Week 2 in Review

I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed, thank you for asking. How are you?

I have the unnerving feeling that we are running a marathon at a miler’s pace. I tried out a different strategy this week, completing all of the reading before joining the Discussion Board. As a result, I avoided the awkwardness of weighing in on a topic only to discover later that the authors have done a better job of making the same point, however I instead arrived fashionably late to a well-populated discussion in which my points had already been made (again, probably more eloquently) by my colleagues. :-(

So what did I accomplish this week?

• Completed all of the assigned reading. I enjoyed all of it, though my progress with Benkler was particularly slow and I’m not sure why.
• I read all of the Discussion Board entries posted before 0900CDT today. I contributed five posts, with particular effort directed towards the topics of the internet as democracy and on reframing “lurkers” as “customers”.
• I read all of the class blog entries and comments posted before 1400CDT today. I also followed all of the links and watched all of the videos. (I don’t know if I can keep that up—some of the bloggers are pretty prolific in their use of links.) I lost count but believe that I offered in the neighborhood of fifteen or so comments on various blogs. I committed myself to helping make sure that everyone knows that they really are being heard (“read”), but am also unwilling to simply make “David was here” comments. Of course, sometimes you just can’t think of something substantive to add….
• I researched Diigo, Flickr, DimDim, Utube and some others that escape me at the moment. I joined LinkedIn and (with trepidation) Twitter. I hope the latter is not the time-waster I fear it is….
• I investigated several blogs of school teachers using Web 2.0 in their classrooms, and applied to join a Ning Network of such. I originally thought that might be the W2.0 community in which I would actively participate for the community observations assignment, but they haven’t yet approved my membership so I moved to a different topic.
• I selected three discussion forums to follow, and joined one. They are unrelated to education/training/performance, but are of current interest to me. More to come….

Okay, gotta go—the final game of the World Cup is in overtime. ;-)

Week 2 Prompts (and Again, My Responses)

One of the reading assignments for this week was “Produsage: Towards a broader framework for user-led content creation”, by Axel Bruns (2007). Bruns introduces the term “produsage” as “…a new hybrid form of simultaneous production and usage…”, and describes four key characteristics:

1) “Distributed generation of content by a wide community of participants”;
2) “Fluid movement of produsers between roles”;
3) Perpetually evolutionary, unfinished “artefacts”;
4) Right to work on artefacts based on merit rather than ownership of copyright.

This week’s prompts from the instructor center on Brun’s term:

• How might the concept of produsage be applied in your life (personal and/or professional) as it stands today?
• Are you already a produser? If yes, what do you do? If no, why not?

The boring truth is that I am only this week really taking the first steps to becoming a produser per the full definition, although I have perhaps experienced small elements here and there. Perhaps I have been a proto-produser in my professional life. To explain using the four principles listed above, I have certainly worked on many collaborative projects, sometimes with team-members drawn from near and far for the expertise, but almost always with pretty well-defined roles. And while I have had projects that had iterations, they were always a series of editions, each of which had a period in which it was “finished” and official. Finally, every project I have worked on had very serious attention to copyright and permission to use.

While I sense a sea-change due to the Web 2.0 tools and philosophy I am learning about, I cannot yet say that I have effectively combined my “user” and “producer” roles.

Turning Social Networking Data into Information

In The Wealth of Networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom, Yochai Benkler spends some time talking about network topology. Citing Ravi Kumar and Gary Flake (et al), he states: “Early work done in the IBM Almaden Research Center on how link structure could be used as a search technique showed that by mapping densely interlinked sites without looking at content, one could find communities of interest that identify very fine-grained topical connections, such as Australian fire brigades or Turkish students in the United States. A later study out of the NEC Research Institute more formally defined the interlinking that would identify a "community" as one in which the nodes were more densely connected to each other than they were to nodes outside the cluster by some amount. The study also showed that topically connected sites meet this definition. For instance, sites related to molecular biology clustered with each other - in the sense of being more interlinked with each other than with off-topic sites - as did sites about physics and black holes. (p.25)


This brought to mind a 2009 episode of NOVA, PBS’s award winning television program. The show is called “The Spy Factory”, and it addresses present day surveillance as conducted by the National Security Agency, or NSA. (Also lovingly known by many of its employees as “No Such Agency”.) Chapter 5 of the program is entitled “Intelligence Overload” (begins at the 40.56 point of the video here); it describes how the Agency is vacuuming up absolutely stunning volumes of digital data and using massive computer resources to identify the kinds of topical connections that IBM researched. When trying to identify and track terrorists, they are engaged in the kind of community identification that NEC studied. Finding legal identities and physical locations follow virtual identification and location.

