Community Spirit

Where I live...

I live in a small community in a historic and picturesque village on the outskirts of Milton Keynes.

The community has gone through up and downs, and most notably when a local man Paolo Sicorello disappeared earlier this year, he was well known in the community and, for example, went to school with my wife so most people knew of him or his family. I was amazed by how quickly the whole community got behind the search for him. There was a Facebook campaign and groups out organising search parties, with the help of the police, again coordinated through Facebook.

Eventually he was found dead in the canal, he had fallen in and drowned. His Facebook campaign became a memorial site and there were some absolutely wonderful stories and heartfelt outpouring on the site which I think his family really appreciated.

Recently I’ve again seen some of that community spirit as we’ve had problems with a group of travellers. These are not the nice sort of travellers. These are the damaging property, thieving, fighting in public and littering type of traveller. I know the other type exist as I spent some time with courteous travelling folk in my distant youth. These ones are a breed apart.

Anyhow the travellers moved in and the community started to find things going missing and property being destroyed.

We have two ponies which graze on local paddock land owned by the Parks Trust and the travellers took particular interest in the animals. They started marking up the signs on the bridleways as if they were planning to use these as a way to get to the paddocks at night. Another horse owner found a plait in the mane of her horse. A sure sign that travellers are interested in stealing it as they use the plaits to find the animals at night.

The good thing was how the community seemed to rally together. People informed local land owners straight away and the manor park lands ware closed to the public. People went out checking on their walks for anything out of the ordinary and kept watch on each others property.

The police were informed within hours of the travellers arriving to a new site (they kept switching sites but staying in our area). Community Support officers patrolled the area and the parks trust rangers also did patrols of the paddocks. We even had local security firm come and agree to do patrols of the paddocks for free and put up signs on the gates to deter criminals.

Of course the measures were not infallible and we did have a chain a padlock stolen. Thieves actually broke down the fencing to remove the padlock and chain from next to the gate. The parks trust rangers thought it was an attempt to test how easily they could break in and how quickly we’d respond. The rangers phoned around and arranged for contractors to replace broken items and we texted them the crime reference number after we telephoned the police and the parks trust sent the police the images of the damage via their mobile to use to support a criminal damage claim as well as theft if the criminal is ever caught.

Since then nothing further has happened. The parks trust are considering installing CCTV surveillance on that area if there’s any further trouble and the police are using the local paper to inform people to keep a look out and raise awareness. The travellers have now been moved on by the police so we’re keeping our fingers crossed that they don’t return.

I do love the humanity I see displayed around me – both on-line where digital media affords different and new types of community interaction and in the real world where people use ubiquitous and ambient technology, mobile phones,digital cameras and text alerts to help the community. This type of community has existed for thousands of years but the wonder is how the newer technology has become an integral element of the community spirit.

Plus ca change

I’ve been using Google+ for a while now and I’m starting to build up a bit of stickability with it. There are already millions of guides and resources building up around it, a bit like the buzz surrounding launch of an Apple product. Including Mashable resources, the Google+ guide and Professors use of Google+ in classrooms to name three I’ve read recently.

The launch of Google+ put me off a little, because it was much like that of Google Wave in that there was a kind of limited public release surrounded by lots of PR and buzz. Luckily they moved quickly to a more open release as I was complaining that the whole concept of circles seems diminished if you can’t share with other Google people who are excluded from the release.

Lets start with Circles…

I enjoy the circle concept for allowing me to place people and share with different groups. I don’t on the whole enjoy categorising people though and I started to try it at the beginning and quickly just moved everyone into my ‘friends’ circle. I have however more recently received some requests from people I don’t know so well and have set up a circle for them. I also move people between circles and so I’m becoming familiar with the paradigm. I do think it’s a bit like Grainne Conole said in her recent keynote at MoodleMOOT about the evolution of people and technology and I’m wondering how much I’m adapting my behaviour to suit the product.

There are ways to do ‘friend’ grouping within Facebook and friends of mine who are adept at Facebooking do set up groups to share specific things with. I’ve always said that I find the cognitive overhead of this a bit much for what are, in effect, just my public outpourings. In general within Google+ I tend to share with everyone but there have been occasions where I’ve selected groups to share with and so the intuitive method Google+ have devised to allow this may well mean that I start doing this more often and therefore the metaphor is more like one of entering different rooms or online forums where you pick the forum you want to post to and go there to do it.

