Pruning your social network connections?
Casper, Oscar and me in Luc Peire's "Environment III" (1973), Auckland City Art Gallery Dec. 31, 2011
This post began as a comment on a blog post by Matt Thommes titled “Pruning your social network connections,” which he published in June, 2010. It was brought to my attention by Diethild Starkmeth, who is an active contributor to the diigo group that has been set up to support a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) that we are both participating in (CCK12: Connectivism and Connective Knowledge). (Diethild also blogs at mariposa Monarca and and at The Third Place, and is known on Twitter as @dista11). When my comment grew to be longer than his post, I thought it was more appropriate to discuss it here. So,with thanks to Diethild, here ia an open response to Matt’s piece.
Hi Matt
Thanks for your thoughtful post, “Pruning your social network connections”. Although it is now almost 1-1/2 years old, online social sites and practices continue to grow, so your points are even more relevant today.
Pruning network connections seems like a very sensible thing to do. I regularly block Twitter followers who seem to have interests that are very different tan mine. For example, yesterday, I blocked @SpankJenniMack, who describes her herself as follows:
I am a lifelong spanking enthusiast, spanking model, and blogger exploring the art of discipline and kink. Oh, and I’m not a brat. I’m not! I’m not!! I’m not!!!
Right. I don’t want to be followed by someone with her pants down, waving her arms wildly as she tries to pull mine down, too. Well, not in public, anyway. And I’m not interested in following her, either (she’s got 339 people chasing her already, and I don’t have the patience to wait my turn – even if I was just a tiny bit interested, which, as I’ve said, I most certainly am not).
I try to make strategic use of both Twitter and my blog. My blog header says that I’m interested in education, media, and design. That’s already a pretty Catholic collection (no, I’m not particularly interested in religion – I’m a fallen Catholic, if the truth be known, and I’m not blaming @SpankJenniMack, either, or anyone even just a little bit like her, not in the least).
I use Twitter to connect to people who might be interested in the things I blog about. I tag messages that might be of interest to people who are doing the same online courses, and I send direct messages to friends who I think really need to see something I’ve come across. My friends do the same for me. People who I’ve never met help me out this way, too. Its all about reciprocity – you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours, do onto others as you would have them undo you, that kind of thing. Whoa, is it getting hot in here, or what?
Where was I? Right. I like to be focussed and directional. I want to make the most efficient use of my time, and I want to mix with people like me, who think like me and who share my interests. But here’s my problem: sometimes, by complete accident, I come across someone from a very different background, with very different interests, and I see something they’ve done, or I read something they’ve written, and it just turns my brain inside out. Once I’ve settled down again, I find that I’m not quite the same person. The experience has changed me a little bit. I feel more awake and more alive. And I am grateful for the chance encounter that has shaken me up.
It’s true that we can’t really be friends with hundreds, or thousands, of other people. And we can’t follow more and more conversations simultaneously without feeling like we’re winding our way up the Tower of Babble. We can limit our exposure to strangers, and we can block them out when they gesture to us as we pass by. But we have to be careful that we don’t protect ourself too much. If we close ourself off completely from strangers, we risk finding ourself in a room of mirrors, where the only people we hear and see are those who reinforce our increasingly embedded beliefs and opinions. For our own good (and, sometimes, just for the fun of it), we have to leave at least one window open and one door unlocked.
Mark
Kindle screen failure reveals repressed memory of earlier technology
Kindle Screen Fail: A permanent cloud of E-ink
A dark cloud has settled over my Kindle landscape. Unlike the Kindle Cloud, a service that allows me to access and read my books from the Web using different devices, this one is permanent, and remains “printed” on my Kindle screen even after the device is turned off.
The Kindle is one of the many E-book readers that uses E-ink technology to create a simulation of a printed page. Unlike laptops and tablets, they display text and images using reflected light, rather than emitted light. Tiny, electrically charged white particles float in black dye between two plates. A change in the magnetic charge in a matrix of electrodes on the plates creates the illusion of printed paper (if attracted to the surface, the white particles reflect light like paper; if repelled to the back, the black dye absorbs light like ink). The cloud on my Kindle is like the repressed memory of an earlier technology that has been erased through the act of simulation.
