Some thoughts about making choices about the software and systems you use, they may have hidden positives or negatives.
Featured image, iPhone screenshot, edited in snapseed
A classroom, like any other social group will have popular pupils, the ones who get heard most by other pupils. I guess a teachers job is to encourage participation for all learners.
We have to think if software companies are the best people to curate our information.
A While back I turned off the setting in twitter to show me the ‘best tweets’ first. I noted that I hadn’t noticed this being turned on.
Yesterday I found a new setting, not sure when it happened, and tweeted turning it off with a gif:
This got a couple of interesting replies and I put in a few more pence worth:
@johnjohnston @robfmac I wonder what the measure of “quality” is? I’m already struggling with missing everyone in other SM algorithms.
— Jennifer Jones (@jennifermjones) August 20, 2016
@robfmac @jennifermjones danger of algorithms is they reinforce popularity at the expense of inclusion perhaps.
— john johnston (@johnjohnston) August 20, 2016
@johnjohnston @jennifermjones absolutely. I’m already fed up with FB hiding posts because my default is ‘most recent’.
— RobertMacmillan (@robfmac) August 20, 2016
@jennifermjones@robfmac I favour my own curation of RSS. Have idealistic dreams of community built on aggregation of open content
— john johnston (@johnjohnston) August 20, 2016
I don’t really do Facebook 1 but it is even further done the algorithmic path.
I presume the algorithms will be designed with the end goal of getting more ad views, not for what is ‘best’ for the user or community. They may also have negative effects on a learning community see: Participant association and emergent curriculum in a MOOC: can the community be the curriculum? | Bell | Research in Learning Technology, which I’ve read too quickly a couple of times now.
I don’t suppose there is much to do about this in the short term other than turning off settings when we can. Longer term it might be wise to think about the IndieWeb.
Featured Image: A screenshot…
PS. This post is mostly a few tweets, I’ve been thinking that interesting things often get lost in the stream, and pulling out a bunch might be useful.
This is a experiment, I’ve generated a list of my recent (last 6 weeks) Pinboard: bookmarks tagged ‘facebook’ and post them below.
This will hopefully be a useful reference for me and perhaps others.
I’ve been thinking about Facebook quite a bit recently. I still only visit occasionally and feel fairly negative about it. When I do visit I often see interesting things about folk I know, but not enough to make me visit more often. I also recognise that it can be used for really interesting projects for example the EAST Project we talked about on on Radio #EDUtalk.
The video, linked to by Alan, held my attention for the full hour (I find it hard to watch online videos for more than a few minutes).
The Featured Images is Soild links | SONY DSC | Bernard Spragg. NZ | Flickr used under a public domain license. Stamped with the stamped attributor version of flickr cc attribution bookmarklet maker.
Got a web site?
Want to publish your posts to social networks?
Want to see comments and likes on your site?
Bridgy is for you.
Bridgy lets you post to social networks – and comment, like, reshare, and
more – from your own web site. It also pulls other people’s comments, likes, and
reshares of your posts back to your site. In
IndieWeb lingo, Bridgy lets you
POSSE to
the silos easily and
backfeed the responses
automatically.
Check
out this example, or see the docs for more details.
from: Bridgy
This looks like a really exciting development in social media. Recently most of the commentary on blog posts has moved to twitter, g+ or facebook. This looks like it could link that up and push out posts and then pull comments made on other sites back to your blog.
Last week I was in a primary seven class lending a hand to set up e-portfolios.
As a distraction to leading 30 pupils through the many steps it takes to setup a glow blog as an eportfolio and as a way of introducing them, I usually talk about the pupils existing online presence.
“How many folk are on facebook?” got an affirmative response from half a dozen or so pupils. Not what I expected for other visits to other classes. I wondered aloud if they were kidding.
I then moved on to a brief survey of YouTube: a few channels, one pupil had an origami channel of 30 odd videos and another was part of a scooter group. This seems more ‘normal’ and we continued to setting up the eportfolios
Later on a pupil asked me if I wanted to know why no one used Facebook, of course I did: “We are all on Instagram.” And they were. Most posting from iPads, iPods, a few tablets, a couple of galaxies and one iPhone 4S.
I had a quick chat with the class, but didn't realty get a good overview of what they were posting. Only a few admitted posting selfies, maybe that comes later? Some post, 'what they are doing', some 'funny pictures'.
