Liquid Learning

BBC news clips on social software

As if to prove the continued rise of and fascination with social software tools the BBC has posted a couple of interesting news clips about social networking.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/

Social Networking:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/5391258.stm

Virtual Communities:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/5392906.stm

The article on virtual communities includes an interview with Howard Rheingold - seen by many as the father of social networking. I was particularly taken by the following comment on Weblo:

"This week saw the launch of Weblo, a new concept which aims to provide a carbon copy of the real world by allowing members to buy, manage and trade virtual assets as diverse as celebrities and landmarks, making real money all the while. "

The gap between virtual and real is becoming ever more blurry and the opening up of 'new worlds' within which one can manage an alternative virtual life that hooks into the 'real' in such a fundamental way as money feels like the final step in the collapse of the dichotomy between being online and offline.

Susan Sontag's journal writings

If blogs are a mongrel breed descended from the journal then the jottings discovered in the cache of notebooks left behind by Susan Sontag are illuminating to this genre of writing:

"Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself."

She continues:

"The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual daily life but rather - in many cases - offers alternatives to it."

And finally - after reading about herself in another's journal:

"... Do I feel guilty about reading what was not intended for my eyes? No. One of the main (social)functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people, the people (like parents + lovers) about whom one has been cruelly honest only in the journal."

ALT-C 2006 mumblings

I couldn't help but notice that Josie has added a few mutterings to her blog re: ALT-C 2006 . She picked up on the main debate of the event, namely the growing tension between VLE and PLE approaches to 'learning' which have raised fundamental questions regarding the philosophical grounding of our teaching systems and indeed our underpinning educational values. I think this was reflected in the number of talks that engaged directly with learning as an emergent, context-dependent dialogical activity. One area that seemed to be lacking in many of the conversations surrounding web 2.0 and social software was complexity (including the notion of critical mass) and the associated interest in emergent behaviours (patterns) and emergent classifications (folksonomy) which represent powerful concepts in analysing the way that many social software tools operate, for example social recommendation systems and I cannot help but wonder what implications these might have if (or when) applied to an educational context.

Wikis in education workshop

Just announced and a shameless piece of advertising. A timely one day workshop will be run at Austin Court in Birmingham on Friday 3^rd November by Brian Kelly and myself on 'Exploiting The Potential Of Wikis'. It is a great venue with and excellent line-up that includes Henry Rzepa  from Imperial College London and Phil Wilson from the University of Bath. There will be plenty of time for discussion and interaction so please book early if you can as there are limited places for this one.

Slides available at: http://www.slideshare.net/stevenw

Folksonomies: what are they good for?

This has been languishing as a draft post - probably because the subject area sparked too many ideas to get them all down. This was from a relatively recent attendance at the excellent Content 2.0 conference in London and amongst a host of inspiring talks I found myself particularly excited by  Matt Locke - Head Of Innovation, BBC New Media - and his question: "What use are folksonomies?". The premise being that user generated tags allow for participation in classification systems and in so doing they also afford play within those classification hierarchies.

He put forward a list of reasons for why people tag:

• Future retrieval
• Contribution and sharing
• Attract attention
• Play and competition
• Self presentation
• Opinion expression

A statement that kept me thinking was that the success of a tagging system is predicated on serving the selfish motives of the individual. Chew on that. He also touched upon the ways in which classification systems make things visible and invisible and that this has both social and political consequences. This is really just a taster and if you are interested in categories and classification systems then the issues, touched lightly upon here, are drawn out in the very readable book by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star called 'Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Inside Technology)' 

Multi-tasking: what is the cost?

One can barely get through a conference or seminar these days without some discussion falling on the so-called net generation (or digital natives or millennials ... call them what you will). This wave of new learners with apparently new (and frightening) competencies are on the verge of sweeping into our higher education establishments [see Jason Frand's article on the Educause website]. And if we are to believe the current rhetoric we are simply not ready for them. To ease panic and no doubt steer clear of the Valium bottle I have become quite taken by the cognitive psychologist's view on the nature of multi-tasking - one of the privileged characteristics of the net generation. A recent Sunday Times article provided sobering reassurance that there is a debt to pay for engaging in multiple attention spanning activities i.e. multi-tasking is only really available when approaching simple tasks such as ironing and listening to the radio [I knew that !] as more complex tasks require more concentration. It sounds like common (or good)sense so perhaps this generation X-er does not need to feel quite so out of place.

Other commentators:

David E Mayer: http://www.umich.edu/~bcalab/personnel.html

Elinor Ochs: http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/ochs/

Stephen Monsell: http://psynet.ex.ac.uk/stafflist/profile.php?id=920