a random thought on tagging and declaring

…Week 2 =  Declare "who you are and what you hope to achieve in this session." This is where I tell everyone why I'm here. That's always been a problem because I'm usually unsure why and am here to find out. Maybe more than just one thought altogether. Central and shaping thought is about going at it backwards: not quite reverse engineering my declaration, but considering it already declared and laying it bare, exposing even quantifying it. 

Declare by blogging, tagging, tweeting, bookmarking and aggregating. ✔ already do all those: the necessary ingredients should be there. I've got the tagging habit (albeit with occasional gaps), mostly thanks to Vance and earlier Multiliteracies sessions.

So let me look at the tag clouds on my blogs and bookmarking accounts. Twitter tags and textual analysis of files are not out of the question but possibly more than I want to think about taking on just yet, but a tweet cloud would be an interesting and revealing experiment. http://tweet-cloud.com creates a Wordle from any public account name. There are a number of other apps. 

Nor will I limit myself to education/teaching related blogs and posts because that is only part of my online online life. Most of my blogging and projects, from community and advocacy to personal interest, are information sharing and learning related. Including them in declaring could be a big step in integrating digital identities, already somewhat overlapping. That is the other thought and corollary that raises it above a counting game.

Maybe this will even help me wayfinding and sensemaking through multiple massives (whatever was I thinking /not?).

@VanessaVaile, @VCVaileNFM, @NewFacMajority, @PWPicnic

Posted via email from Multiliteracies for Social Networking and Collaborative Learning Environments

Don't Write Yourself Off: Bio-writing Secrets to Living Larger Online - Forbes

…writing advice from Forbes, specifically targeting self-defined entrepreneurs, those readers hopeful of or desperate to market themselves online. Is this for Computers Language Writing? You betcha. I'm experimenting, reinventing CLW again, rescuing it from the dark forest in the kingdom of the moocs, looking for a mode and format that fits both suits its original and description and interests me enough to keep blogging. Back to writing and language basics. If you want to read about Massive Open Online Courses, check archives (search or see tag cloud in sidebar) or head over to MOOC Madness.

The article is also cracking good advice for bio and introduction writing that students, native and non native speakers alike, so often stumble over. Later, putting yourself out there as a product, you will need a good cover letter.  Then there are those interminable LinkedIn profiles. It's genre and related to bio / intro writing assignments, cover letters, etc. Forbes contributor Dena Kouremetis writes, 

at long last: hello #multiliteracies, #POTcert11, #CMC11 & #change11

Finally! Today is the day I break the block, stop procrastinating and MOOC blog. So long, too much territory to cover.  I won't even try. Even so, it is still long enough to invite procrastination. 

I started impressions in 750words, an online writing application to develop the habit of daily writing. The purpose is just to write, get started writing and keep writing, with no other purpose ~ certainly not create blog posts, create documents, answer mail and so on, but the morning word dump gets me started.

Quick take on current state of my mooc activity at this point: if I had a compelling reason (i.e. credit, professional development, to add to CV) to or cared about optimum keeping up, I'd be in a drowning panic. I'm not though. Each mooc is a different gem, a view through a different lens that I'd rather not set aside in order to meet recommendations set by someone else.

Sure, I'd like to be getting more done but this is not all I am doing, not even all I am doing online. Try six+ blogs, four Facebook pages (in addition to profile and a number of groups), a bulging feed reader (even the filters have filters), four Scoop.it pages, three Pinterest boards, four Twitter lines (unsuccessfully trying to hand off local farmers market one), a NetVibes aggregation page and a static web page. No surprise that neither of the last get enough maintenance time. Moocs enrich and inform the lot.

That aside why am here? Orient, declare, network, cluster, focus and all that jazz?

Facebook, News and the Future of Free Thought

I came across this article in my drafts file ~ over a year old. It's still interested and hardly obsolete. I still read most of my news as rss feeds on a Google Reader, although I now use Twitter more than I did a year and especially for fast breaking news. From casual observation, I suspect those using Facebook as their sole news source are not serious news readers, were not before Facebook. Then as now, they take the easy option: one stop shopping. Then it was one newspaper, usually local, with AP or UPI providing the news window on the larger world, supplemented by a weekly news magazine that told them what to think about the news. Media change; human nature does not.  


