Vanessa Vaile's List: webculture

• Summary: Although instant and text/SMS messaging is beginning to supplant email for some groups' primary means of Internet communication, effective and appropriate email etiquette is still important. This resource will help you to become an effective writer and reader/manager of email.
• How do I compose an email to someone I don't know?
• a meaningful subject line
• open your email with a greeting
• Use standard spelling, punctuation, and capitalization.
• clear, short paragraphs and be direct and to the point
• friendly and cordial, but don't try to joke around
• guides for continuing email conversations?
• respond within a reasonable time frame
• Trim back the old messages
• If someone asks a lot of questions, it may be OK to embed your answers into the sender's message copied at the bottom of your email. However, if you're going to do this, be sure to say so at the top, and leave generous space, for example:
• What sorts of information shouldn't be sent via email?
• attachments?

• Email Listservs and Discussion Groups

   

  Poor email behavior is always cropping up on email listservs and discussion groups. Here are some common mistakes to avoid:

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• A PLN becomes a student's virtual locker, and its content changes based on the student's current course work. When I assign them a term paper, the students comb the Web to sign up for information that will feed into their personalized Web page to construct a PLN for that topic. When they get a new project, they assemble another page.
• Perhaps the most telling response on the subject of PLNs is from my student Hope, who says, "My iGoogle page is very helpful and helps me keep things organized. It lets me know when my agenda changes." The fact that a ninth grader would talk about her own research agenda gives a glimpse into the power of the PLN; she is using a term here that is often reserved for grad students.
• Constructing a PLN is the essential skill that moves my students into the driver's seat of their own learning. It helps them sort through and manage the proliferation of online materials that jam the information superhighway. It is also indispensable to our project-learning curriculum
• Tony Wagner, from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, lists assessing and analyzing information as one of the seven survival skills in the new world of work. I think the ability to create a PLN is a fundamental information-management skill that will help my students succeed in the future.
• An RSS reader is a Web site that puts together all this information in an easy-to-read format. Google Reader, netvibes, Pageflakes, Bloglines, and my preferred reader, iGoogle, are all examples of sites providing RSS readers. The RSS reader is the raw material for building a PLN.

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• developments in their relation to Personal Learning Environments as several people over the past months have asked me why I think there is a need to develop a Personal Learning Environment at all.
• Applications and aggregators of information are freely available and people can take their pick of their preferred ones and create their own network
• easy it is for conglomerates to take over the development of tools and applications
• three issues that I find important in this respect.
• 1. Intelligent data connections are one exciting option for PLE development and networked learning,
• Recommender systems of information, resources, critical friends and experts could form part of the access options
• the challenges of an open online networked environment for learning.
• The reality, however, is different and research is available to show that not all adult learners are able to critically assess what they find online and might prefer to receive guidance
• difficult it is for anybody to reach and access a deep level of information by using search engines
• need for critical literacies while learning informally on networks
• Learning in my view is not synonymous with accessing information, and requires a level of reflection, analysis, perhaps also of problem solving, creativity and interaction
• 3. Access to technology
• trends in access and digital divides
• reasons for their non-participation. Some are related to age and socio-economic group, but some are also related to relevance, confidence and skills set.
• people least likely to use the Internet are also the least likely to participate in adult education.
• could PLEs that would provide help with Internet use and might be used on mobile devices be the answer to making the Internet relevant
• What components would be needed?
• 1. A personal profiler that would collect and store personal information.
• 2. An information and resource aggregator to collect information and resources.
• 3. Editors and publishers enabling people to produce and publish artifacts to aid the learning and interest of others
• 4. Helper applications that would provide the pedagogical backbone of the PLE and make connections with other internet services to help the learner make sense of information, applications and resources.
• 5. Services of the learners choice.
• 6. Recommenders of information and resources.

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• Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) do exactly what they say on the can - they are personal to each individual, created by them, owned by them, used by them within their lifelong learning.
• Originally a counterpoint to the institutional Managed Learning Environment (iMLE or 'VLE'),
• Delegates at the conference could not agree whether PLEs should remain the sole domain of the learner, or whether in some way they could be incorporated into institutional infrastructures.
• students own and create their PLE but that the iMLE also has something to offer them, even though it is highly problematic in its current form
• reconceptualise PLEs, so that they are locatable within both informal and formal learning contexts.
• walled garden effect, which presents a great barrier to student freedom and creativity
• challenge the unhelpful binary of PLE versus VLE
• the true nature of the PLE - its anatomy
• in our view, the PLE is wider than the Web tools students use to create, find, organise and share content. It is also wider than the Personal Learning Network (PLN) of people and content that each of us generates when we learn informally or in formal contexts.
• hybrid approach.
• students require structure and scaffolding when they first venture into digital learning environments. No-one is a digital native, no matter how much the Prensky theory is talked up
• Yet the average institutional Managed Learning Environment is by nature dull, uninspiring and difficult to navigate.
• Web 2.0 tools (Cloud Learning Environment) are more attractive, easier to use and free, but are unprotected and vulnerable.