The ghost image is a fragment of one of the Kindle screen savers – an Albrecht Dürer engraving (1519) depicting Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg. This is what must have been displayed when the pixels in the upper quarter of the screen suddenly suffered some kind of machine dementia, or stroke, and died. The colour of their small square tombstones, in one of sixteen shades of gray, is their silent epitaph. The resulting text, although just a fragment of some larger narrative, is confidently inscribed in Roman capitals that are familiar to us from Trajan’s Column (and the posters for too many Hollywood films). The monumental letters, first chiseled in stone, then etched on printing plates, printed, and digitized, are now memorialized on my Kindle screen.
As Arthur C. Clarke says, “[a]ny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The technology that makes E-books (and other digital displays) possible is pretty impressive. However, like other magic tricks that we’ve seen many, many times before, this one, too, has become expected, predictable, and ordinary. The real magic is not the technology, but its invisibility. All technologies become invisible through repeated use - until they fail. Then, we are reminded of the magic, the seeming impossibility of how it works, and the fact that it can stop working. The distortion of a cellphone call, a frozen video frame, and the crackle of a radio transmission are all wake-up calls.
When technology fails, the penny drops – like the light fixture that falls from the “sky” in The Truman Show. In the same way, the existence of social structures, organizational systems and other abstract tools that we (or others) have devised to enable us to deal with the complexities of social life is brought into high relief when they break down (or work against us). So, we should welcome limited technological failures when they occur, because they remind us of the many ways that we have extended ourselves, and they provide us with an opportunity to reflect on the artificial nature of the world that we have made and inhabit.
I suppose I could have my Kindle repaired or replaced (assuming I can find the printed receipt), but I might just leave that cloud hanging there – as a reminder, and a warning.
Is the organizational model broken? Start a company.
Today’s edition of Stephen Downes’ Online Daily email contains a link to Sebastian Thrun’s “University 2.0″ video (27:30), in which he explains that he left his tenured position at Stanford University in order to embark on a “mission to change the future of education“. Thrun is responsible for Stanford’s high profile “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course that attracted 160,000 students from over 190 countries (it’s part of the “Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE)” initiative). Not surprisingly, this large, open, free course also attracted considerable attention from the media, including the New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Thrun quickly realized that he was on to something. So what did he do? He started a company (UDACITY), launched a website, and began offering more courses. The first, ”CS 101: Building a Search Engine” is introduced in the video (1:37) embedded below.
(Video uploaded to YouTube by knowitvideos on Jan 23, 2012)
Not only is UDACITY.com open for registrations from students, the company is looking for employees, too. If you act quickly, you can get in on the ground floor of a firm that offers a “competitive salary, benefits, and Series A stock options“. Series A stock options?
Sebastian Thrun has rightfully earned attention and accolades for his impressive accomplishments, educational insights, innovative mindset, and infectious passion. However, the main problem is not the outdated practice of university academics lecturing to small groups of privileged, fee-paying students in campus classrooms (although this is certainly worth critiquing). The foundational problem is that we have developed a way of organizing and rewarding the work that we do (including teaching and learning) that is inefficient, wasteful, and inevitably leads to goal displacement and unintended (usually negative) consequences. We won’t solve the economic crisis by building another private bank, and we won’t solve the education crisis by launching another dot com startup. Rather than pinning our hopes for tranformational change on heroes and their companies, however ethical and well-intentioned they might be, we should work together to develop models and approaches that are based on fundamentally different philosophies and goals. One way we can do this is by participating in open, distributed, inclusive networks of collaborators who understand the power of collective effort and who recognize the problems associated with the private ownership and control of ideas and organizations. Through this process, we might be able to transform, not just education, but our practices, our structured relationships, and ourselves.
I’ve joined another MOOC. Thats nice . . . What’s a MOOC?
