17 posts tagged “social networking”

Due to one of the speaker’s not being able to attend, we had to find, at the last moment, a couple of speakers to take part in the opening session at IWMW 2008. I was pleased that Claire Gibbons, University of Bradford and Mike Ellis, Eduserv, were able to provide brief presentations which helped to engage with the IWMW 2008 theme of The Great Debate.

I videoed Claire’s talk, in which she described why the University of Bradford had set up a social network using Ning. I have previously commented on institutional use of Ning, including Bradford’s service, but it was good to hear why this social network was established (to support newly arrived students) and how it is envisaged that the social network is expected to have an impact only during the first term of the new academic year. Such social networks, according to Claire, don’t always have to have long term sustainability - and maybe a social network can be for just until Christmas.

Please note that this video is available on YouTube (and further details of Claire’s talk are available on the IWMW 2008 Web site).

A post by Lorcan Dempsey cited Tony’s Hirst’s comments on use of the Ning social network at the University of Wales, Newport and the University of Bradford.

Michael Webb, Head of IT and Media Services at the University of Wales, Newport was responsible for helping to establish one of the first institutional strategy embracing use of Web 2.0 in the UK, as he described in a talk on “Developing a Web 2.0 Strategy” which he gave at the IWMW 2006 event (a video of his talk is also available).

AJ Cann responded to Tony Hist’s post by saying:

AARRRGHHH! Bad idea! These sites are just ghettos waiting to happen. Do they think that students joining the institution don’t already use social networks? Do they think they can compete with MySpace/Facebook?

He could be right - but we won’t know unless we start to gather evidence on the ways in which social networks may be in higher education.

And I have to say that I’m impressed with the approaches which are being taken at Newport. As Michael describes on his blog they first identified the purposes for the service (”The brief was to create a social place for students coming to the University to meet online before they join the University, and to be able to contact the student mentors“), they considered the legal implications of Ning’s terms and conditions (”we retain ownership of content. Hosting locating is ambiguous, but is the data isn’t that precious.“) and were willing to ‘address the constraints’ provided by the service (the use of adverts, the costs for additional storage space, the lack of single sign-on and the loss of institutional branding in the site’s URL).

In return Newport have gained an opportunity to evaluate the potential of a social networking environment for new students at little cost to the institution:

If we had created the site ourselves it would have taken months. If we had bought in software it would have still taken weeks. This took days. And no worrying about upgrades, downtime etc. What have we lost? We can’t control the development of the service - our users probably don’t understand this, and have already started suggesting functionality improvements.

I welcome this development - and I am particularly pleased that Michael is being so open in describing the reasons for this decision, the possible risks and how the institution has responded to the risks.

In the opening planary talk on Hands On The Internet at the Museums and the Web 2008 conference Michael Geist mentioned the popularity of Facebook in Canada - apparently Canada has the highigest per capita Facebook usage in the world. And, as described in a blog post on the talk by arkrausehardie Michael described the “enormous pressure a sort of flash-mob FaceBook group can bring to bare (sic!) on public policy such as the recent group started by Geist on copyright issues in Canada, now with more than 40,000 members“.

The interest in the potential of Facebook for engaging with a museum’s user community was described in a number of papers at the conference. For example Shelley Bernstein’s paper on “Where Do We Go From Here? Continuting with Web 2.0 at Brooklyn Museum” dscribed the ArtShare Facebook application they had developed to “share works of art from Museums around the world“. And a paper by Brian Kelly and colleagues at the Canada Science and Technology Museum on “Social Presence: New Value For Museums And Networked Audiences“  described “specific experiments with social media, including a detailed analysis of a Facebook group used by the Canada Science and Technology Museum Corporation’s Membership Program“. In addition the paper described “two theoretical models – the “Innovation Radar” and genre analysis – to help analyze the nature of the opportunities for innovation, and to develop a better understanding of the distinctive characteristics of alternate communication channels“.

And yet in some circle such use of Facebook is being derided with comments such as “It’s a closed garden“, “Its popularity is on the wane” or “Twitter is a better development environment” being made. I have to say that I foind that such comments tend to miss the point.  A recent post on “The Becoming Uninteresting Complex - Facebook versus Twitter” commented on the “pretty irrational questionings like “is Twitter replacing Facebook?“, Twitter doesn’t allow socialization. It simply allow instant interactions“.

