Pew Internet has released another report on how people search for information, with some interesting results: "For help with a variety of common problems, more people turn to the internet than consult experts or family members to provide information and resources...Compared to their elders, Gen Y members were the most likely to use libraries for problem-solving information".
While I agree that the use of social technologies is not evenly distributed in society (age, socio-economic position, and field of work are only a few of the impacting factors), I find this proclamation unusual: Email an d cellphone contacts are the real social graph - "I spent a lot of time with non-geeks over the holidays, and while I heard mention of email, texting, and cellphones in casual conversation over many days, I didn’t hear a single mention of Facebook, MySpace, or any other web-based social networking application."
I spent much time with non-geek friends over the holidays as well. And Facebook came up often (a family gathering on New Years Day was arranged on Facebook), so did texting, and of course email and cellphones. Facebook and other social-based software services are introducing many non-geeks to the joys of networking online. As I've stated previously, in six years of blogging, I've only had one friend and no family members take up blogging. Facebook, on the other hand, is bringing people in to my network that I forgot existed.
Intelligent software agents: "The notion of Intelligent Software Agents (ISA) capable of finding, organizing, and analyzing information on behalf of their owners is the most important concept regarding the Internet today. This new generation of agent technology promises to help reduce the cost, effort, and time of filtering information on the Web."
In the near future, we will be making some very significant choices in our relation to and use of technology for learning and development. New tools for data visualization and intelligent agents aren't too unsettling; at best, the issue becomes one of personal privacy and who we give access to our information habits. The bigger issue relates to technology augmentation - implants, real-time tracking, smart pharmaceuticals, bio-technical convergence, and nanotechnology will force a reconsideration of what it means to be human. Oh, what fun we shall have with the ethical considerations.
New models of media and interaction often start under the umbrella of an existing medium - usually somewhere on the fringe. Once the infant medium (or tool) grows in prominence and popularity, the traditional structure takes note. Eyeballs garner attention with decision makers. Several options then exist: fight the new medium (what the recording industry is doing with DRM and lawsuits), accommodate by adopting elements (what the newspaper industry is doing with their adoption of blogs), or use the new medium to create an entirely new field/industry/approach (what is happening with Linux, open source, and the participative web).
Organizations react to YouTube in a blend of these approaches. YouTube is often seen as a poster child for grassroots media. But in 2007 it has been extensively adopted by traditional groups: presidential debate, the Royal Family's YouTube channel, the music industry ("The most popular videos on YouTube this year were a bunch of major label music videos - not the user generated content the site would like to be known for"), and recently as a promotional tool for Microsoft (Vista).
It will be interesting to watch how things play out in media, education, and even society over the next several years. The tension between grassroots, bottoms-up, emergent approach and the formalized, planned, organized model will continue to increase. Once a medium has enough attention and participants, someone will step in and start to organize it toward intended, focused goals. Learning Management Systems followed this path. Participative media is starting to move in this direction with blog/media and podcast networks trying to create a revenue model. And I suspect what we currently call personal learning environments will also be subject to increased formalization (I recently attended an Angel Learning demonstration - starting to sound like web 2.0 meets LMS). And if the amount of invitations I receive for product reviews and new feature announcements are any indication, marketers are increasingly aware of the viral-like nature of blogs and other citizen journalism approaches to present their products.
TechCrunch provides a quick overview of their top headlines of 2007. A quick skim reveals a frenetic development pace: Google Gears, Microsoft Silverlilght, Facebook Platform, Zoho, Ning milestone, Hulu, DRM resistance, Android, Beacon, DoubleClick...and on and on...
Bryan Alexander highlights a bet made in 2002: would blogs or New York Times have better search result returns in 2007? The winner isn't very clear, though some have given blogs a slight edge. Dave Winer, who was betting on blogs winning, expresses disappointment with blogs: "While blogs have broken many stories, they have not, in general, turned into the authoritative sources I hoped they would in 2002. When the blogosphere resembles journalism it's often the tabloid kind." (He should follow some of the conversations occurring with edubloggers - the subject of books, journal articles, and conferences are typically discussed a few years earlier in edublogs). The unknown, come-from-nowhere winner is Wikipedia - often taking the first position in search results. The initial bet didn't conceive of an option "c". As Rogers Cadenhead states: "Instead, our most trusted source on the biggest news stories of 2007 is a horde of nameless, faceless amateurs who are not required to prove expertise in the subjects they cover."
