divided by – social media?

Nice post here from George Siemens – worth quoting

Does the internet – social media in particular – act as a unifier? Apparently not, according to several researchers. Instead, social media amplifies existing social structures. Or, as danah boyd states, “pervasive social stratification is being reified in a new era”. Technology doesn’t (immediately) alter human nature. It provides new views (mirrors) for seeing what we are. The desire to associate with people who share our beliefs, values, and economic conditions, migrates to new social spaces – digital or physical.

As I’ve said before [here], we shouldn’t think of social media/ web 2.0 as being any different from any other form of social practice and so subject to the type power relations and issues that can be found in any social context, I think Danah Boyd says it a bit more elegently mind.

digital content maturing

An interesting post here from mathemagenic on the process of developing blogged content into some form of ‘product’. The post succinctly lays out a process from initial capture of ideas, to pattern recognition, meaning-making and final explicit articulation as a product – in this case, mainly academic papers.

I would be interested to see how such a process would work in an organisational context, eg, if project blogs/ communications/ critical incidents are systematically analysed for particular patterns of behaviours/ activities to inform final lessons learned type reports or to feed into training interventions or other learning resources and/ or standard operating procedures. My experience to date has been that such analysis of captured data is rare – a preference seems to be for the often tired and partial project review meeting leading to an unread report and learning transfer is partial (transfered by particular team embers to a new project) and knowledge inertia is high.

Link to: Business impact of social learning

A short post linking to a great post from Jay Cross here on the business case/ ROI of social learning in [what should be] the age of learning platforms and ecosystems rather than training courses and programmes. Some very useful resources are also available via the post.

on digital identity

An interesting post here from David White at Oxford on digital identity in educational settings. I particularly agree with his focus on shifting the emphasis from the internet as a broadcast/ content distribution channel to thinking in terms of relationships which “focuses back on the heart of teaching and learning.”
But I think his notion of a digital tutor or student identity overly simplifies the issue. A person will tend to have multiple virtual and non-virtual/ actual (?) identities with different purposes or goals that may conflict with one another – but this may be less of an issue within the closed walls of a university VLE. Furthermore, the recipient of the projection of the identity may read that identity in a very different way and understand it in tems of a very different purpose. So my identity as projected via facebook may be aimed at relationships with long time friends and so have many complex and subtle facets yet someone else seeing my profile may ‘read’ that identity in different (unflattering) ways. So while moving out of the:

recent epistemological cul-de-sac that is the digital identity of the individual by considering not what digital identity is but where it leads.

let not loose sight of the richness, complexity, ambiguity and difficulty of digital identity for the purposes of being pragmatic.

riding the Google Wave

… well technically more like watching someone else ride the Wave. Anyway, a very clear and helpful post on Google Wave from Dion Hinchcliffe here. The potential of Wave in terms as [tacit/ social] knowledge ‘management’, collaboration and learning is immense [or will be a big disappointment – assuming, of course, that organisations have the leadership and vision to embrace that potential.

What this post and others on Wave really bring home to me is the extent we in higher education are or are not preparing future talent to live, work and change things in this sort of environment. I feel, but would be delighted to be wrong, that too many Programmes are no where near understanding the implications of all this. Understandably to a degree – if learning is social, networked, experiential and collaborative, then what is the point of a “lecturer”?

the problem(s) with Second Life

Superbly written post on SL here that reflects my experience of the ‘place’ – especially having someone fly into the mid-point of a conversation [which never happens to me in real life] However, I do think virtual worlds have a learning & working value by being less ‘open’ and more purposeful as is the case with Sun’s virtual office that I briefly discussed here. The virtual office as outlined in the video appears to address many of the issues fuzzy buzz identified in SL, eg, zoning activities, focusing on interaction rather than space per se..

critical perspectives on social media

Good post here from Ian Delaney on a critical perspective on Twitter. Interesting stuff and I left a long (ish but very rambling) comment in essence suggesting that social media, as with any social practice, can and should be viewed with a eye to power relations. Power being a process of socialisation (and so not necessarily a bad thing), the way things are done to ‘legitimately’ participate in a community. Some aspects of power relations may be manifest in a number of indicators – numbers of follows, peer ranking, bespoke design etc. – denoting whose opinions may be more valued, as well as issues of simple access [to the internet, to broadband, to high-speed broadband etc.....].
Hope to see more consideration of a critical perspective on social media, web 2.0, enterprise 2.0 ……….

experiencing twitter

Its been a couple of weeks since I started using twitter. Like some others I’ve been an erratic user. Initially (and perhaps, still) it can feel a bit overwhelming and a time sink – so many people to follow. A few things stand out:
- offers of support/ advice came almost immediately (thanks harold, Christian,Shawn)
- some of my followers seem very random
- limiting my Twitter use to a couple of time a day seems sensible yet slightly not in the spirit
- I’m very poor at using my iTouch or mobile for tweets
- I really enjoy the sense of serendipity it brings.

I’m still embedding twitter into the jumble of apps I loosely term my personal learning environment [PLE] but Twitter feels right as a sort of wide end of the funnel, pulling in the useful, not so useful and very un-useful bits of information. It also helps build a sense of being part of a wider community and what will be interesting to me is to think through the interface between Twitter, other tools (eg, blogs) and the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development. I’m not ready to make any sort of reasoned comment on that yet but it will be the subject of a future post ….

social media platforms for learning

Here is the last in an excellent series of posts on social media platforms for learning from Jane Hart at the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies. Much of the challenge for the provision of qualifications is in the cultural, pedagogical (or should it be andagogical) and bureaucratic changes required to allow the formal accreditation of the demonstration of learning through social media. Is there a cultural similarity between the control imperative of qualifications based quality assurance agencies and traditional management thinking/ practice with both acting as barriers to social media adoption reaching its full potential for learning?

more to learning environments

just a quick addition to my previous post on learning environments as I should have referred to this post from Pontydysgu that discusses how/ whether micro-learning objects developed through social learning technologies can and do ‘mature’ into more formalised learning content, eg, through a process of aggregation and validation perhaps. The essence of this for me (ie, placing technology issues aside!) is whether the highly-situated and problem-specific nature of a lot of workplace learning via social media can be the basis of more generic and transferable knowledge and what the processes for making this happen might be ….

The Mature IP project looks like one to watch …