It is really quite amazing, and potentially frightening if your concerns run towards the Orwellian. If you want to lose some sleep, check out this companion article to the NOVA program: .

The “Invisible Hand” of the Network

This week’s class reading assignments included a chapter from The Wealth of Networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom by Yochai Benkler. After reading Benkler’s explanations as to why the internet neither devolves into overwhelming bable, nor becomes an echo chamber that only knows a handful of notes, I am amused at the clever title the author chose for his work. I believe that Benkler very intentionally plays upon economist Adam Smith’s seminal work, (called in short-form) The Wealth of Nations. Smith perceived an “invisible hand” at work in free-market economies, a force that serves the best interests of society even as individuals pursue their own best interests. I think that Benkler too infers some wondrous balancing mechanisms woven into the warp and woof of the “networked Public Sphere”, and he gets a lot of mileage out of what I learned as “the Pareto Principle”, but he calls by the more encompassing term “a Power Law Distribution”. I came away reasonably satisfied with his fascinating description as to why a highly networked public has a democratizing effect.


As a practical matter, I think that Benkler also offers nice reasoning for how the network can at the same time be both nimble and robust. In the summary on this point he states, “We are seeing a newly shaped information environment, where indeed few are read by many, but clusters of moderately read sites provide platforms for vastly greater numbers of speakers than were heard in the mass-media environment. Filtering, accreditation, synthesis, and salience are created through a system of peer review by information affinity groups, topical or interest based. These groups filter the observations and opinions of an enormous range of people, and transmit those that pass local peer review to broader groups and ultimately to the polity more broadly, without recourse to market-based points of control over the information flow. Intense interest and engagement by small groups that share common concerns, rather than lowest-common-denominator interest in wide groups that are largely alienated from each other, is what draws attention to statements and makes them more visible. This makes the emerging networked public sphere more responsive to intensely held concerns of a much wider swath of the population than the mass media were capable of seeing, and creates a communications process that is more resistant to corruption by money.” (p.21)

I like his notion of nested peer review by affinity groups promoting viewpoints to national prominence, even as it also confers some “resistance to corruption”. Benkler has offered up some strong stuff, and there is a lot to chew on. I will post again shortly on another topic from this work that I enjoyed, on network topography.

The View from the Classroom....

Last week I found myself somewhat distressed that we seem to have ample anecdotes regarding the use of Web 2.0 tools yet models for their use for instruction and performance improvement are elusive.  I'm trying to get past individual displays of creativity in favor of actual models and strategies.  I haven't picked up a strong scent yet, but I'm hunting.  On the assumption that the lesson plans of teachers teaching with W2.0 rather than about W2.0 may offer instructional design insights, I've gone searching amongst the classroom educators.  Here are two promising links that are relevant to the instructional uses of Web 2.0:


“Classroom 2.0” (http://www.classroom20.com/ ) is a Ning Network that is presented as “…the social network for those interested in Web 2.0 and Social Media in education”. Posting privileges follow membership (my application is pending), but lurkers have read-access to the forums. I have hopes for the nascent (at present) discussion of constructivism.

“Mrs. Muñoz's Class Blog” (http://techmunoz.edublogs.org/) describes one teacher’s attempts to incorporate Web 2.0 in the classroom and lesson plans. Yesterday’s post, Reflection: A Year Of Implementing Web 2.0 Tools In My Classroom, offers a brief description of the tools she used during the past school year and outlines lessons learned. Good stuff!

Everyone Who Wants It Already Has It?

Whew, I finally finished reading chapter 7 of The Wealth of Networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom by Yochai Benkler. It was a bit of a slog at times, but definitely worthwhile. I will comment on it here later after a bit more reflection.