Several lessons here:
1. Five year predictions are rather futile when too many unsettled factors are interacting
2. A medium rarely becomes what we theorize it will become. Instead, it becomes what users of the medium determine it will be through interactions. Blogs haven't overthrown newspapers, but they have become very valuable means of exchanging information and creating personal learning networks.
3. We are blinded by our current context. The view of blogs/NYTimes as being the only two options seems a bit near sighted in retrospect. It's important to be aware of fringe elements which may disrupt our existing framework of thought and move an entire discipline in a new direction.
The end of year/early new year summary/prediction process is often more about trying to say something memorable (and thereby increase marketing appeal) than saying something useful. Consider the declaration that 2008's big problem is information overload (ok, and the last ten years were what?). Of particular interest is the statement that information overload costs the American economy $650 billion a year. How do they come up with that number?? Seems rather arbitrary. The cost is, according to the article, found in lost productivity due to the time lost in switching tasks. Twitter, email, phone calls, and other tools shoulder the blame. What about the upside productivity gain in having ready access to a network of people able to provide help and information as needed? Or the information filtering role played by a well-formed network? To deal with information overload we have limited options: 1) reduce information flow (not going to happen), 2) rely on alternative means of managing information (networks of connections serving a filtering role and information visualization), 3) improving our personal capacity to handle information (we're at our limit unless we start talking about augmenting human cognition with technology implants). The only way to deal with information flow today is to rely on the very network-forming tools the report lists as the source of the overload problem.
We haven't quite got this whole open collaborative knowledge thing worked out. Wikipedia's spectacular success created concerns of authenticity and gave rise to Citizendium (which relies on experts to validate or approve articles). Google's decision to launch Knol suggests they are concerned about Wikipedia's popularity as a first choice for information (a title Google certainly doesn't want to relinquish). EdTechDev argues for Knols Over Wikipedia and Citizendium based on the ability for individuals with a bias to slant information sources excessively in a preferred direction. I can see the basis for this concern. It stems from the perceived failing of Wikipedia as an accurate and reliable source. But I'm concerned about what we lose in the shift back to a system of selected experts. While I desire accurate information, for me the big lesson of Wikipedia has always been threefold: access, collaboration, and democracy. Any model of information authenticity needs to be worked out within the framework of those three elements. Google's Knol succeeds only on access.
When we look back, decisions we made/should have made seem obvious. When we look forward, everything is viewed through a lens of conflicting and competing information and ultimately converges on uncertainty. Think back 10-15 years to what now seems very obvious, but at the time may have been a bit loony: the teacher eager to use this thing called the internet for teaching, the librarian wanting to put information online, the person in the office cubicle next to you wanting to register the company's domain name. Or more recently: Google's IPO, Apple stock three years ago, the iPod. In retrospect, things look very clear. But for every iPod, iPhone, or Google, there are many Newton's, Webvan's, also-ran search engines, and other products. AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy, after all, sought initially to lock down their service to subscribers. History often provides clear winners and precise insights. When lived forward, life fails to offer such clear demarcations between what we ought to do and what we ought not to do. Hence, uncertainty still exists around SecondLife, Facebook, and to a lessor degree, blogs and wikis. The facebook issue currently rests on suitability for enterprise-wide use. Consider these two posts: Is Facebook in the Enterprise an Oxymoron? and Facebook enterprise application. In a few years, we may see the wise insights of leaders who eagerly pursued the organizational use of Facebook or the educational use of SecondLife. Or we might find that both have slipped into obscurity and are remembered with the same passing indifference or sense of oddity now reserved for Newtons and Webvan.
Several weeks ago, I was interviewed by Stephen Walsh of Kineo. We chatted about how organizations need to change to take advantage of the distributed nature of knowledge, newer technologies, networks, and the increased need for innovation in designing learning models. The interview is available here.