A MOOC is a Massive Open Online Course. A MOOC can accommodate a large number of individuals (thousands, in some cases), and they are open to anyone who wants to participate. The weekly plan, resources, live sessions and recordings are available for anyone to access online, and they are focused on a particular area of study. You don’t have to pay any fees, unless you want to gain a formal credit for the course through the supporting academic institution. I’ve just registered for a MOOC titled “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2012″ (CCK12). Information about the course, including a more complete explanation of MOOCs, can be found on the course website. The hour-long live sessions for this 12-week course are scheduled for Thursdays at 8:00 pm (Eastern time). In preparation, I’ve watched the videos (one is embedded below) and am going through the readings that have been uploaded for week #1 and week #2.
Video: “What’s a MOOC?” Written and Narrated by Dave Cormier, video by Neal Gillis, CC-BY 2010
Why participate in a MOOC if you are not working towards a qualification and don’t need the credit? Well, you might be an educator investigating innovative approaches to learning, an administrator who wants to transform institutional structures, or a lifelong learner who is simply interested in the subject and who wishes to engage in conversations with other interested people. You can sample material and sessions that suit your particular interest and schedule, or you can immerse yourself by attending all the sessions, absorbing the resources, following discussions on Twitter, and writing, reading, and commenting on blog posts. You decide on the level of engagement that suits you. Since MOOCs are conducted entirely online, you are visible to the extent that you take part in the live sessions and post material (usually through a blog or Twitter feed). By adding a tag (a shortened version of the course name, e.g.: “#CCK12″) to published material, relevant comments and resources can be easily found, collected, and distributed in list form to course participants. The facilitators arrange for guest speakers and provide useful resources, but the connections that the MOOC model facilitates (connecting learners and resources, learners and facilitators, and learners and other learners) opens up channels and conversations that can take you to places that you never thought you would go, and the journey doesn’t need to stop when the course is over.
I’ve participated to varying degrees in a few MOOCs over the past year, and, for me, they have been well worth the time and effort. I’ve learned that what you gain from these courses is directly proportional to what you contribute. It’s a bit like a face-to-face conversation – if you say little or nothing, you are less likely to feel present or engaged, and what you hear is less likely to seem relavent or interesting.
If you think you might be interested, I suggest that you simply register for one and give it a try. The facilitators (and more experienced participants) are patient and helpful. You will find that your presence, and your contributions, will be appreciated. As well as the “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2012″ MOOC, there are others that may interest you. Here are a few that I’ve discovered:
Learning and Knowledge Analytics (I believe this course is also starting this week).
#Change11: Education, Learning, and Technology (currently in week 17, this course finishes in May 2012).
#DS106: Digital Storytelling (started earlier this month – the related radio show is worth a listen).
#EC&I 831: Social Media & Open Education (finished at end of 2011, but will likely be run again in 2012). This course may not be “Massive”, but it is certainly “Open”.
#CMC11: Creativity and Multicultural Communication (finished at the end of 2011, likely to continue in some form; smaller “class” than the other Open courses I took part in).
I had plans to finish several draft posts about my experience in these MOOCs, but I had trouble pulling myself out of conversations that were taking part in other blogs and in various other nooks and crannies online where people met. Hopefully, I’ll do better with #CCK12.
Students go to school in the mornings, make a film in the afternoons
This morning, a colleague drew my attention to an interesting report (5:34) that aired on TV1 news last night (Monday 23 January). It was about a group of five New Zealand students at Hamilton Boys High School (Juan Robertson, Robin Kuyper, Nathaniel Watson, David Robinson and Simon Lillis) who attended school for just three hours a day last year so they could devote their afternoons to completing a short film. They recently uploaded the finished 16 minute result to YouTube (embedded below), and promoted it through a website about the making of the film, a Facebook page, and a Twitter feed (follow @PluealFilms).
