Peaches?

string1
The Geldof girl writes in the Guardian about MySpace today, mixing up two popular ideas, narcissism and addiction. In the first, publication on the internet is seen as the ‘new vanity’ produced by an inflated sense of self; in the second the internet is a drug that ‘takes over’ our normal self. Here’s a link to the article. It’s interesting reading down the comments. The majority are quite hostile to the article. And how, I wonder, will the Guardian read this? Favourably because it attracts attention or unfavourably because it seems unpopular? And what I wonder of the commenters are they vain, addicted or both?

The dark side

sunset 2
The blogosphere is buzzing with Kathy Sierra’s account of the death threats she’s received on her blog. These events and their very serious consequences are posted about here. Naff comments and spam are one thing, but in the ephemeral and sometimes lite and frothy world of blogging, there’s shock and surprise. Unpleasant though it maybe, some argue that because this sort of thing happens anyway, in life, it’s inevitable that it’ll happen on blogs from time to time. Are we moving away from the naïve view that everything to do with social networking is innocent fun? Utopian ideals are one thing, but do we need to protect the vulnerable from this sort of thing…and how? We need to be able to steer a clear line between moral panic, censorship and surveillance. (Note the same issues surface in educational responses to new media.)

Web 2.0 use

shadows
Here’s some detail about a UK survey on what Web 2.0 apps are getting used by certain sectors of the population (pdf report). This work is part of the JISC funded ‘SPIRE’ project. Their blog describes the work in the following way: ‘we ran a survey to try to discover which online services people were using and in what manner. We were interested to find out which services were popular and if they were being used for work, for study or socially / for fun.’

Louise Poulson (1953-2007)

louise-poulson
We were once both young and aspiring academics in Sheffield - often exchanging our frustrations concerning the old guard and 'the system'. Things moved on, and so did Louise, but we always shared the camaraderie of co-conspirators! My fondest memories of Louise are of collaborating on an article for the British Journal of In Service Education. We had such fun that summer - it was a wonder that it ever reached completion! For a short time we shared an office, which quickly became a hotbed of subversion. Louise's impersonations of colleagues were so entertaining that I would regularly be reduced to fits of uncontrollable laughter. Tutors from the English Team at Sheffield Hallam University, who worked with her, have warm memories of Louise as a bright, entertaining spirit with an incisive mind and a wicked sense of humour. We will miss her.

Watching social networks

light play
Here’s the Digital Ethnography project at Kansas State University, explaining it’s work on YouTube to the YouTube community. Their blog is here, and it seems like a project worth keeping an eye on. I’ve been so busy this week that I completely missed the Danah Boyd rant on MySpace and narcissism. I can’t really relate to this – maybe I feel ill-equipped to comment on cultural life in the US, but I’m just interested in the take-up and the identity performances on MySpace in the UK. I can’t get that bothered about it, but then I’m biased – I think this is OK – or am I just an ageing liberal?

Bike, train, taxi

UCE
Today I was here, talking to these lovely young people about digital literacy. I could only photograph part of the room and it came out a bit blurry - but at least it shows the purple seats! I promised them I'd post a link to Active Worlds and also to the education bit (AWEDU). There, done that then.

Spend, play, chat

peeping
Webkinz are ‘lovable plush pets’. First you buy the ‘real thing’ and then you adopt an online simulacrum in the Webkinz world – a world that runs on its own economy in the form of Kinzcash. You feed and exercise your pet, give your pet’s room a makeover, play trivia quizzes and arcade games. You can also collect (buy) other pets and build up a family. Kinzchat enables IM interaction and social networking. It’s a sort of cross between Neopets and Beanie Babies. In the words of the advertisers: ‘Be a part of Webkinz world come in and play’. Let’s keep an eye on the fortunes of this one.

Play, risk, power

That's what they call buttons
On Friday I went to a great seminar in Lincoln – part of the Play, Creativity and Digital Cultures series. I was struck by the recurring theme of control, surveillance and censorship in children’s digital lives. Part of this is based on some very real issues that get rather loosely captured under the banner of ‘internet safety’ - but a substantial amount of this is fuelled by moral panic. I also wonder whether the unruliness of the web and the peer-to-peer power of online social networking are also perceived as a threat to teacher authority. The idea of decentralization seems to unsettle corporate media and political organization too, as this piece argues.