The streams are quite Twitter like, although at the moment more like Facebook because there aren’t too many people posting however I expect as the numbers grow the ‘streams’ will really start flowing and managing that will be like dipping in with twitter. I’m sure that Google have done testing to see that under heavy usage the important stuff does actually surface using the +1 concept and the fact that you can select the groups (circles) to view but I don’t think there’s enough usage yet to really get the impression of how this will pan out.

I like the fact that you can post longer posts than with Twitter. Twitter is good in limiting you to say thing succinctly but there are times when you need more words to express yourself than Twitter allows easily. I’m very verbose though (as you can tell from this post!). The lack of limit though means that there is more scope for pedagogic  application.

What about Hangouts?

I tried using the hangout feature (not sure that I like the name!) but quickly came unstuck as the whole thing crashed on me. I later discovered (thanks to colleagues who investigated further) that the problems arose because of the local firewalls at work that blocked me from hanging-out. I think this may be a problem for Google if they want to get it used more widely as corporate firewalls will simply not allow it. I’m not generally one for social video sharing as I prefer to mong around in scruffy clothes and unkempt hair when using social sites at home and wouldn’t want the effort of having to become presentable to chat to people. Note to Lord Sugar – That’s why the Amstrad video phone never took off.

So how does it shape up overall?

I like the integration with other Google products, this may well be the killer move since so many people use Gmail or Google Docs regularly. I think that Google+ mixed with Google Apps for Education for example will make a very interesting a dynamic suite for constructivist learning.

I think that on a simplistic level Google have done something that could be considered as much of a social experiment as it is a technology breakthrough. Are people evolving to think more overtly about the groupings they share information with or do they just want to be public and open with everything as they can with Twitter?

I’m still unsure about whether I’ll be sticking with Google+ in the long-term as I tend to spend most of my ‘cognitive overhead’ time in Twitter and even then most of that as a consumer rather than a producer of information, I especially like reading the postings by my peers but also like the feeds coming from tech news services etc. This flow is important to me. What Google + allows though is the movement of information easily between social groups and this may become something extremely useful. It will require the evolution of people and product and it will also require a tipping point where organisations start adopting it so that we get a mixture of social space and feeds of useful information.

For me the jury is still out but I’ve stuck with it for over a week and I logged into it before either Twitter or Facebook this morning so perhaps that is a sign of things to come.

I’d like to know what other people think of it.

Nevolution

Nevolution = Evolution through networking

Borg - Are we evolving into them?

Since listening to a keynote by Grainne Conole recently at MoodleMOOT I’ve been thinking about the concept of people and technology co-evolving. It’s not that profound a concept really and links to a previous post about the “hidden influence of social networks” we adapt to technology probably more profoundly that the technology adapts to us.

In the case of Twitter this is becoming somewhat of a concern to me because I’m starting to become the type of person who will try to make his posts witty and engaging (perish the thought), this leads to a tendency to exaggerate or enhance. You have this kind of hyper-reality dynamic played out in Twitter where there are the seedlings of truth but couched in the attention grabbing advertising blurb that gets them noticed, you then run the risk of becoming obsessed by ego rather than the topic. It’s not true of all interactions of course, and there is a lot of very good factual information provided without hype, but I’ve been on twitter now for a number of years and it’s only recently that I’ve started noticing the ego-centricity of Twitter.

I think blogging is similarly an egocentric method of communicating and I remember when Martin Weller first encouraged me to blog many years back I was concerned at the time about it being all a bit of an ego massaging exercise. Perhaps that is one of the reasons that when I started my blog I tried deliberately to blog about things that I’d refer back to and find useful for me and my work so treated it like a diary and reminder. A “To-Do” of research ideas. I did originally intend to blog about all things but technology is the predominate subject within many of my posts and perhaps it because my “other life” is one I’m still not comfortable in sticking into blog posts because that does seem rather egotistical. I do occasionally do put family stuff up on Facebook.

