Here's a slightly bizarre use of Twitter. It's one thing to know asteroids and the such are in the vicinity of Earth, but if one decides to pay a visit to the planet itself, I'm not sure any amount of tweeting will help...
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/the-real-twitpocalypse-asteroid-alerts-come-to-twitter/
The title says it all!
Possibilities:
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/worklife/07/28/cb.best.job.facbook.addict/index.html
Expertise on the web is a funny beast.
My notion of this does differ from my concept of expertise in face-to-face settings.
I assume that in such a setting, an expert will be introduced to me by someone who has vetted the person's credentials. In face-to-face interactions, actions do speak louder than words and one can judge someone's expertise in procedural/physical activities just by observation alone.
In an online setting, we may have to look at actions more than words. This is where things get tricky.
On a community I visit, they use a form of karma related to forum titles.
Every so often, after a specific milestone of posts, your forum title changes and everyone knows what these milestones are - so a person with a certain title will also have a certain number of posts/activity that they have engaged in and ostensibly, will be an expert.
I go by forum karma in an online setting.
However, a large amount of activity does not mean that activity has been useful. Bruns points that out in Chapter 12. Some people might just like to see their post counts add up. In my experience, judging someone's expertise online also involves evaluating other people's interactions with the person in question (are they civil/reverential/derogatory?) and also - observing how often this person in question is called upon/quoted in the popular colloquy.
Sometimes a large number of posts need not reflect either - good or poor quality/expertise. It might simply indicate a longevity of existence on a particular forum.
This is where vouching from the community comes in.
On this same web forum, some people get custom titles, which are suggested by the community, not requested by the person. If you get a title which reflects on your expertise, which has been popularly chosen - well then, you're golden.
On another website, members have the option of "vouching" for each other and a little icon appears next to the vouched person's name. Yet, this person can't vouch for anyone else until at least three people vouch for them in the first place.
This is a fairly robust system of expertise recognition.
In a nutshell, credentials and actions would be bases for expertise evaluation that I'd use in "meatworld" and activity + popular vouching (not popularity) would be bases I'd use in an online environment.
We were discussing this in the first week of the class.
It's actually interesting that my "IM time" with friends has gone down once I started blogging about interesting things that happen to me. Since my friends have already read stuff, I don't get to tell many stories any more...
This hasn't cut down the quality of "face time" much but may cut down on topics of discussion...
I happened to come across this presentation/talk while I was chatting with my friends here in Canada.
The video embedded below is a demonstration of Sea Dragon technology from Microsoft, however, things get interesting from about 3:30 on the timeline. He talks about using images off flickr to create spatial representations of places.
The speaker also mentions how a "semantic richness" could be added to user experience by the use of Sea Dragon. I'm not quite sure what the implications of this are. Are we looking at Web 3.0 here?
As I discussed it with my friends, one mentioned that he likes the idea of being able to explore any place on earth through pictures and representations created by the software. However, he also mentioned how one might be able to follow any single life of a person who's had pictures posted somewhere on the web.
That is the scary part.
Like I said, I'm trying to get my head around this but wanted to share it to see what other people thought. I'm not sure whether this merits a discussion post or not... maybe comments on this post will help me make up my mind on that.
I saw this in one of the papers here the other day. I was hoping to find an online article.
Facebook's holding on to information has been a contentious issue for a long time, in many places. Recently, I was "refriended" automatically when a (Canadian) friend of mine reactivated his account. While I was happy at his getting back in touch, the "auto reboot" was slightly disturbing. Now it turns out that such an action is actually breach of Canadian law. It should be interesting to follow this story and see where it goes...
Embattled British PM Gordon Brown seems to believe that the awareness brought about by new technologies like twitter and blogs is a good thing. I wonder how many politicians actually agree with him about such issues of transparency... Someone should ask Mahmoud Ahmedinejad (that was the obvious one) or perhaps Silvio Berlusconi...
I wonder what would happen if these technologies were used to pull Brown down any further...
Yahoo seems to be all set to have its main page be a mashup. It's interesting how they are becoming more open to collaboration with some of their direct competitors.
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/biztech/07/21/cnet.yahoo.new.home.page/index.html
I foresee myself working in two separate environments.
