The End

Well, here it is—post number 36 and the last for my Web 2.0 class. It has been a challenging and rewarding experience and has given me a few insights into all of those blogs I have previously taken for granted. I have a new appreciation for the mechanical ease of creating and posting to a blog, as well as the challenge of actually generating worthwhile content. I certainly hope that I have succeeded at the latter.


I won’t be continuing this particular blog, as I intended it to specifically compliment this class, a six-week exploration of Web 2.0 tools and techniques and their potential use in training and performance support. But I may well take up another blog; we’ll see. In the meantime, I wish to thank everyone who stopped by and read my efforts, and I feel special gratitude towards those who took the time to comment; the beginning blog can be a lonely (virtual) place, and the occasional calling card lets the author know that there really is an audience out there. I’m now much more inclined to let other bloggers know that, “DD was here—you have readers—keep up the good work!” I also must thank my family, who were very understanding as I sequestered myself in the office for so much of the summer, working on this class—I appreciate your support!

Now it is time to seal this time capsule. Let me wish us all happiness and meaning in our lives. And with a tip of my hat to my forever ago journalism teacher I'll finish with that traditional and mysterious conclusion to every story…

-30-

 

Week 6 in Review

Today is the last day of class for Summer Term “C”. This was a “wrap-up” week, with lots of discussion on the boards and a lot of playing with the products created by my classmates. In summary:

• I made approximately 35 posts to the Discussion Boards. I read everything my classmates posted through 0700CDT today.
• With the exception of two Facebook pages that wouldn’t let me in, I examined and explored all of my classmates produsage efforts. I have some very clever classmates and gleaned a lot of good ideas.
• I read all of my classmates blog posts through 2000CDT yesterday, and commented on several. I do wonder how many of us have caught the “blogging fever”—I will be monitoring for future activity.
• I made five blog posts of my own, including this one. Number six will follow shortly.

It’s been a very worthwhile class and I’m glad I did this. I hope to meet many of my classmates in person at some point. Good luck all!

Week 6 Prompts and Answers, part 3

“Reflect on what you have learned in the class and how you will use it professionally as both a lifelong learner and an instructional systems professional.”


How will I use this in my capacity as a lifelong learner? I feel bolder and more self-assured regarding contributing to a wiki, for example, and I have new appreciation for the actual importance of community participation for generation of new knowledge. I also think that I am now more sensitive to the subtlety and nuance of the community behind a discussion forum, and am more inclined to slow down and contribute there when I have something useful t give.

Nonetheless, I don’t know that my new insights will much change my behavior vis-à-vis my usual quest for information. I embrace my general role as a produser, but expect that I will still act as a harvester far more often as a sower. The fact is that I am still likely to consume 1000 wiki articles for every contribution I make to a topic.

Furthermore, I conclude this class every bit as much a private person as when I began. I cautiously joined LinkedIn, but can’t see myself joining Facebook. I’ve made a few tweets, but mostly about things that I think others might find useful (i.e., I don’t tweet about myself). I remain mindful of my electronic footprints.


How will I use this in my professional capacity as an ISD and performance improvement consultant? This has a two-part answer. First the fun part! I have an enhanced sense of the value of tools that permit a community of practice to document its knowledge and to generate new knowledge. I see the obvious value of a wiki within a CoP, as well as threaded discussion forums. I have new insight into blogging and responding to blog posts.

Perhaps the most personally useful experience is discovering the relative ease with which many of these tools can be employed. While some projects may call for professional skills to enhance the final production values, the fact is any designer can at least get a good trial use up and running as a test of concept in a specific situation.

The less satisfying part of the answer is that I will have to keep looking for the larger implications for design and learning. My present conceptualization is that Web 2.0 is currently best approached from the instructional strategy standpoint, and in some cases simply as mediation options. Yet I believe that incredible expansion of our general interconnectedness will soon lead to the creation of actual design models for Web 2.0; but we aren’t there yet. I am encouraged by the fact that serious academics are focused on describing and measuring different aspects of the phenomenon. I am confident that someone will soon do for Web 2.0 what John Keller did with motivation research and pull it all together in a useful theory with prescriptive value.

Week 6 Prompts and Answers, part 2

“Reflect on what you have learned in the class and how you will use it professionally as both a lifelong learner and an instructional systems professional.”