Pew Internet just released a report on how teens are creating and sharing content online: "Content creation by teenagers continues to grow, with 64% of online teenagers ages 12 to 17 engaging in at least one type of content creation, up from 57% of online teens in 2004.
Fueled by new technologies, websites, and social network domains such as Facebook and MySpace, large numbers of teens share and create materials online."
The last few years have seen significant change in how we relate to information and each other through the web. This interaction, however, has occurred largely on the desktop. Blogs, wikis, facebook, YouTube, SecondLife, and so on, are largely laptop/desktop dependent. The next few years I suspect will produce the greatest shift to date in the form of mobile devices. The interactions now tethered to a computer will be mobile based. For this trend to take hold, we will need to see more sites like Treemo - sites that do for mobile content what Blogger did for blogs and YouTube did for video (TechCrunch lists a few other mobile content sites)
The evolution of personal publishing: "The personal publishing market evolved from cumbersome web sites to online diaries called blogs to social networks and more recently to microblogs."
Don't quite agree with blogs being equated with diaries (thought we worked through that view a few years ago), but the article is an useful exploration of how microblogging tools (like Twitter and Tumblr) fit into the established blog and social network space.
Design - whether software, physical items such as a classroom, or something as nebulous as learning and knowledge - has many entry points. For example, if an organization decides to design an online course, numerous approaches exist: determine content required, determine outcomes or skills needed, design for tools to be used, etc. David Armano emphasizes a people-driven design approach: "People-driven design starts with real people in mind. What they do, how they think, what their pain points are, why they like and dislike things and how they'll use what you create for them."
This approach is not suited as a sole approach (content, software, and other aspects need to be considered), but it is an important starting point and thread that should run through the entire design approach, and in the case of learning, right through to the end of the course. The problem in asking people what they want is that we then have to sacrifice our own assumptions. I had an experience of this nature in a recent course I taught. We (Peter Tittenberger and I) asked students to blog and user wikis for interaction and reflection. We discovered rather quickly that students didn't share our affinity for blogging. They were uncomfortable with the experience of writing publicly. One group - due to the nature of their discussions (government employees) asked if they could hold their discussion in WebCT. What then is the role of user-based design? Do we "force" learners to continue with our approach because we know (so we think) that what we are asking them to do will be important in the long run? Or do we acquiesce when they provide resistance to the design we have imposed on their learning?
Google Gets Ready to Rumble With Microsoft: "The challenge for Microsoft is not the ability to do much of what Google does. Instead, the company faces a business quandary. The Microsoft approach is largely to try to link the Web to its desktop business — “software plus Internet services,” in its formulation. It will embrace the Web, while striving to maintain the revenue and profits from its desktop software businesses, the corporate gold mine."
I personally enjoy the increased competition in software and technology. After over a decade of Microsoft dominance (and as a result, decreased innovation on the desktop and the experiences of end users), the last few years have been exciting. Innovation after innovation has opened options for software use. The "wow, that's cool" factor has been scarce over the last ten years. Now, I encounter it almost weekly - often from Google and other companies finally able to innovate outside the rigid framework controlled by Microsoft, and even from Microsoft itself. The consumer will be the clear winner.
I just came across the Computer History Museum's ("committed to preserving and presenting the history and stories of the Information Age") YouTube site. What a great use of a service like YouTube to promote a message, and more importantly, introduce the next generation to some of the legends involved in developing the internet. A good example for other museums to consider as they seek to capture the interest of today's youth (and, for that matter, make their services more accessible to everyone).
Like other 2.0 terms (learning, school, web, education), enterprise 2.0 is a catch-all term expressing something foundational is changing in how organizations function. Jim McGee presents a compilation of important articles relating to this foundation enterprise-level change. My ongoing resistance to the "2.0" tag is that it sets up each subsequent small iteration as "3.0, 4.0" and so on. It's great for consultants and pundits. But rather irritating for actual practitioners in, or new comers to, a field. While many of my presentations over the last few years have been directed to more technologically aware audiences, the last few have been directed to educators or trainers who are not necessarily involved with technology. Terms like wikis, blogs, podcasts, and web 2.0 are absolutely foreign. They do, however, recognize something is changing. They just aren't as burdened with buzzwords as many of us are to describe the phenomenon. Our terminology and vision for change needs to be revisited if we expect our message to be heard.