It leaves me wondering if a stream of photos (do they comment, use hashtags?), give the same benefits as Facebook. Are we becoming more visual communicators. It is obviously a different Instagram would that the one I inhabit troutcolor on Instagram.
This week another class, a different town, primary six, most everyone on Facebook, puzzled looks when I mentioned Instagram. Perhaps social media has arrived but is not evenly distributed.
A decade ago, metadata was all the rage among the geeks. You could tag, geo-tag, or machine-tag Flickr photos. Flickr is from the old community. That’s why you can still do Creative Commons searches at Flickr. But you can’t on Instagram. They don’t care about metadata. From an end-user point of view, RSS is out of favor. The new companies are not investing in creating metadata to make their work discoverable and shareable.
from: Joho the Blog – [berkman] Anil Dash on “The Web We Lost”
Some great reading this morning starting at How the Web is being body-snatched ~ Stephen’s Web through Doc Searls Weblog – How the Web is being body-snatched to the post with the above quote.
This quote really jumped out at me, I’ve loved the flickr API for a long time and used it for lots of fun. I enjoy Instagram too, for its easy, quick hit, and lightweight community.
I really hope that we are not drifting away from such valuable resources with apis and rss feeds to the easy and locked in.
One of the things that makes the huge gap between sites like flickr and facebook is who has access to data and how they access it. When you share on flickr you are doing something quite different, and potentially much more valuable than sharing on facebook or google+.
I hope that open never gets old.
I just noticed Neil‘s photo on flickr.
Article from The Herald on Sunday about cyberbullying. Includes recommendation that teachers should join Facebook.
I’ve had a facebook account for a wee while now and am pretty ambivalent about it. I am not really very keen on the closed nature of the network. Most of the web 2 stuff I’ve found useful (rss, blogs, flickr and I dare say twitter) are open(ish) networks, anyone can see what you have to say.
Someone, maybe Ewan, explained that facebook could be a place to get away from the openness and post more personal things that they would not like all to see, but now teachers are being asked to be ‘friends’ with pupils on social networks which would remove this personal aspect.
Personally I’d not post anything onto facebook or anywhere else that I want to keep secret.
I know facebook groups can be useful, teachmeetperth on Facebook, but in my opinion a wiki is better.
Neil has a great post Are You Going Far Enough? Or Too Far? on this area and I agree that in the case of your own children you need to discuss and reach agreement about access to their social space. Fortunately (for me) my daughter is too old for this to become a problem, I’m her friend on facebook but not on Bebo and for a 17 year old living away from home that is fine.
For pupils this is a different matter, I can’t imagine that many would be happy with teachers befriending them on their space and I don’t think I want to sneak in by faking my age or claiming to be a pupil.
Better in my opinion to:
and hope/expect that understanding and behaviour transfer to other online areas.
On the topic of facebook I did get an interesting invite the other day:
I just wonder how to accept it
I’ve been reading a pile of stuff about twitter over the last few months. Quite a few edubloggers around the globe have taken up tweeting in a big way. I originally thought that it would be more use to conference goers than class teachers and didn’t pay much attention.
Yesterday I saw that a facebook friend was wondering how to update his status on facebook and on twitter at the same time.
This remined me that both twitter and facebook have APIs. A bit of googling took me to ”More status updating goodness‘ where Sören provides an applescript for quicksilver to update several status messages at once, including twitter and facebook. I took the script and simplified it a bit, got rid of the quicksilver stuff other services and I am afraid removed the keychain scripting for the faster hard coded username and password.
So I am thinking of what good scripting these services would do. I guess you could combine the script to tell other twitters what you are playing in itunes, what you are reading in safari, or some other information grabbed by AppleScript either locally or via a webservice. You could run thse in an idle loop so that someone could twitter the current webpage they are reading, application they are using etc. Would this be useful? Eventually a scriptable phone could twitter its geolocation…
Now I am on twitter I’d appreciate some contacts, my username is johnjohnston.
It is not all that likely I’ll be doing much tweeting for now. I do look forward to seeing it it is a useful tool at the Scottish learning festival and TeachMeet07.
Speaking of which the planning for TeachMeet07 is well under way. Check the wiki or follow everything Tagged: Teachmeet07. It looks like being a great event.