Just 5 minutes?

The five minute university. I know it's a bit old, but it's still funny and it is Friday!

Goes both ways

Leicester sculpture
Today I read Fade to Play’s report on a Cory Doctorow lecture about privacy and surveillance in the new media age. This is not a direct note but comes from that blogger’s notes, and it made me think. It goes something like this: ‘We are sleepwalking into a surveillance state (eg CCTV cameras). A CCTV camera only records. Only stops muggers that don’t have good judgement to stop because they are on camera. Parents can track kids with mobile phones and Myspace. Technology can serve us or enslave us.’ But I’m not so sure it’s a simple choice. I think both happen, both are happening simultaneously, but of course we still need to be watchful. Web 2.0 isn’t all a bed of roses.

After the goldrush

string2
Not only is my university intent on taking over the centre of Sheffield, it has also established a presence in Second Life, joining all the other universities, business outlets and political parties competing for attention. It looks like we’ll be buying our own private island in Second Life as well – that’s so we can keep out the riff-raff, of course. No comment. And on a totally unrelated note I read that NCLB has set some unrealistic targets – now that seems familiar! (Thanks to Leanne for bringing this to my attention.)

Jittery

juggles
Twitter is a site that allows you to post one-line messages about what you’re currently doing. Either you use the web interface, IM, or SMS. You can limit the messages to your friends list, or you can make the messages public. This is instant social networking in which you choose your audience and, in so doing maintain a lightweight online presence. On the other hand, Tiddlyspot allows you to set up a personal wiki - again this can be private or public. So what is going on with all these tiddly, twiddly, twittery things – I, for one, would like to know!

Lip gloss

No, I do not take medicines for this.
Originally uploaded by ♥ Eve ♥.

Last October I posted here about a joke birthday present from Ruth – the Peppermint Schnapps flavoured Mullet lip balm. I’ve had a few comments on the picture on my Flickr stream, and lately one from Eve who is a lipgloss collector. She has nearly 300 different ones. The picture above (shown with permission) shows part of her extensive collection. It’s tags are ‘lipgloss’, ‘lip’, ‘lipsmackers’, ‘smackers’, lipsmacker’, ‘collection’ and ‘lipbalm’. She also belongs to the LIPGLOSSADDICTION public group. So, just like the padlock example I wrote about here, we again see social networking in Flickr as a way of creating an affinity space for niche interests. Don’t worry about me – I’m not about to start a collection, but I’m intrigued by this aspect of photo-sharing!!

Video on video games

Here's a 20 minute video from Orange County Department of Education on using video games in education. The rather quirky intro gives way to some useful stuff and includes Jim Gee, Henry Jenkins and other key figures in the debate.

Choked

grasping
I was in Leicester today at the UKLA research meeting. I now regret going by car – it took me three hours to get home! London’s quicker. Listening to the car radio I learnt that Jean Baudrillard died in Paris on Wednesday. Here’s an appreciation. I also found out about the latest wiki scandal – a Wikipedia administrator has been posing as a tenured religion professor. He’s a 24-year old with no qualifications. Is that bad? Unreal, Baudrillard would say, I expect. Tomorrow I’m teaching - it’s blogs and wikis, so I really thought I ought to get something down today!

Book runs into trouble

books
I first saw the humorous Norwegian video ‘Helpdesk’ on Colin and Michele’s blog. It’s a good observation on the destabilizing effect of a new technology. Since then it’s run into a spot of bother and has been removed from YouTube - see the story here. You can still see the original here - and still get the gist. A great little sketch!

Cheese-stacking

door1
This is Ning. Ning prides itself as being ‘the only online service where you can create, customize, and share your own Social Network’. Basically, you create a network for your family, class or whatever. You make your own affinity space. You can make it public or private, tag entries etc etc. It has a very simple interface that allows you to design your own portal. It lets you see what you can have, and allows you to arrange what you want where you want. You just have to drag objects into different columns. .. interesting -anyway that’s where I found this excellent cheese-stacking video.

