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The new morning routine
I have a morning routine now, which has evolved over the past year or so. It’s remarkably different from even a couple of years ago, largely as a result of becoming a blogger I think. Here it is: After the school run I sit at the laptop with a cup of tea and bowl of muesli (if I’m indulging – marmite on toast). Firstly, I check email, delete all the spam messages, do any quick responses, and mark any more detailed ones for later. I check messages in the student forum for the course I run. So far, so 1990s. Next I go to my blog, check stats, and comments…
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Teach the people – would you sign up?
Teach the People is a social networking site with an emphasis on learning. It’s not up and running yet, so I’ve registered for a beta invite. It has more of a content focus than a lot of the other sites, claiming that "Instead of just messaging with other users like on traditional social networking services, users on Teach The PeopleSM are creating their own communities for fun, education, innovation; whatever! User can then fill those communities with as much content & media as they desire" I hope it works, but I’m not sure myself, and this was based on my initial reaction – I didn’t instantly get the point as…
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Facebook and Twitter – the status wars
I’ve decided to give Twitter another go (you can see it on the sidebar there if you’re reading this in the blog). What inspired me was a couple of posts – from David Warlick who relates how Twitter was used at a conference and Ewan McIntosh who asks for the Twitter details of people attending the Scottish Learning Festival, so they can create a page of reflections on the conference. It seemed to me that maybe having a Twitter identity was a professional requirement, a component of the essential modern identity an educational technologist should construct. But my problem is I’ve tried before and not established it as a habit…
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The nature, and limit, of friends
My (real) friend from university, Will Reader, has done some research on Facebook friends recently, which the Guardian and others have picked up on. They are all running it as an ‘online friends aren’t real’ type story. But I think this isn’t what Will was saying. What he actually says is "Although the numbers of friends people have on these sites can be massive, the actual number of close friends is approximately the same in the face to face real world," Previous research suggests that the maximum number of friends you could manage socially or cognitively was around 150, known as Dunbar’s number. What Will’s research was doing was looking…
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FB – It can’t be private and not a walled garden
(Warning – this post contains some dangerously stretched garden metaphors). There have been lots of mutterings about Facebook being a walled garden recently, for instance danah boyd ponders I am utterly confused by the ways in which the tech industry fetishizes Facebook. There’s no doubt that Facebook’s F8 launch was *brilliant*. Offering APIs and the possibility of monetization is a Web 2.0 developer’s wet dream. (Never mind that I don’t know of anyone really making money off of Facebook aside from the Poker App guy.) But what I don’t understand is why so much of the tech crowd who lament Walled Gardens worship Facebook. What am I missing here? Why…
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Learning from Facebook
Susan Mernit has a nice post on 10 things we can learn from Facebook (and other fads). I particularly liked: 2. Local is a state of mind. 7. Forget Starbucks, the third place is digital. Got 5 minutes? Need a break? That place you like to go is probably right on your screen. 8. Passive versus active still matters–but you can drive behavior. Remember those rules about people who watched TV rather than posted in online forums? It’s still that case that most people are reluctant to write, slow to put themselves out there, and cautious about privacy and sharing. BUT–smart networks like FB model behavior and get that lagging…
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Mo’ Facebook
Richard Scoble has a good post on Why Facebook, why now? After noting some of the criticisms (and his follow on post about a lot of the apps simply not working in Facebook is right also, but we’ll pretend they do for now), he argues that Facebook is successful over LinkedIn because it’s personal. He also points to the quality of the people and the applications (if they worked). AJ suggests that the reason Facebook has stickability is Skinnerian conditioning and Tony Hirst suggests ways in which a status like function could be mined to aid learning and networking. I think Scoble is right about the social aspect of FB…
