Nach ein paar Tagen Pause vom Internet, zumindest von diesem Blog, wieder zurück. Man hat eben auch als Halbrentner viel zu tun. Eigentlich wollte ich nahezu täglich meinen Alltag bloggen, aber manchmal schafft man’s nicht oder ist zu luschig, setzt andere Prios, etc. Vielleicht sollte ich mir vornehmen, morgens nach dem Frühstück ein paar Zeilen zu schreiben. Werd’s mal probieren.
Meine Teilnahme an der Quodlibet, der hamburger Antiquariatsverkaufsmesse, habe ich sehr genossen. Nicht übermässig viel verkauft, aber doch zufriedenstellend. Die gemachten Erfahrungen, den direkten Umgang mit Kunden und Besuchern, Kollegen usw. fand ich sehr erfrischend. Insgesamt bestärkte mich der Ablauf der Messe darin, dass das Gutenbergzeitalter seinem Ende entgegengeht. Viele Kollegen wollen das nicht wahrhaben, aber die Zeichen hierzu scheinen nicht nur am Horizont auf, sondern verwandeln sich in gleissende Spots, denen man nicht mehr ausweichen kann. Es wird mich dennoch nicht aufhalten und entmutigen, meiner Nebenbeschäftigung mit dem gedruckten Buch nachzugehen.

Gestern abend war eine tolle Runde bei Beckmann mit sehr interessantem Thema: Internet und wie es uns und unsere Welt verändert, der gläserne Mensch und die Allmacht des Netzes.. Die öffentliche Diskussion über diesen “Machtkampf” zwischen Mensch und System wird spürbar stärker und findet Eingang in sonst flaue Talkshows. Ich bin überzeugt, dass es nur noch wenige Jahre dauern wird, dass das Internet-System noch  rasantere Geschwindigkeit aufnehmen wird zur Vervollkommnung und Entwicklung eines eigenen Handelns und Bewußtseins. Vielleicht wird es schrecklich werden für uns Menschen oder segensreich, noch kann man das nicht sagen. Aber der Weg zur allumfassenden Verselbständigung und Mächtigkeit ist weit beschritten und nicht mehr aufzuhalten.
Karl Olsberg hat eine mögliche schreckliche Variante in seinem Thriller “Das System” vorweggenommen.

Wahrscheinlich sind die Zeiten nicht mehr fern, wo die beiden Google Gründer Sergey Brin und Larry Page sich nichts sehnlicher wünschen, sie könnten die Büchse der Pandora, die sie mit ihrer Suchmaschine und allen Konsequenzen, Entwicklungen daraus geöffnet haben, wieder schliessen. Aber diese Lawine wird weiterlaufen und vieles begraben. Die Firma Google hatte die besten Absichten, wird es eines Tages heissen.
Aufregende Zeiten in denen wir leben; man braucht wirklich keine SF mehr zu lesen, wenn sich in der Realität mit der Entwicklung des Internets und allen damit zusammenhängenden Themen eine Entwicklung zeigt, die weit über die Phantasien von Philip K. Dick oder Arthur C. Clarke hinausgehen. Bei mir formen sich auch einige Themen und Ideen für aktuelle SF-Geschichten; vielleicht sollte ich mir Zeit nehmen und versuchen, es zu Papier (haha) zu bringen.

Heute stand im Hamburger Abendblatt, dass die Post ihr normales Briefgeschäft bald einstellen wird, zumindest ein völlig neues Konzept anbieten will, nämlich eine Umstellung der besonderen Art: angeboten wird dann, dass E-Mails postalisch auf Papier den Empfängern zugestellt wird. Damit ist dann das Schreiben, das Anfertigen eines papierenen Briefes oder Dokumentes völlig out, aber man kann dann über die Post dem Empfänger noch etwas Materielles zustellen lassen. Ich glaube durchaus, dass dieses Konzept erfolgversprechend ist, aber es wird zu  einem Nischendasein führen, zumal sich die Post das bezahlen lassen will/muss. Damit ist für mich das Schicksal der Post auch klar. der Konzern wird sich auf diesem Sektor zum Nischenbetrieb entwickeln, mit der Folge von unzähligen Arbeitsplatzverlusten. Howard Rheingold, ein sehr kluger Internetbeobachter und Autor,  hat schon vor mehr als zehn Jahren derartige Entwicklungen (völlige Digitalisierung/ Virtualisierung) vorausgesehen.

Leo

The BBC is developing a unique four part documentary series for broadcast in 2010 on BBC Two. It has a working title of ‘Digital Revolution‘, and there are a number of ways we can all get involved, including helping Stephen Fry to come up with a better name for the series, and shaping the content of the series.

Here’s some blurb from the Digital Revolution website about the project:

‘Digital Revolution’ is an experiment in collaboration. We want to hear the opinions, thoughts and experiences from the populace of the web – you. Add your comments to our blog posts. Tell us the stories you think we should be covering. Your input will help shape our documentary.