A few days ago, I posted on how up to 30% of Google and Yahoo search results link to an article in Wikipedia. Google started its life by being a pointer - pointing to and filtering an overwhelming information base. The "pointing to" was valuable for searchers because it helped to eliminate much of the junk. But, with the rise of Wikipedia, Google serves little value to its users by simply linking to the site (though as one reader commented, it's not only the first link, but the many different search results that are of value). Why not just go directly to Wikipedia and skip Google? Well, it appears Google realizes its vulnerability. It has launched a new project called knol: "Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it."
Tech Crunch thinks Google has gone too far: "Google is moving away from simply indexing the worlds content to being a content provider itself...Knol on the other hand brings the power of Google into a marketplace that is already rich with competition, and a marketplace where Google can use its might to crush that competition by favoring pages from Knol over others, on what is the worlds most popular search engine."
I've posted my keynote presentation for Ohio State Extension Conference: Pressures of Change: A response. Basic message: the confluence of change factors places strong change need for education institutions. In two words: transformation and transformation. Transformation and innovation need to occur at all levels: course design, delivery, policies, funding, and the organization of the institution itself. We can only tweak at a course level for so long before we have to conceptualize an entirely new system.
The concept of third places - "social surroundings separate from the two usual social environments of home and the workplace" - is gaining a fair bit of attention. Teemu Arina assigns space-based attributes to serendipity in his "Serendipity 2.0: The missing third places of learning" presentation. I indirectly addressed this in my University of Manitoba blog on coffee houses as "penny universities". Richard Florida suggests that "hotels and some airline lounges provide a possible glimpse into the future of third places". New Media Consortium states in their whitepaper Social Networking, The "Third Place", and the Evolution of Communication (.pdf) that the internet is the new space "where people connect with friends, watch television,listen to music, build a sense of togetherness with people across the world, and provide expressions of ourselves which are themselves forms of communication". Constance Steinkuehler views online games as third spaces (.doc). Third places have been with us since recorded history. New technologies and media, however, are providing a new shape and new ease of access to these spaces. The question comes down to: how can we as educators make use of these spaces as informal learning tools.
Two points - which don't really belong together, except for the common presence of Google:
1. I've noticed the prominence of Wikipedia results in Google searches. But I didn't anticipate the significant rise over the last few years: In 2005, for all 10 first page results, "2% of the links proposed by Google and 4% of those proposed by Yahoo came from Wikipedia. On the first link alone, Google offered no Wikipedia results (at least not in our sample) and Yahoo offered 7%.
The strategies have changed completely. Today 27% of Google’s results on the first link alone come from Wikipedia, as do 31 % of Yahoo’s. "
If increases of that size persist, eventually we'll skip the search engine altogether and just use Wikipedia.
2. Rogers Wireless (the Canadian mobile phone company that overcharges me each month for mediocre service) illustrates why net neutrality is such an important discussion (the comments and links below the article offer differing views). Essentially, Rogers splits (adds content to) the Google search page in order to "communicate with its customers" (which in this case is a Rogers-Yahoo information banner).
I received an invite to attend an online presentation of Open Yale, but unfortunately missed the session as I was in transit to Ohio (I'll be delivering the keynote address on Wednesday for Ohio State University Extension Conference). The Yale initiative is interesting in that it offers course outlines, readings, transcripts, and lecture downloads. I sampled a few of the sessions. Great video quality and talented presenters. My only complaint - I'd like to interact with others who are viewing the resources. Yale faculty do not need to be involved, but allow those of us on the outside to react to course materials and dialogue with each other. I certainly appreciate these types of initiatives. Unfortunately, creating a one-way flow of information significantly misses the point of interacting online. However, as Hewlett Foundation President Brest states: "Truly, all the world is becoming a classroom".
