Is Virtual Friendship different than F2F Friendships?

Yesterday I read a great article in BusinessWeek entitled, What's a Friend Worth: Companies are Scrambling to Decode New Data About Our Online Relationships, Hoping for Profitable Insights by Stephen Baker.

"Decoding friendship many believe, could be key to getting consumers' attention"...Facebook, Google, and Yahoo hire leading sociologists, anthropologists, and microeconmists from MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley. Microsoft just established a research division focused on social sciences in Cambridge, Mass." (We spent a lot of time studying social learning theories in my doctoral program at Pepperdine).

One of the things researchers are looking at to determine the strength of an online relationship is whether or not communication travels in both directions. This is something I'm looking at in my dissertation where I'm looking at transformative communication patterns in 1-to-1 laptop programs.

IBM encourages their workers to be involved in social networks. "Each new friend plugs an IBM worker into another sphere of knowledge and human contacts".

This concept aligns with the underpinnings of an online course I teach entitled Technology Literacy 102: Building Knowledge Management Systems. You can learn more about this course on our professional development website.

In reference to the title of this post, Is Virtual Friendship Different than f2f (face-to-face) friendships I would say it depends. I just helped chair a committee that wrote a paper on social networking in education. One of the things our committee discussed is that social networking can be hard to explain because it is user defined. Each person determines their purpose for using it, so there in no one way to use it. In the BusinessWeek article they are talking about how businesses are trying to tap-in to online networks as a way to promote themselves. In other ways, using viral marketing techniques. I think one of the things these tools provide us with is the ability to expand our networks to people on a massive scale never possible before.

Stephens Group Words for 2008

I recently added a cloud tag to my blog. It was interesting to reflect on which words I tagged most often in 2008.

21st Century Skills-- This year we added a new belief statements to our mission statement, "We believe all students need to graduate with 21st Century Skills". All of our professional development efforts have been aligned to support this belief statement.

MDMC2008- - MDMC stands for the Milwaukee Digital Media Conference. This year's conference was a huge success. We had 120 educators collaboratively work with us on real world digital media projects at the Milwaukee County Zoo. You can read more about the conference in an article published by The Milwaukee Journal.

One-to-One Computing- - This year The Stephens Group started a new division of our company on One-to-One Computing with four consultants who have experience working with one-to-one computing programs. We started a free social networking site around this topic and currently has 37 members from all over the country. One-to-one computing was also the topic of my comps paper and will be my dissertation topic too- so I'm sure it will be tagged a lot more in 2009.

PODetc-
PODetc is also a new division of our company. It stands for Professional Online Development for the Educational Technology Community. The online relationships that have been developed are truly amazing. We have had teachers and administrators from all over the world in K-12 and higher ed take our courses. On Monday we start our fourth session of graduate courses for educators. We currently have five courses aligned to the new ISTE NETS Standards for teachers.

Social Networking & Twitter- - As Tammy Lind, our director of professional development stated recently, "I have learned more from people on Twitter this past year than all of my professional development including my master's degree combined". Consultants need to be constantly learning. Social networking tools such as Twitter and CollectiveX have helped us reach out to our clients, share information with one another, get just-in-time support and brought us closer together. I'm sure we will be leveraging these tools even more in 2009 as we broaden our personal learning networks.

Ultraportable Devices- This year through an internship with CoSN I had the opportunity to work on a report on ultraportable devices. I have become really interested in this topic as it also related to my dissertation. In my consulting work, I have been surprised that school districts have been somewhat reluctant to go this route with their hardware purchases. If we are really serious about providing student centered learning experiences, I think these devices have huge potential for changing the teaching and learning process.

San Jose Digital Media Course- This year we held a course at the San Jose Museum of Art to create vodcasts (or video-podcasts) using a method of inquiry that can be used in any discipline. We will be holding the course again June 22nd-29th. More information is available on our course wiki.

Wiki- 2008 was definitely the year of the wiki for The Stephens Group. The Stephens Group has seven wikis. Some are internal for consultants to share information and collaborate. Others such as our Information Technology Planning Wiki are to share information with clients. We use this one a lot with our clients as a means of sharing research and best practices when developing strategic information technology plans. Our biggest wiki, however is the wiki we created for this year's digital media conference. Educators worked in teams to create multimedia wikis around exhibits at the zoo. We are very proud of their work! You can view their wikis at http://mdmc2008.wikispaces.com/Directory.

