Danah Boyd writes a well timed blog post reporting on the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project who have released a report entitled “Reputation, Management, and Social Media” . The blog appeared on the same day that Facebook announced its latest tweaking on their privacy settings, a move already denounced as inadequate by privacy campaigners. The UK group Privacy International said “the latest changes merely correct some of the most unacceptable privacy settings on the site. Very little has changed in terms of the overall privacy challenge that Facebook and its users need to navigate.”

The Pew Internet survey found that young adults are more actively engaged in managing what they share online than older adults. 71% of the 18-29s interviewed in August-September of 2009 who use social network sites reported having changed their privacy settings (vs. 55% of those 50-64).

Danah Boyd comments:

Young adults are actively engaged in managing their reputation but they’re not always successful. The tools are confusing and companies continue to expose them without them understanding what’s happening. But the fact that they go out of their way to try to shape their information is important. It signals very clearly that young adults care deeply about information flow and reputation……

Much of this is because of digital literacy – the younger folks understand the controls better than the older folks AND they understand the implications better. …. This is also because, as always, youth are learning the hard way. As Pew notes, young adults have made mistakes that they regret. They’ve also seen their friends make mistakes that they regret. All of this leads to greater consciousness about these issues and a deeper level of engagement.

From my own experience young people do care. And they spend considerable time managing their Facebook accounts – tweaking settings, editing and deleting comments and especially editing tags to photos of themselves. However, this is not so much because they are concerned with their long term reputation and the repercussions of access by potential future education institutions or employers. It is because their digital image is part of their everyday image of themselves as they present it to others – and in that way part of the process of growing up. Identities are dynamic and always changing. Identities also face both ways – outwards and inwards. Young people often suffer considerable angst over their digital image. And it is little point saying that they can choose to delete their accounts or that they shouldn’t complain about a free service. Facebook, for better or worse, is a central focus of present youth culture. To opt out is to opt out of that culture.

Danah Boyd summarises key messages from the Pew Internet report:

• Young adults are still more likely than older users to say they limit the amount of information available about them online.
• Those who know more, worry more. And those who express concern are twice as likely to say they take steps to limit the amount of information available about them online.
• The most visible and engaged internet users are also most active in limiting the information connected to their names online.
• The more you see footprints left by others, the more likely you are to limit your own.
• Those who take steps to limit the information about them online are less likely to post comments online using their real name.
• More than half of social networking users (56%) have “unfriended” others in their network.
• Just because we’re friends doesn’t mean I’m listening: 41% of social networking users say they filter updates posted by some of their friends.
• Young adult users of social networking sites report the lowest levels of trust in them.

• Young adults are still more likely than older users to say they limit the amount of information available about them online.
• Those who know more, worry more. And those who express concern are twice as likely to say they take steps to limit the amount of information available about them online.
• The most visible and engaged internet users are also most active in limiting the information connected to their names online.
• The more you see footprints left by others, the more likely you are to limit your own.
• Those who take steps to limit the information about them online are less likely to post comments online using their real name.
• More than half of social networking users (56%) have “unfriended” others in their network.
• Just because we’re friends doesn’t mean I’m listening: 41% of social networking users say they filter updates posted by some of their friends.
• Young adult users of social networking sites report the lowest levels of trust in them.

The issue is no longer one of digital literacy awareness. Young people are aware. Their frustration is that Facebook does not listen to their concerns.

Sometimes it it is hard to see anything stopping Facebook ruling the world. But a few years ago it was hard to see anyone ever challenging My Space. And some of us can still remember Friends Reunited. Now the tide may be beginning to change against Facebook. It is Facebook’s own financial greed and their willingness to run roughshod over privacy rights which is threatening their hold.

A new generation of entrepreneurs are emerging with a very different vision and different technologies.

A report in today’s New York Times explains: “A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business.” They go onto say: “They have called their project Diaspora* and intend to distribute the software free, and to make the code openly available so that other programmers can build on it. As they describe it, the Diaspora* software will let users set up their own personal servers, called seeds, create their own hubs and fully control the information they share. Mr. Sofaer says that centralized networks like Facebook are not necessary. “In our real lives, we talk to each other,” he said. “We don’t need to hand our messages to a hub. What Facebook gives you as a user isn’t all that hard to do. All the little games, the little walls, the little chat, aren’t really rare things. The technology already exists.”

