http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/28045.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1375

Interesting new search engine that claims to index three times as many pages as Google and displays the results according to analysis of content. Just when we thought the likes of Alta Vista, Infoseek and the rest were dead and buried! It seems pretty fast but, frankly, it would benefit from a few of the ‘superficial popularity metrics’ that it explicitly rejects (but, oddly, seems to use a bit). The results may be relevant but, without the wisdom of the crowd, provide little hint as to their quality. I like the three column display for most purposes (though my poor little eee PC is less than pleased and it is not easy to decide whether to read across or down) and the fact that it collects no private data is reassuring but inevitably reduces the relevance of the results.

It’s a good system and I suspect I may use this for complex and precise queries when Google fails but it is not likely to take much market share until it pays more attention to the collective mind.
Created:Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:38:15 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/27840.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1374

Google is entering the immersive social world. This is not exactly a competitor to the likes of Second Life, HiPiHi, OpenSIM or Wonderland, but a lightweight 3D chat system that is easily embedded on a Web page – at least, it is if you happen to run Windoze. If not, tough. This doesn’t feel like a typical Google application. Though small and easy, it is ugly, closed and clunky, the opposite of what has made Google great in other areas. It has support for static multimedia and embedding stuff from YouTube etc, but no real-time sound. There’s a big menu of objects to populate your space and a decent collection of avatars, but this is not a space for authoring. It may be OK for small groups, but there appears to be a limit of 20 people in each space.

What I really like is that it enables easy, low-threshold, rich collaboration in real time, embedded in a wider context without big downloads and separate environments. It is also nice that Google is thinking about integrating it with the desktop, the browser and its own gadgets.

What I really dislike is that it appears to largely ignore any standards (apart from pulling in stuff from elsewhere) and of course it relies on a single service provider.

This is Google doing ‘me-too’ rather than innovating in a big way. There are plenty of good systems out there like IMVU and Twinity and it is hard to see much in Lively that makes it different. It is encouraging that immersive spaces are hitting the mainstream and starting to live in browser space, but what we really need is something like this that is genuinely distributed, interoperable and connectible.
Created:Thu, 10 Jul 2008 18:12:53 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/27600.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1371

Very interesting confirmation of what we already know about the use of social networking sites. Highlights include:

"Women and the 14-24 year old demographic are more likely to use Myspace and Facebook than other demographics"

…

"Men and the 25-34 year old demographic are more likely to use LinkedIn and Flickr than other demographics"

It is notable that the ones men like typically involve less direct communication and that, by the time we get to men of my age, almost no social networking happens at all.

Oh dear.

In society at large my demographic is probably the one with the most power and money (not me of course). I wonder if we are beginning to see a surge in collective/network power that will grapple that from us? Not soon enough I reckon. However, I guess that I should not get too enthused by this: the graph stops at 9% of the overall population. And 90% of those studied were from the US, which is hardly representative.
Created:Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:56:05 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/27594.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1370

This is a very neat application and a wonderful example of the power of the collective (a combination of multiple independent people’s activities and algorithms). By comparing pictures on Flickr that have geolocation information supplied with those that are unknown the authors can fairly accurately guess the location at which photos were taken.

How cool is that?

Of course, they get it wrong pretty often, but they reckon they can do about 30 times better than chance, which is no mean feat. What we see, therefore, is a means for collective human intelligence to augment (but not replace) individual human intelligence. I love this stuff.

Now all we have to do is to find an educational application.

I think it shows an interesting feature of collective applications in general, which is that they are inherently fuzzy. I would never trust one that told me with authority that it had the answer to what I seek. Google, the archetype, is pretty good at finding the right things when fed with appropriate keywords, but not perfect. It, and applications like this one, can offer choices that help us to narrow down the search but, ultimately, it is we who are selecting the right things for our needs. While systems can help by offering interface cues (e.g. list position in Google) the final arbiters are us. If we don’t get the definitive answer first time, we must find more evidence or improve our search. A skill for the twenty first century that we all need to learn is therefore fine-grained decision making, to successfully judge the value and validity of a relatively small selection of competing resources or ‘facts’. Synthesis and analysis come next, but they are subordinate to using the collective wisdom of the crowd.

It bugs the hell out of me that there are those who believe that the Google generation are getting dumber because of Google. These are higher order skills than we have ever had to deal with in the past. Collective intelligence gives us a shin-up, a means of climbing the intellectual ladder to give us a head start. But rather than making us dumber, it should just put us higher up so that we can be smarter.

The trouble is, there are still educators who are trying to perpetuate and assess skills that the collective is more than capable of surpassing. This is pointless. Requiring students to repeat knowledge that they can easily get from Wikipedia or Google is like assessing basic arithmetical skills on a graduate level mathematics course when the students all use calculators. We might mourn the passing of mental arithmetic skills but let’s get over it and move on. Or, if we think it is so important to develop mental skills which don’t rely on technology, let’s scrap this whole stupid book idea and, while we’re about it, let’s stop writing too. These things are so bad for our mental acuity and we rely on them too much.
Created:Fri, 20 Jun 2008 07:04:18 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/27590.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1369

Donald Clark on typically good form, this time laying in to stoytelling and narrative as a learning method. I particularly like his notions of various activities (including blogging, wikis, social networks and games) as non-narrative learning. He also throws in sports and reality TV shows like Big Brother.