It comes as no surprise that the most tagged word in 2008 was Web 2.0. Many of the technologies we are using as a company have not changed from 2007. However, what is changing is how we use them. Our company has consultants and clients in multiple states. Web 2.0 tools has really allowed us to work more efficiently and seamlessly across multiple timezones.

I'm looking forward to seeing what new words get tagged in 2009!

MySpace: A Cultural Practice

I ran across this interesting quote today:

My space is a cultural requirement for high school students. As one teenager said, "If you are not on My Space, you don't exist"~ Dana Boyd, Researcher

Social Networking and the Election

I have been really interested in the role of social networking in the election. One great site devoted to this is techpresident.com.

In particular, there is a lot about twitter. On a personal note I have really had a lot more fun this election being connected via twitter. It has been fun to see my twitter friends from across the country announce when their going to the polls, what's happening in their state, and what coverage we are all watching on TV and how we rate it. It has really made me feel much more connected to people to twitter in real time about an event that has such deep importance to all of us.

Twitter

On Saturday, I team taught an advanced podcasting workshop with Joan Roehre. Participants in the workshop were really interested in Twitter. Twitter is like a real time blogging tool. Joan shared a Common Craft Video to explain what Twitter is.

I had a Twitter account, but hadn't really done a lot with it. Next, we all got a twitter account and started exploring and twittering with one another. Soon we had other people not at the workshop following us and interested in what we were learning about.

Tammy Lind who was teaching in the other room twittered to us. She asked, "Why do I care?" Joan said this is a valid question and that in order to make Twitter meaningful, you need to build your network. She also said that she thinks of it as "a help desk of your peers".

Toward the end of the workshop someone asked us what the difference was between XML and RSS. We weren't sure, so we posted it to our twitter accounts and sure enough not long after we received an answer. Not long after that someone Twittered the question of was there a program like Garage Band for the Mac for PCs. I was able to Twitter back that Audacity is like Garage Band and can work on a PC or a Mac.

I'm going to play with Twitter some more. If you are interested in following me, my twitter name is tstephens.

Reflection on my use of Web 2.0 tools in 2007

As I reflect on my work-life in 2007, there are a number new of Web 2.0 tools I’m utilizing that have become fully integrated into how I work and interact with people.

Skype allows you to conduct free calls over the internet or chat with others online. This tool has been invaluable in keeping connected with family and colleagues.

GoToMeeting is a form of web-conferencing. The Stephens Group uses GoToMeeting to work collaboratively on projects with one another and with our clients.n We also use it for internal training purposes.

We use GoogleDocs to allow committees to collaborate on documents such as Information Technology Plans. This saves a lot of time. Prior to Google Docs we would have to email versions of the document to committee members and make changes. The use of Google Docs has really streamlined this process because there is always one true version that everyone in the group can log-onto and update. Another great feature is you can see who made what changes when. I have all of my GoogleDocs linked onto my iGoogle web page which I have set as my homepage. I have also added useful Google widgets such as the weather, online dictionary and thesaurus and tabbed links to personal bookmarks as well.

We use CollectiveX internally within The Stephens Group. We have a number of different teams working on different types of projects. One of the advantages of CollectiveX is it allows members the opportunity to share contact information, discuss issues of concern, share information and upload files that need to be shared among consultants for different projects, and allows us to keep a shared calendar. Another great feature of CollectiveX is that it emails consultants updates that have been made.

Bloglines is a blog aggregator. What that means is it grabs new entries to the blogs I have subscribed to. This means that I can quickly read a number of entries without having to go to each blog individually. Subscribing to blogs has allowed me to keep on top of new trends and ideas in educational technology better than traditional media such as magazine subscriptions.

I wrote about Clipmarks in my blog entry on Shaping the Flow of Media. This tool has been great in helping me hang on to and catagorize things I find interesting when reading my blog feeds. The ability to “clip” and “tag” things to add to my library has been a huge help in organizing online content.