One of the things I personally find exciting about the project is that as many as possible of the video rushes† are being made available by the site for us to watch, share, download and, significantly, edit ourselves (adhering to the licensing terms, which are similar to Creative Commons but have to differ because of the way the BBC is funded and run). This ties in with a previous post about Remix. Some of the people interviewed and available in these rushes include:

• Tim Berners-Lee
• Clay Shirky
• Charles Leadbeater
• Howard Rheingold
• Stephen Fry
• Jimmy Wales

many of whom I’ve written about, used quotes or photographs of in presentations or writings, or communicated with directly.

When I have time, possibly next week, I’ll certainly be remixing this video content.

You can follow Digital Revolution on Twitter @BBCDigRev

† Rushes (or dailies) are the unedited, raw film (video) footage from a days shooting.

Rushes sequences from interviews with web luminaries Howard Rheingold and Tim Berners Lee are among those now available for viewing and download on the Digital Revolution website.  It’s the latest development in what the BBC site describes as an “open and collaborative documentary looking at the way the web is changing our lives”.  The public are debating the issues, contributing ideas for storylines, and commenting on the emerging shape of the TV series that will be on BBC2 in the new year. The website has been buzzing with intense conversation ever since the project launched back in July.  It’s great to be able to see these rushes sequences at length rather than the inevitably short extracts that will end up in the cut programmes.  People can view, comment,  or edit the material under a one-off license.
Beyond the odd promotional clip, TV producers tend to be pretty nervous of letting material be previewed online. They can be worried the exposure will scupper interest in their linear output and awkward or rejecting of the idea of sharing what to date been very much an auteur project.  But opening up the process the way that Digital Revolution has is proving to be a grand exercise in community building in advance of the TV series. The internet is of course the perfect subject to approach in this way – as the BBC are trying to tell a story about the web platform and the demograph they need to engage with are available there. It wouldn’t work with every topic right now. Still, the approach is modelling a more open, dialogic form of TV making.
Digital Revolution is the working title of the series. The final name is of course being crowd sourced, and this has turned out to be an undertaking just made for twitter, a kind of 21st century parlour game, with tweets offering an array of more and less serious title ideas – “Chips with Everything”, “The Turing Stroud”, “Excess Babbage”…

Melody pointed me to this video of a flash mob dancing to the Black Eyed Peas’ ‘I gotta feeling’ in Chicago for a block party to celebrate Oprah’s 24th season. It’s quite awesome to watch. The organisers got the people behind the T-Mobile flash mob in London to work on it, and Oprah herself was completely clueless. Here’s how it was planned.

This was an engineered event no doubt, and therefore less ‘flash’ than in the typical usage of the term, but there’s still something to be said about watching people’s collective behaviour in a crowd. There was a time when the word ‘mob’ only had negative connotations. Flash mobs have changed that, and even more interestingly, are a phenomenon that only began with the increasing use of the internet and mobile technology. That’s pretty significant, don’t you think? I think ‘smart mob‘ is a much better description though, a concept introduced by Howard Rheingold in his 2002 book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Anyway, that’s the sociologist in me thinking aloud.

By Stefanie Panke
Editor, Social Software in Education

In August 2009, I received an email from Etienne Wenger, announcing a book he has written with Nancy White and John D. Smith called Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities (Portland, OR: CPsquare, 2009). In a way, this book is a follow up activity on a survey of community oriented technologies that Etienne published in 2001. I was amongst those who downloaded this report, finding an overview of various technology products and – more important – inspiring insights that helped me to understand the role of technology for communities. We were in the process of implementing community features for the portal e-teaching.org, a German Web site on e-learning in higher education. Since then, the concepts of situated learning and legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice have greatly influenced my work on the design of educational resources.

In a community of practice “learning means to become, that is, to belong differently than we do at the moment” (Lee & Roth, 2003). Since Howard Rheingold’s seminal work on virtual communities (1993), online communities of various kinds and in very different fields, such as marketing, education, community informatics, etc., attract researchers’ and practitioners’ attention alike. A fundamental question across the various perspectives and domains has been up to now how online communities work: How do they come into existence? What are critical success factors? And how can technology be designed to support community development? Digital Habitats develops a conceptual model to describe the skills necessary for choosing, implementing, and maintaining digital tools that enable a communities’ togetherness. The character of the work can be placed somewhere between practitioner’s guide, academic reflection, and visionary pamphlet. The book’s eleven chapters are clustered into four parts: “Introduction,” “Literacy,” “Practice,” and “Future.” The following summary outlines the content of each part and highlights a chapter or concept that I found particularly inspiring.

Part I

The first three chapters introduce the idea of learning communities, explore how their development is intertwined with technology, and finally define the notion of technology stewarding: “Technology stewardship is an emerging role that describes both a responsibility and a practice – an attitude as well as all the conversations, decisions, and learning that address the design and management of a community’s technology infrastructure” (33).

