Facebook privacy settings: Who cares?

danah boyd, as ever, pushing the bar on research into social computing, this time with the help of Eszter Hargittai. As it turns out, privacy is not showing any signs of dying soon and it is something people really really want.

If only Facebook took the clear needs of its users seriously it would not be quite as evil. But privacy is not good for Facebook and they make it as hard as possible to achieve, while just about keeping the customers satisfied. Connections make a powerful drug that keeps the customers coming, but the price is high. It would be nice to see Facebook price themselves out of the market on this one.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3086/2589

Icebergs and achievement

Reading a PhD thesis today that discusses, amongst many other things, the effects of different kinds of motivation on achievement, I was struck once again by the great weaknesses of many of our traditional methods of measuring achievement. The study finds that intrinsic forms of motivation do not have a great effect on grades when compared with extrinsic forms: people who have high extrinsic motivation and/or the extrinsic end of intrinsic motivation can, as long as they also have a fair degree of intrinsic motivation, achieve the ‘same’ results as those who are more purely intrinsically motivated.

What interests me, and what we seldom measure, is what else those with higher levels of intrinsic motivation achieve. Those for whom learning is relevant, rewarding, connected and meaningful in itself would, I would hypothesise, achieve far greater long-term benefits from the process that are not usually measured in grades. The greater sense of competence that they experience would encourage them to continue confidently learning after the course of study is over. The relatedness that they feel with others would encourage them to continue to engage and extend their learning networks. And their sense of autonomy would give far greater ownership of the knowledge: they would be far more likely to build strong connections that reinforce and extend existing knowledge. None of these things are measured in most traditional institutional approaches to assessment, with their focus on content and subject-specific competences and goals.

I’m not suggesting that content and competences are unimportant – far from it. Such details are what give visible shape and form to the bigger picture, the paints that we use to create it. Without something to make it from, there would be no bigger picture. Also, I would like my doctor to know about medicine when she is treating me. But that’s just the starting point. While the ability to pass a few exams in a short space of time might be an indicator of minimal competence, I would infinitely prefer to be treated by someone who has enthusiastically continued to learn, who understands how to apply and build on her knowledge creatively and insightfully as a continuous process, who sees the connections between the many different subjects she has studied and who contributes actively in learning communities of other doctors.

The stuff we learn about is shifting and changing and, in many fields, not that important. I was once able to pass exams in writing COBOL. I could not do so now and there would be no point in me doing so as it has been close to irrelevant in any context that interests me for about 20 years. In fact, I do very little actual programming nowadays of any sort.  I suspect that my teachers mostly believed that they were teaching me to program in COBOL as that’s what they examined me on, but that’s by far the least important part of what I really learned. My continuing ability to think like a programmer and to engage in an ongoing dialogue with others in the profession remains a truly valuable skill. I understand the world in different ways, know why some of those computer things behave the way they do, can abstract concrete systems and concretise abstract systems, can dream bigger because I know what is possible and maybe can dream smaller in some ways because I also think, maybe erroneously, that I know what is impossible. I know the ways that the apparently autistic programmer mind works and can see the beauty and value in that as well as work round some of its limitations. I can express myself in dynamic systems. I can see the simplicity in some superficially complex things, and complexities in the superficially simple. I can reframe knowledge I already possessed in different ways, creating new knowledge, new perspectives. I can see possibilities that I could not see before and they continue to grow as I learn more. My boundaries changed and continue to change as a result of what I learned. Because I learned things that were never assessed in exams I am a more creative, more articulate, more informed person than I would have otherwise been, a better problem-solver and a deeper thinker. And that’s what I really learned, not how to program in COBOL.

A successful education is one that changes the way you think. It is no surprise that extrinsic motivation can (at least with a bit of intrinsic motivation to complement it) produce good ‘achievement’ because the measurement of that achievement concentrates on the visible tip of the iceberg, not the big and mostly hidden mass underneath.