And as can be seen from a SIteanalytics snapshot which compares usage of Facebook and Twitter,  it you want to make inappropriate comparisons, it’s Twitter which fares badly.

Making these points, I should add that we shouldn’t explore the potential of Facebook uncritically. But the early adopters do acknowledge some of the concerns which need to be recogonised. Dawson et al have commented that “There are, however, a variety of potential pitfalls with social networking sites. One concern is whether such sites are a fad or flash in the pan“. The paper goes on to add “Issues of privacy are another important factor. Users of social networking sites appear to be willing to live with great compromises in their privacy. However, even these broad boundaries have been tested a number of times. Facebook, for example, has risked alienating its users in controversies such as the introduction of the news feed in 2006 (boyd, 2006a), and the more recent introduction of the “Beacon” in 2007 (Hirsh, 2007).“

So let’s be realistic and continue the experoimentation and debate. But let’s also be critical of our preferred environments.  And although I’m a happy user of Twitter and participated in its use at MW2008, looking at the hashtag data for the mw2008 tag I would acknolwsdge that it was used primarily by a small group who knew each other - and indeed went out drinking together.  Twitter can be useful for some - but it’s not neccessarily the killer application for everybody.

“With friends like these …”

The Guardian recently featured an article entitled With friends like these … which Josie Fraser described as “a blistering critique of Facebook“. The article not only laid into Facebook but also social networks and communications technologies more generally. And, as can be seen from the concluding paragraph: “I want to reconnect with it. Damn air-conditioning! And if I want to connect with the people around me, I will revert to an old piece of technology. It’s free, it’s easy and it delivers a uniquely individual experience in sharing information: it’s called talking.” the author also seems to want to reject a whole raft of technologies including the telephone and letter-writing!

Josie has written a critique of the article entitled Facebook: Neo-con social experiment? in which she responds to each of the points Tom Hodgkinson made in his article. I would very much agree with Joan Vinall-Cox’s comment: “Thanks so much for your rebuttal of Hodgkinson’s points“.

Rather than revisiting this particular debate, however, I would like to pick up on a point made by Frances Bell in her post on Tom Hodgkinson’s rant on (or should I say about?) Facebook. Frances commented that she “found Tom’s article to be quite informative in parts but tiresomely Luddite in other part“. Frances main point was that the issue that needs to be debated was the ownership of social networks and the related privacy issues. She picked up on the comment that “By using Facebook, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States .. [which may be shared] with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies“.

I feel that, along with Josie and Frances, social networks can be beneficial to our social, work and learning activities. And I would agree that there is a need to address these issues of ownership. Indeed I feel that this topics should be included as one of the topics in my recent call for a Web 2.0 debate.

Who should own the social networks?

So who should own the social networks which large numbers of our society are now using? Currently the popular social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace are commercial services with, put simply, a remit to make money for the owners. And it is this commercial aspect which is causing concerns for many in the educational and wider public sector - and not just those who have doubts concerning the benefits of social networks, but also those who feel social networks can be beneficial to society in a variety of ways.

But if we have concerns that such services may be owned by large companies (such as, in MySpace’s case, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp or, with Facebook, part ownership by Microsoft) or the uncertainties or private ownership (with Tom Hodgkinson’s article pointing out the links the venture capitalists have with the Republican party and the CIA), who should own the social networks? And as a follow-up, how realistic may such hopes be and how would a transition from private ownership actually occur?

The initial response may be that the government should own social networks. But (a) is this really desirable and (b) is it realistic? I would suggest that if social networks were provided by a government agency that the concerns over links with security forces would be of greater concern than they are at present. And can we really envisage, in the UK, a Gordon Brown government nationalising social networks? It’s not going to happen, is it?

Perhaps our organisations should run social networks for the employees? But surely an important aspect of social networks are the communications with people outside one’s host institution? And the notion that JISC could provide a social network for the higher and further education community could be difficult in working with groups outside that community and would probably fail to address the informal aspects of social networks which, it has to be admitted, have proved popular (although I’ve not played Scrabulous on Facebook, I know many people who have).

And we also have to ask ourselves whether the user community would actually be willing to use social networks which are provided by our organisations. How easy, for example, might it be to be critical of the organisation if the organisation owns the communications channels and is responsible for the rules and policing such rules?