In part 1 I offered upon some of my macro-level reflections; on a more applied level I also learned that…

• …There are myriad tools for all manner of situations, and most of them are under constant revision either by their users or in response to their users suggestions and requests. If it occurs to me that, “I wish there was a way to…”, I will search for a tool because there is a decent chance someone is trying to solve the problem already.
• …Asynchronous guided discussion such as that used on the class discussion boards might take a bit of getting used to, but it can be a very interesting way to elicit the sharing and discussion of ideas. The two most obvious advantages are time-shifting and the irrelevance of location. The principle drawbacks as I experienced them are that it can be difficult to maintain a lively exchange when it is asynchronously stretched over a long period of time, the absence of body-language cues can make it challenging to “hear” the tone of a comment, and it can be difficult to interpret lack of follow-up commentary (i.e. Was this comment irrelevant? Obvious? Uninteresting? Generally regarded as moronic? Or so profound that no one else has anything to add?)
• …Setting up a blog or a virtual group or a wiki or a Twitterfeed or a Facebook page or etcetera… is easy. Populating it with interesting/meaningful content is less so. Throwing the creative access portal open to participants is the new model—ten thousand people contributing to a common purpose means that some portion of it will be really good and will rise to the top.
• ...As with so many creative endeavors, it is real experience and effort that distinguishes the “best” exemplars from the dreck and dross. This brave new networked world may allow anyone to become a publisher, but talent and professionalism still shine. So if you genuinely feel inspired to do something then do not be deterred by all the others in the same arena—quality will show.
• ...Using the power of creative networking promises/threatens to be transformative on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. To loosely paraphrase a blogger I follow, five-billion of us are in the process of joining in with what heretofore five-hundred-million of us have been doing. This is exciting in terms of creativity, but terrifying in terms of demand upon finite resources.

Okay, I guess the “how will I use this stuff” will be in part 3.

Week 6 Prompts and Answers, part 1

“Reflect on what you have learned in the class and how you will use it professionally as both a lifelong learner and an instructional systems professional."


I learned (or had reaffirmed) that...

• ...Humans are so social that every tool and technology will be explored for pro-social uses. Computers were invented to crunch big numbers and the internet originated in an effort to improve the survivability of the U.S. Military’s networked radar systems; but look how we use them. (500,000,000 active users of Facebook!?!) We tend to describe Web 2.0 in terms of participation, but the better word may be sharing.
• ...A power-law distribution is an amazing thing. I long ago adopted the Pareto Principle as a valuable lens through which to view organizational behavior. But the related PLD is a mind-blowing extension!
• ...Once you take the plunge and set you thoughts out there in a public blog, it is really (really) nice to have readers. I have to say that my posts that required the most contemplation and effort seemed not to garner any comments. They tended to be the ones where I tried on old hats in sociology, economics, and anthropology. At least I had fun. (A liberal arts education is its own reward!)
• ...Even though I often suspect that we’re all going to hell in a handcart, Benkler makes a strong and reassuring case that all this connectedness is good for society, that it promotes democracy and inhibits corruption. (My immediately previous blog post notes that Twitter and SMS were harnessed to fight election fraud this week in Kenya.)
• ...Even more than I had suspected, privacy is undergoing a distressing transformation from basic expectation if not foregone conclusion to a highly-qualified concept that is almost theoretical. When all aspects of modern life--your work and play, your location, your history, everything you’ve written and much of what you’ve said—is all internetworked, then only your thoughts are private. (And I’m sure that even that realm is under assault.)
• ...Produsage is shaking up the old information infrastructure in some very interesting ways. The recording and movie industries, as well as the publishing houses, are trying desperately to throttle what new technology makes possible and how it is used. They are going to lose, at least so far as their old ways of doing things. They are under pressure to evolve or die.
• ...The ease of producing coupled with the never-ending news cycle has led to the amateurization of much of our modern news media. We are gaining lots of eyes and ears for collecting news, but we are losing the hard-won professionalism and responsibility that characterized much of the journalism profession of my youth. The recent Shirley Sherod incident should cause us all to cringe.
• ...The most significant legal decisions of the next ten years will have to do with ownership of personal data. The bottom line will be, who owns “you”? What do you have to “give up” in order to benefit and participate in networked society? (Okay, I didn’t “learn” this so much as surmise it.) Before the next year is out, I predict that some data aggregator will attempt to sue someone for providing false information in registering to use some Web 2.0 tool.
• ...I agree with boyd that we can best serve our children by preparing them for the networked world rather than trying to protect them from it.
• ...My classmates are very smart and insightful. I really enjoyed reading their blogs (yes, really!) and I learned so much from their responses to the produsage assignment—this is the point where I wish the class could meet and debrief it all. I’ve seen some very clever ideas that I wish to learn to emulate.
• Okay, here’s an embedded measurement: if you made it this far, give me a “high-five” or an “Amen” (depending upon how southern you are) in the comments section. Come on, help me find out if this has been a game of solitaire.