I was most impressed with the theme of chapter 2, which gives a historical overview of the mutual influence between communities and technology, drawing a bow from the Well to Web 2.0 and from the physicists at CERN to Ward Cunningham’s first wiki, invented to support the pattern community. “Technologies have changed how we think about communities, and communities have changed our uses of technology” (21). Technologies enable communities to form and to act in new ways, offering infrastructures for interactivity and connectedness. At the same time, communities have played a critical role in the invention of new technologies.

Part II

Chapters 4 to 6 introduce three different models on technology’s role for communities. These models constitute a specific kind of media literacy that allows for analyzing the technology needs of a community and pursuing a course of action. The first model includes different aspects of technologies such as tools, features, platforms, and configurations. The second model points out the inherent dilemmas of everyday community life. The third model deals with the specific traits of different communities, their so called orientation. “Communities learn together in different ways: some meet regularly, some converse online, some work together, some share documents, some develop deep bonds, and some are driven by the mission they serve. We say that these communities have different orientations towards the process of learning together. An orientation is a typical pattern of activities and connections through which members experience being a community” (69).

Chapter 5 offers a thoughtful perspective on the technology landscape, building upon three inherent polarities that challenge technology use in a community: Togetherness vs. separation, participation vs. reification, individual vs. group identity.

• Togetherness vs. separation: Community interaction follows a rhythm of togetherness and separation. The use of synchronous and asynchronous tools and the alteration between them are part of this rhythm.  “How do synchronous tools contribute to a community’s rhythm, both because they enable members to be together in time and because they often leave traces in the form of recordings or transcripts? In an asynchronous conversation, how often do people have to post something to sustain an experience of togetherness?” (57).
• Participation vs. reification: One could also call this polarity “interacting vs. publishing.” For instance, the writer’s community behind the ETC blog has a lot of discussion and negotiation that is handled through a mailing list. This is the “participation” part, where we interact with one another and negotiate meaning and identity. The “reification” part is happening when we actually write a blog entry or pursue a project: “Literally, reification means making into an object” (57).
• Individual vs. group identity: Learning together in a community of practice does not require or produce a homogenous group of people, all focused on the same goals. Communities cannot expect to have everyone’s full attention, since the activity level, learning aspirations, and needs vary individually. This creates both a challenge and potential for discourse, both being fueled by technology. “Technology contributes to the tension between individual and community. While a tool may be designed for groups, it is largely used individually, often when one is alone. Technology also increases the complexity of the group/individual polarity. By providing varied opportunities for togetherness, it also opens the possibilities for extreme multimembership” (59).

______________________________

“Technology contributes to the tension between individual and community. While a tool may be designed for groups, it is largely used individually, often when one is alone. Technology also increases the complexity of the group/individual polarity. By providing varied opportunities for togetherness, it also opens the possibilities for extreme multimembership.” –Wenger, White, and Smith

______________________________

Part III

Although the introduction states clearly that Digital Habitats is neither a shopper’s guide to technology products, nor a roadmap to technology selection, this part of the book comes close to filling out these roles. Chapter 7 addresses contextual factors that have an impact on technology choice, such as stage of community development, diversity and complexity, members’ experiences with and attitudes towards technology. Chapter 8 discusses the pros and cons of different acquisition strategies like “build your own,” “get a commercial platform,” “use open source tools,” “go for the free stuff,” etc.  The focus of chapter 9 is the ongoing role of technology stewardship in the daily life of a community. Chapter 10 gives a practitioner-oriented summary in the form of an “action notebook,” comprising checklists, step-by-step guides, questionnaires, and evaluation sheets. Actually, I found this section also interesting from a research perspective. One can use it as a concise instrument to analyze the characteristics of different online communities (see pages 149-152).

Part IV

The final part is an essay on the future of technology stewardship. The two central questions of this outlook are: “Where is the interplay between community and technology going?” and “How should technology stewards develop their practice?”

Chapter 11 identifies four emerging trends that influence out interaction within digital habitats. First, an increased connectivity around time and space is fostered by ubiquitous Web access through wireless networks and mobile devices (“always on”) as well as the new qualities of virtual co-presence in 3D environments. Second, we are facing new modes of engagement for interacting and publishing. The web is becoming a medium of self-expression. At the same time, technology enables mass collaboration on an increasing scale. Both perspectives are brought together through application programming interfaces (APIs) that support a constant remix of web content.  Third, the geographies of community and identity are changing. The complexity of the Web is growing. People can choose from a multitude of communities and resources. The boundaries between different Web sites are becoming more and more dynamic. Due to search engines, every voice popular enough becomes accessible. Individual content aggregation allows for a personal information diet that makes the mix palatable. Fourth, people are using the Web increasingly as a socially active medium. “The combination of distributed production, digital representation, and search capability make the web an active medium where the social and the informational build on each other” (179). Programs exchange and produce information about social relations, supported by semantic web technologies. Our digital footprints are intermingled with the reflections others imprint on us.

Who should read this book?