K-12 and Corporate Training.
In a K-12 environment, a collaborative blog might be a good idea to keep the parents updated about various activities that happen in the school, maybe send out a call for volunteers for events, or reports on events that took place in school, policy updates etc. The blog could be written by the principal and a designated faculty member who may put up pieces on behalf of the various departments.
A wiki does not have a particular use at the admin level in K-12 settings, in my opinion. However, it could be used to foster collaboration and slightly divergent thinking of part of the students if used as a tool in class or as a project requirement.
In a corporate environment, there are already documented instances of wikis being used for knowledge management. Gina's blog is a good example of the use of blogs to "educate" people on various issues pertinent to the organization and others like it.
A K-12 blog doesn't really support learning per se or performance but it does let the public know about the school's performance and as such allows for a sort of accountability and transparency in its functioning for its stakeholders - the parents. One could say that the parents learn about the various happenings in the school through it.
For students, use of a wiki in project work would foster the spirit of collaboration, held develop team work skills, thinking and filtering skills and if the teacher sets some sort of criterion about quality of work, it would also help them in reseach/writing skills.
In a corporate environment, wikis help provide "just in time" training. Where procedural knowledge is not required, one could replace training seminars with information on a wiki. People don't waste time and money in training but just pull up information on a need to know basis.
One could argue that procedural training could be achieved through use of videos and pictures, as has been discussed on the discussion board. However, this training would require setting aside specific time for the creation of the resources and also their distribution.
Blogs are a similar source of knowledge, which are not as easily edited by members of the organization. One would assume that SMEs might be in-charge of blogs where any member might be a contributor to a wiki.
As far as design/implementation challenges go, in my experience (and I mean no disrespect to anyone here - either in this class or otherwise), teachers who've taught for a long time tend to be extremely resistant to change and bitter in general. There are of course, exceptions to this rule. However, some new activity that might require extra work on their part, above and beyond their job description will likely cause some sort of resentment. How would this be handled by management?
Well, in India, it's pretty authoritarian. So people will be expected to do as they are told, and moaning will ensue. The job will get done though...
[This has been your fix of cynicism for the day)
Resistance in corporations might come from training departments, who might think their duties are being usurped by a wiki. A centralised pool of knowledge might make instructors obsolete. Then there are employees who prefer to be told what to do and might prefer a training scenario, as opposed to being self-regulated and learn on their own. Further... wiki scripts have their own particular syntax and it involves learning a new skill before you can contribute to the effort. Some people might find this irksome.
How might opposition/resistance be solved in such a situation? Especially in a multi-national corporate environment?
That's a very good question.
However, the prompt doesn't ask for solutions. So I will leave it hanging. ;)
After the internet blackout, I thought I'd still answer last week's prompt, late as it may be.
I am fairly interested in new technologies but still maintain that some times there's just too much to choose from and too much information and too many tools to sift through.
As such, I may have used differing produsages, created by other people. However I have not created one yet. The assignment due on monday would be the first official one.
Having little or no work experience, I have not needed to create one for my professional life. My limited summer jobs and time in school back home in India dealt mostly with proprietary software and "chalk and talk"
Like I mentioned in the Pro-Am thread, I hope to function nearly at the professional level in certain skill sets, which are not quite ISD skill sets and I foresee using different Web 2.0 technologies to create produsage in my future professional life.
Just what those will be... we can't know yet.
On the "Uses of Diigo" discussion thread, I mentioned how I foresee using diigo to lead middle and high school students on a treasure hunt webquest across the internet, using its annotation tools.
Looks like New Yorkers like to hunt for treasure using twitter!
This seems to be in lines with Gina's concerns with security and cloud computing from last week's discussion.
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/16/twitter.hack/index.html
Here's a follow-up to the previous post on Google's new OS
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/15/google.microsoft.battle/index.html
With an aim towards familiarising myself with technologies I want to use in my first produsage, I am now on twitter and diigo.
Diigo seems to have a lot of potential for use in a field like ours, where networking, sharing of information/knowledge and just building knowledge bases together is very important.
Twitter... is still evil :P
If you want to friend me, I'm razanur on both sites.