The OCLC report on Sharing, Privacy and Trust in our Networked World, which I posted about recently, provided some interesting data which suggested that end users aren’t as concerned about privacy as we professionals think they should be (no surprise there) but, more surprisingly, they seem to be more willing to make their personal data available on commercial services (they understand that such data is needed to provide the services they find useful and, perhaps, younger people are more accepting of capitalist motivations than those of us who remember when the word ’socialism’ was used at Labour Party conferences and can complete the phrase “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, …”).

The need for realism

It’s nice to be in opposition - all you need to do is to complain about things and suggested uncosted solutions, with no need to develop deployment strategies. But I think we need away from our comfort zone.

In particular we need to ask how social networks will be funded - such issues are raised in the context of commercial services, with some people suggesting that Facebook isn’t economically sustainable in the long term. But, if they’re not provided by the commercial sector, how would they be funded? And this question has particular relevance in light of the announcement made shortly before Christmas that Curverider were closing the Eduspace social networking service as ”Running a community takes a lot of time and hard work, which we have no longer been able to give EduSpaces, and in that light, it seems both unfair and unwise to keep the site going” (although subsequently a Canadian not for profit company has announced that it will now host the service).

Calling for the government funding (which really means calling for extra taxes) is unlikely not only for political reasons, but also in light of the recent shocks in the global financial markets, as described on the BBC News site:

… huge declines in shares across Asia and Europe on Monday, with London’s benchmark FTSE 100 suffering its biggest one day fall since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, gripped by fears of a US recession.

To revisit the questions which I feel need to be answered:

• Who should own the social networks?
• Should ownership of social networks be any different from other software services we use in our institutions (including VLEs such as Blackboard, Web 2.0 services such as Flickr or  blogging services such as Edublogs Campus)
• How should a transition to a change of ownership take place?
• How realistic is the transition strategy?
• How do you know what this is what the users actually want?
• How will social networking services be funded under alternative ownership resources? And if the answer is increased taxes, how will you get that past the Daily Mail readership which seem to be influential in informing policy discussions for both the Labour and Conservative parties?

And if you manage to solve this issue, perhaps you could suggest how we could reclaim our football teams from ownership of billionaires from the US, Russia and Thailand whilst, of course, still ensuring that you team gets into the Champions League (local self-made billionaires are probably acceptable).

In a recent post on Should Personal Data In Facebook Be Exportable I pointed out the potential dangers of allowing data to be exported out of an environment in which access control can be managed. I have previously suggested that in 30 years time potential new leaders of political parties will have their Facebook entries trawled by the tabloid press - I didn’t expect this to happen quite so quickly, but an Australian news site has the headline Benazir Bhutto’s son targeted on Facebook and the Guardian newspaper recently discussed the ethics of using data published on Facebook to support a news story.

It is quite clear to me that the ‘data must be free and open’ line is too simplistic. And we are not in a position in which it is a simple question of social networking service providers supporting open standards. There are many important issues of gathering requirements, exploring use cases, discussing and arguing solutions, etc. which we now have a need to address. And these aren’t just issues for services such as Facebook to address - institutions be facing similar questions, especially if they provide social networking services (such as Elgg) within their institution.

So it is good to hear that there are a number of new initiatives which have been announced recently. There is the Data Portability group which, as announced on Techcrunch, Facebook, Google and Plaxo have joined recently. And, via a comment on my blog, I discovered John Breslin’s blog, in which he recently posted on DataPortability.org, web standards, SIOC and FOAF. FOAF I’m familiar with, but SIOC is new to me. SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities Project, but also the Gaelic word for frost - there’s a convoluted explanation on the SICOC Web site) does seem interested and there a SIOC tutorial has been accepted for the WWW2008 conference.

John’s post concludes:

It’d be great if we can get some of the DataPortability.org people to come to the WebCamp workshop on Social Network Portability in Cork in March.

I do feel there is a pressing need for institutions to engage in the development of approaches for data portability. The relevant open standards aren’t available yet and, as many have argued, we will face difficulties in the future if we continue to grow large-scale walled gardens. Are there any readers of this blog who are planning on attending this event?