I've tried twitter on numerous occasions. I just can't make it a habit. Yet I keep hearing about how valuable many people find it for staying in touch with friends, family, and colleagues. Why are these micro-communication tools so popular? Possibly because they are phatic communication tools?: "This is communication with little hard, informational content, but lots of emotional and social content. Phatic communications doesn't get much said, but it has social effects so powerful, it gets lots done."
I won't surprise many readers in declaring that I'm not the most visually creative person. A few years ago, an individual from Australia sent me an email stating that he was considering unsubscribing from my newsletter because of my apathy toward visuals. Since then, nothing much has changed. I spend most of my time in text (though my presentations include greater visuals than even a year ago). Robin Good, perhaps out of sympathy, requested to take my newsletter and spruce it up on his site. The results of week one are here, including his introductory comments: "Breaking technology news, the latest app, scores of startups launching in beta every day. The incoming wave of technology and media related news keeps increasing by the day with no signs of pause or slowdown. And while many blogs and news sites give plenty of coverage and space to the latest and most promising ventures, very few devote their time to make sense of all that is happening and connecting the dots of the ongoing revolution we are witnessing."
This prompted Mike Powers to state: "Robin Good republishes the same material but in a much more presentable form making the very same ideas seem far more interesting.
There is a lesson here for all those bloggers who think content trumps everything else."
I respect what Mike is saying. Yet I likely won't make any huge changes in how I write my blog. Why does Robin do it? I imagine the motivation is partly economic (traffic or adsense), but in the process, he is adding value to the network for people, like Mike, who prefer greater effort paid to the presentation of ideas.
Five plus years ago, as blogs and wikis were beginning their emergence from the technology field to wider use, I frequently encountered comments acknowledging their value for communication, but with a tone that questioned their practical application in classrooms. The concern of practical use has largely been settled as learners and academics alike have adopted blogs for learning, communicating, and connecting. Sub-networks of academic, school, and corporate blogs (sometimes created intentionally with a handful of prominent bloggers posting to a site or sometimes created through interests shared by bloggers and the resulting links of information exchange) are a viable means of staying informed of trends and interacting with colleagues from around the world. Youtube is crossing a similar chasm of uncertain application to education. While some videos are of useful (like the Stanford Prison experiment), most are of limited value. But new sites - like SciVee and TeacherTube - may serve to provide practical application to educators and trainers.
Just had a chance to review Brian Lamb's recent SCoPE presentation on: Social Media in Education. Brian's presentation is available in a wiki: Coming Apart. He builds an excellent case for the need to share/use/reuse the educational materials available. A key quote from Brian: "I'm going to keep doing it until the world behaves the way I want it to" :).
Lee Kraus reflects on information overload: "Some talk about this as the signal to noise ratio. How much information do you have to weed through to get to the highly relevant content that you really want?
What I do to produce "incremental relevancy" which I hope leads to incremental productivity improvement is to try to tweak my daily (continual) information management practices through both automation and structure within these communication tools."
I just received my invite to xobni, a program that organizes email, showing relationships between recipients, frequency of email exchange, people I haven't emailed in a while, visualizations of peak email use, rates email relationships by sent/received exchanges, etc. I must say, I'm impressed. These developments are very much in keeping with what I've been saying about technology doing the "grunt cognitive" work for us, displaying patterns, revealing relationships, and allowing us to move to more advanced cognitive tasks (such as "what do these patterns mean?"). We can't keep functioning with the explosive information growth with existing tools. Xobni is a company that understands the need for new methods and approaches based on our changed relationship with information.
The value point for content has shifted. With books, magazines, journal articles, and newspapers, the value point was the product itself. We charged for books. For access to journals. Or for the morning newspaper. The content creator negotiated economic value based on the artifact the embodied information. The internet has largely changed that. The value point is not found in the product itself. Instead, it's found in reputation and access. Most authors don't make significant revenue from books. Instead, value is found in the increased reputation, speaking or consulting opportunities, or improved employment options. This trend is quite strong in the music industry. Artists like Madonna are no longer negotiating only on albums. Value is found in reputational components - merchandising and concerts. Scott Karp takes a slightly different slant and states that the the new value point rests in distribution: "For many people who paid for print publications, including newspapers, magazines, and books, a significant part of the value was in the distribution. That DOESN’T mean people don’t value the content anymore. It means that the value of having it delivered to their doorstep every morning, or having it show up in their mailbox, or carrying it with them on a plane — in print — has CHANGED because of the availability of digital distribution as an alternative."