Where do you read the news? Your friends and colleague? Your students? What are your thoughts about internet culture and how it is changing the way we learn, read, acquire and process information (to turn it into knowledge)?

Facebook and the Future of Free Thought

via ReadWriteWeb by Marshall Kirkpatrick on 2/3/10

The consumption of news -- that formerly-respected category of information outside of humorous cat and music videos that impacts hundreds of millions of peoples' lives -- could be substantially improved by new methods of subscription offered online. Unfortunately, that's not happening. Numbers from web traffic analysts Hitwise released tonight indicate that almost nothing has changed in 10 years when it comes to popular consumption of news online. The big portals and search engines, delivering their version of news, remain in control. That's bad for independent thinking and human free will.

If you were hoping that a new world of web technology would empower free-thinking people to subscribe to diverse sources of information and analysis about the world's news, then Facebook, albeit a little awkward as a news-reading platform today, may be your best hope.

On Monday we argued that Facebook's call to users to subscribe to news outlets on the social network could soon make it the world's leading news-reading platform. Hitwise picked up on that story and ran some numbers today. Their conclusion: Facebook already drives 350 times as much traffic to other websites in the "news and media" category (3.5%) as Google Reader does (.01%). Perhaps more importantly, though, Facebook, Google News (1.4%). and Google Reader together account for less than 5% of news sites' total traffic. The #1, 2 and 3 drivers of traffic to news sites? Google, Yahoo and MSN - portals and search engines where the editorial judgement is made by centralized algorithms and powerful front-page editors.




So Facebook is the web's most popular subscription-enabled place to read news; be it from links shared by friends or by becoming a Fan of news organizations like Facebook is now encouraging. That doesn't mean that Facebook is yet a better news-reading service than dedicated RSS readers are. But it has certainly caught on as a way to read news far better than dedicated news-reading software has. In fact, it may offer the only meaningful chance that the technologies of online self-publishing and simple subscription are going to change the world like they ought to.

According to Hitwise's Heather Hopkins tonight:

Last week, Google Reader accounted for .01% of upstream visits to News and Media websites, about the same level as a year ago. Google News accounted for 1.39% of visits and Facebook 3.52%. Facebook was the #4 source of visits to News and Media sites last week, after Google, Yahoo! and msn. News and Media is the #11 downstream industry after Facebook, receiving 3.69% of the social networking site's traffic. To offer a comparison, 6% of downstream traffic from Facebook went to Shopping and Classifieds last week and 6% to Business and Finance and 15% went to Entertainment websites (YouTube in particular).

We detailed on Monday a number of ways in which Facebook was already the best place for millions of people to read and share news, but when looking at these Hitwise stats it's important to realize that it's traffic that's being counted. So full feeds inside Google Reader deliver the whole story, whereas Facebook snippets require that readers click all the way through to the source site. None the less, a multiple of 350 is a multiple of 350.
Google News, the 2nd leading news reader according to Hitwise, made some nice changes this week around starring stories to track over time. That could increase its marketshare. But Do-It-Yourself subscription to diverse selections of news sources may be contrary to the contemporary human condition, as desirable as it may be. As web standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman said in an unrelated post this week about the closed nature of the iPad: "The bulk of humanity doesn't want a computing experience it can tinker with; it wants a computing experience that works." The same could probably be said for news about the world, and look where it's gotten us.

I'm not saying Facebook is a better way to read news than through an RSS reader. I'm saying no one uses RSS readers, even after years of their being as obviously life-changing as many of us know they are. Instead, people are beginning to use Facebook to read news. That's good, because platforms that encourage independent subscription instead of just consumption of pre-selected news are very important.

Facebook Could Be Our Only Hope (Online)

The big story is of course that the vast, vast majority (like 95%) of traffic to news sites doesn't come from news readers like Google Reader, Google News or Facebook at all. It comes from search engines and portals. Google, Yahoo and MSN. That's what these numbers appear to indicate. Sure there's a long tail of other sites like Twitter, Digg, HuffingtonPost etc. but it's hard to imagine all those other sources at less than 1% each are adding up to much in aggregate. (We've asked Hitwise and await their response.)