For many of us it’s easy to find ‘friends’ on Facebook. Once you’ve got started and added a few friends it can often be easy to find other people you know. And the more links you have the easier it is to grow your network.

But how many of us have actively ‘defriended’ someone on Facebook? (And, incidentally, is this a word? The answer, it seems, is yes - see below). In real life we may lose touch with our friends, or chose not to have contact with them. But we probably haven’t publicly said ‘I’m not friends with you anymore ’since we were at school.

What is the etiquette, then, of pruning one’s list of Facebook friends? If we defriend someone, is this displayed on our respective News Feeds pages? And will this cause intrigue? And what happens if others then start to defriend the same person? Will they lose face?

Well I took the plunge recently, when I defriended someone for the first time. This was someone I had messaged, asking if she was the person I’d know when in Newcastle. It turns out that she wasn’t - but, as her message was ambiguous, I needed to befriended her to verify this. As we didn’t know each other, I defriended her - and felt slightly guilty as she only had one other Facebook friend. But at least this action wasn’t displayed on my page.

I do think we will need to start to defriend our Facebook friends. It would be helpful if there was a Facebook application which could help manage one’s friends, perhaps in some automated way. But we will still need to grasp the nettle and let go at some stage.

Perhaps we need a Letting Go Of Your Facebook Friends day?

PS A Google search for defriend revealed several definitions, including this one from the Enclopedia Dramatica:

To “defriend” is to remove someone from your LiveJournal’s Friends list; it is tantamount to “throwing down the gauntlet” and declaring one’s friendship at an end. Unsurprisingly, many people consider defriending a severe blow to their pride and reputation, and thus the act of defriending tends to stir up a lot of Internet drama.

and this one from the Urban Dictionary (which demonstrates that the term pre-dates the popularity of Facebook):

1. To remove someone from your livejournal friends list.
2. the act of removing a friend on your Myspace friend’s list. 
3. defriend smbd v , transitive de + friend; cf. befriend - to break off friendly relations (with smbd)

I should add that, as Andy Powell has observed recently, the Urban Dictionary has also defined the term Facebook limbo to refer to “the electronic space between accepting and rejecting a facebook friendship“. Is it worse to be rejected or to be ignored, I wonder?

I have just received the following email:

Subject: Important EduSpaces news

Hi All,

We would like to inform all users of EduSpaces that we will be shutting down the service on Jan 10th, 2008.

We have provided a mechanism for you to export all your blog posts in either an RSS format or HTML. To do this, go to your blog and select the submenu option you require. For those of you with files, you might want to download those as well.

Thank you to everyone who has supported EduSpaces over the last three years.

So on 16^th December I received notification that any content hosted on EduSpaces will be unavailable early in the New Year. Not much time to do anything, is it? And most unfortunate for anyone who is taken an extended break over Christmas.

But at least they aren’t in breach of their terms and conditions:

• We reserve the right to modify or terminate the EduSpaces service for any reason, without notice at any time.
• We reserve the right to alter these Terms of Use at any time. If the alterations constitute a material change to the Terms of Use, we will notify you via an appropriate method. What is a ‘material change’ is at our discretion
• We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time.

And Frances Bell (”Anyway thanks to elgg bunch, Eduspaces was nice while it lasted“) and Josie Fraser (”huge thanks to the whole Eduspaces team for the massive contribution and commitment they’ve made to demonstrating what’s possible, and to moving the discussion forward so much in terms of technology, and web 2.0/social technologies for education“) have both expressed their gratitude to the EduSpaces team.

But what does this tell us about the sustainability of such services? And what lessons can be learnt?

Was their policy on openness (”We claim no intellectual property rights over any material you provide to the EduSpaces service“) a contributory factor to the difficulties Eduspaces seem to have in finding funding to provide a sustainable service? In a recent post on The open source misconception Ben Werdmuner commented on the unrealistic expectations that people may have about services driven by open source software such as Eduspaces: “... software is not developed by magical elves. It doesn’t appear like water, for free. People have to put time and hard work into creating it.” He went on to add that “Elgg in particular has no funding beyond Curverider, despite a common misconception that it’s the recipient of public grants or affiliations.“

So did those of us who signed up to the service (including myself) fail in our responsibilities to our communities by not expressing concerns over the bluntness of the statement that “We reserve the right to modify or terminate the EduSpaces service for any reason, without notice at any time“? And as the service was relaunched on 8 October 2007 as “the world’s largest social network for education and educational technology” users of the service might be surprised at the sudden demise of the service.