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• functionality of PLEs - the physiology if you will - what is it that learners need from their PLEs?
• the three main functionalities
• functionality is exclusive to the personal web tools (PWTs)
• creation, organisation and sharing of content to a wider range of practices including analogue content, such as newspapers and magazines, realia (visits, real experiences, encounters, conversations) and other non-digital materials.
• A fourth component, communication - which includes sharing, discussion and dialogue in both synchronous and asynchronous modes, can be represented as an overarching circle within the Venn diagram.
• key functions of the PLE (Personal Web Tools component) can be managed through a number of tools, and learners each have their individual preferences, all of which ensures that each PLE will be unique to that individual learner.
• many are interchangable for different tasks and purposes.
• Note that the e-portfolio sits across all functionalities, and is the most likely tool to be provided by the institution

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• The term ‘Multiliteracies’ refers to two major aspects of language use today.
• The first is the variability of meaning making in different cultural, social or domain-specific contexts.
• the business of communication and representation of meaning today increasingly requires that learners are able figure out differences in patterns of meaning from one context to another.
• The second aspect of language use today arises in part from the characteristics of the new information and communications media
• extend the range of literacy pedagogy so that it does not unduly privilege alphabetical representations, but brings into the classroom multimodal representations, and particularly those typical of the new, digital media
• pedagogy of synaesthesia, or mode switching.

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• There was always more potentially relevant information out in the world than people could ever hope to know. But Twitter, Facebook, social bookmarking sites, and countless other content streams and conversation threads — constantly available in the era of wireless networks and mobile computing — have thrust many in academe into an endless, unwinnable race to keep up.
• At a session on Friday here at the Sloan Consortium International Conference on Online Learning, called “Managing the Flow of Information,” a roomful of higher ed technologists commiserated about the information assault and discussed how to figure out what information to ignore without abnegating their obligation to stay current.
• While some instructors might take the sight of students typing on keyboards and smartphones as a sign of chronic inattention, the authors of this study take it as the opposite.

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• I argue that commercial social networks are much less about circulating knowledge than they are about connecting users (“eyeballs”) with advertisers
• not the autonomous individual learner, but collective corporate interests that occupy the centre of these network
• business model restricts their information design in ways that detract from learner control and educational use
• Just as commercialism has rendered television beyond the reach of education, commercial pressures threaten to seriously limit the potential of the social Web for education and learning.
• Web 2.0 and online social networking have been the subject of sustained and lively interest among practitioners and promoters of educational technology
• what is seen as the radical potential of these services
• Social networking is so central to these new versions of education that a new “connectivist” theory of learning has come to be closely associated with them
• a theory in which “knowing” itself is seen to be “defined by connections” making “learning primarily a network forming process”
• described in terms of the liberation of learners from traditional constraints, as allowing them go beyond the classroom, to network “with peers worldwide,” and ultimately, to “take control of their own learning”
• These visions are above all associated with the “personal learning environment
• The personal learning environment is envisioned as a set of applications and services — to a large extent, logos and brands — organized around a single user, according to his or her learning and informational preferences and needs.
• Through these services, the user is to be connected with teachers, mentors and other learners
• some advocates of these approaches to learning have been raising concerns about the commercial nature of many of these services.
• “You are not Facebook’s customer. You are the product that they sell to their real customers — advertisers. Forget this at your peril”