A review should not only tell you how much I liked the book, but also what you as a potential reader might get out of it. This calls for a clarification of the target group. Luckily, the authors have already done this job themselves, describing three groups of addressees.

• Deep Divers are interested in exploring the connections between technology and community from an interdisciplinary angle. Their focus lies in applying conceptual models and learning theories to the domain of technology adoption by communities of practice.
• Attentive Practitioners are interested in developing their practice, whether technology plays a major or minor part in it. They seek practical advice as well as theoretical concepts to communicate their role as technology stewards effectively.
• Just Do-It-ers are action oriented with a strong focus on getting the job done. Their main interest is in practical tips and tricks while the more conceptual aspects are in the background.

This review reflects a “deep diver” perspective. A practitioner’s summary would most likely highlight different aspects of the book. Whatever description characterizes best your interest in online communities, Digital Habitats is great reading for those who seek a compass to navigate the technology ocean.

For additional information and further discussion, see the accompanying weblog: http://technologyforcommunities.com/

Source

I have had a wonderful opportunity to explore personal learning in my new role at the University of Canberra. There are so many colleagues at the University keen to discuss and explore learning and there is a vast array of forums in which to engage. Last week I attended a Gaggle (“an orderly and cheerful group of professional educational advisors”) which led me to think again about personal learning (the topic for the gaggle was wiki development in vocational education). The meeting coincided with my reading of Steve Wheeler’s Dead Personal post.

Steve distinguishes between the personal web (“a collection of technologies that confer the ability to reorganize, configure and manage online content rather than just viewing it”, Horizon 2009) and a personal learning environment that “extends beyond personal web tools to encompass other tools and resources, such as paper based resources and broadcast media such as television and radio, as well as conversations with other people and so on. Having said that, each and every one of the above could be mediated through web tools, but they are not exclusively so”. Whilst reflecting on Steve’s suggestion and re-visiting the Horizon Report I was sidetracked by the delightful way the Horizon report is shared with readers. I managed to spend the next couple of hours looking at CommentPress as a format for my WordPress blog. (But I missed reading the About page!)

Source

A week later I was delighted to see that my fascination with a personal web met my personal learning environment when Bob Stein spoke with Ramona Koval on Radio National’s Book Program.  In their discussion there was an exploration of writing as a collaborative process with readers and the Gamer Theory project became a focus for this. Bob raised the question “If a book is a place what is the place of a book” (this post explores these ideas in detail) which lead to an intense discussion of the “broader ecology of reading and writing”. Bob was in Australia to participate in the Melbourne Writer’s Festival (for posts about his participation see here and here.). The promotion literature for his talk on the Future of the Book noted that:

The shift in our world view from individual to network holds the promise of a radical reconfiguraton in culture. Notions of authority are being challenged. The roles of author and reader are morphing and blurring. Publishing, methods of distribution, peer review and copyright – every crucial aspect of the way we move ideas around – is up for grabs. The new digital technologies afford vastly different outcomes ranging from oppressive to liberating. How we make this shift has critical long term implications for human society.

CCK08 opened me up to a wonderful perspective on sharing and collaboration. Many of the participants have added to my personal learning environment in the last year. The growth in Twitter since the start of CCK08 has been remarkable and this is becoming an important filter for me. Although my blog has links to many of the CCK08 participants it was a Twitter exchange between George Siemens and Howard Rheingold that added to my personal learning reflection.

Howard Rheingold has produced some great material this week (social media and mindful infotention) to ignite my revisiting of personal learning.  Seth Simonds in his post encouraged me to think about and clarify why to post (“The internet is not going to die if you feed it less frequently”). When I reached Justin Kistner (via Howard Rheingold) I realised the enormous possibilities for a vibrant personal learning environment (as with Nancy White’s delicious configuration links). This Editis video emphasised for me the possibilities of a ubiquitous personal web meeting the teachable moments created by one’s environment (I noted Tim McCormick’s point) or as this video demonstrates the lisable qualities of digital technology. Lisa M Lane had two excellent posts this week (here and here) about creating spaces and reflecting on the process of creating these spaces.

Nancy White’s post  about The Social Media Tools I Use brought me back to Steve’ post about the personal web and as ever I was keen to read what Graham Attwell had to say in his posts at Pontydysgu. Fortunately I read Michele Martin’s post about critical thinking so that my decisions about what to consider and share can be enriched by Snopes.

This post is a placeholder for me about incandescent ideas in a week of eclectic reading. It was initiated by a group of colleagues discussing wiki development and concluded at the Melbourne Writers Festival via asynchronous reading and participation. I was trying to write the post whilst listening to the Public Sphere 3 event as a virtual participant. The week reinforces for me the collaborative potential of personal webs and learning environments.

Ago 2009 | Mie 12

Howard Rheingold, profesor de la Universidad de Stanford y creador del concepto “multitudes inteligentes” o “Smart Mobs”, nos habla en este vídeo de periodismo ciudadano.