This year we had our first digital media conference. We were so impressed with the podcasts that teachers produced at the Milwaukee Public Museum. We are really looking forward to our second conference being held at the Milwaukee County Zoo, July 28th-31st.

In 2007, The Stephens Group developed two wikis. One for our Digital Media Conference as a way for our instructors to share resources with our participants, and one to help our clients with strategic planning on their information technology plans (The Stephens Group Information Technology Planning Wiki).

The addition of a clustermap to our blog has been a great addition. I love logging on and finding out where in the world people are reading our blog from. It has helped motivate me to keep writing.

In 2008 The Stephens Group will be learning more about digital mapping, the power of meta-tagging content, vodcasting at the San Jose Museum of Art (August 11^th- 13^th), using iPods to assist ELL students (see us at CUE), using social networking tools such as Facebook and Linked In to connect with wider audiences, as well as exploring the potential of gaming in education.

We hope you will continue to read our blog throughtout 2008 as we explore these new technologies.

Think Before You Ban: How Classrooms Become Communities with Web 2.0 Technology

Don't miss the next CoSN webcast entitled Think Before you Ban: How Classrooms Become Communities with Web 2.0 on January 16th at 1:00pm EST.

As user-generated content and social networking take over student social lives, can they also be used for instruction? By leveraging these new technologies within the school firewall, teachers and students make the most of technology for collaborative learning. They also have the opportunity to discuss acceptable behavior and learn how to be responsible members of an online community. We discuss positive uses of these technologies and lessons learned by practitioners.

• Karen Greenwood Henke, Author and Speaker, Nimble Press, San Francisco, CA (Moderator)
• Kevin Jarrett, Technology Facilitator, K-4, District Webmaster and Google Certified Teacher, Northfield Community School, NJ
• Connie Sitterley, Technology Director, Penncrest School District, PA
• Susan Brooks-Young, Web 2.0 Consultant

You can register for the webcast at http://www.cosn.org/events/webcasts/2008.cfm#January08 . CoSN members can attend the conference for free. Non-CoSN members need to pay a registration fee of $59.00. Click here to learn how you can become a CoSN member.

Shaping the Flow of Media

I recently started using a social note-taking tool called Clipmarks. Clipmarks is a tool that allows users to organize and transmit information. It is a modern form of collaboration that allows users to “clip” parts of a web page that they find interesting. You can save your clips to your own online clipmarks space, add your clips to your blog, email your clips to others, add clips to social bookmarking sites such as delicious or print your clips. When you install clipmarks a small icon in embedded in the toolbar of your browser making it easy to multi-task as you clip parts of websites as you browse.

When you clip something you “tag” it. Tagging is an evolving social practice that allows uses to add their own searchable metadata, such as keywords, to their clips. Lankshear and Knobel (2007) call this a “bottom up approach” because the user makes the decisions about how to classify information instead of relying on a pre-established hierarchal system. This makes the exchange and sharing of information more “fluid, continuous, open” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007, p. 15) and less “expert-dominated” (p. 9).

You can also create catalogs for your clips and make them public for others to search, view, or add comments to. The fact that others can add comments to your clips makes this a relational technology. The fact that clipmarks was designed for users to share their clips publicly shows that the developers understand that “learning is an individual phenomenon and a collective phenomenon…understanding that learning and development is a bi-directional phenomena” (Kaptelinin, & Nardi, 2006, p. 91).

The ability of social networking tools such as Clipmarks is shaping the flow of media. The ability to tag is revolutionizing the way we use the web. In a print world there were top-down hierarchical standards such as the Dewey decimal system on how information was classified. In the past the designer or author might give keywords to a web-site. Now, the ability to tag allows a bottom-up organic approach where the individual user has the ability to create keywords, categories, and libraries to categorize information in ways that make sense to them. In other words they control the flow of the media. The ability to share these tags with “my clippers” allows you to add a social network of others who have similar interests. Again this is allowing the users a new way to flow media and information to one another.

References:

Knobel, M., & Lankshear, C. (Eds.). (2007). A New Literacies Sampler (Vol. 29): Peter Lang.

Kaptelinin, V., & Nardi. (2006). Acting with Technology. Boston, Massachusetts: MIT.