Meanwhile Facebook itself is showing some signs of recognising the danger.  Nick O’Neill on the All Facebook web site says: “Facing increasing pressure from the media and users, Facebook has called an all hands meeting tomorrow afternoon, at 4 PM Pacific, to discuss the company’s overall privacy strategy according to sources inside the company……..While it’s unknown what Facebook will announce during the meeting, it’s pretty obvious that changes will need to be made if Facebook is going to regain users’ trust. The most likely change will come in the form of a temporary removal of the “Instant Personalization” service, or at the least, a shift to “opt-in”, something many privacy advocates have been calling for.”

One thing we know about social networking is that it doesn’t stay still. Witness the decline of Bebo and My Space, which only two years ago looked all conquering. Now Facebook is in its zenith but how long will this prevail?

I am interested in the connections between the different affordances of social network sites and how we communicate (both on-line and face to face).

My Space was above all a site to talk about music and for bands to communicate with us and with each other. In those terms it remains highly stressful.

Facebook could be said to inherit the mantle of Friends Reunited. Whilst the latter sought just to allow us to stay in touch (or get back in touch) with friends from school or university – interestingly the attempt to extend it to the workplace didn’t really take off – Facebook started out primarily as a place to connect with present friends in college or university. Even following its expansion outside education the principle remained the same – friends mutually followed each other with both having to consent to the connection. Twitter changed all that by allowing non reciprocal connections i.e. I can follow people without them following me. And people rapidly grew long lists of followers. Different people use Twitter in different ways. For me, it is a great resource repository – an informal, real time feedreader if you like. And despite the long running debate as to whether Twitter is killing blogging, I find myself reading more blogs as a result following links in tweets.

Bit I wonder if the social is missing somehow from these social networking services. In an article in Wired Magazine, Clive Thompson says:

socializing doesn’t scale. Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote. “They feel they can’t possibly be the person who’s going to make the useful contribution,” ….. So the conversation stops. …. At a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they’re having fun — but any bigger and it falls apart. Social media stops being social. It’s no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting.

In that respect I think the rise of ‘extreme; social networking site Chatrouette is interesting. According to the Guardian newspaper:

Chatroulette, which was launched in November, has rocketed in popularity thanks to its simple premise: internet video chats with ­random strangers.

When users visit the site and switch on their webcams, they are suddenly connected to another, randomly chosen person who is doing precisely the same thing somewhere else in the world.

Once they are logged in together, chatters can do anything they like: talk to each other, type messages, entertain each other – or just say goodbye, hit the “next” button and move on in an attempt to find somebody more interesting.

Perhaps predictably, Chatroulette is reportedly host to “all sorts of unsavoury characters” and the Guardian quotes “veteran blogger Jason Kottke, who has spent years documenting some of the web’s most weird and wonderful corners, tried the site and then wrote about witnessing nudity, sexual activity and strange behaviour.”

But I wonder in Chatroulette is a sign of us wanting to use the internet as a social space to meet new friends, in the way we might face to face in a bar or at a party. Despite the attempts of Mr Tweet or of Facebook to introduce us to new people, they lack the randomness and intimacy of human face to face serendipitous encounter.

And I wonder too if that may be some of teh thinking behind the new Google Buzz social networking service. I can’t find the link now, but when I first looked at Buzz (in the pub!) on my mobile phone, there was a tab for ‘local’ allowing me to specify the geographical radius for activity I wanted to see. Along with us wanting to recreate the opportunity for meeting new friends, I think the future for social networking may be local, with us wanting to use such services to be able to find out what is going on around us, at a distance in which we can physically reach.

So as social networking becomes part of our everyday life, it may be that we want to  integrate it into our everyday physical spaces, rather than extend the range of the everyday to unreachable zones of cyberspace.

Just an idea.

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 🙂

More on scoping Open Education. In this series of blog posts I am trying to extend beyond our present focus on Open Educational Resources and look at the different dimensions of Open Education. These include include artefacts and tools, communities, Curriculum, pedagogy and the organisation and recognition of learning

I am not going to try to define any of these, still less to try to put forward any form of construct for measuring openness. Instead I want to try to explore the dimensions of these different ways of understanding open education and what they might mean in practice.