“El periodismo ciudadano va a ir más allá de democratizar el acceso a la información y servir también, aunque sea de forma imperfecta, como el filtro que el periodismo tradicional tiene”.

La pregunta respecto al periodismo ciudadano, Plantea Rheingold, es: “¿tendrá filtros eficaces que permitan, a una parte significativa de la población, obtener la información veraz que ellos necesitan para ser plenos ciudadanos en una democracia?.

En el contexto actual, comenta Reingold, “vemos al periodismo tradicional y a las marcas en las que la gente confiaba como se van encogiendo, se trata de un problema económico”, lo que ya no es una cuestión económica es “cómo va a recibir la gente la información que necesita, a la hora de ser ciudadanos informados, dentro de una  democracia” y “de dónde van a surgir las instituciones que van a permitir esto”.

Fuente: http://www.periodismociudadano.com/2009/08/12/howard-rheingold-el-periodismo-ciudadano-va-a-ir-mas-alla-de-democratizar-el-acceco-a-la-informacion/

I’ve the pleasure to publish another great interview made by Andrea Romeo, a really creative member of Brain 2 Brain! This time he interviewed Howard Rheingold by twitter: simply 2.0

Have a brainy time reading it.

Nowadays more and more people speak about social networks, and it seems that such instruments are becoming more and more powerful. There are lots of people that, unified under what are named smart mobs, work and fight against what they think wrong in their world. And these smart mobs are so powerful if we think that in Philippine, in 2001, they organized a rebellion against their president Estrada just using sms.

Social networks are a kind of Artu’ round table, where all the agents exchange information by a peer to peer relationship. Information can be manipulated, commented, filtered out, and put again in the stream of communication. Each agent has to have an active role in this “social game”, becoming filter of something which is bigger then him, or rather the communication itself which is a new environment, a new world. So the internet made the world of media so uncertain: the internet took off every certainty to the old power, the traditional media, the ancien regime, since what it was called mass now is the main player of this game.
And, step by step, the internet is getting its soul, is going away from the older media, becoming something new. We left the world of traditional institutions in the name of one made by entities. Those entities are people without a body, but that unify themselves in something new to find some true, to try to make a better world. And also, new powers came over there, in this digital eden, people with different aims. Some time they fight, other time they collaborate toward a common ideology and aim.
It seems that twitter is the most powerful social network ever. The communication is very fast there, as this new world imposes us. And also it is a communication very specialized, since you can follow (and be followed by) only people you are interested on, eliminating all the formal rituals the old programs imposed us (maybe because still linked to the traditional world). So, in few words, a World made by fast entities who deal with every sort of communication/information.

It was exciting for ME when I found out that my students were getting more involved in the internet (beyond just chatting on AOL). I ran home one night and created my very own MySpace! Then I started looking for my students! It never really occured to me that this might be considered unorthodox; I thought it was cool! I spent that first evening getting used to the interface, and commenting back and forth with the students that were online. I had to ask how they actually chatted, because, at that timne, there was no myspace chat. I found out that they were using AIM and Messenger to chat with their friends. My students really weren’t uncomfortable with this because they already knew me and trusted me and therefore, they didn’t feel like I was trying to catch them doing something wrong.

However, as this social media giant grew and grew, my students retreated. I still connect with those students from the first few years, but the number of students that shared my excitement to communicate this was dwindled drastically over the next couple of years. Now, when I put my URL on the syllabus or on the board, I was met with blank stares instead of awed expressions. I thought (naively) that these new students had not been introduced to these new communication tools and that I needed to explain it to them! Ha!

Now, it is so apparent what was going on, that I want to kick myself for not being less obvious with my approach. Instead of thinking that I was a cool teacher, my students were thinking that I was creepy! I most have looked like an enormous threat to their privacy and their individualism. I – Was – Encroaching – (Literally) – On – Their – “Space!”

I recently heard the term “Creepy Treehouse Effect” from flexknowlogy, another hubber on similar topics. That’s when it really hit me! My students (and yours) don’t want you to violate their personal space! They want to separate school and social life, just like it always has been – until now.

That’s when I did some more research and found that this concept was not stating that we, as teachers, should not find a way to get involved in their lives through the use of technlogy! Not at all – instead they want us to learn our own way to be professionals using the available media at our fingertips and teach them in an environment that is intended for educational purposes! Think about how it would feel if we took the classroom into their bedrooms or to the dances or malls! That is not where teaching takes place. So, now, I am finding more and more information about Virtual Learning Environments, or VLEs. Howard Rheingold (follow hrheingold on Twitter!) won the Hastac award in 2008 with his Social Media Classroom.

There are an abundant number of VLEs already in existence. The most popular, beside Rheingold’s, is Moodle. an Open Source, free downloadable Course Management System for Educators. It’s an amazing concept. Check it out and let me know what you think. You might want to create an account at Second Life too!

