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Share Your Video with Video Sharing Software & Sites | StartYourTube
Tags: social, youtube, social-networking, video on 2008-05-01 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.startyourtube.com
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Study Curve
Tags: education, social-networking on 2008-04-03 and saved by6 people -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.studycurve.com
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Classroom 2.0
Tags: education, social-bookmarking, social-networking, web-2.0 on 2008-03-26 and saved by410 people -All Annotations (5) -About
more fromwww.classroom20.com
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Infinite Thinking Machine
Tags: social-networking on 2008-02-13 and saved by36 people -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.infinitethinking.org
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eLatin eGreek eLearn - Helping Classics teachers (Latin and Greek) understand and incorporate technology into the classroom.
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Fireside Learning (ning) - "Conversations about learning. Sit by the fireside and share your thoughts."
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Gifted Education Ning space for parents and teachers started by Ginger Lewman to discuss gifted issues
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Museums and Students - A network for museums and students to interact and learnAg
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Truss2YPI - one of several private Gr. 10 class networks, "Learning about grassroots organizations in our community." see YPI
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openlearn - Open University Course Material
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Communication: I want more. How about you? - Internet Time
Tags: communication, ning, overload, social-networking, water-cooler on 2007-12-05 -All Annotations (0) -About
more frominternettime.ning.com
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Reply by Harold Jarche Oct 13
My attention is spread between my blog, comments, other's blogs, Facebook, Ning, social bookmarks and a few other social spaces. My best (?) thoughts usually go on my blog. If you added up all of the aggregate conversations of these 165 members there is probably much more depth than we see here. Perhaps we just have too many online options today. -
Permalink Reply by Andy Jones Oct 15
Finally someone has said it. I'm surprised (and pleased) it's you. You're right - this is a bit, erm, treacle like. I'm a full throttle, get involved, interact, shout, rant, think type of person (in case you hadn't guessed).
Internet time is where I put my ideas to the test of the community.
Because, as you said, there are some really good minds here (so what are YOU doing here I hear you ask) then I get some really good insite, ideas etc. If it wasn't there, I'd be going it alone.
We could become a stellar "think tank". STELLAR. With the knowledge, experience and wisdom sloshing around here then all everyone needs to do is contribute once every 40 days and we'd still get 4 new posts a day. Simple that way right. Imagine being able to ask the help of 167 other people from all over the world who are willing to help?
For those of you reading this thinking "but Andy, I can't write sparkling and witty prose like you". Spit it out and we'll work it out! Jay's made it clear that the rules are to play nice - so you're not going to get attacked or ridiculed (because if you did I'd be gone long ago - I once suggested that Lobster was a realistic currency - no seriously!).
Anyway - enough of the rambling. Jay - we're going to need to do some kicking but I think we're going to get somewhere. -
Permalink Reply by Bill Bruck Oct 15
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I'd like to suggest three points for your/our consideration: technology, you, and us.
Technology
Ning is a nice platform. But I see it as more of a social networking platform (designed for weak ties and occasional interactions among larger numbers of people) rather than an online community platform (designed for stronger ties and regular interactions among a smaller group of people). -
The affordances for the two types of platforms differ in subtle but socially important ways. Things like the ability to quickly and easily read all new posts, to participate by email (I was told that's so Web 1.0, but it's important to me at any rate, and would up particiption 100% to see and reply to things from my Outlook inbox); etc.
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You
I've become convinced - and you've heard me say so in my talks - that self-organizing start-up communities just don't work very often. They need a strange attractor to get things going and build the momentum to where they have a change of being self organizing. They need a wedding planner - someone to take stewardship for creating a coffee shop and seeding it with some great discussion items. They need an event planner - someone to ask the equivalent of the leaning circuits "big question" of the month. They need a facilitator to ensure that every post is responded to - and not simply by the facilitator - so much facilitation is back channel, bringing in "ringers," etc.
Bottom line - I hate to be blunt about this - but this is your community. It's your social capital that has me taking half an hour of my time posting here, and coming back from time to time to see what's happening - but now less and less, and there's not much going on. -
Us
That having been said, it's not enough to have a robust platform and charismatic strange attractor(s). The soil has to be fertile and the time right to plant the seeds. That soil is us, and I'm not sure how fertile a field we are. Harold said it already - he spends his time planting seeds in his own field. -
I would suggest that a lot of it, in our field, is driven by the desire for personal branding. Folks want to make a name for themselves. In fact, for many, online personal branding is a (the?) cornerstone of building their own reputation in the field, and even generating visibility and buzz that will lead to consulting and other contracts.
I believe blogs are much better than participating in someone else's community for this. -
So, I guess another question to ask or factor to consider is this: Of the 165 folks who include some of the best minds in learning - how much appetite is there actually to simply be an indian and not a chief? To be part of a community and not the start of our own one-person play?
How much to we want to sing together in a chorus (or have hilarious disagreements in the local pub) v. stand on our own soapbox in Hyde Park to proclaim our view of the world to passers-by? -
I WAS, in fact, suggesting as a possibility that many of us "learning professionals" may, in fact, put our online posting energies into building our brand and marketing, and have very little left for participation in online communities that will offer less in this regard.
In know it's a rather bold statement, and in fact, may be offensive to some, for which I apologize in advance. But as I compare the sharing I experience in other online venues with what I observe in the learning community, it seems like folks have much more energy for posting where it will build their brand. I actually don't have a lot of judgment about this, but I do suspect it may be true. -
active stewardship needs to take place in order to maximize the possbility that the community will grow.