So that leads me to another evolutionary trend which is that I’ve noticed now that I’m CATEGORISING my online persona and using different media to reflect different parts of myself and to interact in different ways with different groupings of people. In Facebook the club of followers is quite narrow and when people are flagged to me as “mutual friends” that perhaps I should friend, I don’t tend to do that unless I have a close connection with them in the real world.

So Facebook is, for me, only a group of real friends and close colleagues, and where I feel safe to share personal information.

Twitter on the other hand is more like a pub where I have some close friends that I’m out with and where there are various other interesting people who I know or ‘follow’, some of which are celebs and where listening to them is amusing. The pub persona also means that I do a bit of boasting and bragging and ‘hyper-reality’ is the norm.

Blogging for me is that part of me that wants to remember things which I find useful and may also be useful to others, so my use of blogging is a kind of therapeutic method for me to relieve myself of some thought that I’ve been struggling to articulate. It is like revision classes where I’m repeating stuff that I may have mentioned in class (in a tweet or on Facebook) and trying to explain it, mainly to myself, so that I can work out if it’s got any validity.

This persona building is happening constantly and it’s evolving over time. I also have my “linkedIn” and my “academia.edu” and various other elements of myself expressed online.

How much though is the media I’m engaging in changing me? …am I becoming ‘hyper-real’?

Dark clouds ahead?

I have been considering the issues of betting the future or your organisation on a commoditized cloud based-approach.

I’ve tweeted many times about the benefits of cloud and how were exploring those at the OU. It’s always interesting though when things come along that wake you up to some obvious dangers.

Organisations lose their autonomy and right of decision making when moving to cloud providers.

Take for example the cull of Ubertwitter, this article by Dave Winer sums it up nicely. In it he says…

“They [twitter] sent two wakeup calls to their users:

1. Hey it would be safer to use our client to access Twitter.

2. We will kill your use of Twitter if it suits us. “

Why is it important? – Well taking the control of your users outside of a carefully crafted institutional environment and leaving it in the hands of a for profit commercial organisation does bring risks and one of those is that they have the power to decide how and which users access their site. You only have to look at the Google censorship row in China to see that big organisations can cause big problems for governments, that in itself can cause problems for organisations who rely on those services to reach learners in countries such as China.

As well as institutional loss of control there are also individual loss of control issues with cloud. Summed up by Richard Stallman with regard to Chrome OS (again I’ve blogged about this being potentially very powerful in past posts). Another post by John Honeyball talks about the “thorough data rogering” of Twitter and the fact that some cloud providers are still not giving guarantees about where data is being held.

Imagine how embarrassing and difficult it would be for example if an organisation had recommended UberTwitter to it’s clients (learners) and then found them cast adrift (and perhaps unaware of being adrift). I’m most concerned though that to work in a loosely-coupled distributed way organisations must take a significant risk over ceding the right of access, delivery and protection of information for their community. If you get into bed with one of the big providers and then they piss off a country you lose a potentially huge market and also remove access to anyone currently studying from there. It’s a risk.

Hidden Influence of Social Networks

I’ve been interested for the past few years in the inference that can be done using publicly available information. The web means that people nowadays give quite a bit of information away freely in their public profiles. There are now a number of tools which automatically attempt to link peoples user accounts together based on profile information provided and there is a lot of other information that is picked up through the routes and links that people click through and make determinations about the type of person, sometimes referred to as social graph privacy.

I found the article “Eight Friends Are Enough” from a group of researchers at Cambridge interesting because, using data provided from Facebook, it seems to support the claims that much can be inferred by the information provided by the person and by their peers (friends). I’ve seen various media articles using this research to make bigger claims for example there was an article in last week’s Sunday Times about how governments are using this type of information for political gain, removing dissident factions and controlling populations. Our own government for example is conspicuously scanning email traffic looking for terrorist threats.

It will be interesting to see how things pan out in the future. I already know that for example I have spent money buying things that were brought to my attention through services designed to target advertising to me based on my previous preferences. That’s a small and some would say innocuous example of how information is used. Humans are influenced by others, the ‘wisdom of crowds’ can sometimes mean that large numbers follow a direction because they see ‘trending’ on Twitter or highlighted on Facebook. Is this any different from reading it in print? - I think the difference is that if you think enough of your friends have liked something you may give it extra gravitas. So the more of the social network we engage in the more our individualism may get polluted? - Or perhaps it no different from going to the pub and agreeing with people just to keep them happy?