Howard Rheingold om vilka kompetenser som behövs i det 21 århundradet.
Ett 40-minuters anförande finns här:
http://blip.tv/file/2373937

*Festivals: Read NPR’s take on the Pitchfork Music Festival. Because public radio rules the rock and roll roost. (The previous statement contains an implicit commentary about modern society and the devolution of formerly rebellious forms of art.)

*Streaming: Spotify is on its way to the U.S. Slate reviews. I don’t normally care much for Slate.

*Phones: Textually points out this fat-burning concept phone. With obesity on the rise, how about a phone that derives energy straight from our expanding fat stores? You know what I mean? (Our guts.)

*Twitter: It has been stated that in the world of twitter, there are two camps: the favoriters and the retweeters. Here is a look into the enemy camp. [venturebeat]

*Illness: Melissa Auf der Maur kept a Swine Flu diary. [earfarm]

*Podcasts: I linked to this on Twitter, but I need to do it again. Listen to this podcast from The Memory Palace on Ben Franklin and his rumored death ray.

*Video: Howard Rheingold talking about 21st century literacies. I can’t spell. Or think. Or read.

*Ice cream: The Cloud Project proposes to seed neighborhoods with ice cream-flavored clouds. [wmmna]

*Obits: Walter Cronkite died. Esquire posted his “What I’ve Learned” interview. “I grew my mustache when I was nineteen in order to look older. I never shaved it off even though it overran its usefulness many, many years ago.”

*More on music and torture: Prisoners forced to listen to Dr. Dre and Eminem for 20 days straight. [harper's]

Last post I wrote a reflection for the culmination of my participation in the  Powerful Learning Practice program. Still, I felt I hadn’t drilled down to what was essential for me.

Listening to Howard Rheingold this morning, and rethinking things, I wrote another reflection.

My participation in PLP has been life changing. I know it smacks of evangelical fervour, and I’ve often written about this in my blog, but PLP came just at the point that I was ready for it. I’d just completed SLAV 23 things, and started a blog. Everything was new to me. Nothing was easy, I wasn’t a natural, probably more of a technophobe than anything, but something pulled me in. Jenny Luca must have read my blog somehow, and emailed me about joining the PLP cohort of Australian schools. It all avalanched from there. Soon I was blogging, wikiing, ninging, twittering, flickering, and having a great time.

Thinking about it more seriously, I realize there’s a big discrepancy between my personal awakening to online participation and what I’ve been able to do in convincing other educators at my school or anywhere else about what I see as a crucial path we must take in order to make learning relevant and engaging for students. Yes, I’ve made steps, and for me, these steps have been significant. I’ve been reflecting and sharing knowledge and resources in this blog, I’ve explored the literacy possibilities with Flickr’s image sharing, I’ve supported English and Art faculties with wikis, I’ve created a blog to inspire reading in the community, I’ve been working on a ning as a platform for learning, collaborating with a wonderful English teacher, I’ve sent countless links and resources to teachers as a result of my own connection to my online network. But it’s not enough. It hasn’t moved a significant portion of my school, it hasn’t changed the way my principal thinks, or other the way faculty heads function. Although, I suppose I shouldn’t underestimate small victories, such as the approval for an external fiction blog (read here and here).  On the whole, though, it’s often resulted in friends, family, colleagues casting a critical eye or making derogatory comments, telling me to get off the computerand get a life. Basically, I haven’t convinced many people that what I’ve spent an enormous amount of my own time on is worth anything.

It has, however, connected me to a network of people who are my lifeline. People I otherwise wouldn’t have met or known about. People who are experts in different fields, who are brilliant, engaged, supportive. It has crossed borders, transcended nationality, age-group, ignored physical apprearance and status – it’s been fantastic. I agree with many great speakers I’ve listened to: it’s not about the technology tools, it’s about literacies. Our students need critical thinking to navigate the flood of information and media that comes their way. They are learning outside of the classroom – and social media and technologies such as Youtube and Facebook provide a platform for communication, collaboration and collective action which is more important to them than their textbooks. One day it’s about organizing a large gathering through Facebook, and next thing, it’s organizing political action. None of it comes from teachers or parents; it wouldn’t spark that level of engagement.

I’m seeing the power of collective response to disaster. Why aren’t we thinking in terms of social capital? Why aren’t we thinking about how to mobilize people to do things using social media? What are we doing at school? How can we spark this level of engagement? Should we rethink the ways we are teaching, the content?

You can see that this isn’t about technology tools, although all of this is made possible through technology. These are the things that drive me today – as an educator, parent, citizen. I don’t have the answers but the questions are driving me forward, connecting me to others who find the conversation valuable. This is what my PLP experience has been about. Life is a series of new starts. That’s why we feel we never reach our destination. We’re always starting out with new questions and new problems to solve. That’s why it’s a journey.

There are times in your life when you get to go on a gig that, on the face of it seems relatively mundane, but actually has some significant relevance to yourself, your work and maybe even your life.