Hitwise reported in September that of traffic leaving Twitter, for example, only 3.4% of it went to News and Media sites.

In other words, consumption of online news may not really have changed much for almost anyone in the last 10 years. You, dear reader who probably came here from Twitter or Google Reader or Facebook (maybe Digg if we're lucky), appear to remain part of a freakishly small minority.

That minority may be disproportionately powerful, driving market trends (maybe) and running circles around information streams online (definitely), but the experience of finding out news about what's going on in the world may not be a structurally different thing for almost anyone else, as it is for us.



This is your news on portals

That doesn't bode well for the long-tail of publishers, small voices given volume by easy publishing tools online. The subscription tools to make those long-tail voices a regular part of our news life have arrived - but no one is using them. Except Facebook, in growing numbers.




Above: News outlets post to Twitter using RSS, manually or with applications like Networked Blogs

Facebook is the player to watch. Facebook - the dreaded privacy-violating, Farmville-drenched, closed-data, social networking megalith (which is also fun to use and great in many ways) - could be the web's best hope for transforming the world through the power of online syndication and subscription.

So what are you going to do, Facebook? Are you going to move news about the world to an honored and important place on the site, are you going to reverse your December move pushing Fan-page subscriptions irrevocably public (a hostile environment for subscription) or are you just going to post an occasional post to the company's blog about how you can use Facebook to subscribe to news feeds - through a tedious process?

I'm hoping Facebook will take this opportunity and encourage its giant nation of users to add subscriptions to diverse news sources to their news feeds of updates from friends and family. That could deliver a tangible improvement to the world's information landscape, like the internet was always supposed to do.

Book Review: Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

Although not immediately relevant to specific topics, assignments, etc on any MOOC, massive or modest, that I am currently following (albeit in a distracted, scattered fashion), this review and its subject is relevant ~ highly "connectible" ~ to data, multiliteracies, connectivism, networks (virtual and IRL). 

Popular culture is another rich source of data about cognition, learning, social behavior, crowdsourcing and networking. Connectivism on the hoof. 

More on social media theorist Clay Shirky in his own write:

• writings about the internet
• here comes everybody (2008 blog about book of same title)
• blog
• TED profile
• "Does the Internet make you smarter?" ~ WSJ review of Cognitive Surplus

reviewed by Nabeel Ahmad — January 05, 2011

Title: Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
Author(s): Clay Shirky
Publisher: Penguin,
ISBN: 1594202532, Pages: 256, Year: 2010
Search for book at Amazon.com

Citizens across the world watch an average of 20 hours of television per week, adding up to trillions of hours each year. The interest in this fact is not that we have this free time – or Cognitive Surplus, as author Clay Shirky describes – but how we choose to expend our most valuable resource. Shirky argues that our creativity and willingness to share in this connected world – the book’s subtitle, even on a miniscule level and especially through the Internet, can have great impact. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age succeeds in getting us to think about how we can better understand this phenomenon by dissecting numerous examples and threading them together into a smoothly read piece.

Is Innovation Fair? Andrew Keen Says No

more from an indefatigable critic of all things Web 2.0 

How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture.

Naturally when I saw Keen's core conversation at SXSW, it was clear that social media and the term "read-write web" are perhaps the antithesis of what Keen has become known for. While we as a publication (and often as a community) celebrate the participatory culture of Web 2.0, Keen sees the rise of amateur publishers as the fetishism of change-based culture and the breakdown of centralized moral authority. In less diplomatic circles, he's accused of being an elitist. When an intimate 40 person setting of bloggers like Stealthmode Partners' Francine Hardaway and legendary futurist Bruce Sterling failed to erupt into an angry mob, I was surprised.

In addressing the question "Is Innovation Fair?" Keen maintains that there is no definitive answer. He says, "If you asked a peasant whether innovation was fair during the industrial revolution, he'd answer no. But history is written by innovators."

navigating chaos

"Managing chaos" is an oxymoron. I'm changing out the expression for "navigating chaos" or "chaos coping." A colleague uses "intuitive chaos navigation" (suggestive of Dune's blind navigators on spice), but I'm not ready for that yet. The intuiting part not the spice. Wondering about the chaos part? Look at the tags.