Modal crossings

Islamic design
Watching the movie of Suskind's 'Perfume', I was struck by the challenge of representing one mode in another. The novel is a masterpiece in evoking the olefactory in words, whereas the movie has to make do with bombarding the view with images, and it doesn't work so well. That brought to mind the ways in which writers convey the other senses - sound in general, and music in particular. My personal favourites are the string quartet in Proust, Vikram Seth's descriptions in 'An Equal Music' and Toni Morrison's 'Jazz'. But the best of all is at the end of James Baldwin's short story 'Sonny's Blues' - a brilliant example of how skilfull writing can capture the emotional resonances of music.

Control

spellin
Too much technology in the classroom? This is a rather feeble article that sets out to take a balanced view of Interactive Whiteboards, but doesn’t really get anywhere at all. I suppose the idea that schools somehow have to compete with ‘iPods, Playstations and home computers’ is a bit naff anyway. Asking which technology and for what purposes would be more interesting. IWBs themselves are pretty neutral, but they do tend to lend themselves to face-the-front teacher demonstration/domination rather too easily. Meanwhile the BBC continues to try hard – clearly worried about the fragmentation of their market, they now plan to use YouTube as a ‘gateway’ to younger audiences. Doesn’t that miss the point a bit? Only time will tell how successful exploiting new media to draw people back to old media will be. Note the similarity in both moves as attempts to re-establish the traditional authority structures of a disciplinary society by using the very technology that seems so threatening.

Video conference

door2
This afternoon we had a great video-conference lecture from Anne Haas Dyson at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (courtesy of WUN). Her studies of children’s ‘birthday party fantasies’ and ‘pine cone wars’ vividly illustrated how children make use of writing tools in the context of their own cultural worlds. I was quite moved by the fact that all this seems to thrive within the context of the ‘return to basics’ agenda of NCLB. Anne in her webpage blurb talks about how she has “become interested in changing notions of written language and of the texts through which people learn and play (particularly those of popular culture), in how children's literacy use reflects these changing notions, and in how schools should respond to those changes.” Great stuff, I can’t wait to read it in more detail!

Social media

Hannah and Aysha
I notice that ‘social media’ is the new buzz word in the blogosphere. Social media, aka the Read/Write Web , provides us with the potential to build and extend our knowledge and understanding, develop niche interests, and connect with others beyond our face-to-face networks. This has major implications for education, liberating it from the constraints of time and place, making it a continuing process. Well is that emancipatory or oppressive? Are we stumbling towards a ‘control society’ where nothing ever gets finished, because it’s always in process: "In disciplinary societies you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in control societies you never finish anything... school is replaced by continuing education and exams by continuous assessment. It's the surest way of turning education into a business." (Deleuze (1995:179).

I'll be back

sunset3
I'm heading off into the sunset for a short break, so there'll be no new posts on this blog for a few days. Have added the New Literacies Sampler pdf to the sidebar (under books), please feel free to preview!

Just a second

cat and mouse
I've been following the public debate (in so far as a blog debate is public) between Clay Shirky, Beth Coleman and Henry Jenkins around the status and significance of Second Life. I think I'm interested in Second Life for much the same reasons as Jenkins. It's what people do there - what they perform and what they produce that interests me. But, at least for the time being , I've drawn a line. First Life is too demanding, too complex and too full to even entertain the thought of having a parallel second one! That aside, Jenkins makes some powerful points. Here's a summary of the ones I find most significant:

1. SL provides a model of civic participation and cultural production;
2. The more significant uses of web-based communication lie in asynchronous written communication that frees us from the constraints of place and time;
3. SL represents a particular enactment of Bakhtinian carnival;
4. SL is keeping alive the idea that 'we might design and inhabit our own worlds and construct our own culture' (see 1.)

This said, I think we need a more in depth look at how virtual worlds could provide environments for a wider variety of things - collaborative learning and dispersed problem-solving amongst them.