I have already written extensively on the artefacts and tools which mediate activities and learning. Artefacts and tools include Open Educational Resources and open repositories, cloud and social software as well as Personal Learning Environments.

What is missing at the moment is easy tools for resource discovery (Google is still fairly poor at finding Open Educational Resources).

Communities to support Open Education are more problematic. Institutional communities remain largely limited to those enrolled on a particular course. As David Wiley has pointed out one of the problems of Virtual Learning environments is that the tools and artefacts of such groups are usually deleted at the end of a particular course..

And, of course, we have seen the emergence of communities of practice around different topics, practices and occupations. Such communities are by definition emergent (as practices evolve) and vary greatly in structure and purpose.

According to Wenger, a community of practice defines itself along three dimensions:

• What it is about – its joint enterprise as understood and continually renegotiated by its members.
• How it functions – mutual engagement that bind members together into a social entity.
• What capability it has produced – the shared repertoire of communal resources (routines, sensibilities, artefacts, vocabulary, styles, etc.) that members have developed over time.

Rather than looking to learning as the acquisition of certain forms of knowledge, Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in their book “Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation” have tried to place it in social relationships – situations of co-participation. As William F. Hanks puts it in his introduction to their book: ‘Rather than asking what kind of cognitive processes and conceptual structures are involved, they ask what kinds of social engagements provide the proper context for learning to take place’. It is not so much that learners acquire structures or models to understand the world, but they participate in frameworks that that have structure. Learning involves participation in a community of practice. And that participation ‘refers not just to local events of engagement in certain activities with certain people, but to a more encompassing process of being active participants in the practices of social communities and constructing identities in relation to these communities’

Lave and Wenger see the process of integration in communities as coming through involvement around practice – what they called legitimate peripheral participation. And evidence suggests that may work well for many learners, particularly those in vocational education and training. However it may be far more problematic for academic education or for those whose learning needs (or desires) lay outside present participation in am occupational practice.

We also have a growing number of free and open online courses. However there still remain issues.  Firstly, participating in a community of practice, particularly a dispersed community using technologies for communication, does not necessarily provide access to the support learners’ may need. We still lack is an easy way of peer matching for learners – what Vygotsky called a “More Knowledgeable Other.”  As Illich said in 1971: “It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity.”

Secondly – and even if a leaner has managed to develop their own Personal Learning Network and has configured their Personal Learning Environment – there remains the issue of how to structure their learning. Traditionally learning has been structured around curricula or course outcomes. Yet traditional curricula, based on expert knowledge of a domain area may not be appropriate to present day needs characterised by the ready availability of information through the internet or indeed to the ideas of open education providing increased leaner autonomy. Dave Cormier says that the present speed of information based on new technologies has undermined traditional expert driven processes of knowledge development and dissemination. The explosion of freely available sources of information has helped drive rapid expansion in the accessibility of the canon and in the range of knowledge available to learners. We are being forced to re-examine what constitutes knowledge and are moving from expert developed and sanctioned knowledge to collaborative forms of knowledge construction. Social learning practices are leading to new forms of knowledge discovery. Cormier sees a movement from expert defined curricula to community based curricula but does not elaborate on how this process might happen.

In putting forward a metric for measuring openness in education, George Siemens talks about the “Systemic integration of openness – i.e. openness is part of the curriculum development process, not as an after market add on.” However, this would appear to be an appeal for transparency in the development process and for linking curriculum development to Open Educational Resources, rather than a basis for open education curricula.

The work of Joss Winn and Richard Hall has probably not received as much attention as it deserves. Joss Winn is particularly concerned with the dependency on tools and services underpinned by oil and technocentric economic, social and educational development in a world faced by growing uncertainties due to declining oil production. In a long blog post entitled “Towards a resilient curriculum for HE”, Richard Hall considers how curricula could prepare learners to deal with uncertainty and change. He also refers to the UK JISC funded Learning Literacies for the Digital Age project. The project final report highlighted the urgency of supporting a differentiation of identities and engagements in multiple spaces:

“there is a tension between recognising an ‘entitlement’ to basic digital literacy, and recognising technology practice as diverse and constitutive of personal identity, including identity in different peer, subject and workplace communities, and individual styles of participation.”

