After attending the EduCause SWRC08 conference here in Houston last week (btw - great job, folks!), I've been pondering what, why and whether certain popular Web 2.0 and Social Networking technologies are needed, useful, or even appropriate for our campus. The essence of SocNet tech is that it helps the user to overcome either physical or temporal constraints that limit participation in traditional (time and place constrained) social networks.
On many university campuses, these physical or temporal constraints are felt most keenly by those who are part-time and/or older students. These groups usually have full-time jobs, families or other off-campus commitments which can interfere with classroom interaction and (perhaps even more importantly) interaction with professors and fellow students outside the classroom. For such non-traditional students, SocNet tech can make a decided difference in the overall quality of the educational experience and may even help to determine whether the student is successful in the course.
On commuter campuses or at schools which host a reasonable percentage of non-traditional students, the advantages of tools such as blogs, IM's, tweets, virtual worlds, podcasting, etc. are becoming more recognized and accepted. At my institution, however, we have very few non-traditional students, either at the undergraduate or graduate level. Classes tend to be relatively small and the interaction between students and professors, both inside the classroom and out, is quite high. Indeed, class participation is counted heavily in most professors' grading schemes. In an environment such as this, Social Networking technology is merely a solution looking for a problem. In fact, many faculty members view such technology as interfering with communication between faculty and students. In short, we don't need it. That doesn't rule out possible limited use for some or most of these applications, but there is certainly no need to mount a campus-wide effort to integrate these technologies into the everyday lives of either students or faculty.
The approach that I'll need to take in helping to advance SocNet on campus is to look for niches where such technology might be used to enhance and support normal classroom interaction. One way in which we've begun to use some of these techniques is in the use of audio & video pod- or web-casts to provide general IT information, such as e-mail configuration, network storage access and other services offered by IT.
For now, I see my role as that of a (cautious) evangelist, taking every opportunity to discuss these technological options and probing for the right niches where some of these technologies might be able to augment existing programs.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Friday, February 15, 2008
It's time!
I've decided that it's time I started blogging a bit from a quasi-professional viewpoint. By that I mean that I'll be dealing with things I deal with in my professional life in academic IT support, but there may be some non-professional topics thrown in from time to time. I'll address the topic of my choice of "Metadiversity" as my blog title later in this post.
Let's get a bit of biographical info in place:
I've been involved in academic computing support, both as a vendor and as a institutional employee for over 20 years. Before that, I worked in the "real world" in a project and customer management capacity for technical and industrial companies. In academia, I've had the good fortune to participate in projects that exploited new technologies like Gopher ('93) the Web ('94-present), and audio/video over the Internet ('94-present).
One of the primary reasons I left web development to return to desktop and server support was that I missed the social interaction. For the projects I was involved with early on, web development meant that I was trapped in front of the keyboard for 38 hours per week. (They let me out only to feed me and attend meetings.)
Now that "Social Networking" (Web 2.0, or whatever buzzword is in vogue this week) has come into more widespread use, I find that there is more opportunity to actually "reach out and touch someone" and be touched in return. It it this social aspect, inherent in much new technology, has a recaptured my interest. I find myself excited and enthusiastic about my work and interested in learning and applying as much as possible these days. I'm even dusting off my long-neglected programming skills (such as they were) to pursue a few small projects. I'll write about those as I can.
Among the "new" technologies that are capturing my interest, imagination and time are:
Second Life (username: toster Oh)
Twitter (username: toster) (http://www.twitter.com/toster)
I like meebo for the integration it provides (I can access twitter, jabber and webmail accounts all from one window), although I'm looking forward to better integration of meebo with the options available from the hosts directly.
There are several others that I am or have played with, but that haven't yet captured my interest or my time. I'll revisit them as I can & perhaps they'll be added to this list.
Of special interest in my investigation of these new technologies is the social aspect, both from a casual perspective and with a view toward the usefulness of these tools tools in augmenting (*not* replacing) traditional modalities of education.
The source of the blog title "Metadiversity" follows rather directly from this exploration process. I'll add pointers and links later, but key in this process have been sites and organizations such as Clever Zebra (http://cleverzebra.com/), the New Media Consortium (http://www.nmc.org/), Metanomics (http://www.metanomics.net/) and the work and comments of people like Nick Wilson, Cynthia Calongne, Hilary Mason, and Sarah Robbins. There have been (& will be) many more, so this list will expand & I hope become a good reference point for folks just stepping in to these wide and deep, but fast-moving technological waters. Metadiversity is intended to indicate the breadth and depth of work in, and exploration of, these social networking worlds - these diverse metaverses, if you will. The term itself isn't found at http://dictionary.reference.com/, but does surface primarily in one context, relating to biodiversity.
