Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

I am off to the JTEL Winter School on Advanced Learning Technologies 2010 It was quite a surprise to have received a scholarship, and quite short notice too. I can’t believe it’s already about to start! WOW I am excited about the programme. It seems to be quite hands-on. I was asked to create a three minute presentation [...]

I was idly wasting time reading my twitter stream and it occurred to me that I seem to be getting less tweets these days. So I twittered out “Is it my impression or do i get less tweets these days. Following more people so are they just tweeting less?: And in the wonderful way that twitter works back came a reply from @paulbrichardson: “I am getting fewer tweets too. But there is more substance to them – usually expressing or referencing an idea..” This was quickly followed up by “Worried that my last tweet points to an attempt at a taxonomy of tweets. I am definitely not going there though…” And of course @tmartinowen couldn’t resist the bait: “here is a totally unsubstantial tweet – just to keep the classification going – or does the parenthesis give it substance?”

Nor would I wish to risk a classification. But there do seem to be a few things going on in the way we are using twitter (or at least the people I follow). There are far less of the straight forward “good morning Twitterverse” or “had a great lunch” or “tired and going to bed now” type tweets. u suspect this was a leftover from the Facebook status update days (in the same way few people are bothering to update their skype status nowadays). Have we simply become bored with our own mundane lives?

And Paul is right – most of the tweets I receive do seem to be on points of substance and many point to a resource. This may be due to the increasing use of sophisticated Twitter clients and to cross application linking through the API (e.g posting Diego links to twitter). Twitter is becoming a rich repository of links to resources. However discovery remains problematic and harvesting is tricky due to lack of longevity.

This is all to the good. But I am increasingly missing the social nature of Twitter which also seems to be on the wane. We are using twitter for reporting and shouting out but does it still retain the social and collaborative nature of its early days? Of course there remain the odd maverick – @johnpopham’s #uktrains series is strangely compulsive.

A further trend is to increase the ability of machines to read twitter through hash tag taxonomies. As reported in the ReadWriteWeb a group of hackers ” in collaboration with Project EPIC, developed a new syntax to make it easier for computers to read tweets from areas that are affected by a disaster. If adopted widely, this new hashtag-based syntax will make it easier to automatically extract data about locations or the status of a road or person.”

But as comments on the blog pointed out such taxonomies are far from people friendly. is there a trade off between machine readable functionality and human and social uses of media?

Twitter is an interesting platform because of the wide affordances in its social use. The changing ways in which we are using Twitter may point to the evolution of the use of wider social media in the future.

Anyway – time to send a tweet announcing this post

Today’s been a complicated day, if for nothing else because I hate chairing meetings!!!!!  On top of that this was a meeting that touched on a very sensitive area: changing practice. Although this allows me to kind of stick my nose into someone else’s practice and look at ways how it could be improved, especially [...]

An interesting post by Tim Kasteele on Networks and the Information Glut. Tim links to the video above by Dan Edelstein showing the social networks of correspondence among 18th Century scientists:

As Tim says:

“It’s great research that illustrates some important points:

• When we talk about ’social networks’ we don’t just mean facebook and twitter. People have always functioned within networks, and these have always been important in the development and spread of ideas. James Fowler makes this same point in his interview with Stephen Colbert.

• Ideas diffuse through networks. The structure of the networks through which we are trying to get our ideas to spread has a significant influence on the diffusion of our innovations. Our connections within the network can enhance or hinder our ability to get our ideas to spread. One of the reasons that Darwin gets credited with the idea of evolution through natural selection instead of Alfred Russell Wallace is that Darwin’s connections within the scientific community at the time were more numerous, more widespread, and better.
• Even though we often feel like we’re overwhelmed with information and data to be absorbed, the information glut is nothing new. Think about the volume of connections shown in the video. Or think about Charles Darwin – over the course of scientific career he sent over 15,000 letters. It’s safe to assume that he received just as many. Think about how much time he would have spent reading & writing letters, and how much new information and ideas would have been included in that – it’s probably more than we’re spending writing our blogs, updating our statuses and twittering. In fact, if you just look at the networks, you might argue that Darwin was the Chris Brogan of the 19th Century.”

Of course Tim is right in saying that social networks are not new. But it may be worth considering what has changed through the spread of social software powered networks.

One change is speed. I do not know how fast the post was in the 19th Century (probably no slower than today ) but today’s communication is almost instant. When I have finished this post I will press the publish button and the article is in the open. I wonder though if the speed of communication is leading to less reflection on what we are writing.

There are changes in power relations. Notwithstanding Facebook’s claim to own our data and to control our privacy, today we can all publish our ideas, rather than in the past when publishing was limited to those with money or to selected researchers and writers.

Moreover Twitter, blogs and wikis have opened up access to ideas. Perhaps more important than access to scholarly writing such as papers is access to discourses as they happen.

Of course, the use of new media raises the question of form and content. I can very much imagine that Darwin would have loved to have a wiki for his research. I can imagine him blogging from his iPhone in the Guadaloupe Islands. Twitter could have been useful for sending messages back home but I am not so sure it has the same affordances as a letter. Mind, Jo says Darwin might have Twittered “Got new theory, check out my new blog on it”. I am not so sure.

One question which would be very interesting to see is the patterns and interaction between social networks. My guess is that today we have denser patterns of overlapping networks – though I may be wrong.

And one of the most interesting things about today’s forms of social networks is the straying between discipline areas. Whilst I guess 19th century networks tended to be organised in fairly strict disciplinary or subject groups, today’s networks tend to wander across different subject areas and domains. It seems Time Kasteele is in the French department at Stanford. And when his video came to an end up came the video on Welsh and the importance of minority languages which we are currently featuring featuring on the front page of this site.

I thoroughly enjoyed today’s session as part of Buth’s workshop. There were very though provoking questions there! It is great to connect to new people all the time…it’s just brilliant to be challenged by people’s ideas and experiences. It makes me think, it helps me reflect, and most important it helps me see things from [...]