hack the system

I can think of a lot of reasons to buy the WorldChanging book. But there’s one reason to buy it today:

Here’s how the system is supposed to work: you write a book. If people think it’s good they buy it. If enough people think it’s good it becomes a bestseller and widely read, spreading new ideas into the public debate.

Here’s how the system actually works: you write a book. Unless your publisher spends large sums of money on marketing and promotions to convince booksellers that you will be a blockbuster, your book remains obscure, often quickly sinking out of view, and few people have a chance to see it, let alone encounter the ideas it contains.

(Digg it)

lkl soso frapper

Child of LKL SoSo, and Manchester Workshop Series

Child of LKL SoSo

Anjana (aka Natasha on-line), Steve and Mark had a longish meeting on the 31 August 06 to discuss arrangements for the spin-off workshop series that was mooted during the original series. As yet no name has been suggested for the series.

The series will be held at King’s College over a period of ten weeks, with five meetings once every two weeks. King’s is not a sponsor, but a handy place for the series. The first meeting will be a bit into semester 1, so academic attendees can settle into the new academic year.

We think that potential attendees will be PhD candidates, academic and research staff, and interested others.

We are hoping to up the level of discourse to reflect what was learned in the last series, but all sessions will have (perhaps three) graded readings so that neophytes can lever themselves into the general area for subsequent discussion.

The first three workshops will be set up in advance. After these, there will be a checkpoint for group discussion of what we should do for the final two sessions. No topics have been set for the first three workshops as yet, except that they will be in a very broad conception of the social software area. Suggestions please in an e-mail, perhaps to our Google Groups e-mail address.

Slightly tongue-in-cheek, we have adopted some roles:

• Anjana – general organiser
• Steve – room booking and arrangements czar
• Mark – wiki editor / tools meister

We expect to hand these roles off to others for a later third series…

Manchester Workshop Series
Also, there is to be a somewhat similar series hosted by the University of Manchester’s School of Computer Science. This series will concentrate on the convergence of broadcast media, social software, community formation, and elearning.

Contact mark – a – t – cs.man.ac.uk to ask for more information when it appears.

Links, remote attendance

We are not sure about the possibilities of linking these workshop series, nor about remote attendance.

However, for the Child of LKL SoSo, we want to provide unrecorded real-time meeting facilities for members of the group who can not get to central London.

Some stats on market share email, news, messaging, maps, social networking

From the New York Times. Interesting stats.

Collective Intelligence: some theories

This week I will present a brief overview of Pierre Levy's theories on collective intelligence.

One of the most influential theorists of Cyberculture, Pierre Lévy offers a metaphorical conceptualization and posthumanistist theorizing of cyberspace to argue for a new relationship between technology and knowledge. His view on collective intelligence allows the cultivation of a mutually developed and enhanced knowledge space through social interaction and associatiative cognitive exchanges. Lévy’s ‘information utopia’ can be nspiring for grasping the cultural ethic of open source movements and social software we have been discussing in the seminars. But as much as such approaches enlighten some elements of the cultural interfaces of the Web, they also obscure, I would like to argue, the clear relationship between the Web, digital knowledge forms and the rest of the industrial society. I will try to combine some of our reflections on the definition and classification of social software with some of my research findings from online encyclopaedias (including wikipedia).

First post – between sessions 1 and 2

I wear at least a few different hats: phenomenologist, library and information professional, and candidate working towards a postgraduate certificate in teaching and learning in higher education having completed a PhD last year. As such, I’d hope to participate without any particular frame of reference other than whatever seems relevant to the “problem” at hand.

For example, in considering Carey’s “Task following on from Session 1 … about the use of wiki's and the need for effective use to be focused on a product which might later evolve …”, I wonder if it would be okay for me to start exploring some questions of “evaluation” alongside the “products” that may be “evolving”.

Am thinking in terms of how a workshop series such as this may be evaluated for the purposes of a review in due course. Some of my current work involves looking at “evaluation research” and the sorts of quantitative and qualitative approaches that can be taken in order to help inform policy/funding decisions. It strikes me that this workshop series (and beyond?) may turn out to pose a perspicuous setting for revisiting some aspects of the debate thus far and/or perhaps fostering a new perspective on “evaluating” e-learning, e-research, and e-administration straight from the horses’ mouth, so to speak.

Having started participating in this “course” without any expectations, I’m certainly fascinated as to how it has begun to shape up already, and yet retain its fluidity to a degree. Perhaps declaring an express focus on such questions of “evaluation research” from here on in may have an effect on its formation. Perhaps not. But given that this intention has arisen over the past 10 days or so of gentle lurking, I hope it helps at some stage.

