The Loudest Voices

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:

quality-filter — I don’t want Twitter being a quality filter.

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’.

— RobertMacmillan (@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.