I haven’t spent so much time in Facebook lately. I wrote a post about how it was becoming boring. But in the last few weeks Facebook – or at least my view of Facebook – seems to be changing as more advanced applications continiue to be developed and deployed. Above you can see a screenshot of my Facebook wall this morning. No longer is it dominated by status updates. In fact I am not even sure they are being displayed on the wall. Instead it is recording my friends interactions with different goups and through different applications. The problem is I am not usre this is any better.

I suppose it is useful to know that Josie attended BarcampUKGovewb and Mobile Geeks of London III. I didn’t know about those events -and it gives links to find out more. That Lou and Paul have joined a group called ELESIG is not so helpful. I don’t know what ELESIG is. But as for the Twitter and Jaiku information – that is really useless. Josie says – “I did put up a nice wallpaper. That must count for something?” And Ewen is just about to pull out of Manchester station and will lose his wifi link! These are fragments of conversations about which I have no context to understand. Just for the record – I ahve no interest whatosever in custom cars or in pictures of them.

I guess that the problem lies in the plugins I have installed and in my settings. But the problem is that as Facebook becomes more sophisticated to get much out of it takes considerable time and effort. The original selling point was that it was so easy to use. And of course as our ‘friends’ have increased – so has the noise. My feeling is that to be of much use they are going to have ot allow us to form groups of friends and to display activity within those groups seperately. Perhaps then I could understand what is going on in the block of cyberspace that facebook represents.

The Guardian covers an interesting report: “MySpace 08: People. Content. Culture”.

Future Laboratory, who produced the report identified six types of MySpace user, say the Guardian, classifying 38% as “essentialists”, who primarily use social networking sites to stay in touch with friends.

“Just under a third, 28%, are “transumers” – those who follow new trends rather than make them.

Around 10% are “connectors”, who specialise in identifying and linking to cool content; and 5% are “collaborators”, who create events and projects online by teaming up with other users.

One in 20 MySpace users get their thrills from “scene breaking” – hunting down new bands and talent online and sharing that through the site; and 4% classify themselves as “netrepreneurs”, who use social networking sites to make money.”

I thought this was pretty cool stuff so tried to get hold of the report. No link to the original in the Guardian (they are very bad at that). Surprisingly few references on Google. Finally found a reference to the project on MySpace. Very strange – a sort of mash up between MySpace and a research site – I think they are trying to look trendy. But nowhere can I find the original report. The Guardian covers it in a blog article. But – unless I missed something – I suspect they have just rewritten a press release. No is it research, is it marketing or is it just hype.

Anyway this is what the “Future Laboratory” say about their rsearch on MySpace. Now at least they have put up something about what they are doing. And I suppose I am naive in wanting to see such work in the public domain. But it saddens me that important work on culture is now the preserve of the marketing people – not research.

“1) The research for PROJECT:CREATIVE LAB is due for completion by November 30th 2007
2) Any submissions can be made through the PROJECT:CREATIVE LAB MySpace page in the comments section or by mail
3) PROJECT:CREATIVE LAB is searching for 10 case studies only, and will make a shortlist of possible candidates before deciding on the final 10
4) PROJECT:CREATIVE LAB’s team of researchers will be responsible for choosing the final 10 case studies and hold the right to change or remove case studies from its report at any time
5) PROJECT:CREATIVE LAB holds the right to approach and choose case studies even if they have not submitted themselves or been submitted by others
6) Chosen case studies will be asked to:
a) Answer a series of questions via email;
b) Take part in a short telephone interview with a PROJECT:CREATIVE LAB researcher;
c) Submit photographs, imagery, video files, MP3 files and examples of work to support the case study,
and d) Provide further contact details for possible future research
7) All successful candidates will have to sign a media release form to confirm permission that their name, work and imagery can be used in future media and press coverage for/by MySpace UK and Lexis PR
8) Candidates will receive £200 for their participation. This will be given to the case study upon the final delivery of the report and dependent on candidates complying with all terms & conditions
9) PROJECT:CREATIVE LAB is part of trend research, insight and brand strategy consultancy The Future Laboratory, who have been tasked to create a bespoke report called ‘The voice of a generation’ on behalf of MySpace UK
10) MySpace will own the rights to the final report delivered by The Future Laboratory
11) MySpace and Lexis PR will use the report for internal and external use within their marketing, strategy and press departments.”