And what will happen after the service is shut down on 10^th January? Will the domain name become available, and likely to be taken over by a domain squatting agency or a porn company? This would be rather embarrassing for people, such as Salvor at Brighton) who has links to what is currently legitimate posts about their elearning activities. (Of course, a clever porn company would ensure that blog RSS feeds continue to be served, but delivering information about Russians teenagers seeking western husbands rather than reflections of elearning strategies!).

I’ve just discovered that I am not along in having such concerns.  Mandy Honeyman has commented that “I used eduspaces as my portfolio for my teacher training and so it is quite extensive if not necessarily public. I have downloaded via the html option, but what a mess! I guess I could install my own elgg just for me, but I’m about to move hosting so that’s not really an option. I guess I could install elgg on the server at school, but that’s windows, so that’s not an option either. This is a pain.“

Or are such criticisms unfair - maybe we just have to accept that such services, which we do not pay for, will come and go and we need to spend more time and effort in planning for the demise of such services. And I think it is true to say that EduSpaces played a valuable role in introducing the benefits of edublogging and social networks to educational technologists around the world. For that, we should express our gratitude to the EduSpaces development team.

On the second day of the Online Information 2007 conference I attended the OCLC Symposium on Who’s Watching Your Space? The symposium provided OCLC an opportunity for OCLC to unveil their report on Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World which I’ve commented upon recently.

The session began with a talk by John Naughton, journalist and academic at the Open University. I enjoy reading John’s regular column in the Observer and many years ago I read his book on A Brief History of The Future. So I was looking forward to hearing him speak for the first time, but was very disappointed by what I felt were his cynical views on social networks. It’s over-hyped and journalists always love to joy in with the over-hyping of popular trends, John argued, and there are no sustainable business model. His comments reminded me of the various comments people were making about the Web in 1993 and 1994, and the scepticism people such as Jon Maber (original software developer of the Bodington VLE at Leeds University) faced when the idea of delivering teaching and learning services on the Web. It struck me that if journalists are guilty of over-hyping trends they also enjoy following this up with the doubts (”you build ‘em up, you known ‘em down”). I did raise this in the questions, but, as Tom Roper reported, John didn’t really answer me questions. But possibly, as Tony Hirst suggested to me during the drinks reception, I read too much into John’s critical remarks and as Tom described in his report on the symposium “He (John) thought there might be possibilities for harnessing social networking in education, in corporate organisations and in libraries“. (I suspect I was slightly annoyed that the explorations of the potential and best practices for making use of social networks in education context, which is being carried out by pioneers such as Tony Hirst and David White, and addressed in the recent UKOLN workshop on Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs and Social Networks seem to be invisible to John).

The second speaker was given by Matt Brown of Nature Network. Matt described the various services which Nature have developed, such as Connotea. Now I’d be the first to congratulate Nature on the pioneering work on such tools and their early commitment to RSS - but this talk provided nothing new for me, and I was beginning to wonder whether I should have stayed at the Online Information Conference, possibly attending the session on Folksonomies vs Ontologies or Service Innovation - Tools and Resources for Library Users.

However Cathy de Rosa’s highlights from the Sharing, Privacy and Trust in our online world report did make the session worth while, by providing much-needed evidence on the changing online environment, together with some surprises. The statistics that use of a wide range of online services (e.g. Web sites, social networks, instant messaging) has gown since their last survey was expected, but the decline in visits to library Web sites will, perhaps, have surprised people in the audience who might have expected a report commissioned by a library organisation to describe successes in the library domain. However if that statistic may have surprise some, the discrepancy between the (US) librarians’ views of their strengths and the users’ perceptions was probably shocking - librarians, it seems, place a high regard on their approaches to protecting the privacy of library users; the users, however, don’t feel that this is the case and also don’t feel that privacy is such an important issue.

As Tom Roper commented “There’s lots in the report” for people to digest. And there will be a need to explore the validity of the findings (Tom pointed out that “the samples used seem a little small“) and the relevance in a UK context (I suggested to Rosa that she should make use of the SCONUL organisation next time to try to get a representative sample from the UK academic library sector). But at least we now have data and interpretations of the data to forward the debate.