Certainly the web opens opportunities for social influence marketing, and consequently for other uses of that information.

Here’s an interesting video on YouTube by Nicholas Christakis: The hidden influence of social networks

Hmm. Ripples in the pond.

Cities Turn To Rubble

I’ve been reading articles over the past year by a number of people amongst them John Naughton, Luis Villazon and Stephen Baxter who have all give some views about how the current technology is influencing our society. Stephen Baxter wrote a fantastic piece in BBC Focus magazine a few months back about it which was a vision of how people will work in small communities and the idea of cities will just that since they will have broken down and the people dispersed. 

Machu Picchu

I do like considering how the technology in our society influences us both on a daily basis and also in a more ambient and subtle way over a long period to make changes that are felt across the globe. A good example of this is the way people have integrated mobile phones into their lives. Love them or hate them they now form part of our connected presence. I regularly use my iPhone to pick up emails and to book events or browse the web when I’m on the move. I see people using their phones all the time. This is not just a western but a global phenomenon. 

There are potentially much bigger changes however happening across our society and in western culture the economic downturn and destabilization of transport services through industrial action in the UK is influencing people to think seriously about video conferencing and conducting meetings remotely (VR, Unified Comms, etc.) – A good example within the OU of this is that last year we hosted a big conference called “Making Connections” which was well attended. This year it has been decided to run this as a “virtual event” and Martin Weller is leading the organisation of the event which takes place this Summer and I’m contributing my knowledge and support with the technologies for it and Elluminate are partnering with us to provide the event. There will be a number of nationally and internationally renowned keynotes however I’ve been asked to keep quiet about the lineup until it’s officially launched.

 

The whole event will be organised to be available totally online and will be location neutral. I’ll be interested to see how successful it is but it’s just one of thousands of meetings that now take place in the virtual rather than by a traditional face to face method and academia is actually behind commerce in embracing the use of new technology to support distributed meetings. 

Other influencers are the green issues and the combination of green and economic is driving people to consider purchasing locally, reducing their travel costs and to grow their own food and become more self sufficient. I was at a wedding a few months ago with friends who are scattered across the globe, with ages ranging from mid twenties to mid forties, and the conversation turned naturally during the meal to the things we’re all growing ourselves. I was amazed that almost everyone at the table was growing their own fruit and/or veggies in some cases in such large quantities that they were providing it for their local community. 

So whilst I don’t think that cities are going to turn to rubble overnight (you only need to look at the population figures for greater London to see that cities are still doing very well thank you!) I do think that over a long period of time the things that are currently moving people subtly in a particular direction, using cycles rather than driving, buying locally, travelling less, communicating online rather than in person etc. will impact more on our society on how we live. 

traditional farming

The idea of smaller well connected  ’village like’ groupings, forming their own socio-economic communities and becoming much more self sufficient is one that harks back to the wartime but also seems to be in tune with how the world is shaping up today.

Clowning Around?

I’ve hardly blogged at all recently (been on twitter lots) - There’s a debate raging about whether twitter kills blogging. We’ve been having the debate using cloudworks which is our very nice home grown system and I intend to give my opinions of that in another post, but suffice to say I love it.

…anyhow back to my point. By far the most traffic to my blog was generated from my post about Why Clowns are Dangerous. This has in fact also spawned a lot of quite vitriolic and IMHO (!) self opinionated comments, these tend to be light on research and factual evidence but heavily packed with personal insults.

From this I summise:-

1. Michael Wesch is spot on in his analysis about behaviours around anonymity and rage. Particularly people  think they know me from what is a very incomplete set of criteria by which to judge….and for the record my sister runs a circus troupe and regularly dresses in a clown costume. There is a recognised condition around clowns and their fear. Stephen Kings “IT” is directly playing on that association.

2. Clowns are not something to make fun of. Clowns take themselves very seriously.

3. My sister runs a circus troupe (performing arts and trapeze and the works) so there is a clown in my family

4. The more bizarre the blog post the more traffic it generates. My second most popular post is on silent vacuum cleaners. Therefore ridding the world of scary clowns and noisy vacuum cleaners is likely to make someone very popular.