According to their promotional website, the film is “[s]et in a futuristic, dystopian society where everyone is forced to be equal, the short follows one man as he attempts to go beyond the heavily enforced restrictions of such a world”. Citizens of this near-future society are constrained by the “2014 Uniformity Act, section #A7″, which states, in part, that
“…attempting, in any manner, to educate one’s self or others in any concepts not outlined in s.A2 (‘Equality of Individuals and Accepted Levels of Ability’) is prohibited…”
Clearly, these students didn’t wanted to be limited by what they could learn through formal education alone. As the TV1 reporter noted: ”the boys decide that school was getting in the way”. So, working at home, they set about teaching themselves what they needed to know in order to achieve what they wanted to do. As the director, Juan Robertson (17) said, ”I’m creating things, I’m doing what I enjoy, and I’m learning a lot”. Fortunately, they had the support of their parents and progressive teachers, who accommodated the students so that they could combine formal and informal education. Their abilities were recognized, and they were not limited by normal expectations and “accepted levels of ability”. The film is an amazing accomplishment. Oh, and their high school results were excellent, too.
10 New Years Resolutions for 2012
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During the summer holidays this year (yes, it is summer in the Southern Hemisphere over Christmas), I travelled through the North Island with my family. On Tuesday, January 10, I spent some time wandering through the centre of Wellington. When I spotted something that suggested a New Years Resolution, I took a photo with my iPhone and used the Instagram App to publish it immediately on Twitter as well as send it to my family by email. The Twitter and email messages contained a thumbnail of the image and the caption. Clicking on the image showed a larger version with a map showing where the photo was taken. The 10 images and captions are displayed in the slide show above.
Ex-Greek PM George Papandreou on Democracy Now! 9 Dec.
We all remember the response from the mainstream media, the financial sector, and most European political leaders when, in early November, then Prime Minister, George Papandreou, called for a referendum to ask his people if were prepared to accept the European Union’s bailout plan, and the severe austerity measures that it contained. This recent plan follows a similar deal in 2010, when Athens agreed to years of austerity measures in exchange for a $146 billion bailout from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. There was no referendum then (the last referendum in Greece was in 1974), and the decision sparked many protests and riots. Against this backdrop of earlier cuts and mounting domestic pressure, it is understandable that Papandreou wanted to give the Greek people an opportunity to have their say. After all, consulting the electorate before committing to further domestic spending cuts would seem to be a sensible and expected part of the decision making process in a democracy. However, leaders in the rest of the world were focussed on the health of financial markets, not on the health of the democratic process, and they saw the referendum as a high stakes gamble. Not surprisingly, the markets were rattled, political pressure on Athens was intense, and Papandreou cancelled his plan for a referendum. Others, not the Greek citizens, would decide how the country would respond to its worsening financial crisis.
On 9 November 2011, Lucas Papademos was appointed as Prime Minister of Greece, replacing Papandreou. Papademos is a US-educated economist and former vice-president of the European Central Bank. He has never been elected to any public office. As the Guardian reported on 10 November, Papademos explained: ”I am not a politician but I have dedicated the biggest part of my career to economic policy in Europe and Greece”. The Guardian interviewed a spokesperson from one political party, who commented that Papademos expressed the ”logic of banks and markets”.
“The new government and the new prime minister are being called to impose a political policy that does not have democratic legitimisation,” said Alexis Tsipras, who heads the leftwing Syriza group, adding that Papademos “is someone who has not been elected or judged by the Greek people”.
“This development amounts to a merciless distortion of popular sovereignty,” he said. “The choice of Mr Papademos is a guarantee that the same policies that have destroyed us will be continued with greater force and consequence.”
On December 9, Papandreou was attending the U.N. climate change summit in Durban, South Africa, and Democracy Now! has been on location to cover the event all week. Amy Goodman got an exclusive interview with the former Prime Minister of Greece. She began by asking Papandreou to “talk about the status of democracy now in Greece, the cradle of democracy”. He responded:
Well, I believe that we have a democratic challenge around the world right now, because we have a globalizing economy, but our institutions are national. Our democratic institutions are national. And that means that there is a lot of power being concentrated in the global economy, in the hands of a few—it could be in money, it could be in media, it could be in technology—which is not under any democratic oversight, whether we call them rating agencies or whether we call them the CDSs, the credit default swaps, or whether we call them the tax havens. This allows for a lot of power to be concentrated, which is beyond our citizens’ reach.