One last post on the Eduspaces story and then it is time to move on. Much good has come form the whole event – howerver difficult it has been. Mark Pearson sums it up best in this post on the Eduspaces forum:

“We should look on the threat of Eduspaces closure as a gift. It has concentrated minds and made us focus on what we would like to give and receive from a close online community (in the narrow and broad sense). Managing an open system like Eduspaces is a thankless task at the best of times (think of all the postings where you see “I want” and a list of demands…) and I think that this resurrection will lead to a stronger and perhaps more united community spirit. The TakingITGlobal organisation are to be commended for stepping in and providing the means to continue this unique service.”

Sadly my posts seem to have upset Dave Tosh. I am sorry for that. One reason the discussion has been so difficult is the respect Dave, Misje and Ben have in the educational technology community. Curverider is not just another remote software company. Rightly or wrongly we regard then as part of our own and are proud of their achievements. Elgg remains important for all those wanting to experiment with new forms of learning using social software. I think many of us feel some guilt that we have not contributed more to the development of elgg and to the stewardship of the Eduspaces community. It has become clear that supporting and sustaining a community like Eduspaces involves a lot more that just hosting an instance of elgg or a similar platform.

There are many lessons to be learnt from the Eduspaces debate. We have to find new models for community development and sustainability. We have to find ways for communities to work together with developers to mutual benefit and understanding. We need better understandings of the interaction between global communities and local activities. And so on….

The discussions on the Eduspaces forum are addressing these issues. Hopefully they will not die down just because an immediate answer has been found to continuing with Eduspaces.

It has certainly been interesting reporting on the Eduspaces developments over the week whilst travelling around. this will be a short post – am waiting at Vienna airport for my plane to be called.

I am pleased to be able to say some good seems to be coming out of all this.

First, fair play as we say in Wales to TakingITGlobal for recognising the need to develop a partnership with the community. Luke Walker, Director of Education Programmes says:

“As part of our new role in hosting, maintaining and improving the Eduspaces community, we’d like to set up an advisory board, consisting of active members of the community, determining together where we go from here. We’re new to this (Eduspaces) though: we’ve run advisory processes within our own communities before, but we don’t know what kind of systems and processes work best for all of you. So two questions:
1) What kinds of online advisory processes have any of you been part of or led in the past; what has worked well; what do we need to do to make sure where getting feedback from all the different groups of constituents involved in Educspaces?

2) How can we determine who our advisors in an open and transparent way?”

A promising start.

And in the UK there are moves to set up a community association of Higher Education elgg users. In anyone wants more information email Josie Fraser.

Meanwhile Brian Kelly is pursuing his interest in the general issues regarding outsourcing, sustainability, business models, etc. (See interview with him in which he calls for a policy debate on the issues associated with provision of Web
2.0 services).

So we are all learning – lets hope we come stronger out of all this.

The debate over the closure of eduspaces continues apace. And whilst the decision was originally largely accepted there is growing disquiet over the way on which the closure has been handled – see eduspaces discussion group.

Obviously much of the discussion centers on trying to find a solution to the problem with various offers being put forward.

More fundamental issues will have to be discussed once the short term problem is solved (or not as increasingly seems likely). For me the whole debacle raises major issues over how communities are organised.

Once it would have been relatively easy to answer this question. Face to face communities usually have at least some form of representative organisation – albeit elected, appointed or often self appointed.

It is not so simple with on-line communities. The nature of the eduspaces community needs further examination. A cursory examination suggest many of the groups on eduspaces had few members with little activity. Many of the blog entries, like my own may have been feed inputs from other blogs. So why does the edtech community feel so upset by the closure?

I suggest for two reasons. Curverider and elgg were not just another open source or social software provider. Elgg was seen as coming from our community and we were proud of it (and of Dave and Ben’s achievement). The closure – and especially the way the closure was handled feels like a betrayal in the trust we felt we had.