Attention!

weighty sign
People clearly have different motives for signing up to a photosharing site. My original motivation was to create a bank of pictures online that I could use on this blog. Since then things have changed a little - friends, family and a few online acquaintances will, from time to time, visit and comment on my photostream. I enjoy playing a small part in this community. This is quite a typical story of social networking. I’m aware that for others popularity/ attention is a strong drive. If you’re one of those, then Thomas Hawk has 10 tips for getting attention that you might like to look at. But of course it’s not a simple divide between attention-seekers and the rest. I quite regularly check on the popularity of my pics (mostly because it’s an accessible feature and partly because it’s nice to get some approval). The fastest climbing picture in my ‘views’ count is shown above. It’s a quite unremarkable picture of an icon on my daughter’s door. Posted on January 8th it’s now at Number 11 out of the 200 listed why? I guess it’s the tags. I’ve noticed ‘home’ and ‘house’ always attract attention (interesting)… ‘sign’ isn’t exactly a crowd-puller. So I guess it must be ‘weights’ and ‘lifting’. Now I’m running an experiment. I’m going to give the same tags and title to a random image and see how it goes on the ratings. There’s nothing better than a bit of attention, after all.

New literacies

sampler
Well, hard copy of the book has finally arrived and I think it really works well as a collection. There's a really good exploration of Web 2.0 stuff here, and I'm glad to be a part of it! New literacies/digital literacies is really well communicated in this short video which illustrates the changing nature of text as well as what happens behind the scenes in html, with feeds and so on. Not only informative but.. er um.. appropriately presented - ends with a great message.

Music-sharing

Is it a sock or a is it a glove?
I’ve been doing some preliminary work on music-sharing. There’s not much of a literature in this area, but I did find this which shows how music-sharing is ‘richly interlinked with other social practices.’ The authors (writing in 2001) suggest that the challenge for developers is to create technologies that enable users to strengthen existing friendships, make new friends and social contacts. It struck me that there are some key differences between music-sharing and photo-sharing. In photo-sharing you offer your interests, your activity – parts of your personal narrative, whereas music-sharing is much more about signaling affiliation and identity through consumption. The power of recommendation is, after all a significant part of group membership. So allconsuming.com achieves this through the act of naming musical tastes, but pandora.com offers this through the act of sharing files themselves. More to follow…

MySpace (again)

Souvenir table
At last some common sense! Sameer Hindujar’s study shows that teenagers are more alert than they are often given credit for. He says ‘some of the threats allegedly posed by MySpace and its ilk may be a bit overhyped.’ There’s also this on social networking, and an interesting look at tagging as an online social practice (here) Many thanks to Sarah for these!

GreySpace

door1
Not that I have a problem with it, but I found out that Neil Diamond has a MySpace page. In fact, according to this report, more than half of MySpace visitors are now age 35 or older. Why even my old friend Harry has his own page. But despite the demographic shift you can see a whole different look to these pages – different design principles are at work - and, for the most part, there’s a different business sense or purpose at work. In fact it seems less like social networking and more like putting down your marker in cyberspace.

Surfaces for writing

Butterfly tattoo
I was driving the car today when I noticed that someone had written 'I wish i had a car' in the dirt on my rear windscreen. They must have done that in mirror-writing for me to be able to read it. It's probably the simplest act of graffiti - the finger that writes on a dirty white van 'also availbale in white' or 'clean me I'm dirty' or, of course, something less polite... in a similar fashion there's writing on steamed up glass... Then, today, I read in Siri Hustvedt about 'dermagraphism' which seems to have become a generic term for a scratch on the skin that appears like a pattern. But in Hustvedt, it's more of a magical act in which passing a hand over the skin reveals a written message - a sort of psychic tattoo. Mmmm!

Ludic spray

Jez's maze
What a strange-sounding coinage! It sounds a bit kinky, but actually its not... Originating in this interview, ludic spray is defined as ‘the stuff that is inspired by a formal game but doesn't adhere to its rules.’ We could include fanfiction, the emergent economies that grow up around online games and so on. So, when Aleks Krotoski talks about ludic spray in relation to this Ofcom consultation report it begins to make sense. She says that ‘the new media revolution has highlighted that everyone plays. We surf, we tweak, we mash up, we blog. It's how we grapple with new concepts, new ideas and new experiences. Play is an essential part of how we make sense of our universe.’ I’ve been turning those words over in my mind – it’s a popular Western liberal ideology (I even wrote my undergraduate dissertation on that topic all those years back!). Play power sounds like a universal, but is it? I’m not convinced about that. Anyway it’s certainly true about new media – a world in which the boundaries between play and work are often hard to define. And I guess most of my own interests are about tracing that ludic spray into learning in informal and formal educational settings (bring on the virtual world).