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This space is not a community. It's a community center - the online "building" in which a community can meet.
You probably have a commuity center near your house. But there's no one in it now, because there's no basketball game going on. Community centers - be they online or bricks and morter - need to have basketball games and other activities in order to attract people. And we're all busy folks. We need sometone to organize and structure these activities to build a vibrant community. -
Reply by Jay Cross Oct 15
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I particularly like Bill's suggestion that we fill the event planner role.
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I'm surprised by this talk about each of us gardening our own plots. Indeed, blogs are a wonderful tool for self-promotion. But that's not what you come here for. This is not a blog; it's a place
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To play on another of Bill's analogies, the basketball game is here. Be here now. You can sit in the stands or join the action on the court. I take part to improve my game.
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I like the idea of an active stewardship to boost the allround activity in the community.
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Egocentric vs. Object Centric Networks: I Think I Know the Problem With Ning
Tags: ning, social-networking on 2007-12-05 -All Annotations (0) -About
more frommichelemartin.typepad.com
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I think I see more clearly why we've hit the wall, so to speak. It's because we're an egocentric network, not an object centric network.
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This was actually a new one to me, that I stumbled across while reading this article from Fred Stutzman. In it he explains that egocentric networks are places like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. They develop around the profiles of the people who join them. Object centric networks, on the other hand, develop around interactions over digital artifacts--like Flickr, which has formed communities around photo-sharing and del.icio.us, which focuses on sharing links.
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Social networking sites are ego-centric.
Object-centric social sites, like Flickr, YouTube, Del.icio.us, place
something else at the nodes of the network (admittedly, though, Flickr
is a tough one). I have previously called this the primary pivot.
The way to ascertain what type of network you’re looking at is to look
at what gets the URLs…what is the primary thing being shown at the URL?
In ego-centric sites it’s a profile. In object-centric sites it’s the
object… -
our ability to handle egocentric networks is finite--we can handle only so many people in our lives. But our ability to manage object centered networks is infinite, especially when it's so easy to share digital pieces of information.
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when people are interacting about an object (like a photo or a video), they tend to visit and revisit the site to add more of these objects and find new ones. In an egocentric site, though, once you've put up your identity, then what do you do? Eventually you will probably get tired and move on (unless you're someone who has endless amounts of online time, like teens who are happy to spend hours on Facebook).
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In thinking about our Ning network, I think that the fact that we formed the network around a common interest puts us in a funny in-between position between an object-centered network and an egocentric network. The common interest of better blogging is to some extent like an "object" for us--it pulls us together around a central theme more than might happen in a more general network. But at the same time, our profiles are a much bigger part of the community interaction than we might find in a place like Flickr. And there isn't the reason to go there to add objects that you have with a YouTube kind of network.
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Comments
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Hi Michele. I think most of the Object Vs Ego centric comparisons are true. One aspect that may have been missed out, however, is the function centric network. Where a network forms in order to perform a function or achieve a goal. In this case, it doesn't quite fit into either pigeon hole. When you leave, you can take your personality away but everything you've put into the network, all the work you've done trying to perform the function or achieve the goal may be lost. I say may be list purely because the goal the network is trying to achieve may be public, personal or shared.
I mention this for two reasons. I think at the moment the better blogging community is a function centric community but the goals we are trying to acheive are very much public, i.e. our individual blogs. If we could set some shared goals, it may get people a bit more involved. Secondly, I've used similar analogies when dealing with clients, although in a slightly different context. And as a BA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_analyst) I'm used to defining things like this to the nth degree.
Very good write up by the way.
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Posted by:
Kevin Jones |
December 03, 2007 at 04:01 PM -
Hi Michele:
I first learned about the difference from a user interface design standpoint from Rashmi's slide show
http://www.slideshare.net/rashmi/perils-of-popularity-webdirections-keynote/Anyway, have you started to explore all the online facilitation/community literature techniques and how they apply to white label social networks?
Great post! And thanks for your comments about Harry's powerpoint. Tonight he decided to replicate some handrawn comics he had created in powerpoint. While he writing in the speech bubbles, he called me over to show me something he discovered - the spell check! Then I got a series of questions how come it doesn't suggest the correct word? Look what happens when I mispell the word this way instead of that way ... why is that?
Now, the space of less than a week - he knows more about powerpoint inner working than I do and I've been studying it for years ...
Posted by:
Beth Kanter |
December 03, 2007 at 07:13 PM -
hi Michele
had the same kind of question popping up in another ning-group:
http://internettime.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=656824%3ATopic%3A9751Jay Cross also felt as though the community saw him as the creator and thus the one that could make things move. your remark on 'this was created by...' is very true, it would make a difference to get away from the ego and onto the community spirit.
Posted by:
Ignatia/Inge de Waard |
December 05, 2007 at 02:29 AM
Notation: * = Private bookmark and comment|… = Clipping [?] | … = Public highlight [?]
I, too, created a NING site for those interested in Social Learning: SocialLearning.ning.com. But after I did and I started getting people there... what now? How do I get them to want to come back. The first thought was conversation. But that is not something you can force. And if it doesn't happen, people lose interest and move out.
But if it is centered around objects, especially ones that each individual has some ownership in, then there is some sticking power. So, the question is, how do you combine the strengths of both type of networks to strengthen networks like your Bamboo and my Social Learning networks? I can how it is combined in a corporate setting. But what about more of an informal network setting?
I need to think about this some more...