There are some obvious and well-documented things we might (and sometimes do) do to redress this, including:

  • portfolios of evidence, especailly across courses and disciplines
  • reflective commentaries
  • flexible and broad learning outcomes/expected competencies (e.g. ‘should be able to constructively participate in discussions with professional peers at dinner parties and conferences’)
  • delayed submissions and statements of relevance long after the period of instruction
  • disaggregation of instruction and assessment (e.g. Athabasca University’s challenge exam process or PLAR/APEL processes)
  • freedom to negotiate the type and content of assessment
  • constructive alignment of assessment and learning activities
  • authentic assessment of real-world competences

And plenty more. It’s not that we can’t assess achievement more authentically and richly, as long as we have an awareness of the need, the flexibility and the will to do so.

There are some risks of course. It would be almost as bad if all that our assessments showed were the levels of motivation of our students, their ability to bluff, or their enthusiasm for a particular subject. Given our dual and often conflicting roles as judges as well as educators, we have to be able to assess competence, and that includes the stuff we already do look at as well as the rest of the iceberg. We also have to find ways of avoiding cheating in the system when we are the arbiters of quality in learning but, on the bright side, these sorts of approach render that much more difficult and unlikely: when we take a more holistic approach to assessing achievement then we cannot help but be strongly aware of the human at its centre, rather than the abstract chunk of disembodied skill or information they present us with.

The things that change us, really change us, are the rest of the icebergs below the waterline of formal education that matter most. A sea-change is needed in how we consider achievement, not just in isolated pockets of northern lakes ruled by pedagogues and eduphiles, but across the whole educational ocean.

 

The Real Life Social Network v2

Interesting if absurdly huge slideshow from Paul Adams of Google, talking about our different overlapping networks. This very closely mirrors and supports what we are doing on the Landing, where we have been developing a context switcher to enable people to present different facets of their identities to different groups of people (as well as switch personal contexts for different needs).

Address of the bookmark: http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2

3 Things Facebook Gets Right

actually, I think that facebook does many things well, though I think they are a deeply awful company and will ultimately fail unless they embrace openness and a distributed model

facebook understands parcellation, presence, collectives, networks, rich connections, diversity, the need for population density, the need for evolvability, the importance of adaptation and much much more in a way that puts most other social systems to shame. They really don’t get trust at all, and they probably know that a centralized model will ultimately fail, but they are probably happy enough that they are going to get huge amounts of money for at least a couple more years before the penny drops and the weaknesses of their centralised approach allow a better system in. Or that they figure that out. Or that Hell freezes over. Whatever comes first.

 

Address of the bookmark: http://mashable.com/2010/06/22/what-facebook-gets-right/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29

Why Facebook Can’t Genuinely Connect People

I like the notion here that Facebook fails to bring people close because vulnerability cannot safely be shown in such a one-dimensional space. That’s why our new context-switching functionality (due on the Landing fairly soon) will be so important, allowing us to display different facades to different people.

Address of the bookmark: http://mashable.com/2010/06/17/facebook-connect-fail/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29

Designing for Social Interaction

Interesting discussion of the strength of social ties in social software systems by Paul Adams. He talks of strong, weak and temporary ties and notes the design issues are different for each (and provides some useful insights on ways of trust-building for those temporary ties, many of which are collective-based).

The strong vs weak/temporary separation maybe reflects the division of groups and networks that some of us like to use, but the weak/temporary is a useful further subdivision of networks. It may be that some groups, especially in education, might fall into the ‘temporary’ category too, which suggests that we might have some interestingly different design problems if we try to form strong but temporary formalised groups.

Address of the bookmark: http://boxesandarrows.com/view/designing-for-social

Smart.fm

An intriguingly designed (and stupidly named, bearing in mind the popularity of SmartFM for listening to music) adaptive learning tool that attempts to improve the effectiveness of self-paced learning by reminding you about stuff relating to your learning goals at the right point on the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. In essence it’s a sequencer for memory-based learning. Purportedly based on brain science and using a very strongly cognitivist approach, this actually looks like quite a useful way to remember stuff if you use it in a disciplined way, although the effort and hassle of actually using the application may limit its utility for many people.  

Address of the bookmark: http://smart.fm/tour