In the meantime, I came across an interesting post from Wired-dot-com citing an impressive fall-off in new-user registrations for Facebook—7.8 million+ in May, followed by only 320,000 or so in June. By my hasty calculation that is a drop of 95% plus change!

Ryan Singel, the post’s author, notes that Facebook took a bit of a public flogging during this period over their sleight-of-hand regarding privacy settings, and that certainly could be giving potential new users pause. But the more intriguing conjecture, as Singel puts it, is “…there’s also the possibility that almost every American who has any interest in joining Facebook already has.”

That would represent one very fast ride to (U.S.) market saturation!



http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/07/facebook-fatigue/

Week 1 in Review

Note: This course requires some weekly bookkeeping in the form of a “participation post”. If you somehow can to this blog through the side-door and are not a member of the class, you can confidently skip the rest of this post! Have a wonderful Independence Day!

Whew, what a week! I don’t think we are asked to actually tally our hours invested, and that is good because I can’t count that high. But to be fair, I spent an obscene amount of time just researching blog-engines and RSS-readers and other nuts-and-bolts stuff. It reflects on me, not on the task. Anyway, here is the itemization for “How I spent my summer, episode 1”:

• I read the all 288 of the Discussion Board posts time-stamped before1400CDT today.
• I made 10 posts of my own, but two of those were an introduction and the URL to this blog. Of the remaining 8, about five benefited from real blood, sweat, and tears, and the other three were pretty spontaneous. One was too spontaneous and clearly didn’t make sense to anyone but me. I didn’t concentrate anywhere particular, as this is all new to me. This asynchronous, text-based communication is going to take some getting used to. At least for me, the lack of voice inflection and other body-language cues really impoverishes the communication.
• Counting this one, I made six posts to my blog. That is six more than my previous lifetime total.
• I read all of my classmates’ blog posts up through Friday night. (That’s assuming I set up my feed-reader correctly—I think I got everybody.) I did not respond to anyone’s posts on their blogs, and that is the source of my resolution for next week—I’m going to make a particular effort to let each classmate know that we really are reading what they produce. Despite my effort to keep my ego in tight check, when I see “0 comments” I can’t help but wonder, (“Was this uninteresting? Did anybody read it? Am I in the wrong class?”) I’ve found that if you choose to write for others, you suddenly need them for validation. Jeez….

Okay, time to go fire up the grill and find the sparklers. DD.

Week 1 Prompts (and My Responses)

Each week the course instructor presents a set of prompts to be addressed within our blogs. We’re nearing the end of week 1, so here goes:

• What have been your prior experiences with Web 2.0 technologies?
• Do you consider yourself a leader or follower in this realm, or something else altogether? Why?
• Discuss what you hope to get out of this class.

Prior experience with Web 2.0 technologies: Pretty minimal experience with the technologies. No blog prior to this one, no pages on Facebook or MySpace, no Tweeting. Over the past few years I have posted the occasional question to a technical forum, usually in search of a solution to a computer problem. (I have never come away disappointed! That speaks to the obvious power of a good community of practice!) But in these cases I joined the forums exclusively to ask my question and to solicit technical wisdom from experts, and then I was done--my question would be my “post #1” and my last; the response would be someone’s “post #3,029”. While each forum was a “community of practice” for those wizards who participated every day, my own experience was more akin to schlepping over to Delphi to ask a question of the Oracle. I was a supplicant—I might be present within the virtual walls, but I couldn’t be considered a member of the community.

I have served as a respondent to queries a couple of times on a sailing forum for which I have forgotten the URL and my password, “paying it forward” when my experience and knowledge allowed me to provide (hopefully) helpful responses to someone else’s need for information or advice. But I just couldn’t maintain interest in continuous on-line chit-chat about something I would rather be out “doing”. However, I have ample experience with the zeitgeist of Web 2.0, for I have been an active contributing member of teams and associations and panels that formed around particular interests and that valued and encouraged collaboration and contribution of expertise and effort!

Leader, follower, something else. Why?: If “leaders” in Web 2.0 technology are those people who create wikis and forums and virtual social meeting venues, than I could in no way claim the title. If “followers” of Web 2.0 are individuals who follow Tweets and befriend bands on Facebook and otherwise simply enjoy the mechanisms others have brought forth but who do not champion them in any noticeable way, than that doesn’t describe me either. I must be something else.