Secondly is the impact of the closure for those of us who have advocated the use of social software and open source in education. There will be an inevitable fallout in terms of trust of social software. That fallout may well extend to open source. In that regard, Curverider may have badly underestimated the damage they will suffer long term. Trust is not a commodity that can be bought. Inevitably many people are wondering about the future of elgg, which, like eduspaces, is reliant on the support of Curverider.

The eduspaces closure calls into question the way in which online communities are organised (or not) and the relationship between communities, social network providers and software developers. As far as I can see, eduspaces never had any form of community organisation. Curverider set it up and ‘gave’ it to the community. But of course with no organisation, Eduspaces was always the gift of Curverider, to give or to take away. The lack of any discussion between Curverider and the eduspaces community has been one of the most disturbing aspects of the whole affair. But it is a two way thing. With no community organisation there was no body who could engage with Curverider over the future direction of the platform.

The biggest lesson for me is that in future where communities are established, we have to develop ‘organised’ relations between software and service providers and community developers. This in turn may require a reappraisal of the way in which education organisations and communities relate to social software developments.

It is very sad to see Eduspaces is shutting down from the 10th January. It is not a big surprise. It has been fairly openly known that Dave and Ben from Curverider wanted out. What is very disappointing that no-one stepped in to take the service over.

As Josie Fraser says “Eduspaces and the Curverider team have provided a really important service, and an even more important model for the international education sector – demonstrating how web 2.0 and social technologies can be used to support learning and teaching, and showing the world what a learner-centric system might look like.”

What I liked about Eduspaces was the mixture of different cultures and languages. Projects, conferences, communities are predominantly mono-lingual.  Eduspaces was an experiment in letting everybody speak their own language and then make sense of what they could. We need more of this. And we need more communal places for sharing ideas.

Anyway, the good news is that ELGG remains open source and Curverider remain committed to supporting ELGG. Thanks to Dave and Ben for all their work in the last and good luck in the future.

On Friday we organised the Bazaar project conference – Show that you Share – at the University of Utrecht.

Personally, I greatly enjoyed the conference – as I think did other participants. As with previous Bazaar project events, the conference was designed to be participant led.  And we wished to draw on the experiences and expertise of those attending to develop new ideas and knowledge. It will take a little time to draw out the different insights from the discussion. But for me what became very apparent was the link between social networking and Open Education Resources.

Whilst the Open Educational Resources movement continues to grow in terms of ideas and support, a number of major issues have not been answered.

• What is the motivation for developing and sharing Open Educational Resources
• How can we find  appropriate resources
• How can we provide resources in a format which is easy to edit and adapt
• How can we track the use of resources
• How can we provide contextual metadata

Whilst much development work has gone into the creation of repository services, use of repositories in at best uneven. The long tail probably applies – most Open Educational Resources are available on local machines, local networks or little known servers.

What has perhaps not been probably considered is the influence of communities or social networkas as a major factor in resource sharing. People are happier to share if they know the community in which the resources are to be used and equally people are more trustful of resources if they come from a community of which they are a member. Yet resource repositories have focused on subject or discipline as the main way of finding and prioviding resopurces – there is seldom any focus on who created them for what purpose.

Refocusing on people and through people on practice could overcome many of the barriers listed above. This does not mean that resources would be limited to closed networks. Social software allows a transfer of trust and trust relations between people in different networks. But of course social software focuses on people  and and practice, rather than artefacts.  The Open Educational Resources movement has tended tofocus on the artefacts themselves, rather than people. If we could build on social software to provide social networking for resource creators and resource users, it might be we could take the OER movement a further step forward.

Thanks to all of you for your kind comments about my keynote presentation at Online Educa Berlin. Here are the slides from the presentation. Coming soon – the video and two papers – one in English and one in German explaining the key ideas on which the presentation was based.

plugin by rob

How ironic. I was waiting for a telephone call to IBL to talk about a discussion for Sounds of the Bazaar podcast on collaborative learning. And my eye caught this article from the Guardian technology page.

“More than 1,700 public employees have been sacked or disciplined for internet or email misuse in the past three years, our research has found.