I think he is right up to a point – at least, we tend to construct our own narratives in a far bigger way when faced with such things and engagement is fundamentally social, at least latently. And it is true that most of life does not have the neat plots of authored stories.

However, as a (late) baby boomer, I have a bit of a fondness for narrative and I don’t think it is entirely misplaced. What I find interesting is how popular narratives are changing and becoming more like the non-narrative forms that Donald is keen on. I am a fan of Steven Johnson’s ‘Everything Bad is Good for You’ which makes a compelling point that TV shows (in particular) are becoming far more complex and requiring far deeper imaginative involvement than earlier examples of the genre. Yes, they still have neat plot lines, albeit massively intertwingled, but the best of them challenge us in utterly different ways. Compare the latest Battlestar Galactica with its wan forebear for instance. This is a show that is packed with moral ambiguities and deep shades of grey that challenge us to engage at a deep ethical, emotional and intellectual level, to explore and raise doubts on what it means to be human and to delve the depths of the psyche. Yes, it is enriched by the numerous sites and blogs that surround it, but as a learning object it stands alone pretty well. And it does this very intentionally through the narrative form, not by taking me on a journey but by forcing me to engage in a dialogue. The same is true of a decent novel, play, poem or piece of music. Traditional narratives, at their best, are not about leading but about conversing. And, like any good learning experience, they provide this conversation in a safe environment, taking away some of the chaos in order to communicate more effectively about the things that matter (at least to the authors etc). Traditional narrative is as much about what is not chosen as what is chosen. It invites us to look at an artificial world and to see how it relates to our lives and the people and things we know. A story is metadata, often massively complex and ambiguous, but at its heart just a model that enriches or makes it easier to understand our own reality. So yes, let’s embrace the social, but let’s not forget the value and opportunities that the guided dialogue of a good narrative provides.
Created:Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:56:37 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/27502.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1366

Video introduction to what is described as an online social learning platform, written as a Facebook application. Using Facebook, you can join an existing class or request a new one – in which case you can teach or learn. The actual classes are run through conventional synchronous webinar tools, but the process of deciding what, where, when and how to learn is very much devolved to the crowd and there seems to be little or no centralised intervention.

I like this idea a lot. I have suggested similar things in the past but at a time when social networking platforms were just a glimmer in someone’s eye so I was imagining building the whole social system. The integration with Facebook lifts this to a new and interesting level.

Supercool School has some rough edges and clearly has a way to go, but the basic infrastructure seems sound. It adopts a marketplace model but it is hard to find out how reliable or useful a given class might be – even levels are not always clear. I guess you could rely on the social network for recommendations if and when it grows big enough. I think it could take more advantage of the crowd to help find stuff that is useful, not just on the right topic, and they should supply it as an OpenSocial app, but this is definitely a cool direction to be going in. Universities should take heed – we already have the trust relationships and reputation management in place, so we have a head start.
Created:Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:40:02 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/25584.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1365

A fascinating glimpse into the behaviour of people getting to and interacting on social networking sites in 2007.

One little snippet of information that particularly interests me:

” MySpace (68%), YouTube (65%) and FaceBook (42%) are all visited by a greater percentage of the 18-24 year old user population, as well as more frequently than other age groups. They also search YouTube (81%) and MySpace (41%) for entertainment purposes more than other age groups. And finally, 18-24 year olds post comments on MySpace (56%), YouTube (31%) and Amazon (30%) more than other age groups. “

That’s a really high percentage of engagement. This is another little bit of evidence that there is something different about the younger generation and the ways that they expect to interact with Web content.

There are a couple of issues here that have me pondering.

Firstly, I and many others already do try to use this propensity in teaching, but often without those levels of voluntary engagement seen on social sites. I think that this relative lack of participation might have a fair bit to do with ownership and motivation, though also to self-confidence: contributions on a social site are from a position of strength (we wouldn’t comment unless we thought we knew something)whereas when learning something we are, by definition, less sure of ourselves. If we want engagement then it is important therefore to build educational activities that are within our learners’ comfort zones.