The Event

The UKOLN workshop on “Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs and Social Networks” took place yesterday at Austin Court, Birmingham.

This event was initially meant to be held in March 2007, with the title “Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs“. However as we discovered a clash with the UCISA annual conference, we decided to postpone the event until November. And by the time we got around to selecting the talks it had become clear that it was the area of social networks which was exciting (and terrifying) many people. Providing a wider focus for the event proved popular with the event being fully-subscribed with 100 participants, rather than the 60-70 we had originally planned for.

The Talks

The talks at the event provided a narrative which outlined the variety of approaches which institutions are taking in provision of and/or use of blogs and social network services. After my initial introduction to the workshop Stephen Clarke (University of Birmingham) gave the opening plenary talk on Blogging In A Managed Environment in which he described the benefits which can be gained by supporting student learning though use of a managed application environment (which, at the University of Birmingham, is Web CT). Melissa Highton (University of Leeds) focussed on supporting the teachers in her talk on Leedsfeed: a Blogging Service based on the Open Source Elgg Application, again through use of an in-house application.

In contrast Alison Wildish (Edge Hill University) suggested that institutions need to Put Yourself Out There- and at her institution this means recognising that students (and potential students) will use services such as Facebook, and so the institution needs to respond to this by making its information available in such places.

It was appropriate that Alison’s talk was followed by Tom Milburn, Vice-President, Education at the University of Bath Students Union. In his talk on The Student Perspective. Tom gave a valuable insight into ways in which students at the University of Bath are setting up Facebook groups which can “provide students with the support of their cohort in a structured environment, … provide constant support that is not bound by office hours and … ease pressure on staff with older students helping to ‘teach’ younger students.” Tom also described the pro-active approach being taken by the students Union in advising students of the potential dangers which may be posed by social networks. In particular he described the Facebook flyers (adverts displayed in Facebook) which were made available to students in the University of Bath Facebook network. Interestingly Tom concluded that effective use of social networks “will depend on how much effort staff put in and the culture of students on various courses“. At the University of Bath it would seem that students may welcome staff supporting their use of Facebook.

After lunch there were two talks given the institutional IT Services perspective. Stuart Lee (University of Oxford) described The Hidden Dangers of Social Networks: You can log-on but you cannot hide. Interestingly the slides (which I had uploaded to Slideshare prior to the event) had been commented upon by Grainne Conole and AJCann, with the suggestion that IT services were scared of these dangers - although Stuart’s intentions (which he described in his responses to these comments) was to discharge the responsibility of a service department “to point out hidden pitfalls in some systems that users need to be aware of“.

In the final talk David Harrison (University of Cardiff) described how the University of Cardiff is seeking to respond to Disruptive Technology and its Implications for University Information Services. David described how his work in this area began as “a response to a presentation from Brian Kelly and John Heaps at an earlier UKOLN Workshop” (Initiatives & Innovation: Managing Disruptive Technologies, a joint UKOLN/CETIS/UCISA workshop held in February 2006). An initial draft of a briefing paper was written in early 2007 for comment within UCISA Executive, and part 1 of the briefing paper is now available. David’s concluding remarks included:

• Users need protecting against their own foolishness - thus EDUCATION is the most important thing
• Institutions should begin to trust their staff and students more but be also prepared to use existing disciplinary codes where the trust is betrayed
• Must embrace and engage – to do otherwise would be counter-productive and make us look foolish – consider the concept of enablement
• Should consider a partnership rather than service provider role and be customer-centric

The Participants’ Perspectives

As with many of UKOLN’s recent events we encouraged participants to make use of the WiFi network to enhance their learning at the event, to make use of a wiki for keeping notes of the discussion groups and to share their blog posts, photographs, etc. related to the event.

Chris Sexton, who kindly helped out in in the final summing up session, was very productive during the day, with posts of the morning session (part 1) , morning session (part 2) and afternoon session. Matt Machell, on his Eclectic Dreams Blog also provided useful summaries of the morning and afternoon sessions. If there are any further blog posts about the event which I’ve missed, please let me know and I’ll include details here (note I came across reports on the Digital Narratives blog, the DMU PatherFinder blog and Helen Newham’s blog after publishing this report).