Traveling Geeks, on the face of it, looks like another round of US entrepreneurs and commentators foisting themselves on a UK public. But for me a it was a bit different, the key thing being able to talk candidly, openly and at close range with some people that I have admired for a very long time. Not in a conference style, but round a table as equals.

Howard Rheingold and David

For me, meeting and talking with Howard Rheingold was a particular lifelong goal. Howard inspired me in the 90s to start thinking about communities of people as the source of learning for each other, and inevitably caused me to develop ideas on community-based learning (we call it “social” now) that I used towards the end of my time at the University of Salford and in the development work that I did at Academee. I still use those ideas now in the work I do with students in their online learning communities. Nowadays I think of it as ordinary, but it’s great to think of them as coming from a time when they were classed as ground-breaking.

It’s also good to see that as Howard has got older, his dress sense hasn’t gotten any better I hope I degrade as disgracefully as he does.

“As networks get bigger, they become more valuable; as they become more valuable, more people want to join; as more people join, they get bigger; as they get bigger, they get even more valuable; that makes even more people want to join… an so on”

David G Post

Uno de los clásicos (si no el más clásico de todos) argumentos en contra de Internet como medio tiene que ver con lo que en estadística solemos llamar la “N”. Dicen los apóstoles del old media, que nada puede hacerse con Internet hasta tanto no tenga esta un nivel de penetración y alcance similar al de los medios tradicionales. Es decir, hasta que la “N” de los que andan en eso de “la internet” no se acerque a la “N” de la TV o la prensa. Puede que tengan razón, pero sin duda es una aproximación “reduccionista”, pues no parece lógico evaluar una forma de comunicación de “uno a muchos” de la misma manera que se evalúa otra cuya característica es que es de “muchos a muchos”.

Curioseando por ahí me tropecé con un episodio del podcast de Howard Rheingold en el que habla de 3 leyes diferentes, cada una de ellas planteadas para determinar el valor de las “redes” conforme estas se fueron desarrollando. Luego, leyendo ese fabuloso libro de David G Post titulado “In search of Jefferson´s Moose: notes on the state of cyberspace”, tropecé nuevamente con la misma información. En vista de que ambos son intelectuales y académicos de mi absoluto respeto y admiración, y también en vista de que lo que ellos exponen me parece crucial para iniciar un debate sobre el valor de las redes, intentaré echar el cuento en los párrafos que siguen.

Cuando el “broadcasting” se hizo algo ubicuo (con el advenimiento de la radio), David Sarnoff un pionero de la radio y la TV en EEUU, planteó que el valor de una red de radiodifusión (broadcasting) era proporcional al número de receptores. Es decir, de acuerdo con la Ley de Sarnoff:

Valor de la red ∿ N

Esta es la forma en la que evaluamos hoy el valor de un medio publicitario, pues se asume que el mismo es siempre de “uno a muchos”. Radio, Vallas, Impresos y TV. Publicidad clásica en toda su expresión. Así, mientras mayor sea tu audiencia, más valor tiene tu “red”.

Luego surgieron las redes de uno a uno, como el fax o el teléfono, y con ellas una segunda ley para medir su valor, planteada por Robert Metcalfe. Según la misma, el valor de una red de dos direcciones es proporcional al cuadrado del total de los miembros. Es decir, de acuerdo a la ley de Metcalfe, el valor de una red bi-direccional sería

Valor de la red ∿ N²

Esta ley se ha explicado usando como ejemplo el fax. Así, un fax solo no tiene ningún valor, pero el valor de una red de faxes incrementa con cada nuevo fax que se suma. Así, 2 faxes pueden hacer una sola conexión, 5 pueden conectarse de 10 maneras distintas y 12 puede hacerlo de 66 formas distintas. Ojo que estos cálculos expresan el número de pares posibles de conexión, no el valor, como veremos más adelante.

Finalmente, con la llegada de Internet surgió la posibilidad de hacer comunicación de muchos a muchos, como es el caso de los blogs y las redes sociales. David Reed, científico del M.I.T, uno de los padres del TCP/IP y uno de los autores originales del artículo en el que se describe el principio “end to end” que hace de internet algo tan valioso (y cuya explicación o comentario dejaremos para otro post por razones obvias), propuso también una ley para medir el valor de estas novedosa forma de interactuar. De acuerdo a Reed la utilidad de redes, en particular las redes sociales, puede crecer de manera exponencial al tamaño de la red, siendo mucho más veloz en crecimiento y valor que el número de participantes per se (Ley de Sarnoff) y el número de pares de conexiones (Ley de Metcalfe). Así, la ley de Reed plantea que el valor de una red es proporcional a 2 elevado al número total de participantes:

Valor de la red ∿ 2^N

Puestas las tres leyes una al lado de otra, obtenemos algo así:

Como puede observarse, las redes como Internet, en la que las posibilidades de conexión son tan altas, crecen en valor a una velocidad muchísimo mayor que las redes más simples, con lo cual, afirmar que hay que esperar que Internet tenga un “alcance” similar al de la TV, parece a la luz de estas leyes, un error. O dicho de otro modo, redes como Facebook o Hi5 o Twitter puede alcanzar el mismo valor que medios como la TV con números muchísimo menores de participantes, sin dejar de lado el para nada minúsculo detalle de que su crecimiento es muchísimo más rápido.