• “This simple reality underlies almost all considerations having to do with these tools,
• To use these tools is to reinforce, however indirectly, the ‘advertised life,’
• The question is whether there is a role for higher education to promote ‘safe spaces’ free of this influence.”
• the business model of commercial social networks is based on advertising, assisted by the data collection, as well as powerful tracking and analysis capabilities.
• powerful surveillance functions
• theories of media ideology and hegemony developed some time ago by Raymond Williams and Todd Gitlin
• constraints presented by commercialized forms and contents rendered educational television a failure decades ago
• similar structural issues threaten to sharply limit the potential of much newer social media for education and learning
• Facebook, Google and other Web 2.0 and social networking services are making enormous sums right now from the users and advertisers they attract, and they are in aggressive competition to do this more efficiently
• The absence of references to advertising (and also to tracking and analysis) in many discussions of the personal learning environments is surprising given the proliferation of logos and brands of commercial services
• Because advertising is the raison d’être of services like Google and Facebook, it also provides the basis for the design, organization and maintenance of all of these other services and functions.
• This way of understanding advertising and Web 2.0 draws on critiques of television (and the role of advertising in it) that were articulated decades ago.
• the goal of these media organizations, he says, is to sell a product, and the product that “the networks sell is the attention of audiences; their primary market is the advertisers themselves”
• One thing that is different today is that there is no one monolithic audience that forms a generic product to sell to advertisers.
• An obvious objection to be raised at this point is that Facebook or Google, unlike television, do not have significant control over the content that is used to assemble audiences for advertisers
• users have a clear choice regarding the kinds of content that they wish to view and disseminate
• complex and subtle but very effective ways in which advertisers’ interests shape online social contexts.
• Raymond Williams’ 1974 critique, Television: Technology and cultural form.
• Williams’ text requires only minor revision to speak to the situation of commercial Web services today:
• whether there is a role for higher education to promote ‘safe spaces’ free of this influence.”
• Williams is making the point that the relationship between content and advertising is subtle and insidious, and that it is slightly different in the case of content “made for TV” than for its non–commercial counterpart.
• “a dominant cultural form;”
• operation in otherwise non–commercial programming is registered in terms of sequence, rhythm and flow
• what is important for the similarly non–commercial content of the social Web is informational design, architecture, and algorithm.
• Users of Facebook are sure to have been struck by the numerous and varied ways in which it cultivates gregarity and interaction, the way in which it relentlessly structures and supports sociality and connection
• It is common to observe that the term “friend” itself is emptied of meaning by this incessant use and quantification;
• Facebook exemplifies a way of generating and circulating information that encourages the expansion of interconnections between users
• The controversy arises from the possible addition of a corresponding “Dislike” button.
• lowers the psychological barrier to connecting with commercial entities
• Gregarious behaviour is rewarded on Facebook
• approval of a resource will draw ever more attention to it.
• To provide the option of expressing dislike for a brand like Coca–Cola or to disapprove of a newspaper report or an article like this one is contrary to Facebook’s business interests
• The dynamics here are rather reminiscent of what television of a bygone era had to offer: In both cases, you can either watch (i.e., “Like”) the products and lifestyles being showcased, or simply walk away.
• “Like buttons” similar to many other connective features of social networks, “are about connection; Dislike buttons are about division.”
• Similarly, other services will also systematically exclude possibilities for the expression of dissent and difference.
• Despite the current prominence of social–psychological and connectivist theories, it is easy to make the case that learning is just as much about division as it is about connection.
• In fact, the consistent pattern of suppressing division, negativity and interpersonal dissent that is central to the business model of social networking services runs counter to some of the most common models and recommendations for online student interaction and engagement.
• Opportunities for social selectivity, discretion, privacy and detachment are an important precondition for the acts of disclosure and mutual critique, falsification and validation central to these models
• selectivity and discretion — the “safe spaces” hoped for by Lamb and Groom — are rendered structurally impossible in convivial, commercially–contoured environments
• Knowledge is not exclusively embodied in ever growing networks of connection and affiliation, and it does not just occur through building and traversing these proliferating nodes and links
• Education is clearly a social process, but it is probably much closer to an ongoing discussion or debate than an extended feast or celebration with an ever-expanding network of friends.
• advertising, tracking and analysis functions of commercial social media present, as Raymond Williams says, “a formula of communication, an intrinsic setting of priorities”
• It only remains to be seen whether this dynamic renders commercial social networking services as fully unsupportive of educational ends as commercial television has long been.

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• Given the source and Yahoo's decision to refrain from comment, the rumor is now widely taken as fact. And it's a fact that should trouble every user of the social web.

• What do we users pay for the privilege of keeping our bookmarks online and accessible from any Internet-connected computer, 24/7? Not a thing.

    

  Not a cent, anyhow. But we're contributing in other ways. Every time I store a bookmark in Delicious, I'm giving the system another piece of information
• You might call that point of common interest a relationship. And for many Delicious users, those relationships are a key benefit to using the bookmarking system
• Those relationships, as much as the bookmarks themselves, represent a common asset. Yahoo! doesn't own the relationships among its users, any more than a party host owns the relationships among her guests.