Another usage is found linguistically, on the technological front. In "Metadiversity: On the Unavailability of Alternatives to Information" (http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/multilingual), David Golumbia says "The term has been introduced by information scientists and conservation biologists to indicate the need for metadata resources about biological diversity, no doubt a critical requirement. But the term metadiversity suggests something else - a diversity of meta-level approaches, or even more directly, a diversity of approaches, of schemes, of general structuring patterns." He expands this explanation in a linguistic sense, relating it to linguistics patterns on the Internet in particular. I won't continue with this here, but his insights are worth interesting.
My usage is related and yet distant enough from both of those (I hope!) to help me avoid criticism. I freely admit that I use it simply because I like the image it conjures for me of this diversity of metaverses.
If you care to drop in from time to time to see what I've been exploring, especially if you have advice or suggestions, I'll welcome your visits.
Let's get a bit of biographical info in place:
I've been involved in academic computing support, both as a vendor and as a institutional employee for over 20 years. Before that, I worked in the "real world" in a project and customer management capacity for technical and industrial companies. In academia, I've had the good fortune to participate in projects that exploited new technologies like Gopher ('93) the Web ('94-present), and audio/video over the Internet ('94-present).
One of the primary reasons I left web development to return to desktop and server support was that I missed the social interaction. For the projects I was involved with early on, web development meant that I was trapped in front of the keyboard for 38 hours per week. (They let me out only to feed me and attend meetings.)
Now that "Social Networking" (Web 2.0, or whatever buzzword is in vogue this week) has come into more widespread use, I find that there is more opportunity to actually "reach out and touch someone" and be touched in return. It it this social aspect, inherent in much new technology, has a recaptured my interest. I find myself excited and enthusiastic about my work and interested in learning and applying as much as possible these days. I'm even dusting off my long-neglected programming skills (such as they were) to pursue a few small projects. I'll write about those as I can.
Among the "new" technologies that are capturing my interest, imagination and time are:
Second Life (username: toster Oh)
Twitter (username: toster) (http://www.twitter.com/toster)
I like meebo for the integration it provides (I can access twitter, jabber and webmail accounts all from one window), although I'm looking forward to better integration of meebo with the options available from the hosts directly.
There are several others that I am or have played with, but that haven't yet captured my interest or my time. I'll revisit them as I can & perhaps they'll be added to this list.
Of special interest in my investigation of these new technologies is the social aspect, both from a casual perspective and with a view toward the usefulness of these tools tools in augmenting (*not* replacing) traditional modalities of education.
The source of the blog title "Metadiversity" follows rather directly from this exploration process. I'll add pointers and links later, but key in this process have been sites and organizations such as Clever Zebra (http://cleverzebra.com/), the New Media Consortium (http://www.nmc.org/), Metanomics (http://www.metanomics.net/) and the work and comments of people like Nick Wilson, Cynthia Calongne, Hilary Mason, and Sarah Robbins. There have been (& will be) many more, so this list will expand & I hope become a good reference point for folks just stepping in to these wide and deep, but fast-moving technological waters. Metadiversity is intended to indicate the breadth and depth of work in, and exploration of, these social networking worlds - these diverse metaverses, if you will. The term itself isn't found at http://dictionary.reference.com/, but does surface primarily in one context, relating to biodiversity.
Another usage is found linguistically, on the technological front. In "Metadiversity: On the Unavailability of Alternatives to Information" (http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/multilingual), David Golumbia says "The term has been introduced by information scientists and conservation biologists to indicate the need for metadata resources about biological diversity, no doubt a critical requirement. But the term metadiversity suggests something else - a diversity of meta-level approaches, or even more directly, a diversity of approaches, of schemes, of general structuring patterns." He expands this explanation in a linguistic sense, relating it to linguistics patterns on the Internet in particular. I won't continue with this here, but his insights are worth interesting.
My usage is related and yet distant enough from both of those (I hope!) to help me avoid criticism. I freely admit that I use it simply because I like the image it conjures for me of this diversity of metaverses.
If you care to drop in from time to time to see what I've been exploring, especially if you have advice or suggestions, I'll welcome your visits.
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