Ideas and tech companies exist on a fine line. On the one hand, you want everyone to know that you exist and that you're cool. On the other hand, if you get too popular too fast, a backlash ensues. Facebook, Twitter, and Second Life are all examples. Somewhere between hype and outright dismissal lies a more accurate picture, as reflected in this article: Hype and Backlash for Second Life Miss the Bigger Picture
Well, I think I want one: Violin-playing robot. The dexterity required to play a violin demonstrates how quickly robotics have advanced in the last decade. My first reaction is more to the effect of "that has to be a person!". And why do robots have to look like us? Why arms, legs, and a head? Is it for comfort, so we don't get too concerned that machines are overtaking us? I want a robot that looks completely unlike people. Where's the creativity?
Strategy execution presents two opposing perspectives on how to set and achieve strategy in an organization. The first - more traditional - involves leaders determining strategy and "cascading" it through the organization. The second is more informal and involves leadership getting out the way and letting people innovate. Context plays a key role in which model to use and when. Personally, I'm increasingly uncomfortable with "point-based" thinking where we create positions and contrast them (how many times haven't we seen the table in conference presentations comparing lecturing to learner-centered teaching, or web 1.0 to web 2.0). Continuum-based thinking is more reflective of reality. The clear distinctions often made between two separate ideas serve very little practical value beyond an introduction to new ideas. Eventually, we need to recognize a gradient exists, and context determines where on the gradient our actions or strategies lie.
Slashdot - still one of the best places online to dissect ideas with humor and offensiveness - is currently discussing games and education. As typical, the comments range from silly to provocative, centering largely on the huge development costs of games and the challenges of "making games fun". A similar discussion was held earlier this year: "Can a game be made that is fun and educational? Sure but I'm just not sure that making it would be an effective use of time."
Games fit the typical profile of academic envy, namely the condition where we see many people doing something and desire to then use the same tools or processes for teaching and learning. Sometimes it works very well...other times the effort required exceeds the potential outcome. Especially when the work requires developing an entire game from scratch. Developed games - like WoW and Second Life - enable learners to develop specific skills somewhat constrained by game design, but don't require educators to invest significant efforts and resources in actually creating the game. Where I've seen academic games used well are in the focus on single activities - like a Jeopardy game for testing basic knowledge. Complex games - such as IBM's INNOV8 require substantial costs and are rarely successful if undertaken by a single institution (IBM can afford to develop the game, but most university departments or research grant recipients do not have the resources). As noted in the slashdot discussion, MMORPG games take a long time to develop.
A course outline or syllabus is a staple in college and university courses. It serves as a central document to direct instructional activities. An interesting perspective on the role it plays in courses today: Death to the syllabus "The implicit message of the modern course syllabus is that the student will not do anything unless bribed by grades or forced by threats."
Two-way interaction is now increasingly evident in media which has long been one-way. Consider radio. Few would see it as a social media (beyond the odd person calling in to report traffic problems or play the joys of radio contests). But that's changing quickly Radio Gets Social: "The on-demand nature of the Internet — getting what I want when I want it — is what has gradually pulled me away from traditional media like print and radio, which I stopped listening to consistently back in the ’90s...Traditional radio was always hit-or-miss for hearing music that I liked, but these services have made it so much easier, as they allow you to filter out what you don’t want to hear and discover new things you might not ever hear on the radio."
This has been getting a bit of attention - Cellular Storytelling: "Remarkably, half of Japan's top-10 selling works of fiction in the first six months of the year were composed the same way - on the tiny handset of a mobile phone. They sold an average of 400,000 copies. By August, the president of Goma Books, Masayoshi Yoshino, was declaring in a manifesto that he was determined "to establish this not simply as a fad, but as a new kind of culture"."