• It's the bargain that underpins much of the social web. Twitter gives us 140 characters worth of storage and a killer API, and we fill it up with our latest thoughts and experiences. Foursquare gives us a nice way of converting GPS locations to actual intuitive locations, and we give it the scoop on where we hang out. Facebook gives us a way to connect with friends, and we tell it who we know and what we have to say to them.

    

  This bargain amounts to the world's most ambitious marriage of public and private value creation. On the one hand you've got private companies trying to monetize their social networks and web apps, generating at least enough revenue to keep the lights on. And on the other hand you've got individuals who voluntarily engage in the social production of common value:
• It's that collectively created value that distinguishes today's social web from previous generations of on- and offline media.
• the only imaginable reason to shut down instead of selling is to avoid offering a competitive advantage to another company, in a truly egregious example of placing competition ahead of customers.
• countless blog posts about different ways to use Delicious
• all those bookmarks! — add up to an investment
• The investment of users like me is what makes Web 2.0 fundamentally different from Web 1.0,

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• Reflections on Open Courses: Curation, Ombuds, and Concierges
• Part of the focus in LAK11 is to explore how we can better use data to make sense of complex topics such as:
• focus in LAK11 is to explore how we can better use data
• How students interact
• patterns of activity
• How knowledge is “grown” as individuals interact with others
• How individual learners develop their conceptual understanding of a topic
• How teams solve complex problems
• tools and activities that are most effective
• How individual learners “eliminate” unneeded or irrelevant ideas and concepts
• methods for analyzing data produced by learners and numerous tools that aid that analysis
• explore various methods for analyzing data
• tools that aid that analysis.
• limitations of an algorithmically-defined world of education
• Google’s search algorithm has been ruined argues
• Google’s search algorithm has been ruined
• What’s the solution? Well, a return to curation, of course.
• over the last five years, social networks and social media have taken over the web
• Google is driven by the mission to organize the world’s information. Facebook is driven by the mission to “help you connect and share with the people in your life”. The two companies are on a collision course: is the future informationally or socially based? Eventually, social bleeds into informational. And vice versa.
• We trust people we like, people with whom we feel a connection
• urators – they present their views and spin existing stories within the framework of their beliefs
• All social interactions are information. Many information interactions are social.
• What does this have to do with LAK11?
• “temporary centres”.
• problem of how to create temporary centres
• ome commentary or facilitator posts
• LAK11, we’ve taken a different approach. We’ve retained similar course design elements to previous open online courses (OOCs – I’m starting to think that M=Massive part of MOOCs is misleading or even off-putting
• What we gain in our decision to run this course on various sites, using more or less accessible tools, is the demonstration that anyone with an interesting topic/idea and a willingness to experiment can open up a course for a broader audience.
• What we lose – and I’m still uneasy about this trade off – is the integrated archive of activity in the course.
• Complexity cannot be understood solely through algorithms
• Curation is an important component in the process
• data mining, visualization
• wayfinding and sensemaking in social systems
• human aspect of data, sensemaking, curation, and trust

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• Discussions spread in ever-which way. Participants migrate between discussions and platforms (or shall we say “bounce”?).
• ‘open space’ conference
• A MOOC follows the same principles but is entirely virtual.
• impossible to follow every discussion
• gravitational fields that people follow, and where they group together
• Centres of gravity are: platforms (Facebook, Netvibes, Moodle, Twitter, Diigo, and many more), topics, and people (certain people attract a greater following simply by being there).
• fluidity of people between nodes
• fixed points of stimulating weekly keynote presentations
• strategy to manage my approach of accessing the knowledge spread across the course.

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• According to an embedded MS Word document found in one of the HBGary emails, it involves creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated "persona management" software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Then, to top it off, the team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online.
• Using the assigned social media accounts we can automate the posting of content that is relevant to the persona.

•  There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas

   
• Really? I thought. How do we know if those are real people? Twitter has to be the easiest thing to fake and to automate with retweets and 180 characrer max sentences. To the extent that the propaganda technique known as "Bandwagon" is an effective form of persuasion, which it definitely is, the ability for a few people to infiltrate a blog or social media site and appear to be many people, all taking one position in a debate, all agreeing, for example, that so and so is not credible, or a crook, is an incredibly powerful weapon.
• I believe there are many people though who will base their judgment on rumors and mob attacks. And for those people, a fake mob can be really effective.

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• Library Turns Hackerspace

   

  
  

   

  Perhaps you’ve heard the term hackerspace, or something along a similar vein, like makerspace, makerlab, or fab lab. Wikipedia defines it as

   

  
  

   

  “a location where people with common interests, usually in computers,technology, science, or digital or electronic art can meet, socialise and/orcollaborate. Hackerspaces can be viewed as open community labs incorporating elements of machine shops, workshops and/or studios where hackers can come together to share resources and knowledge to build and make things.”