I should also add that a Wetpaint wiki site was used to support the event. The notes from the discussion groups may be of particular interest, both to the workshop participants and to those who could attend.

The Remote Participants

UKOLN has been evaluating a variety of tools recently which can be use to ‘amplify’ the discussions and outputs of the events we run. Plenary talks at the IWMW 2007 event were streamed. At this event we went one step further, providing not only a video stream but also streaming the video into Second Life. I would like to thank Andy Powell, Eduserv Foundation for managing these video streams, and Veodia for making their streaming service available for us to evaluate during the event. We did have some hiccups with the service - due, we think, to the limited bandwidth for streaming out of the venue. However this was a valuable experiment, I feel. Andy has also provided some slides which review his experiences (and, after this post was initially published, gave his Reflections on a DIY streaming experience).

What Next?

In a recent post on When Two Tribes Go To War I described the tensions between two communities of developers: those who believe that The VLE/LMS is dead and those who are engaged in providing a secure managed VLE environment. At this event we came across two communities in a slightly different guise: the IT service providers who feel that their institution should be managing its IT provision and those who feel that institutions cannot compete with the popularity of many commercially provided solutions. The good news, is there was very much a willingness to discuss the pros and cons of both positions, and an awareness that each side has its own weaknesses. There’s still a lot of mileage in this debate, I feel.

Which of the following reports is true:

A recent report has shown that workers at many organisations are concerned about being ‘befriended’ by their mangers - who then have access to their Facebook details. “I was sacked“, said one anonymous ex-worker at a large organisation “for arriving late at work. It was due to transport problems. But my manager spotted that I’d been out drinking the previous night, and had updated my Facebook status when I got back from the night club. He used this as the reason for sacking me. I had been out with my mates - what’s wrong with that? But I would have arrived at work on time if the bus wasn’t late.“

The director of the CBI expressed concerns that workers had been ‘befriending’ their managers on the Facebook social network. “It would be churlish to refuse a request to be a friend of someone who works for me” said one manager. “But I hadn’t realised that he would see my status which said I had been out of the office playing golf one afternoon. He doesn’t seem to realise that business deals with our clients is often done on the golf course. This has undermined my credibility.“

vampire.gif?w=192&h=89

“Teacher attacks students in online satanic ritual” reports our education correspondent. “I introduced the children to Facebook as part of their Information Literacy course” Ms X. told us, close to tears. “We started off poking each other, and then moving on to tickling and hugging. Then someone installed the Vampire application and bit me. I, of course, responded in the same way. And now I’ve been suspended“. The head teacher informed us that, following complaints from the parents of one of the children affected by the incident, he had no alternative but to suspend the teacher (34), who cannot be named for legal reasons “We have zero-tolerance to cyber-bullying at this school.” (Note that we have published a photograph of Ms X’s vampire, but have removed the name of the victim).

Get out of MySpace screams a headline in the Guardian, an extreme liberal British newspaper (which had been the focus of vehement attacks during the last US election for its misguided attempts to undermine a democratically held election by a seditious media organisation based in a foreign country). The article goes on to say “a research exercise carried out by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), called the Learner Experience Project, has just revealed, amazingly, that students want to be left alone. Their message to the trendy academics is: ‘Get out of MySpace!’“

The Get out of MySpace! post on the Kinda Learning Stuff blog cited the last example and commented that “there needs to be an increasing degree of contextual sensitivity by users and a subtlety in their development / use before they become really effective“.

Tony Hirst’s post on Helping Students Make More of Facebook Without Stealing Control describes the software development activities he has been involved in which attempts to exploit the benefits of Facebook, whilst avoiding ’stealing control’.

As the Kinda Learning Stuff blog suggests, Tony’s approaches to software development needs to be complemented by addressing issues such as information literacy, user education, negotiations and discussions and the development of acceptable patterns of behaviour in our online social spaces. And we need to realise that the potential tensions between students and staff and not peculiar to the educational community, but will be reflected in any social grouping in which there are hierarchical and power relationships.

We need to have a much more sophisticated response to the cry to “Get out of MySpace” - whether this comes from the workers, the bosses, the students or, indeed, the academics - than abandoning these social spaces or setting up alternative social spaces without any guarantee that these will be successful.