Part 2: How I think I’ll use all this….

I'm going to Twitter on you....

This story in the Christian Science Monitor relates that Twitter and Short Messaging Service were used as formal monitoring tools in Kenya's national elections earlier today.  Democracy advocates set up a program called Uchaguzi to allow citizens to report on conditions, good or bad, at polling stations across the country.

The CSM reports that the election went well, due in part to the fact that anyone with a mobile phone was able to serve as a poll monitor.

Week 5 in Review

This has frankly been a challenging week. I discovered on Friday that I would have to generate a “produsage plan B”, so the weekend has been more intense than usual with this class.


In summary,

• I read everything posted to the message boards by 2115 today. I made 15 posts.
• I made seven posts to my blog.
• I read my classmates blog posts through Friday.
• I planned and launched a Twitter-stream and a Google Group in support of a Boy Scout Troop. This involved negotiation with the church that sponsors the Troop and members of the Troop Committee who are expected to be significant participants.

Week 5 Prompts and Answers

How do issues such as authorship, copyright, and open access impact your desire, ability, and willingness to engage in produsage, both personally and professionally?


It really depends upon the situation. As an independent instructional designer I am very comfortable with “work for hire” situations in which my product will carry the client’s logo and copyright. However, I also take “pride of authorship” in my creations and seethed for a very long time once when a superior inserted his name as first-author on a report I had created. I’m also comfortable with projects where my effort is followed by that of editors and graphic artists and so on—I have tremendous respect for what they do. But then again I also had a project where someone made bizarre changes after my part was done, and it left me flabbergasted. So one would think that open-access would give me heartburn. Except that I have worked on collaborative product that were really fun, and I have contributed to meaningful work that carries no one’s name. I guess it is both my expectations going into a project or effort and the prevailing social norms that together set the tone.

In an environment where individual attribution is the norm, then I desire my by-line. In situations where anonymity is perceived as serving the greater good, then I can be content to contribute uncredited. The problems would arise when the norms/expectations and the attribution policy get crossed. Just as I could be angered to find that my name had fallen off of my work when authorship credit is the standard, I would be mortified to find only my name on a group project, or in a community where attribution is not expected.

"Social Media and Web 2.0 in Government" - Website

The U.S. Federal government has a website dedicated to helping federal, state, and local agencies build and maintain quality websites.  The site offers this about Web 2.0:

"Social Media and Web 2.0 define activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and content creation. Social media tools use the "wisdom of crowds" to collaboratively connect online information. Through social media, people or groups can create, organize, edit, comment on, combine, and share content. Social media and Web 2.0 use many technologies and forms, including RSS and other syndicated web feeds, blogs, wikis, photo–sharing, video–sharing, podcasts, social networking, social bookmarking, mashups, widgets, virtual worlds, microblogs, and more."

The site is a wealth of documentation of best practices for various media.  Check it out, especially if you find yourself working in the federal environment.

Why MySpace is Different from Old-Fashioned Public Space

This week we’ve read another interesting piece by danah boyd* from UC-Berkley, “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life”. boyd examines how today’s teens are coming of age in a very different kind of public space than did their parents, and she identifies four properties that are particular to being in a “networked public”:

• Persistence of communication data;
• Searchability of that data;
• Replicability of data with perfect fidelity; and
• Invisible audiences, meaning that expressions can be viewed across time and space.

She notes that, in theory, the potential audience for any personal expression that makes it into networked public space is essentially everybody, everywhere, from now on. This of course is part of what freaks out the parents of youth who use social media; adults are fearful that teenagers will fail to appreciate that, despite the sometimes clever tricks used to hide or disguise information, anything they commit to the internet may be connectable to them forever. boyd also allows that even some adults are slow to come to this realization.

But boyd states that this is the world in which the youth of today are going to be living in as adults, and that rather than try to temporarily protect them via heavy-handed restrictions we can better serve them by helping them make informed use of social media. She even suggests that adults can learn a thing or two from teens as they experience living in a mediated public space.

I will be recommending this paper to parents of young teens as they begin their own forays into their networked public space.


*boyd, danah (2007) “Why youth (heart) social network sites: The role of networked publics in teenage social life.” MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning—Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume (ed. David Buckingham). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.