While I have been an early-adopter for some technologies, the Web 2.0 tools have never been compelling for me; they have only rarely seemed to be what I “need”. The social media tools usually leave me wary or amused. I see so many people investing astonishing amounts of time into Facebook, or being irresponsible with personal information. (Or wasting large blocks of their employers’ time, or being irresponsible with other people’s information.) I know someone who claims just over 600 “friends” on Facebook; I say if you wouldn’t loan them fifty-bucks, then maybe they aren’t really friends. But I digress….

So what is the “something else”? Well, if the Web 2.0 leaders and followers can be equated to horticulturalists, then I’ve been a hunter-gatherer.

What do I want from this class?: Well, an “A” from the instructor plus some new and interesting colleagues would serve quite well, thank you very much. Okay, okay…my motivations for taking the course are pretty much threefold—first, I am an empiricist, perpetually curious and driven to understand things. This Web 2.0 stuff has made it inside my “bubble”, and now I want to take it apart and see why it ticks. The main lenses I possess through which to examine it are sociology, economics, and instructional systems. Much of it is already starting to make “sense”.

Second, I am by both nature and profession a problem-solver, and I am always open to learning to use a new and useful tool. If there are models and techniques for using Web 2.0 technologies to improve human and organizational performance and to solve social problems, I wish to add them to my repertoire. So, are there models and techniques?....

Finally, I am also a pragmatist. There is no avoiding that fact that casual familiarity with social media is becoming requisite to modern daily life—my adolescent children have told me so. And more important to me (since I am not yet in a position to retire to my sailboat and slip the lines) a professional familiarity with Web 2.0 will likely soon be a necessary (rather than merely desirable) qualification to independently practice my craft. You can’t be a lumberjack if you don’t take time to sharpen your saw.

I want to understand the “what” and “why” of Web 2.0, and I want to know enough of the “how” to either employ the tools and techniques myself or to be a savvy employer when I hire the skill-set.

(Thanks for reading. Have a great Independence Day weekend! May God continue to bless the U.S.A.! DD.)

(Latent) Communities of Practice

As mentioned in my previous entry, the requirements for this course include reading Clay Shirky’s text on organizing without organizations as well as participating in a discussion board. The instructor started a thread regarding “communities of practice”, particularly latent communities, stating and asking in part: Shirky claims that every web page is, effectively, a latent communities. Most will not develop into a community, but some will. Those that do become communities do so because of things like common interests , communication needs, and good timing. How does this observation/claim affect our work toward developing virtual learning communities? Below is the gist of my response, with some linked examples at the end.

I’m really enjoying Shirky’s text, and I’m having fun chewing on many of his observations and comments. But his musing that “…Every webpage is a latent community….” (p.102) seems like an aside. It is mildly philosophical, kind of like observing that in the right (wrong) place at the right (wrong) time every automobile tire is a potential flat, but it really isn’t all that useful. The statement is true, but how does it guide your behavior? And of course Shirky does goes on to state that “…In almost all cases the community will remain latent...” for the reasons cited above—mismatches in interests or timing. I suspect that the real reason most web-pages do not progress to support realized rather than latent communities has to do with the idiosyncratic purposes and motivations of their creators.

But for our purposes of intentionally developing virtual learning communities, the key would seem to be making sure that we employ the proven tools in our instructional systems kit—in this case, needs assessment. In fact, Roger Kaufman’s tenacious insistence that we consider societal-level needs seems particularly appropriate when we set out to create communities. A proper needs assessment should inform our efforts regarding common interests, communication needs, as well as good timing, and should dramatically enhance the probability that our subsequent development labors are in fact filling a gap. From a design standpoint, knowing the answers to the questions, “Why are we doing this? What is the problem to which this might be the solution?” will go a long way toward supporting the success of our nascent learning community.