Hall continues

“Illich saw this as critical and believed that a “convivial society should be designed to allow all its members the most autonomous action by means of tools least controlled by others”, in order to overcome regimentation, dependence, exploitation, and impotence. He saw tools as mediating relationships, and as emancipatory where mastery of them in a specific context could be achieved.

There is a complex interplay between the theoretical opportunities of social media for personal emancipation through engagement in contexts for narrative and authorship, and our understanding of how those tools are deployed and owned in reality …. One key issue is how technologies are (re)claimed by users and communities within specific contexts and curricula, in-line with personal integration and enquiry, and in an uncertain world.”

Richard Hall goes on to look at “how to frame a curriculum that enables individuals-in-communities to learn and adapt, to mitigate risks, to prepare for solutions to problems, to respond to risks that are realised, and to recover from dislocations. This demands curricula that may be:

• authentic and meaningful, framed by decision-making and agency;
• enquiry-based, in which skills, approaches, decisions and actions are developed and tested in real-world situations that demonstrate complexity and context;
• cross-disciplinary, and linked to a guild or craft-style experience rather than a Fordist, factory approach;
• negotiated in scope, governance and delivery within authentic, rather than false, communities;
• accredited through the specification of expertise and experience developed within real-world processes and outcomes;
• framed by mentoring and coaching; and
• focused upon co-governance, rather than co-creation”

In seeking to frame a curriculum to allow individuals in communities to deal with the challenges of the changing environment, Hall puts forward the basis for curricula design for Open Education.

The ideas put forward by Richard Hall are remarkably similar to those advanced by Willem Wardekker in comparing Critical and Vykotskian ideas of education.

Wardekker outlines key aspects of Vygotsky’s theory:

• Identity becomes understandable only in connection with social relations.
• Vygotskian theory has the ability of conceptualizing the plurality of such relations. It can recognize that positions, perspectives, and cultural resources may be inconsistent with each other without one or more of them being false.
• Plurality may be seen in Vygotskian theory not only as a characteristic of society, but also as a characteristic of human personality.  It is not the social structures themselves that are internalized, but the meaning the individual learns to give to these structures in its interaction with others and in relation to what it has learned before. Internalization is an activity of meaning-giving and digestion … Learning does not mean being fitted with a totally new repertoire of behavior; it consists of qualitative changes in an already existing repertoire. At the same time, learning means learning about yourself: building perspectives on yourself in relation to the learning situations you find yourself in. This may generate a certain continuity, without taking the form of a unified perspective which could be called identity in the accepted sense. In different situations, before different audiences, the individual may be guided by different perspectives which may be partially incompatible. Nor does learning have a definite end; as long as there is contradiction in the social relations, learning occurs and identity keeps changing.

Vygotskian theory, says Wardekker, “has a positive attitude towards such change. … This holds on the individual level (that is, the individual development does not have an end) as well as on the level of society (we can only speak of ‘history’ if and where development takes place).”

Wardekker goes on to look at openness in relation to education.

“In the course of his or her development, each individual learns to handle the facts of change and contradiction in a certain way: either negating them or valuing them negatively, or seeing them as opportunities for development and using them in a positive way. Thus, individuals learn, or do not learn, to manage their own development and that of cultural resources. Education can play a crucial part here by stimulating certain ways of handling contradictions. The stimulation Vygotsky-oriented educators offer will go not in the direction of consistency but of openness. Contradictions should not be resolved or covered too soon. A ‘pluralist attitude’ (Rang, 1993) is an aim of education here. Ideology critique is aimed at situations which impede openness.”

These ideas can provide a starting point for a discussion around curricula for Open Education.  Key is the idea of authentic learning in engagement with real-world situations that demonstrate complexity and context. Open education can support learners in developing and exploring their own identities through developing meanings and coping with change and contradictions, both in their own personal contexts and in relation to wider society.

One of the most positive developments in technology Enhanced Learning over the past year has been the ‘mainstreaming’ of Open educational resources’ (OERs). What do I mean by ‘mainstreaming’? Instead of being confined to the fringes in funded projects the creation and distribution of OERs are increasingly being seen as a strategic approach ro institutional educational strategies. At the same time there has been an increase in fundfing avaiable for the creation, distribution and discovery of OERs together with added awareness of what OERs are and how they might be used.