• How could we accelerate the rate of such hubs forming, where events, community, and DIY production collide? Where do you put them? Who funds them?

   
• The other project, LibraryFarm, is a collective farm on ½ acre of public land run on the model of a public library. Anyone can “check out” a plot of land for no cost, plant what you want, and do what you want with your harvest. The idea is to promote “food literacy,” and rediscover the knowledge and empowerment that comes with learning how to grow food. This project is being led by Meg Backus and Thomas Gokey, who taught the “Innovation in Public Libraries” grad seminar at Syracuse University that also led to the above fabrication lab project.

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• who participates in open online courses
• who benefits, and why?
• I always figured that they are for whoever decides to show up.
• my goal was not to target a particular group, but rather to just open things up and share.
• However, after several years of running open courses and meeting colleagues from around the world, I’ve slightly changed my mind as to the ideal participant that I hope will benefit from the course.
• And it’s easy to forget that even being able to run an open course requires a certain degree of privilege.
• It has dawned on me that MOOCs, and openness in general, are not necessarily for those who are trying to work within the existing education system. Open online courses and resources seem to impact those who outside of the traditional education system and in countries that don’t have universities in the “global top 100”.
• Openness in research, education, and scholarship may well have the capacity to alter society and universities.
• people who have taken an open course and have been able to improve their teaching practices and their connections with students
• Publishing on the open web is important for making an impact with people who might lack the privilege that many of us take for granted. Interestingly, this is often in parts of the world that are forecast to be major regions in future economies.
• Perhaps it’s time to see the question of openness less from an economic perspective and more from a perspective of contributing, in a very limited but personal way, the shape of education systems in emerging economies.
• But it is here that my unease increases. Do I actually think I’m making a difference? Doesn’t it seem very arrogant

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• The first few weeks of an open online course are the most disorienting. As a learner, you approach the course with expectations that have been defined by previous learning experiences.
• Let go of those expectations
• You contribute to shaping and defining the course.
• • yes, I might (not will) encounter that node again; on the other hand I might not or it might be years later
• A MOOC is a network. If a node of information is truly important, you’ll encounter it again.
• first orient yourself to the environment and space of learning
• wayfinding - learning the cues, markers, and spaces
• Secondly, you have to orient yourself to the course content.
• steps to participating in a MOOC:
• 1. Somewhat define your goals.
• 2. Declare/Define yourself
• where can people find you?
• 3. Plan your interaction habits
• 4. Build your network through participation and interaction with others
• comment on course participant blogs, share ideas with them, connect on Twitter
• 5. Think about how you’ll manage course informatio
• 6. Create and share
• 7. Fix what’s missing
• 8. Manage you expectations.
• 9. Persistence

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• Transliteracy is recent terminology gaining currency in the library world. It is a broad term encompassing and transcending many existing  concepts.
• Transliteracy is  such a new concept that its working definition is still evolving and many of its tenets can easily be misinterpreted.
• Transliteracy originated with the cross-disciplinary Transliteracies Project group, headed by Alan Liu from the Department  of English at the University of California-Santa Barbara. The main focus of that group is the study of online reading.
• The term has  its basis in the word transliterate, which means “to write or print a letter or word using the closest corresponding letters of a different alphabet or language.”
• transliteracy is concerned with mapping meaning across different media and not with developing  particular literacies about various media.
• interaction among all these literacies
• “the ability to read, write and interact  across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and films, to  digital social networks.”
• working definition of transliteracy
• Basically, transliteracy is concerned with what it means to be literate in the 21st century.
• social networking, but is fluid enough to not be tied to any particular technology.  It focuses more on the social uses of technology
• Transliteracy is very concerned with the social meaning of literacy.

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• how hard-wired our affinity for novelty is
• explores the evolutionary, biological, psychological, and cultural forces that drive our deep-seated neophilia
• how our ability to respond to change saved us from extinction some 800,000 years ago to neophilia’s basic mind-body mechanisms to the profound ways in which the information age has altered our relationship with novelty
• tug-of-war between our need for survival, which relies on safety and stability, and our desire to thrive, which engenders stimulation, exploration, and innovation.
• The three affective foundations underpinning neophilia — surprise, curiosity, and interest — are referred to as “knowledge emotions,
• why the Internet is wired to give us more of what we are already looking for, rather than surprise us with something we didn’t know existed but might find infinitely interesting
• why the filter bubble exists

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