So I've been offline since around this time last week as my cousin moved to a new house and had no internet.
That was Seattle. I'm now in Victoria, B.C., visiting some friends and even though I'm here to relax, we've just been doing so much stuff!
However, I've begged off from activities tomorrow in order to catch up!
In other news, we spotted a pod of Orca while on the ferry from Seattle to Victoria. That was cool! :D
A lot of the class participants have mentioned that they struggle to cope with the amount of information and the sheer scope of tools that Web 2.0 and social networking offers.
Reading this article makes me wonder if it is at all a viable and valid use of our time to set up, and indeed go through, multiple networks as we traverse the web in search of human resources.
I've heard employers often look up prospective employees' facebook accounts to check what they've been up to. I have no idea whether this is true or not. Yet, how far do we stretch the HR department's resources?
Should we only stick to professional networks like LinkedIn?
Should we stick only to our rolodexes?
I see the usefulness and importance of being able to connect with someone at a distance.
A rolodex may not be as useful for non-local contacts; or perhaps, the rolodex will only include contacts for people you've actually met, closing down the chances of you finding someone equally qualified, only because you've never met them.
What do you think?
Flock, the Social Browser...
It's actually handy to have most of the things I'd use in one place... Though perhaps a little heavy on the sidebars and streams...
Check it out and share your thoughts!
Here's a little clipping from the entire article.
This is a little scary.
But I wonder if the R&D departments need Instructional Designers to create training... ;-)
I rather like the idea of Digg Dialogg.
Social filtering = nice.
One might argue that allowing the powers of judgment (what is good, what is bad) to trickle down to the masses might invite a plunge in quality. Yet, I think with most people being sensible, more often than not... some pretty good questions should arise out of such an activity.
Kent commented on my Ubiquity post, saying perhaps it (Ubiquity) should be called a Web 3.0 tool.
I replied asking him what he thought the Web 3.0 would be like.
Now, I don't know if he'd read something along these lines but I stumbled onto something today...
Click.
It's an old article, but what do you think of the idea of a semantic web?
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? Also, discuss what you hope to get out of this class.
I consider open source, IM and facebook to be part of Web 2.0. That is about as far as my active experience with Web 2.0 technologies goes. I am aware of Twitter - I don't necessarily see a need to tell everyone about every little thing I do. I am not as self involved. I hope others are not so minutely interested in me...
However, after reading my classmates' responses and sharing, I've begun to realise that perhaps there is a wider application for twitter in the Learning and Development sphere.
I will be signing up for the service soon. I will also be using it in my first produsage assignment.
Am I a leader or follower? Well, I'm utilitarian. I thoroughly believe in the spirit of collaboration and participation. However, I do not go all out exploring ALL the available tools. I follow word of mouth and marry that with necessity and curiosity - in whatever project goal I'm trying to achieve at some particular time.
What do I hope to get out of this class?
Exposure... I am curious about a lot of things. I dabble in a lot but there are many times when I don't follow through with a few things if I'm not accountable to anyone about it. With the class, we are required to post on this blog regarding our explorations. We are required to use the technologies in the produsage assignments. The discussion board posts are also good for ideation...
This brings a certain amount of accountability to the exploration of Web 2.0 and as I said in my first post, I think I needed just that little push out of the door and hopefully, like Bilbo, I will adventure for a really long time...
I have been introduced to a new word in this course: "mashup".
The end product is exactly what it sounds like but for some reason I couldn't intuitively figure out what it meant. So I went exploring...
One neat tool I came across is a plugin for Firefox called Ubiquity.
It does a number of different nifty things (some of which I hope to use in my produsage assignment) including creating a sort of mashup.
I believe at this point this is as close to an actual mashup that most of us will get, with most of the class having no programming knowledge.
However, rather than trying to explain all the things it can do - I'll embed a video from the site.
The "google map in the email" bit is a mashup. Some of the other utilities - not so much.
Anyway... here you go:
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
Where Twitter and related networks were hailed as being the most reliable sources of news and happenings in Iran recently, in another society, perhaps with different priorities and problems... Twitter and Facebook can also be used for mischief...
Read this article on Celebrity Death Pranks...
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