That is not to say every issue has been resolved. The resourcing of OER creation is till an issue, although some institutions seem to be absorbing the cost into the overall budgets. There remain issues over how to develop OERs, given that materials often include artefacts that are covered by copyright. Discovery – finding suitable OERs – is still not always easy. Academic practices (and terms of service) are not always aligned with the idea of open publishing. And of course we still do not as a community have a single agreed understanding of what constitutes an OER. But all thes eissues can be resolved given a little time.

However, the movement towards OERs conceals bigger issues. Firstly what do we mean by an Open Educational Resource. I am not  talking here about definitional squabbles. More important for me is who the resources are aimed at. many of the early OER repositres have comprised of materials for teaching and not for learning. these are not the same. Of course lecture notes and overhead presentations may be helpful to support learning (and certainly helpful for teachers). But, I am not sure that reading and watching course materials constitutes a learning programme in itself. Neither have many of the institutions providing OERS intended it to be. Why make free courses available online of it would compete with courses offered by an institution.

Yet, at the same time, organisations such as the BBC, are publishing increasing amounts of  learning (not teaching) materials aimed at a wide range of age groups and a wide ability range. YouTube contains hundreds of videos providing help in how to do almost anything. Web tutorial sites abound. And the growing power of mobile devices and if rumour is to be believed, the immanent arrival of smart tablet readers, allows integration of learning into everyday work and leisure activities. In other words, learning is moving outside teh institution at an ever increasing rate. It is these materials which will be of most profound influence on the future of our education systems

My prediction of trends for 1010 is that the crisis over the future role of institutional education will continue to deepen. The crisis, engendered largely by technological and social change, can only be exacerbated by the financial cutbacks facing higher education in many countries. At the moment education institutions can fall back of their function in providing recognised qualifications. Although the degree of regulation regarding qualifications and the weight such qualifications carry for employment varies between sectors and countries, in general we might expect that increasingly employers will look to a person’s digital identity and digital record of learning, rather than accepting qualifications as the basis for employment.

So do educational institutions have a future? I think they do but this will require profound change. Already a few pioneers like Dave Wiley, George Siemens and Stephen Downes have tested new models for online courses including both participants registered for a course credit and those not registered. But more fundamentally institutions may have a role in motivating and supporting the learning of students at particular phases in their (lifelong) learning. But this requires far more flexibility than our present (higher) education systems provide. Although I do not agree with his motives the Prince of Darkness, UK Business Minister Peter Mandelson, may be right when he talks of more flexible degree offerings including both full time two year degrees and more work based degrees. And we may even have to question the degree structures. Why not start recognising the learning that takes place whilst following a course in an institution, rather than referring to the course which frames that possible learning?

And of course such (personal learning) programmes will have to start from the point of where learners are at – recognising their previous learning and their learning needs (and desires). Much of that learning will have come from engaging with OERs in a workplace or social setting. That doesn’t mean there is no place for the seminar, workshop or even lecture. But it does mean that the regimentation of courses may become a thing of the past. Different learners will have different prior experiences and different learning needs. Why not conceive of university as an university such as an extended bar camp or unconference. Students could opt to follow particular elements and could themselves support the learning of others. Support would still be needed to help learners get from where they are now to where they potentiality could be. Universities could become an intense learning experience, unlike the present exam factories, often marketed on the basis of the social life around the institution.

If course I might have been reading too many science fiction novels over Christmas. But the times are a changing, however slowly and the increasing availability of Open Education Resources or Open Learning materials are part of that change.

This research rocks! At a workshop on ‘Technology enhanced learning in the context of technological, societal and cultural transformation‘, held in Garmisch Partenkirchen earlier this month, I was lucky enough to talk to Elisabetta Adami who was presenting an expellent paper on ‘Individualized participation in public forms of communication and learning: reshaping contexts in a changing world of cultural products.’

But it was her doctoral research which really got me interested.  Elisabetta’s dissertation, called Video interaction on YouTube: Contemporary Changes in Semiosis and Communication’, looks at interaction through video replies on YouTube. It is both serious research and fascinating to read.