Sisters online

Stylish
Here’s an interview with Danah Boyd. There’s a bit that just seems to sum up what I wrote about Hannah yesterday. ‘Most of what's happening is they're building relationships, they're engaging socially, they're seeking validation, they're seeking negotiation of status, and this is happening both on and offline in a very fluid way.’ I think that’s accurate. Now whether Ruth (in the pic) uses MySpace in the same way is a moot point.

Friends online

Me and my bag
This is Hannah when we met up in London last night. She’s going out with two MySpace friends on Saturday night. ‘We’ve known each other for over a year..’ she says – but of course that’s only online. ‘The first few minutes is a bit weird..’ she says, commenting on the initial face-to-face contact – but then ‘it’s like you’ve got so much in common..’. So this adds to all that stuff about new social networks. ‘Anyway I need to meet more people…’ is the final comment. It’s interesting that MySpace is the glue (or more accurately the gluepot). Both her new friends are same age, same sex and live within a twenty mile radius. (Reference back to this).

Spooked

living room
If you look at the photo you might just make out part of a set of Chinese paper-cuts hanging on the wall. Well, the other night one fell down and smashed. The picture cord severed in a clean break. Not only that, but a week or so earlier another one went in the same way. Readers with good memories may recall my post about a mirror falling off the wall whilst I was working at home (here). Strange! Maybe we have a poltergeist…I steady myself by looking up David Shaffer’s blog. He has a paper about learning from video games here and look there’s also Shaffer, D. W. (2007) 'How computer games help children learn' : Palgrave Macmillan (a familiar sounding title) – or if you’re fed up with learning well there’s always complete tom-foolery with the mango clip!

On the same lines

blue sky
It’s always good to think of improvements so I enjoyed reading Liz Lawley’s thoughts on Flickr friends. She says: ‘I’d love to be able to see who we have in common.’ That’s interesting because it’s rather more useful than visualizing social networks (anyway this sort of thing needs loads of contacts). Quite a lot of us signal networks across different sites. Here’s an example of this. But I’d rather like a smarter Flickr homepage – one in which you could tag and search interests, and one that you could personalize a bit. After all your profile is just a form you fill in, and up it pops on the corporate page template, hardly changed at all.

New Literacy Studies Sampler

Think Bridget Riley with a migraine
At last, Colin and Michele's NLS Sampler is out. It features Davies, J. and Merchant, G. `Looking from the inside out: academic blogging as new literacy´ - the piece based on the work Julia and I did on blogs. Unfortunately whilst it's on Amazon they say they are 'currently unable to offer this title'. So, I guess that in the meantime I'll have to wait till copies get shipped over! Perhaps by then I'll have put up a PDF link....

Dangerous signs

DSC02115
After the fun of graffiti bombing and the celebration of graffiti as art, it suddenly looks like dangerous business. One of our most subversive forms of literacy not only challenges laws and conventions, it can also be high risk. I doubt that this sad incident is going to change the picture – after all graffiti is as old as writing itself (1550 B.C Memphis, Egypt) – but I suppose we need to try to minimize the risks that graffiti-artists take (discussion here).

Unbounded

kitchen update1
Two recent media stories raise issues about unregulated media. What should we allow, what should we resist and, of course, how - are central questions. Racist behaviour is the latest of a long list of challenging issues in ‘reality’ TV. Reality has become a slippery term. This made-for-TV version of reality creates the illusion that we are looking behind the scenes at how things really are. But it’s not exactly like that (not real) but of course, there’s no denying it’s actually happening there on our TV screens (real). And then to thicken the plot in comes disrespectful behaviour (racism) which is unpleasant and all too common (real). Thousands complain, politicians get involved, but of course it’s already happened. Slightly different in some ways is the way in which supporters of Le Pen’s far right politics (real) set up an office in Second Life (differently real). Here complaint was transformed into activism, but the problem continues. Then there are rumours that UKIP (unreal) are setting up offices in Second Life. That’s just weird – a party that is obsessed with boundaries crosses the blurry boundary – at that stage I just laugh at the possibility that my virtual brother might want to have his two Lindens-worth in Second Life!