The figures – obtained from 65 institutions – show how strongly employers are clamping down on staff who spend hours on social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.

Unions say that disputes over the sites are growing at a phenomenal rate and have demanded clearer guidelines for their use. Studies have shown that up to £130m a day in productivity is lost because of the sites, with Facebook’s British members spending an average of 143 minutes a month logged in.”

And I went on to have a great talk with Jaan and Agnes from Berlin about how e-collaboration tools can enhance learning – especially informal learning, boost productivity and promote innovation.

But it seems UK employers just don’t get it. To a large extent it is a question of trust – the very issue I talked with Jay Cross about in an interview a few weeks ago. Informal learning is the most powerful route to competence development and innovation in the workplace. But informal learning means trusting employees – trusting employees to usefully use their time, trusting employees to make decision, trusting employees to try out new ideas.

The public sector is probably the worst place for trust. In many organizations public sector workers are not even entitled to send emails without prior approval. Supervision rules. Why? The work culture of the public sector is still all too often rooted in Fordist ideas of production. Knowledge is carefully filtered and controlled. Strict hierarchies prevail.

I ‘m not sure even researchers and those who defend the workers get it. From the same article: “Cary Cooper, a professor of organisational psychology and health at Lancaster University, said that managers should be realistic. “Britain has some of the longest working hours in the developed world. Employers have created this culture. It is natural for people to have to use work computers for organising their personal life.”

Of course I agree with him. But that is not the point. Social networking is not just about organising ones social life. I certainly do not go to Facebook to arrange to meet my friends in the pub.

Social networking can be about spreading and sharing ideas, solving problems, forming and participating in communities of practice. And to all of you who say I am not being real, I suggest you study how people really use the internet n companies. Most people like to learn, they enjoy learning. Learning is a natural human activity. How sad we are so suspicious of it.

end of todays rant. Time to organise my social life. i am going to the pub.

Technorati Tags: communities of practice, informal learning

I am thoroughly bored with Facebook now. An endless wall of twitters. I am totally indifferent that Brian Kelly added the Where I have Been application, that 5 of my friends were tagged in an album or that Emma Duke Williams joined the group A Cup of Tea Solves Everything. Sorry. Perhaps I am just an anti-social heartless being. But I don’t care. Mind, it is strange. As much as Facebook status updates annoy me, I like the same feature on skype. That Ben is at ‘Coffee time’, Martin ‘is buzzing’ and Lawrie is ‘overrun by ferrets’ seems to add to my day. I can’t really explain it.

S, time to move on to something new. I have just opened an account with Ning. I know I’m probably being slow – I’m sure you have all already got Ning accounts.

Ironically I only opened the account because Michelle De Craene invited me to join a group she had set up: ‘Remixing History: The International Techohistorian Project‘. Ironically – because she invited me through Facebook. So, tehre is some use for it after all.

Anyway I like the idea of being a Techohistorian – perhaps I should put that on my business card. And although there is not much there yet the idea sounds good to me – “This project is to encourage educators to take on the role of historian in sharing technological advances.”

Back to Ning – had a play around. Seems very easy to set up groups, teh interface is clean and attractive and appearance can be fairly quickly customised. I could see me using it for quick ad-hoc groups around an event or a course. And indeed, my friends from UOC have set up a group to continue discussions around the recent inspiring UOC Unesco International seminar.

The problem I see with it is the opposite of Facebook. There is little or no potential or functionaility for social networking. Unless I am missing something you can set up or join groups. Thats it, full stop. And for that metter, the my groups page isn’t working properly for me – it only displays one of the three groups I am a member of, having grown up on Elgg, I am used to being able to link up with others based on their interests, to manage feeds in and out and to configure my own page through Widgets. Ning has none of this.

I suppose I am just a moaner. But there has to be some half way house. Trouble is that much as I love social networking software we are not in teh driving seat, we are evlauting other peoples designs and development to see what use we can make of it. That is why I am still excited by Freefolio – at least in hacking WordPress we can react to real needs as we find them, rather than telling people what they need is what the software provides.