quaint town hall and white church. Even more importantly: the community is closely knit. Whenever any interesting event happens, everybody knows about it within 24 hours. News spreads like wildfire; and our town town paper only comes out every month. We do not rely upon formal systems to spread the news. Instead, every person leverages their social network (the analog kind) to spread the news. Some people have immense networks (mayoral candidates) while others might only share the news with a couple of people. Regardless of how they learn it, within a week everyone knows about Mary’s new son.

I also live in another kind of small town. In this town, I control who attains citizenship. I am able to sculpt this village (network) to my exact tastes; creating a village with only those who interest me. This is a crucial aspect of our new networks—it is constantly engaging. How often have you been in a room filled with people but felt completely alone? This does not happen in our personal networks built online. Whether you agree with those in your learning network or not, they are always a source of a good conversation. Consequently, everyone in the network grows closer and closer into a tightly knit community.

Online Communities MapWhile many attempts have been made to map the internet before, too many of them focus upon the what and the how rather than the who. One of my favorite maps of the internet shows each tool as a country. I believe this is fundamentally wrong, because we build our network around the people, not the place. It doesn’t take a plane ticket to get from Myspace to Facebook—it takes a couple of steps. Usually, most of your network will walk right along with you. Thus, it really just becomes a matter of walking down the streets with your friends with your network. Together, you form a small village, with location based upon similarities in interests, not on geography (both physical and virtual).

Street Map

Just like in a real village, the news in our virtual (social) villages spreads like wildfire. From person to person, the news is passed. Never have I seen a more perfect example of this than with Students 2.0. In our first day alone, we got over 2,500 visits to our splash page. A significant portion of these visits can be attributed to the power of Twitter and our personal learning network. When we first launched the splash page, I watched as the tweets flew by—the village truly came through for us. The gossip certainly triggered an amazing reaction, which ended up growing exponentially.

After the original buzz on Twitter, the local (to our social village) news media came in. In our social village, this is the blogosphere. Seeing the amount of gossip and buzz happening, the local news media believes it merits a story. Of course, once one newspaper picks up the story, the rest follow. Shortly, over 100 stories were written about Students 2.0: bringing in even more gossip and conversation; the self generated P.R. cycle continues. Of course, then it is time to pull in a camera crew to produce a video.

Seeing the success of the video, even more people talked about Students 2.0 and learned about the project. Continually, the vibrations resonate through the village. A town bell has been rung, and everyone congregates on the town green, eager to hear the news.

The launch of Students 2.0 has been a great example of how powerful our social villages can be. I myself have learned a lot about myself, marketing, and the world through the participation in this project and the dialogue with my social village.

Going back to my real world village, I bemoan the location of my high school; it is outside of the village. While both are dependent upon each other, the school is not a part of the village. Consequently, all of the conversations happening within the village rarely infiltrate the thick walls of school. However, as I have seen with Students 2.0, our social villages can add immense value—both professionally and personally. By not utilizing this network, schools become stagnant; news flows slowly and change moves at a snails pace.

A critical step forward for schools would be to embrace the social villages of students and faculty alike. Schools should be developing portals and websites which take into account the social aspects of our lives. Even more importantly, once those networks are developed, the users should have the ability to welcome others into their village; too often we see systems which further isolate the school community from the larger social community.

This doesn’t need to be a radical step. Rather, a control system can and should be adopted—just as we selectively chose the citizens in our social villages (Twitter). Regardless of how this change is accomplished, it must come about; if schools continue to be separate from our social villages, our villages will continue to evolve exponentially while schools will stay rooted in the past.

The social villages we build around us—spanning various mediums—extend our mind and offer immense power which schools would do well to integrate rather than ignore.

Prometeus

2 years, 2 months ago 0 Comments

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The future is digital. In the future, reality is digital. Everyone is a prosumer. Web 2.0 is just the beginning of the social revolution. News will be social. Politicis will be social. Reality will be social. Prepare for the media revolution.

I’m not sure about the whole idea of digital reality… I was never one to embrace alternate realities like Second Life and World of Warcraft. Instead, I think we will get to a point where everything around us is digitalized, but we are still in reality. Consider everything being a Surface and every device/appliance/object being connected to the Internet. The line between reality and cyberspace begins to thin…