How much mail and such can I wade through this morning before ordering groceries and calling the electric company about billing (autopay fell off the wagon)? I do seem to be handling mail more efficiently thanks to tips from the EVO (Electronic Village Online, pre-TESOL Annual Conference) multiliteracies workshop. I really fell behind this year, but feel I am getting much more out of this year's workshop than previous ones.

That's one prong of the forking pathways of retirement interests. It would be less confusing if they did not keeping crossing one another, economies of scale not withstanding. The workshop is online and covers/involves web 2.0 tools and social media.

As the workshop comes to its end-game, we are to construct either ePortfolios or PLN (Personal Learning Networks). PLN can evolve into a Personal Knowledge Management Plan.I think this is where I'm headed but my conceptualization (mental grasp still exceeding reach) has yet to gel coherently. 

Unlike the other workshop participants, I am retired from active teaching, on line or ground ~ or some mixture thereof. Yet I remain ed involved with an adjunct advocacy group and by volunteer teaching ESL online. The former deals with academic politics and issues; the latter with pedagogy. Both involve social media and have blogs.

See the social media and CMC (computer mediated communication) connection? The thread in the maze that will lead me out and away from the minotaur... or take me down his maw. 

So what about the rest of it? Bear with me, I'm getting there. I blog, not just here. A lot and about all these threads. I figure the "Knowledge Management Plan" will help me keep threads straight, in hand and untangled. It's worth a try.

coordinating networks

Cross-posting myself from my blog at the EVO Multiliteraces page on Ning. Evomlit, for short, is a workshop I am taking at the Electronic Village Online (the TESOL prequel)

Or drowning in them. Sink or swim: coordinate or drown? I just clicked Vance's overload article. "How can teachers deal with technology overload?" at http://multiliteracies.ning.com/profiles/blogs/how-can-teachers-dea.... As an example of overload, I started this post early in the first week, saved most of it to drafts without posting. We are now nearing the end of the second week, and, after over a week of "I'm going to finish that post today." That was then: today is today. Maybe this "today" is the day.

Overload: it's not just for the classroom. There are also personal networks, non-classroom professional networks, community networks, special interest networks, and so on. Nor are all networks separate, discrete and clearly delineating entities. They overlap, some more than others.

Vance addresses the challenge teachers face when they "need to master so many new skills" but also reminds readers (including me) that "these competencies have been needed since the turn of the century" with skill sets continually enlarging in this one. In order to survive in these waters, like sharks, we need to keep moving and feeding.

What do we need to be familiar with? Let me count the ways, tick them off the list of skills and concepts that Vance adapted from himself (adapted from Stevens, 2008). Yes, you can read them in the article but repeating is aide memoire for me as well.

1. Web 2.0 and social networking
2. RSS and feed readers
3. Podcasts (harvesting and producing them)
4. Microblogging (e.g. Twitter, Edmodo)
5. Distributed and personal learning networks
6. Aggregation and tagging
7. Digital storytelling and applications of multimedia to new literacies
8. Communities of practice and connectivism
9. Informal / just-in-time (JIT) learning
10. Synchronous communication tools such as: instant messaging, online presentation venues incorporating interactive whiteboard, voice, and video
11. Asynchronous collaborations tools such as: blogs, wikis, Voicethread, Slideshare, Google docs, etc.

Do you see the most common thread? Not time or immediacy (live feed and synchronicity hype to the contrary) but sharing. If we don't share, it's not communication. Dissemination, exchange, collaboration. If there is no exchange or dialogue it is not interactive.

Let's examine the list for familiarity levels: know about, consume, distribute or exchange, aggregate or collect to share, create. They won't be the same for each. Classification would be another category ~ not just how but where or in which networks do we use them? Bloom's Taxonomy comes to mind.

Another consideration: which applications will we use, find most useful? Realistically, we won't use all of them, but there is no way to know without test driving them. Another workshop goal is to learn more about familiar applications... not to mention that app we installed but have not gotten around to using enough to become more than superficially familiar with it.

I'm going to manage overload by not expecting to do everything and letting myself go off on tangents that catch my fancy ~ an distinct advantage to being more or less retired. As an aside, I am also looking at and weighing these applications from the perspective of networks and computer networking in other contexts: local community and action networks.