Beyond trying to make sure that we are addressing a “need” that is perceived by others beyond just ourselves, there are at least two other elements that Shirky hints can contribute to the successful formation of a community of practice: 1) setting up a clear mechanism to support dialog, and 2) embedding a way for participants to gain desirable recognition for their useful contributions. In the case of the latter, many communities offer ways to vote contributions “up” or “down”, or keep track of the total number of posts an individual has made. One of my favorite examples of weighting individual comments is found at “Krebs on Security”, whose host has a forum that tracks the ratio of favorable to unfavorable ratings and actually “hides” those with poor comment ratings, although they can still be read if you click on them. The wonderful effect is that the community effectively separates the virtual wheat from the chaff. See an example here http://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/07/top-apps-largely-forgo-windows-security-protections/#comments . (As a complete aside, I encourage you to check out Brian’s series on skimmer fraud—there are multiple threads but the first one is here http://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/01/would-you-have-spotted-the-fraud/ ; you will never approach an ATM without scrutiny again!)

"Groups and Society" and Web2.0

The graduate course that has inspired (i.e., “required”) this blog includes as required reading a very interesting text, Clay Shirkey’s “Here Comes Everybody: the power of organizing without organizations” (http://www.amazon.com/Here-Comes-Everybody-Organizing-Organizations/dp/0143114948/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278023967&sr=1-2 ). The instructor’s requirement for this first week of class is the first four chapters, and by remarkable coincidence that is the extent of my progress to date. But let me hasten to note that my slower-than-usual pace is not because the book is tedious but rather because it is so enjoyable. The book begins with a fascinating true tale of how social media was used to form an interest-group/vigilante-mob to compel the return of a lost/stolen phone—that story alone is worth the price of the book. At each turn the author gives me something to reflect upon, then I begin to think of new issues and ideas that I might explore in this blog, and then I turn the page and Shirkey is there waiting for me. On the one hand it is very satisfying to feel so in synch with the author. On the other hand, he keeps taking the wind out of my sails when I find he has already covered my new insights. If I get into chapter five and find out that he addresses the topic of this particular post, I’m gonna be pissed.

The course also involves an online discussion forum, and one of my classmates started a new thread entitled “Groups and Society” and invites comments regarding a quote from Shirkey’s book. Well, for some reason the post sent me on what is probably a wild tangent (sorry Evan), but nonetheless a topic that has perplexed me about the incredible popularity of social media. I mean, who has time for Facebook and Twitter and a bunch of blogs? Don’t people have a life? Well,... maybe this is their life, or at least an important part of where they derive meaning in their lives…. Anyway, its possible that my musings were more appropriate for my blog, so here is what I posted on the class discussion board:

Evan’s post heading, “Groups and Society” recalls to mind two terms from classical sociology--Gemeinschaft (“community” or in this case, the “group”) and Gesellschaft (“society”). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeinschaft_and_Gesellschaft  for a mediocre explanation. In brief, the terms speak to the association between individuals, what binds them to each other. Gemeinschaft was often used to describe rural communities where everyone knows each other (and each other’s business), and where social values and mores are largely agreed to. The individuals in a Gemeinschaft community tend to have common interests and viewpoints. Gesellschaft was used to describe urban communities that are characterized by relative anonymity and higher levels of privacy, and hence less perceived community support (and control—Gesellschaft societies were presumed to feature higher levels of anomie, or “normlessness”, which Durkheim associated with suicide and other self-destructive behavior).

A common characterization of modern life is “I don’t even know the names of my neighbors”, and yet we might regularly communicate with someone six time zones away that we know on a special interest forum. Is it possible that Web2.0 tools are in fact allowing us to reestablish for ourselves little Gemeinschaft communities where we have things in common and we can rally around the things we agree upon (e.g., lost phones should be returned)? Are we thus lowering our sense of anomie by finding people who share and thus reinforce our norms? Does the use of social media ease our loneliness? "After all, per Facebook I have over 100 friends!"

One implication of finding “our people” virtually as opposed to next door is the phenomenon I’ve heard called the “echo effect”, in which, by reading only bloggers who share our position and chatting with people we agree with we are reinforced in our own beliefs and become convinced that we are in the majority. At present in the U.S. we have extraordinarily vocal minorities at the political poles who give every indication of believing that they speak for the mainstream. That seems to fit with the Shirkey assertion that Evan quotes, “…anything that changes the way groups get things done will affect society as a whole….” Of course, this doesn’t say anything about affecting society for the better.

(Thanks for reading!  And thanks Dr. Winston, where ever you are.)