Report

reflect2
“Young people are spending their time in a space which adults find difficult to supervise or understand”. That’s the quote that heads “Their space – education for a digital generation”, the title of a report on new media from Demos. It raises some important questions for all of us. Their pitch is: "Approaching technology from the perspective of children, it tells positive stories about how they use online space to build relationships and create original content. It argues that the skills children are developing through these activities, such as creativity, communication and collaboration, are those that will enable them to succeed in a globally networked, knowledge-driven economy."

With your name

mystery red
MSN allows you to alter your personal settings and provides a window for you to write “what I’m listening to”. This often seems to become the signature of the moment. Here’s a selection from my current contact list:

1. I did actually punch one of the child actors –scuse me
2. I’m not going to tell you ‘how hot’ you are, or ‘how lovely your lips/eyes/hair/whatever’ it’s true
3. Tonight Matthew I’m going to be…A Butterfly
4. This year I’m aiming 4 the moon coz if I miss it I’ll be with the stars

And of course, my very own: *look deep into the parkah*....

The self online

hannah
Increasingly our presence online includes the visual - some sort of visual presentation of the self. I’ve recently been looking at this in three different contexts and thinking about the similarities and differences. Firstly in academic blogs, when the author wishes to be visible she/he will typically show a more or less friendly ‘talking head’ shot see this blog, Vic, Dr Joolz, and Simply Clare (Dr Kate has a slight variation on this theme). Secondly MSN pics – these usually show a ‘me with friends’, ‘me laughing’, ‘me partying’ and so on. Of course video chats offer other possibilities and the screen-grab above shows Hannah displaying a new item from her wardrobe to her jealous sister (AKA: *Some Morrocan has done a cover of my song!*). Thirdly, as we know, in virtual worlds how our avatar looks and dresses attracts attention. I was interested to note yesterday how children working in the Barnsborough environment were concerned about the gender of their avatar and offered onscreen tips on how to select a more appropriate one. But not only that, our teachers too were trying on different bodies, checking each other out, rotating etc…. ‘how does my bum look in these dungarees’! As in life, so online?

Virtually complete

Houses
…still more content to develop but the virtual world has had its first public airing with a presentation by Jane Mackay, Julie Meiner and Paul Rees at the BETT show. You can read more about the project on the ‘Barnsborough blog’. This post gives a brief introduction to the project. We’re currently wrestling with questions about the supervision/monitoring of children’s chat. At the sharp end, these are questions about children’s safety and teachers’ responsibilities…but are pitted against notions of pupil autonomy and teacher control and the wish to provide children with a rich experience of new literacies.

Shoes

shoes
These are not Global Positioning shoes although they are pretty cool. If you want the GPS shoe, it looks like this – also pretty cool! That’s from the Platial blog. Now Platial is described as ‘The people’s atlas’ and it is – it’s social networking and mapping. That’s a bit of a different take on things than simply geo-tagging photos on Flickr. Here’s the Platial frontpage and here’s Sheffield with the potential for community mapping with information, events etc. And then Mapkit allows you to publish a map on your site/blog – but I’m not sure why I’d want to use that on my blog, but I can see where it would help others.

Another day, another dream

smile
I’ve been thinking about what avatars dream of…thought it sounded familiar and then found Mel Slater with a paper called ‘Do avatars dream of digital sheep?’ and Mel references back to Philp K. Dick ‘Do androids dream of electric sheep?’ All told it’s a sort of verbal meme. I also looked at the New Media Literacies website which gives an interesting list of ‘new’ skills. They have play, performance, navigation, resourcefulness, networking, negotiating, synthesis, sampling, collaboration, teamwork, judgement and discernment. I’m not sure they’re all skills and I reckon some of them could be usefully combined. Now these are described as ‘emerging skills’ – they follow ‘preliminary skills’ and that’s rather problematic, too. I’d want to eradicate the distinction altogether (see this post for similar comments).

