Social Computing/Learning
That all being said, let me get to the purpose of this post, my questions for the week.
Though short, Guernsey’s, In the Lecture Hall, a Geek Chorus made me think. Let me give you a brief context. I was reading the assignments for the week between sessions at EDUCAUSE’s Learning Initiative’s annual meeting in Orlando, FL (it was cold and windy and even snowed!). All of her talk about “back-channel” communication came to life in each and every session I attended. I a ma big Twitter user and am constantly searching for #s of a given conference to follow others discussion during a presentation. In fact, I have been known to monitor twitter feeds and respond during a presentation I am giving—it still surprises people when I say, “mrjones asks a very relevant question…” From my perspective you can’t get more social—let people “talk” it generates buzz and great ideas. When I later read about Golub’s work, I thought, “What a great idea! Display the Twitter feed right next to the screen (that will have anything BUT PPT on it) and embrace this back channel activity!” On a quick aside, I also notice (more so at this conference than any other one I have been to) that it is difficult to “know” people between mediums. When people were introducing themselves at this conference it was, “Hello, I am Kimberly Arnold, the Educational Assessment Coordinator for Teaching and Learning Technologies at Purdue University, aka kimberlyarnold on twitter.” People would also introduce themselves with SL name etc. My question is really a poll of opinion—have any of you had similar experiences with identity management? I begin to wonder if social media will become far too overwhelming as it continues to grow?
My second question/observation is also about the conference—sorry, what can I say it was one of those really exciting places to be where everything anyone says is a potential leering opportunity. One of the “themes” of the conference—still years after its “birth”—is defining Web 2.0 and social computing. The theme of the conference this year was “Social Learning in the 21st Century.” Imagine my surprise when I get the conference and discover that there is a substantial amount of program time dedicated to clicker and tablet (PCs) presentations. How in the world does one justify a clicker as a form of social computing? So I applied O’Reilly’s Seven Principles (is 7 a magic number like Chickering and Gamson’s 7 Principles?): 1) I am not aware of, nor do I imagine there ever could be, a clicker system that was fully web-based and not based on software; 2) while the data sets may get bigger, they cannot et “richer,” after all, there is a finite number of possible answers.; 3) trusting users as co-developers—trust me on this one, there are no clicker companies that “users” to be co-developers, they need us to need them; 4) the only feedback clickers provide are letter/number responses and results. Clicker systems do not engender collective knowledge; 5) clickers also do not leverage the software above a single level of device—each student needs their own clicker and each instructor needs their own receiver, full stop; 6) the user interfaces of all clicker ssymes I have seen (and I have seen many) are clunky and unintuitive. In a nutshell, GUIs are not top priorities for most clicker/audience response systems. How after all of this can EDUCAUSE, one of the foremost professional associations on technology in education have so many session dedicated to clickers/tablets? Perplexed by this, I once again turned to Twitter—in less than 10 minutes I got 14 responses from different IT professionals, varying in opinion. Have any of you ever run into a similar problem i.e. having issues with the “ever changing” definition of a a context and how do you handle it?
