Social Computing

I just discovered a series of interesting blog entries from Danny Weitzner, W3C Technology and Society Policy Director and co-director of MIT CSAIL. These aren't especially new links, but I thought they might be worth relaying ...

Reciprocal Privacy for the Social Web - provides an introduction for a proposal "to establish a reasonable privacy balance in social networking environment" using FOAF. Also of interest is a link from Shahan Khatchadourian describing the use of FOAF and OpenID to establish trust/prevent spam. Apparently the solution could be available from Ryan Lee as a Drupal module? In some ways, this sounds similar to the Social Network Portability concept mentioned by Stephen Downes.

In this podcast we feature a conversation between George Siemens, Associate Director of the Learning Technologies Centre at the University of Manitoba. and Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University It was recorded at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting.

Michael Wesch presented a session entitled, "Human Futures for Technology and Education" at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting. He also produced a video, which is referenced in this conversation, entitled "The Machine is Us/ing Us".

George Siemens presented a session entitled, "Connectivism" at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting.

OCLC has issued a new report that sounds like a must read for those interested in navigating the waters of the social web and I look forward to delving into it. I, personally, have mixed feelings about what I've skimmed of the report. I'm particularly vexed about a call from OCLC to "relax the rules of privacy" ... I haven't read the report yet, but that's an interesting call to action. Personally, I'd love to see a call for a more research and experimentation into alternative approaches to the social web that might find a way to protect privacy and raise awareness of why it might be important.

Community Resources    

http://connect.educause.edu/term_view/Web%2B2.0    

Articles:    

Imagining Tomorrow's Future Today
Art St. George and the 2007 EDUCAUSE Evolving Technologies Committee
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 42, no. 6 (November/December 2007): 107–127
http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm07/erm0765.asp  

Wikis and Podcasts and Blogs! Oh, My! What Is a Faculty Member Supposed to Do?
Patricia McGee and Veronica Diaz
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 42, no. 5 (September/October 2007): 28–41
http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm07/erm0751.asp    

NPR's Andy Carvin recently joined Talk of the Nation to cover social networking and sites like Facebook and MySpace. During the recording, they covered a number of issues related to their use in education.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14993512

First Monday is starting up a new series of podcasts. The current recording features an interview with Ian Bogost about his new book, Persuasive Games. Next up is Siva Vaidhyanathan ... I was forwarded a preview of the very interesting recording, but they haven't linked it up yet.

http://www.firstmonday.org/podcasts/

Sex, commerce and stalking.  In recent discussions on our campus on the use of Second Life as a learning environment, these were some of the first things people noted as concerns.  Sex was a problem just because it was there to contend with - whereas it is not much of a factor in our current LMS!  It was also thought that some of the economic arguments about Second Life being an "authentic" environment (because of the real economy) were questionable; i.e. what is so "authentic" about commerce, and is that the kind of "authenticity" we want to emphasize in our courses.  And stalking is a bad thing, of course...

I did not share these concerns about Second Life.  In ways I find both reassuring and depressing, sex, commerce and stalking are all part of life on campus anyway, and in these regards Second Life does not differ much from life on our offline, physical campus (except that real sex is better and real stalking is worse than Second Life sex/stalking).

CANS, or Context-aware Activity Notification System, is an innovative software development project that highlights the role of social contexts and personalization in online learning environments. Currently in use at the University of Missouri, in 10 online courses, CANS offers a way to increase the levels of “sociability” afforded by educational technology infrastructure, and to generate opportunities for collaborative learning.

Recently, I interviewed two of the main architects of CANS, Chris Amelung and James Laffey, via email and took advantage of the medium to ask them some detailed questions about the present and future directions of the project. (Chris's responses are listed in black, and Jim's in blue).

Background

CH: Tell us a bit about the background to CANS. What was the original inspiration for the project?

In this 50-minute recording from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Annual Meeting, we'll hear from Bryan Alexander in a session entitled First Generation Ubiquitous Computing: Social, Mobile, and Gamelike. Alexander explores how gaming, social software, and mobility have synthesized the first generation of global, ubiquitous computing.

Many of my recent posts (Human Education Network, ECAR, Webpage Documents, Trailfire) focus on the future of education and the internet's role in that.  Yesterday Inside Google Book Search posted an short article about a conference they recently had in New York about the future of the book.  As part of their post they posted a video montage of the event.

The conference, appropriately titled 'Unbound,' focused on the future of books.  Here are a couple of quotes.

Presumably talking about a website centered around a book one presenter said:

"The website should be interactive.  It should be forum, there should be author talks, there should be talks the author can participate in."

In this 15 minute recording, Lisa Hinchliffe shares some thoughts on, among other things, the role of librarians in the social computing sphere and shares some thoughts on her experiences there.


This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2006 Fall Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org