Avatars dream of being human

red leather
‘Do avatars dream of electric racoons?’ – what a storming title for this piece by Paul Mason. And as if that wasn’t enough there’s Jeremy Paxman in Second Life – I never thought I’d see the day! Read about it here. Mason has another interesting piece here, too. And thanks to Emma who pointed me to these goings on, and also to the work of Margaret Wertheim ‘The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet’ – sounds interesting to me. Finally, after a few days of problems it seems that Flickr's talking to Blogger, so its back to normal with picture size!

Grid

It’s interesting how when you’re trying to conceptualise things in a diagram such as a matrix you often hit something you’d not thought of before.I’ve been constructing a grid which plots one-to-one and one-to-many against synchronous and asynchronous communication and hit this exact problem - trying to identify something that’s one-to-many and synchronous. That’s a combination more commonly associated with old media and only sometimes used in videoconferencing.But, when I looked into it there is a small but important digital development called broadcast messaging as this article explains.Contactplus is an example of the software you can use.And then, there’s cell broadcast as explained here.Thank you, matrix!

Press

'A year of bad press and security concerns means the educational potential of social networking sites remains largely untapped' writes Jerome Monahan in today’s Education Guardian. The full text is here with a small quote from me on padlocks! I also looked around a few education-related blogs today. School blogs seem to be quite disappointing – mostly providing ‘corporate’ information. Some do allow pupil voice, but this is often unfocused and short-lived. However, I enjoyed this school visit blog – the author turns out to be the Head of Education for East Lothian Council. I also stumbled on a student-teacher blog with much similarity to this one. Both are trainees on PGCE courses. One blog stops on Sunday 19 November and the other on the previous Sunday (12th November). Doesn’t that just tell the whole story!

Mobile clubbing

nearly time
Mobile clubbing looks like an interesting way of co-ordinating time and place to constitute an affinity space. In fact as the website’s URL suggests it embodies the essence of the flashmob. But I was somehow disappointed to learn that these so-called clubbers move around their chosen location cocooned within the private worlds of their MP3 players. So for all the potential of flashmobbing we get a ‘fun’ way of achieving physical proximity with minimal interaction and minimal disruption. That’s not quite what Rheingold had in mind when he wrote on the Power of the Mobile Many, here.

Learning your clicks

Steam cleaning
As you can see by mousing over my links I’m now in league with snap.com. They provide the free service of picturing weblinks – just hover over the hyperlink and 'snap' will display a small graphical preview of the linked site. You may have seen this elsewhere. So if you want to play ball you get this free add-on feature and of course snap.com gets to learn all about the people who visit this site, when you hover and when you click.

Social

The house of rock
Here’s Danah Boyd predicting the future of social networking sites. It’s clear that there are some local differences here, but the media-fuelled moral panic in the UK is always only a few steps behind. My impression is that MySpace and Facebook have been slower to take off over here and it strikes me that they’re being used by older kids (late teens and above). Meanwhile our texting culture continues to grow as this suggests. Main providers report increased volume on New Years Day (but Christmas is a favourite for picture messaging). Better late than never, here’s some seasonal entertainment just in case you missed yesterday’s comments!

New - pedia

sun
This is Scholarpedia, a new wiki that’s works in the same way as Wikipedia. The difference, apart from what the title suggests, lies in the way it’s peer-reviewed. This may lead to more reliable content (a criticism sometimes made of Wikipedia) – but of course that’s not guaranteed. Will it survive 2007?

FOAF

sing me to sleep
FOAF (friend of a friend) data can be used to generate quantitative analysis of social networks. This is applied to blogging sites in this paper. Paolillo and Wright suggest that patterns of interest and social interaction are closely interwoven for a central core of users. These users have strong ties, know each other well and spend time together. However, the majority of interactions are more diffuse, and weak ties predominate. I think that's just about true in the case of vistors to my blog.

Fl... Fl...Flickr flâneur

and more
Photographing my urban environment is a useful reflective process and is helping me to see my surroundings in new ways. I realize that wandering about observing the changing city-scape, the maintenance work, the re-generation and the decay has always been important to me. I’m a natural born "flâneur". Walter Benjamin portrays the "flâneur" as a lone, urban wanderer who drifts through the crowds without direction, reflecting often on all the little things he notices. It seems to me that the camera could become the diary of the modern day "flâneur". I'm also very interested in the ways in which writing figures in this environment. This interest has developed into one of my favourite photo sets – signs and notices.