5. Most people don’t get irony. Or humour. Going back to 1, this is probably to do with the other 55% non verbal communication. Or it could be that people only expect blogs to be ‘either’ comical or serious and not a mixture.

6. People make assumptions. All the time. We forget past things that don’t fit those assumptions and concentrate on the latest things that do. Derren Brown would have a field day. Or am I making assumptions?

Diddit and other online badness

I’ve come across Diddit.com which is suggested to be the next big thing for adventure junkies and others who like to brag. Those in the ‘know’ are claiming it’s going to be the next Facebook. Basically people can post up ’brags’ or diddits about things they’ve done and also about things they want to do (wanna dos). They can also write stories. I think it’s very appealing and I get the idea of it. I think it would be great to have a SocialLearn strand to this and it definitely has a nice social dimension to it.

I’ve read two articles recently about the perils of online environments. The most recent by Catherin Blythe  in the Independent. These things are interesting to read and interpret but the Indy in particular has been going on a bit of a facebook rant and I’m not sure I agree. I think that online interactions can add to the interactions you have in the real world and enhance peoples lives. They should replace those though and maybe that’s where the problems arise. Online interactions are less passive than watching TV, so you gain something over TV from them. Similarly face to face offer opportunities over those so again you gain a richer interaction. Telephony for example has been around for generations and so we’ve always have a level of remote connectivity.

I feel that the problems are not from technologies themselves but how we use them. I think that we need to develop the correct protocols for new technologies to embed them correctly into our (and others) lives. I can go for periods without using Twitter but when I do use it I value it. My followers number only 50 and are people I either know in real life or would expect to know in real life through work or other means. I don’t have any fantasies about having a huge following and making eclectic friendships online, mainly because I’m very happy with my real world friends and I feel ‘grounded’ with that group. but by virtual interactions enhance that experience and draw me closer to them.

I do however agree that abuse of TV and prolonged passive web browsing could damage peoples ability to correctly make inferences. I think over use of any single media is dangerous - but that’s not down to the media, it’s down to the people.

Reducing the Digital Divide

Two things caught my eye that may help with reducing the digital divide.

The first is called Sakshat, announced by the Indian government as the worlds cheapest laptop, which some predict to sell for £7. (by the way Sakshat apparently means “before your eyes”). I have been a slight sceptic when it comes to these schemes in the past, simply because I think that those that have saved up £7 and are in the lower socio-economic bands will not necessarily spend that £7 on a computer, they may still have other considerations, however it will undoubtedly bring the prospect of computing and education to larger group of people and that’s no bad thing.

I think I mentioned before in my blogs that when I met Martin Bean (formerly of Microsoft and soon to be the Open University’s  new Vice Chancellor) he was calling out to us to explore global education provision for the X million programmers in India who would like proper training and accreditation but who are not able to receive that through traditional Indian Universities because there is not enough capacity to meet the demand. So extending the hand of education to free or low cost resources to large number would be a fair way for a University to widen participation without hurting (because additional volume makes up for low margins).

The second thing to catch my eye was Google’s latest toys including Latitude their new phone/map social gadget. Google made several announcements recently including offline for gmail and docs (as part of Google Apps). perhaps I’m banging the Google drum too much these days, many say they’re in line to be the next Microsoft. I however think that creating services to allow for people with poor bandwidth or connectivity and to provide services for large groups and through ‘ubiquitous’ methods and devices. This can only be a good thing and reduce the digital divide.

I’m particular keen to try out Latitude as it’s got incredible potential in my opinion for education, both in terms of ‘contextual awareness and enhancement’ and also the social and peer group interaction (like mini twitter streams amongst people who are geographically or otherwise connected to each other).  I’ll try it out and let you know.

Future of Web Apps 2008

This isn’t a philosophical rant about what constitutes the future of web apps but rather a quick plug for the extremely informative FOWA conference which takes place in October (8th to 10th) in London. I’ve already booked my place and I thoroughly recommend it to others.

These conferences can sometimes be all hype and no substance but this one is full of great content. If you still don’t believe me then read my Blog post on last years event.

I’ll see you there.

I’m registered as both an academic and a manager this year, that should give me a confusing and interesting choice of ‘buddies’!