The entire dissertation, written in English is available on the web and can also be downloaded. Here is an excerpt from the conclusion to the abstract:

“the analysis of the process of video-interaction focuses on (a) its distinctive features and structural characteristics, (b) its semiotic ‘affordances’ (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001: 67), in terms of the material and social constraints and possibilities which the medium imposes over the semiosis, and (c) the diversified (and often conflicting) semiotic practices with which the affordances are actualized by the interactants.

Rather than following traditionally conceived cooperative or relevance principles and notions of coherence and cohesion, video-interaction works on a ‘loose’ form of individualized participation. While the structural characteristics determine the interactional possibilities, the interactants’ practices exploit the affordances of video-interaction in unexpected ways and often lead to changes in the structure itself (in the same way as the Saussurean parole, when made socially dominant, modifies the langue). Patterns of relatedness in the exchanges are driven by the sign-makers’ diversified interests. More specifically, sign-making relations in the exchanges are established through a system of differentiation-within-attuning, so that interactants bring their distinctive contribution while keeping the same (either formal or semantic) theme, set by the initial video. In this sense, video-interaction is analogous to collective forms of artistic improvisation (e.g., the genre of variation in music or the contemporary free-style). Video responses take up – and actualize – one or more prompts within the range of possibilities set by the initial video. This prompt-response relation generally disregards the interlocutor’s intended meaning, it often does not follow relevance principles, it presents (traditionally considered) marked textual organizations, and does not build coherent exchanges. Not only is (intertextual) implicitness widely practiced, but also formal attuning is sometimes more regarded than (semantic) coherence for the establishment of relatedness in the exchange.

Rather than on the interactants’ mutual understanding, video-interaction hinges on a playful and challenging engagement with the medium and with the other texts in the exchange, by exploiting maximally the representational possibilities of both.

Patterns of relatedness are established through an interest-driven selection, transformation, assemblage and recontextualization of (often formal, at times implicit or backgrounded) elements of the initial video or of other texts. This way, sign-making is often done by means of a copy-and-paste technique, which follows the interactants’ diversified interests, and disregards coherence or the signmaker’s intended meaning. Responses frequently and intentionally produce their texts through misunderstanding and exploit maximally the potential semantic ambiguity of the interlocutor’s text. Incoherent exchanges are successful and generally acknowledged and accepted by interactants. In this sense, videointeraction epitomizes the changes in representation and communication which are taking place in our contemporary semiotic landscape, whereby traditional systems of coherence are disregarded and (traditionally considered) incoherent or noncohesive exchanges are acceptable as the result of representations produced through the selection, copy and paste, recontextualization and forwarding of other texts.

These contemporary changes in representation and communication need analogous changes in the theories of communication, while their description requires adequate analytical models. Therefore the thesis concludes by hypothesizing the usefulness of the theoretical and analytical framework devised for the research to the description of contemporary forms of communication.”

I was in Wolverhampton yesterday for round 2 of our AltC debate on Virtual Learning Environments (watch the movie here) this time entitled the VLE is Undead . In come ways it is knockabout stuff – Steve Wheeler, James Clay, myself and Nick Sharratt all delivering a ten minute contribution on our different takes on the theme and chaired by the ever ebullient Josie Fraser.

My presentation was basically pushing the idea of Personal Learning Environments as learners spaces as opposed to the institutionally controlled VLE. There were some interesting points that came out of the discussion. John Traxler noted that we were using the theme of educational technology to discuss the future of education. He is right. The debate over PLEs and VLEs cannot be separated from discussing either where we think education is going or from larger ideas of where we want education to go. But it may be that by focusing on education technology, it makes the debate easier to get a grip on. And it may also reflect the growing importance of technology in education.

My argument was predicated on four trends (borrowed from Martin Weller 🙂 ):

• The growing pressures for personalisation of learning – and the fact that the present standardised education systems and institutions fail to meet the needs of many learners
• The growing demand for education – both from developing countries who lack sufficient education services (and in many cases even access to basic schooling) and demands for lifelong learning)
• The growing diversification of contexts and sources of learning – including of course the web and mobile learning but also media organisations and importantly the workplace – with increasing recognition of the importance of lifelong learning
• The different ways in which people are learning – including through the internet, through personal Learning Networks, through social communities and groups and in communities of practice.