Secondly, and more worryingly, this reminds me that formal education is about attempting to perpetuate (and, albeit, hopefully evolve) the cultural values of academics. Unfortunately we are increasingly finding ourselves in situations where the values that we have learnt are no longer applicable. Like the scribes whose livelihoods were taken away by the printing press, we seek to preserve and perpetuate a way of thinking that does not compete well in an ecosystem driven by dialogue and collective cognition. We old folk are still living in the era of publication, not participation. We trundle along to conferences and subscribe to journals that perpetuate the old cycles of peer-reviewed papers etc not because we are sure it is the best way to do things, but because we have always done things that way. We are both drivers and driven: as academics, our jobs often depend on this. It is like still doing all of our correspondence through the postal service when the rest of the world is using email and IM. Sure, like the scribes, what we produce may be beautiful and well-crafted. But it makes little sense to do it when the fast-moving fast-thinking part of the world is engaged in agile, interactive, participative communication. In my fuddy duddy way I would not like to completely lose the intellectual rigour and richness of the old ivory towers: there will always be a need for this. On the other hand, I would like to embrace the multi-valued, sometimes chaotic, always vibrant collective, cooperative and confrontational melange of the Participative Web. This is a move from knowledge absorption to ubiquitous knowledge construction, where individual authority is just a piece in the mosaic. Sure, when looked at as a pool of information, it is unreliable, eclectic and hard to fathom. But the point is that it is not a pool of information. It is an ocean of dialogue. As academics, we need to swim there, or we will surely drown. Or, worse, we might sit on the beach bemoaning the recklessness of the young swimmers as the rising tide starts to lap around our feet.
Created:Tue, 13 May 2008 18:23:51 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/22806.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1362

A good history that aims to capture most things of importance in the evolution of the Internet towards a social medium.I particularly like the fact that a good deal of attention is paid to what happened in the last century: refreshing after so much collective forgetfulness.

As seems increasingly to be the case with web publications, it is a work in progress, a scholarly version of perpetual beta. This open-endedness that invites sociability and dialogue is far more interesting than the closed peer reviews of the past, making readers into real contributors and allowing us all to explore multiple conceptions that we might otherwise miss (and to allow a little condescending smile now and then when someone posts something stupid, reassuring us a little of our own progress along this learning path). Whether we do so or not, the simple fact that we can engage makes for a richer construction of knowledge. It's like Holmberg's internal didactic conversation, except that this can be real if we wish. That potential transforms how we read: not only is this an attitudinal issue, but it gives a whole new level of control over the learning process. Not sure what the author means? Ask. Want to explore an issue in more detail? Do it.
Created:Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:19:53 GMT

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/22529.html

Robert Cringely predicts the imminent and surprisingly rapid demise of the social networking phenomenon. He is, of course and as usual, right. The writing is clearly on the wall – even the evil empire of Facebook is losing users. Poor old AOL, yet again getting in at the tail end of a storm with its acquisition of Bebo. And so the phenomenon that has scratched gaping holes in my time and patience for so long is on the way out. Not soon enough, I reckon. At least, in the main.  It is a twisted variant of the tragedy of the commons, played out again and again. Instead of grazing sheep on a common, it is our attention and good will that are being eaten away. I suffer a death of a thousand knives as  my friends and my 'friends' compete for my attention with both meaningful and meaningless communication. Email is more than enough to do that already, but the big social networking sites supply their own twist, offering mass-production of demanding drivel that takes no more thought than the click of a button. What makes them brilliant is also what will kill them, as surely as the sheep on the common will kill the grass that feeds them. Sure, most offer some control over what I receive, who I receive it from and whether they are my 'friend', but social pressures make it hard to reject people without them feeling slighted.

Some are better than others. those with a clear and undiluted focus (e.g. LinkedIn) are far less annoying than the general purpose sites.  Others are built for specific communities: Elgg, in particular, springs to mind. The trouble is, Elgg is not federated to any great extent. There is simple import and even simpler export through open standards like RSS and of course HTML, but no deep intertwingling of Elgg sites.

The only one of the big ones that I have a lot of time for is Ning, which does what they all should do in parcellating its landscape with rich and diverse niches, almost none of which has any great value in itself but, as a member of the ecosystem, contributes to the richness of the whole and can pass on its genes (with some mutations) to others when it dies. The only problem with Ning is that it is a single site, which may be its ultimate undoing. As Robert Cringely notes, the business models for these things are decidedly shaky at best. What we really need is a distributed Ning, with open APIs that offer flexibility and customisation at low cost, and trustworthy standards-based transfer of identity between systems. I have just started looking at Noserub (thanks to Brian Kelly for pointing me to this) which seems to be moving in the right direction, though still rather incomplete (e.g. no support for OpenSocial) and as yet paying insufficient attention to issues of trust and privacy. I don't know if it has the momentum to really succeed, but it or something like it are what we need if we are to build truly social networks, with the power and  controllability that is necessary to develop rich social ecologies.

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/22107.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1361

More (slightly indirect) evidence that parcellation is needed to build rich and diverse learning environments. In essence, big, maximally connected groups solve simple well-defined problems better, but groups organised as a small-world network are far more effective for more complex issues. Not only does this resonate perfectly with one of the key principles I developed in my book, it helps to put another nail in the coffin of crazy, evil and pernicious ideas like national curricula.

Big and undifferentiated is inefficient and counter-productive. On the other hand, so is small, for different reasons. Middle-sized offers the worst of both worlds. What we need is small parcellated clusters, weakly connected.
Created:Thu, 28 Feb 2008 07:52:06 GMT