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Who are the reality instructors now?
Stephen Downes has a long, thoughtful piece on the implications of the financial crisis for society, entitled 'The Monkeysphere Ideology'. It's a 'make yourself a cup of coffee, sit down and read' post, in which he raises many issues. One of which is this: "I read this headline in the New York Times: "In tough times, the humanities must justify their worth." Not business, which caused this mess, not media, which propagated the monkeysphere ideology, not accounting, law or political science, which participated by stumbling around each other in their haste to see who could be corrupted most quickly. No – humanities. And arts." I had a similar feeling the…
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Things from Twitter I’d like in real life
I'm sure someone's done this before, but was thinking the other day about the raft of 'online interaction is killing real interaction' type angst we've been having and wondered if we should look at it the other way, ie why real life isn't as good as online. Here are a few things I wish I could transfer from Twitter to real life: Hashtags – how many times have you found yourself half way through a conversation with someone when you realise you are in fact talking about different things. It then becomes too embarrassing to admit your mistake, and you realise some of your previous responses may now look a…
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Celebrity twitter doesn’t matter
In the UK in particular, Twitter has gone mainstream over the past few weeks. This has largely been due to Jonathan Ross (@wossy) and Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) both becoming keen users and discussing it on Ross's chat show. Radio 1's Chris Moyles (@obnoxious – oh, ok @chrisdjmoyles) has also been recruiting a new wave of followers. This meant every chat show, news station, newspaper and opinion writer has been talking about Twitter. This means we've had a raft of pieces along the lines of 'I don't know why people would want to tell everyone what they had for lunch'. Sigh. Technology seems to be the only subject area where the…
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Slideshare is the best OER site?
I've been writing a paper recently (which will appear in the open access journal JIME soon), and one of the things I wanted to do was compare the traffic at educational resource sites, such as MIT's OpenCourseWare and the OU's OpenLearn with a commercial web 2.0 offering, namely Slideshare. Will Woods pointed me at statsaholic, which in turn led me to register with Compete.com. From these I got this nice graph: We can see Slideshare is way out in front. This raises several questions: i) Are people more likely to share stuff through something like Slideshare? ii) Is the basic unit of sharing (the presentation) at Slideshare, something people understand…
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Social networks will make us scared of kittens
<Image the sleeping geek kitten – http://flickr.com/photos/nathonline/918128338/> After Baroness Greenfield's analysis of how social networks are damaging the very brain stuff of teenagers, there's more bad news for social network fans with some research just in. With teenagers spending an average of 7 hours a day online, and engaging in constant social interaction with other human beings, it is highly likely that they will forget to engage with animals. The results could be damaging for the whole of mankind. By constantly engaging with 'avatars' of people online which may resemble animals, teenagers will become separated from the reality of animals. Baron Brownose, a prominent opinion spouter, said 'we know that…
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Technorati – grounds for divorce
Elbow – Grounds for Divorce Adblock Found at skreemr.com (play song while reading) Technorati has always had it's problems, but like in any relationship, you can overlook them for a while. However, they've been adding up lately, and I think we've reached the stage of irreconcilable differences. Here are the grounds for divorce: It's broken – speaking just as this user, I know it doesn't work reliably. Exhibit A) – my authority hasn't changed for 20 days and even if I ping it manually, it still says 20 days ago. Exhibit B) – there are several people who I know have linked to me that don't show up in Technorati.…
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Shiny show #3
I had an email from Kate Winslet this morning saying she would gladly swap her Oscar for a Shiny, but I had to let her down. Sorry Kate, unless The Reader is in fact a mashup tool for finding great quotes and blending them with socially constructed text, you can’t have one. Yes, Oscars, schmoscars, these are the awards that really count. This month’s shinies go to: OpenZine – let’s you create your own magazine, using a simple layout tool, and you can find shared content, subscribe to other magazines, etc. I have produced the first, and yes probably last, issue of The EdTechie, which looks at PLEs. It was…
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What the Digital Britain report should have said
As most UK readers will be aware we have Lord Carter's Digital Britain report available which sets out the vision for the UK economy being one that embraces all things digital (after all, jam making aside, we've nothing else left). If you're not from the UK, don't worry, if you haven't got such a strategy already, you'll no doubt be getting one soon, as all countries see the potential of a digital economy to get us out of the hole we are currently in. The report sets out some commendable aims, such as creating a digital infrastructure, ubiquitous broadband and all that. But where it comes unstuck is in stressing…
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Blair, crowds and Iraq
(I'm finding some old posts I didn't get around to finishing, so hence not as current as it could be). In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Suriowecki argues that often the ‘dumb’ crowd makes smarter decisions than the informed experts. This has been taken to mean that the mob is always smart, which we know isn't true. But what is interesting to me is the reason why Suriowecki's examples work. I think it's because the crowd operates with less information, and there are times when this is actually beneficial (although usually one wants more information). Let us take an important example in recent history – the decision to…
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The Twitter dilemma for organisations
I, like many others, have in the past voiced the opinion that Twitter needs to have groups or filters so you can selectively send messages rather than lump everyone in together. I'm not so sure now, 'lumping' is what Twitter does best, it creates a big old organic soup of social chat, half caught conversations, professional debate, links, tips, cries for help, rambling thoughts, news updates, and plain old nonsense. From this organic soup something wonderful evolves – if you are your network then your Twitter stream is the phenotype of that network. The danger of the grouping line of development is that it goes something like this: Let's have…