Should also mention that I’ve humbly adopted Natasha as my online name following Linday’s Session 1 notes: hope it won’t be too confusing, but would be much obliged if the pseudonym can be maintained for the time being.

Will set up a link to “evaluation” just as soon as I’ve worked out how to do it – but please feel free to jump in at any point in whatever way makes sense to you. In the meantime, will endeavour to keep making it up as we go along.

Pre-course responses

What are my expectations of the course.

I don't really have any, I am just interested to see what use people are making of social software in teaching and learning.

What experiences am I bringing with me?

I have been a learning technologist since 2001 I now work for Imperial College of Science and Technology. I hold an MA in Media Technology for TESOL. I chose that particular degree because I had been using software as a teaching medium when I was teaching Business English and I realised that using materials and equipment that the students were familiar with helped them learn.

I am familiar with V/MLEs both open source (Moodle) and proprietary (WebCT). I use Wikis on a regular basis, subscribe to podcasts and blogs. However, I find it very difficult to persuade the people I work for to do much of this because any new technology, widget or doo-dah requires extra work, a pair of words which have all but the greenest newbie or nerdish nerd scuttling away from me like startled meerkats.

What technologies do you think we should use to support the course and how?

I don’t mind which technologies we use as long as we use them sensibly and not just because we can.

Pre-course responses

In response to pre-course queries… And where to post? Blog, wiki, or yahoo space. Well, I've never made a blog post before so the choice is obvious to me at least, try the blog…

What are your expectations of the course?

 

Most of all I’d like to find out about how to design successful social software; software that has the right underlying concepts, affordances and interactivity to encourage the formation, growth and maintenance of communities.

 

Within that there are kinds of social software that I haven’t tried out for myself; for example this is my first post to a blog. As another example, I’m registered to use elgg, purportedly a medium that encourages reflection, but I haven’t devoted time to exploring it. So the course is, I hope, going to be an opportunity for (mutual) exploration and observation of the characteristics and underlying principles / philosophy / etc of the social software in its manifold forms. This promise of group activity is good, because, betraying one of my biases, meaning is socially determined.

 

One of my interests is in educational systems, and within that, in personal learning environments. I’m interested in comments that I occasionally find (mostly in blogs) that disparate social systems can be combined to form a personal learning environment. OK, that concept, of a PLE, is pretty diffuse, and I can post a short paper I wrote on a space of PLEs if anyone wants. I am interested in if we can make a PLE out of existing systems. People tend to mention elgg and flikr here, and throw in 43things as well. Did I mean “we” in the sense of the course/workshops? Not particularly, but now I’ve written it, this may be an interesting target for us. After all we are using social software as a vehicle through which we can learn, not so? So what is the most efficacious way we can achieve that at a 'utilisation of social software' level?

 

Tags interest me: I’m not convinced about their ultimate efficiency, and as part of my future research I can see that I am going to get dragged towards tags, and automatic tagging. It would be interesting to discuss this further.

 

And now just musing aloud: As a computer scientist I see that at an implementation level social software systems are just server and database technology. Boring, simple stuff. And yet good social software systems are magical, wondrous things – they help build communities. Wow! Somehow I want to kill off my computer scientist attitudes to social software as something simple. As an interactive systems designer I’m mostly there already.

 

Finally, there is underlying theory….

What experiences are you bringing with you?

 

We tend to use wikis in projects I am involved in. They are great documentation tools, for collaborative documentation of developing ideas, system structure, and so on. I think that they enable the construction of things that one person could not get together. In fact, I would not think of running or being in a project these days without a wiki. I don't believe that in themselves they are community builders,

I've also used yahoo (spaces) while running an annual course. But I stopped using that, probably because it wasn't a community medium as used by us. Last year I experimented with the use of a virtual learning environment (Moodle) to support the course and its participants, I think that this will be more effective next year, in a less time-constrained course where students actually have time to interact with other studetns (and me) through the VLE

 

As for my own experience / past, why not check out my home page at Manchester University's School of Computer Science. I’ve spent a long period in my life being part concerned with user interfaces and interactive systems, now I am primarily interested in educational systems.

 

What technologies do you think we should use to support the course and how?

 

I’ve mentioned elgg, and PLEs. The more I think about it, the more interesting I find the idea of trying to assemble PLEs for our own course work / learning / research. I can host a copy of elgg if we don’t want to use the main copy at www.elgg.org

 

If anyone wants to try out a different wiki, I have a spare unused instance of mediawiki lying around. That’s the wiki used to build wikipedia, a fine community effort. Incidentally, wikipedia's page on social software might be worth a read