A policeman casually pepper sprays students protesting peacefully at the University of California, Davis, November 18, 2011 (click to see YouTube video)
Citizen journalists photograph, video, and stream police actions at the University of California, Davis, November 18, 2011 (click to see YouTube video)
Note: For updates on this story, follow Lee Fang (@lhfang) on Twitter, and check his blog regularly.
On 18 November, 2011, Nathan Brown, Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of California at Davis, wrote an “Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi“, for three reasons:
1) to express my outrage at the police brutality which occurred against students engaged in peaceful protest on the UC Davis campus today
2) to hold you accountable for this police brutality
3) to demand your immediate resignation
The police actions that prompted this letter, and many other expressions of outrage, were well documented by the staff, students, and others, who gathered in the university quad that day to peacefully protest against tuition increases and the police brutality that took place earlier in the week.
The information accompanying the YouTube video, from which the stills above were taken, explains that, during the peaceful protest by the Occupy Movement,
police came in to tear down tents and proceeded to arrest students who stood in their way. Once students peacefully demanded the release of the arrested, a police officer unnecessarily pepper sprays the students to open a path for the rest of the officers.
The name and contact details of the officer who sprayed the students is also provided.
A search for “occupy cal” on Youtube shows 377 videos that have been uploaded over the past week. Many of these have already been viewed by thousands of people, with the most popular clip attracting 14,457 views and 396 “Likes” within 24 hours. There are more than 5,300 archived Ustream “occupy” videos, which were streamed live to anyone who wanted to follow the play-by-play. Of these, 95 videos relate to “Occupy Cal,” 21 of which were streamed and archived within the past few days. The fact that all of this work has been done by citizen journalists shows that, as well as occupying significant physical spaces, the protesters and their supporters are creating and occupying new communication spaces online. Like the flow of capital between institutions and nation states, the protesters’ message moves easily and quickly, crossing national borders and bridging cartesian space and cyberspace. However, unlike capital, the Occupy message is multiplied and amplified as it spreads. And all of this without needing to attract the attention of traditional media outlets. In addition to chanting “We are the 99 percent!”, they could also claim, “We are the media!”.
Update (Nov. 22): The Atlantic Wire reports (12:39 PM ET, Nov. 21) that: “Although UC Davis has decided to put its police chief and two pepper-spraying officiers on leave, the school’s chancellor says she’s not going to budge — despite silent and not-so-silent calls for her resignation”.
The video, “UC Davis Chancellor Katehi walks to her car”, which is embedded in a short story on the npr site , was shot by Lee Fang, and has been viewed on YouTube nearly 630,000 times, attracting over 2,000 comments so far. His discussion of the silent protest is interesting. Equally interesting is the way that his video of this event has travelled through various media outlets, and the discussions that it has seeded in these different sites. Lee Fang explains why he calls his blog “The Second Alarm“:
I named this blog The Second Alarm after a Revolutionary War newsletter that led to the Boston Tea Party. Called “The Alarm,” the pamphlet warned colonists that the British and the East India Trading Company would ruin America by sucking the wealth from its citizens and ruling over us in the pursuit of profit. I think a similar dynamic exists today, but instead of the East India Trading Company, lobbying groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and multinational banks like J.P. Morgan Chase pose an existential threat to America’s democracy, and to our greatness as a nation.
Pepper-spray images are now moving through the media like an aerosol, dropping seeds that spawn new stories that then circulate in their own information ecologies. “Casually Peper Spray Everything Cop” images have spread far and wide. They have already become so popular that the Mashable social media site has issued a “New Meme Alert“. The news and images travel via email lists (like Stephen Downes’ “OLDaily“), and through Twitter (check out the increasingly-used “#pepperspray” hash-tag). Sites like the “Pepper Spray Chronicles,” which is devoted to this increasingly used chemical weapon and image of this now-famous (or infamous) police officer, are now popping up like weeds after a heavy rain.