Tanto Rheingold como Post afirman que las leyes que hemos comentado en este ya largo post no son en modo alguno verdades incontrovertibles (como la ley de gravedad, para usar un ejemplo extremo) sino que más bien están usadas como heurísticos para entender el valor que las distintas redes de comunicación usadas por los humanos tienen. Pregunto yo, ¿no sería prudente intentar entender un poco mejor esto al momento de pensar en nuevos medios? ¿estamos midiendo la efectividad de medios como internet de manera adecuada (lo que los psicólogos llamamos validez)? No lo sé. Mi creencia es que no. Estamos lejos siquiera de intentar, al menos desde la publicidad, entender medios tan complejos como Internet. Y es que en la publicidad hay una importante flojera académica que ha llevado a tomar por verdades posturas teóricas tan caducas como la horrible pirámide de Maslow o el modelo de persuasión de la Universidad de Yale. Y de seguir así, pronto nos quedaremos sin poderle explicar a nuestros clientes por qué el trabajo que hacemos es bueno y vale el dinero que queremos cobrar.

Espero que este tedioso post sirva para levantar inquietudes y plantear preguntas. Es hora de que abordemos algunos temas de la publicidad con mayor compromiso. Y por favor, ¡basta de creer que la motivación humana está explicada en la pirámide de Maslow!

This Sunday, the 5th of July, Symbian is sponsoring the arrival of The Travelling Geeks in London, a group of influential bloggers from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Celebrity bloggers, entrepreneurs and thinkers such as Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist), Howard Rheingold or Robert Scoble will report on innovative technologies in London through blogs, videos, podcasts and social networks. They will help explore how innovation in the UK compares with what’s taking place in Silicon Valley in the US, which I am sure will drum up a lot of healthy debate between all parties.

The venue is the JuJu in Chelsea, free food and drink (until the money runs out!) will also be available to quench your thirst and help encourage conversation.  There are still a few tickets available to the event, plus a little yellow duck tells me that the code ‘GeekFriend’ will give you a decent discount on your purchase price!

Get your tickets here!

And if that wasn’t enough, Symbian will be given away branded goodie bags containing a load of excellent freebies to all attendees.

We – Alec, Dean, Rick and I (Heather was in the midst of moving to a new house) were fortunate enough to be joined by Howard Rheingold for our latest podcast – EdTech Posse Podcast 5.6 – In conversation with Howard Rheingold. As you would expect with someone who has the breadth of knowledge, experience and interests as Howard, the conversation brought many threads together.

I get this eerie, bored feeling that internet scholars play but don’t listen. Myself included.

Where boosters see roses: See Howard Rheingold, Vernacular Video in Culture and Education.

Snarks like me see thorns: See Alex Juhasz, The Vernacular and the Visual.

Thanks to Liz Losh for marking this stupid stalemate on her blog.

A video recorded talk by Howard Rheingold in Amsterdam delivered on 1 June 2009 in which he revisits his book Smart Mobs (2002) seven years on, going over what he got right and wrong.

Howard Rheingold attends the Amsterdam MoMo Conference and revisits his prescient work SmartMobs.

Con una giacca colorata e una t-shirt con la scritta “I am the next speaker”, Howard Rheingold rivisita il Mobile Monday (MOMO) ad Amsterdam. Dopo 7 anni che ha pubblicato il suo libro “Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution”, Rheingold rivaluta il suo concetto di Smart Mobs con gli occhi della tecnologia recente.

In breve, il smart mob è un’organizzazione sociale auto-strutturata che usa la tecnologia come strumento principale. Queste tecnologie possono essere l’Internet, e- mail, mobile media, sms, ecc. La questione importante è che il smart mob, al contrario di una semplice “folla”, si comporta in modo intelligente o efficiente a causa della esponenziale crescita dei networks.

I smart mobs sono una forma di azione collettiva, che al contrario dei Flash mobs, è spesso legata a proteste politiche. In paesi non democratici dove il governo controlla e censura i media, i sociale e mobile media sono gli strumenti ideali per organizzare una protesta in modo invisibile e veloce.

Il primo evento significativo accade nelle Filippine dove miglia di filippini affollavano la piazza velocemente dopo aver ricevuto un sms, per protestare contro il governo di Estrada.

Cosa è cambiato dal 2002?

Wiki, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook e senza dubbio l’ IPhone sono i nuovi strumenti con i quali vengono organizzati e pubblicati i smart mob. I nuovi social media sono ancora più efficaci e veloci degli sms e dei mailing lists collettive.

“I am the next speaker”- perchè oggi è il user: che parla, coordina, condivide e pubblica.