i’m sorry, i just don’t know

A new study by MarketingVox found that 1 in every 4 online users are using social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin, etc…  About half of those log on every day.  Let me repeat that… every day.  Now that is some “stickiness.”  These folks come back daily to engage with their friends and colleagues, by playing games, joining groups, finding and sharing resources, and build out their online identity and reputation.  If only educational software had such stickiness.  Really, can we please start leveraging these systems to support teaching and learning?  Please?

Let the fear of online predators in MySpace be gone, or at least be managed in a less reactive manner.  I can’t tell you how many teachers and administrators I’ve spoken to who just see these environments as the devil… unable to see their potential for teaching and learning.

I attended several sessions about wikis and gaming in education so far at ICLS.  I’ve noticed a couple of themes… First, I’m finally starting to see researchers using existing tools to support learning (second life, wiki software, etc).  Perhaps the tools are finally in a stable enough state for the kinds of projects researchers are trying to conduct.  Or, perhaps researchers decided to put their resources to better use and instead of building systems from scratch, modifying existing systems to fit their needs.  Several of the wiki projects I’ve heard about did just that… they like the idea of wikis, but needed to modify existing software before it was useful.

Vanessa Peters from the University of Toronto used wikis to facilitate collaborative knowledge building among high school students.  Two things were of most interest to me.

1)Students who participated in the wiki knowledge creation project scored significantly higher on assessments than students who did not - It’s nice to see an actual finding that supports what we’ve all believed since wikis came about.

2)On average there were 50 revisions before students got to the actual content creation on any given page.  Things like changing the title, formatting, etc… before any content was added.  This actually mirrors what it takes to get me working on any piece of formal writing.  I will spend an hour getting the font right, choosing just the right words for the title, setting up my page numbers, etc.  I’ve long since accepted this as an odd quirk I have, but maybe it’s not just me.  Perhaps there is some value in that time spent “setting things up” that I’ve overlooked or taken for granted.  Maybe I’m setting up the second stimulus that Yrjö Engeström talked about on Wednesday.

One way to look at online social activity, via our lovely Corrine Beaumont, the Mayor of Lemonland.  This model includes user profiles, tools used by each, the process of locating and sharing online resources, and the types of “flowers” online.  (You’ll have to actually look at the image to sort that last bit out :)  Read corrijo’s discussion of the image.

Treasuremytext.com will archive and share your text messages. Sign-up is a bit confusing, but for the person who enjoys being the object of voyeurism, this is the app for you. I’ve signed up, but have yet to successfully get my text feed working. And because I know how spectacularly interesting my life is, you’re all welcome to subscribe to my text feed. I’ll be a little puzzled, frankly, if anyone really does.

So, beyond all of that, I’d love to get my hands on this data and do a little discourse analysis. There is so much reactionary stuff out there where people are worried that texting is making our youth stupid. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that all of these people are over 30 and have no particular use or experience with the wonders of texting. In my humble opinion, this assumption is just that… an assumption. In my humble opinion, texting, like I/M is just another literacy. I heard about a study where they tried to see if texting is an addiction. For heaven’s sake. What is it that caused the older folk to freak out whenever a new, pervasive technology comes along? Is it really that threatening?

(4 hours later…)
Revised Review: In order to use this service, it looks like I have to actually go through the step of forwarding my text messages. Boo. Hiss. I’m not going to ever do that. No one would. Give me apps that fit in nicely with what I already do or don’t give them to me at all.

via Dion Hinchcliffe…

Clay Shirky talks about what motivates people to participate in social media creation.

from blip.tv posted with vodpod

A recent report by G. Oliver Young from Forrester Research shows an increasing trend in organizations purchasing and using Web 2.0 tools (Blogs, wikis, widgets, podcasting software, etc.).

It is interesting that there seems to be a direct correlation between the size of the organization and whether or not they are actually buying Web2.0 apps. The larger the organization, the more likely it is to be buying or considering Web 2.0 applications.

via WebGuild

I’m not a programmer.  I’m a novice mash-upper.  I needed to figure out how to gather, aggregate, and publish the blog posts of community members to my existing website.  My constraints:  I couldn’t just set up a wordpress blog to do it.  I had to display this aggregation in our existing community website.  And, my current site did not support any additional forms.  So here’s how I did it…

1. We have a Society website up built on Wild Apricot that lets me set up members only pages.  I set up a “Submit your Blog” page there.
2. Since Wild Apricot has no API (boo!) into their data, I had to find an external form service, enter:  Wufoo.  The free account lets us build up to three forms.  They store the data (which I’m not concerned about because it is publicly available blogs) which we can access via an online API.
3. I manually (here’s the clunky part) add the feeds to Yahoo Pipes which publishes them out as one aggregated RSS feed.
4. This feed gets turned into a widget by me and Widgetbox.
5. I copy the code for the widget into my community site, and everything is right in the world.

Why a community site is good for an Association…  We want to be clear that we support collaborative engagement around issues relevant to our industry.  Only our MEMBERS can contribute to the conversation.  People are motivated to do this because it builds their online reputation- a powerful motivator as can be seen by the popularity of Web 2.0 apps that support online identity development and social presence (think Facebook- a multi-billion dollar company).

Widgetbox is an online repository of widgets for your website.  My favorites:

• Target Firefox Adsense - This widget only shows your firefox adsense to IE users.  So don’t bother your readers who are brilliant enough to use practically anything other than IE.  Besides, it’s only IE users who click on ads, right?
• Google Site Translator - Let people translate your site into their language.
• Meebo me - Chat with people on your site.

You can also “widgetize” your own blog or site to share with others, and produce or find iMix widgets that let you play mixes of music on your site.

Amy Webb is aggregating acquisitions of major players in the media/technology/web space.  You can subscribe to the feed, or get a pdf of the current state of things.  Am I the only one who notices that the Google list is quickly becoming longer than the Microsoft list?  Anyone looking for a  cool PhD project could do an analysis of this list as it evolves and  correlate that with the subsequent improvements in technology for actual humans.