In reality VLEs have failed to prove attractive for learners – they log in when they have to but with little enthusiasm. And, however we define them, Personal Learning Environments are a reality – in the way in which people are using Personal Computers, web based applications and social networks to support their own learning.

I don’t think I won the debate – if such a debate can be ‘won’. Participants in the workshop were concerned about how to manage learners. For institutions this is a legitimate concern but would be better handled by applications for administering and managing from those for learning (indeed this was what the Jisc tried to do with its approach to service Oriented Architectures although this approach appears to have been too complex and hot problems in defining services at a technical level).

There was also concern over assessment – how would this be done without VLEs (on this I think we need especially in the UK to work out what we are trying to achieve through assessment).

The ideas around digital identities and digital literacies seemed to be very new for many of the participants. I think this is a key area which we will have to do more work on in the future.

I raised the question of students not having access to their work after a module or a course had been completed. Some saw the introduction of e-Portfolios as an answer to this although one said it was the students responsibility to make sure they has personal copies of their work. This seems to me to get to the heart of the problem. VLEs are bing used as a space for handing out assignments and for collecting in the results – as a repository. I am not convinced that VLEs are best designed for such a purpose but it once more begs the question. Essentially students are having to design their own environments for learning, whilst using the VLE as a institutional space for managing their work. And institutions are not interested or do not have resources to support students in developing their learning environment.

Interestingly, those most enthusiastic about VLEs seemed to be in institutions using their own in house software or using Moodle and I would guess that reflects the degree of ownership teaching and administrative staff feel over the VLE. It is of little surprise that those least enthusiastic seemed to be using (or being told to use) Blackboard or WebCT.

Overall, I guess, the main feeling was that VLEs were not succeeding because they were being misused or badly used. And that neatly brings us back in a full circle to the discussions about the future of education and to the purpose of educational technology. But I am concerned that the debate, such as it is, is being framed within institutional concerns. Little attention is being paid to the potential for informal and work based learning and that for me is where the true potential of technology for learning lies.

These are the slides from my presentation from the excellent session on Digital Identities at the Online Educa Berlin conference held earlier this month.

Last week I welcomed Facrebook’s announcement of new fine grained access controls which they claimed would allow users to decide what and iwth whom they wished to share.

On Wednesday they started rolling out the new interface pushing an “important message” to all users:

“We’re making some changes to give you more control of your information and help you stay connected. We’ve simplified the Privacy page and added the ability to set privacy on everything you share, from status updates to photos.

At the same time, we’re helping everyone find and connect with each other by keeping some information—like your name and profile picture—publicly available.”

The new controls are far from simple. And after an hour playing with them it appears they provide far less potential privacy than the original settings. Name, profile picture and as far as I can see your personal wall is set to public and cannot be hidden. So what is behind this? Is Facebook really concerned to protect privacy. It seems a bit too much of a coincidence that the new settings were launched a week or so after the announcement of deals with Google and Microsoft to provide Facebook data for real time search (just an aside – what is the value of real time search – I don’t get that one).

I might be paranoid but I suspect the real point of the new controls is to make sure data is available to the search engines, rather than allowing users more control over their own data. In the discussion over the new settings in the Guardian yesterday, some commentators asked why so much fuss given that it was a free service. Well firstly is Facebook really free. We provide our data which makes the site valuable for advertisers who pay Facebook. That doesn’t sound so free to me.

The question of  access controls will not go away. Digital identities are becoming increasingly important especially for young people. A couple of weeks ago a Romanian CEO of an advertising agency said in a confernce I was at that he would not hire anyone who did not have a good digital identity. Our on line identities are fast replacing the traditional Curriculum Vitae. We have a situation where the main spaces young epopel use to meet. communicate and share their lives together are controlled by private companies who are claiming ownership of our data. That is not a minor issue. OK – we can delete our accounts (although then Facebook still retains the data). But young people are not going to do this. Regulation is probably the only answer, although it is hard to regulate international platform providers. And of course, education on not just digital safety but education about the importance of digital identities and how to develop and manage them.

In my next post I will post a report for the EU ICONET project on a great course developed at Salford University and looking at digital media and identities.