Although events at UC Davis are not as dramatic as what is currently unfolding in Syria and elsewhere, there are similarities in the actors, the dynamics, and the flow of information in each of these sites. The feedback loop (and sub-loops) created by the event, reports about the event in the media (online, offline, and the loop between them) is both entertaining and instructive. It is a fractal dance with hula hoops. These loops (and hoops) are developing, and reconfiguring, more and more quickly as the distance (geographically and temporally) between the event and media reports about the event, collapses. The half-life of the loops and hoops is also getting shorter. Soon, event and media will comprise a single experience, and it will be impossible to separate the event from the reports and documentations about the event. The medium not only carries and comprises the message, it has merged with, and now contains, the event itself. The medium is the experience.
The fight for public space online and off
"Popeye Spinach" by Lancefisher (CC-BY-SA)
“Last night I deleted my Facebook account.” So begins a message that Dave Winer published on his blog on Thursday, 10 November, 2011. I left a comment in response to his post, which I have pasted below. Facebook protests have mounted since recent changes to their “Privacy” policy. For many, like Dave Winer, this was the tipping point. We all know that, online as well as offline, “public” doesn’t always mean ”public”, and “private” does not always mean “private”. Sometimes, “private” means “privatized” and “public” means “publicized”. However, we are often prepared to accept the slippage, the fib, or the outright lie in exchange for ease of use, convenience, or some other short-term benefit. We convince ourselves that it a fair deal; a necessary trade-off. We pull the wool over our own eyes. For many, the weight and opacity has become too suffocating to bear, and they have chosen to come out into the open and say so. In cyberspace and in physical space, they have been proclaiming, to quote Popeye, “That’s all I can stands ’cause I can’t stands no more!”.
Greetings, Dave
It is becoming increasingly difficulty to distinguish between “public” and “private” spaces and conversations online. This is especially the case when we enter a privately-owned and managed site (after agreeing to terms and conditions that we haven’t read) that contains areas and activities that are labelled as “public”, but are not really public — at least not according to the accepted definition of the term. Upon reflection, we may discover that we have not only traded away some basic rights, we have also agreed to a new, much more limited idea of what “public” means. It is like buying into a gated community (without first reading the fine print on the purchase contract) and then discovering that hard-won rights that we assumed could never be taken away from us (like privacy, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly), are gone. Without thinking, we have traded them away for a chance to hang out in a convenient, safe, and controlled environment that provides us with entertainment, a few “free” services, and a chance to communicate with old friends and make new acquaintances. We can be forgiven, at least at first, for not noticing the significant loss of public space and civic rights, because the images, like the words, are cleverly deceptive. But we willingly enter into this “shared hallucination”, and, once there, we choose to forget what we have left behind. The result is a process of erasure through simulation, and a self-inflected amnesia. It’s public life, Jim, but not as we know it.
Mark McGuire
Leave Faceboogle! Join the Social Swarm!
"Online Communities 2" CC-BY-NC
I received the following email this morning. I thought it was worth passing on as is. I’ll post related comments and links soon. Read the comments to get an idea of who is behind this project.
Subject: Invitation to the Social Swarm
Dear fellow people from the Internet.
We know that social network services changed the way we handle information and relationships.
But we also know that social network services create certain problems that come with storing large amounts of personal information.
We are concerned about our privacy on those services. The centralized nature of current social networks forces users to trust third parties that are not trustworthy.
We do not have to surrender to technology as it is.
We have to shape technology in a way that is suited to human nature.
This is why the goal should be to create a network that enables all of its users to communicate freely.
They must be able to use it in the way they want to, without being hindered by restrictions like censorship or the risk of losing control of their own content.
It is not about creating an alternative to existing social network services – it is about creating something even better.
There are different approaches to bringing this about, and they all have different up- and downsides. You are working on them. We are working on them.
So we ask you to join forces, with us and with each other, to create what we all are hoping for, what is driving us and what we need: A free and secure means of communication for everybody and everything.
To achieve this, we think the social network must satisfy these requirements:
1. Free software.
2. Good usability.
3. Decentralization.
4. End-to-end encryption.
5. Mandatory privacy: no plaintext data stored on servers.
6. Scalability.
7. Innovation over standards.
8. Better than what we currently have.
We would love to see you on our mailinglist:
https://mail.foebud.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/socialswarm-dev
To have a closer look at the project, go to our wiki:
Best wishes,
the folks of Social Swarm
