Here are just a few items for consideration when thinking about the use of social software (such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, photo-sharing services, social bookmarking and annotation services) that I’ve come across or thought about:

What new challenges and barriers does the use of social software create, or what challenges and barriers does the use of social software reinforce?

I’ve written about this topic in terms of Zeno’s Paradox; social interaction, collaborative work, and the community-based emergent categorization practice of tagging are all important and useful literacies to develop, and may allow for greater access and participation. With tagging there are even quite a few interesting articles about the more cognitive aspects of the practice (e.g., Tagwebs, Flickr, and the Human Brain and A cognitive analysis of tagging). But there is the potential in collaborative environments for individuals’ weaknesses to be reinforced; as Drs. Eide write in Commenting on Commentary: Interdisciplinary People vs. Teams?,

Many of the most successful innovative personalities are quite lopsided in their cognitive and social abilities. In fact, sometimes very smart people can make big mistakes by diluting their native talents by brooding and working too hard on their weaknesses rather than devoting themselves to their strengths.

In a collaborative environment, there is the danger that the failure of an individual to effectively participate will go unnoticed as those around him or her essentially pick up the slack. This can reinforce this individual’s feelings of low self-worth, breeding more failure. Members of the social network and an educator/moderator should be on the lookout for such scenarios and encourage every individual to contribute so that their strengths are accentuated and to value each and every contribution. It’s not an easy thing to do.

On a slightly more technical note, many of the social software and services utilize a technology called Ajax; while it is very useful for most people, it should be noted that when implemented incorrectly, Ajax poses an access problem for those learners who are blind or have reduced vision and use screen readers.

Again, I am certainly not advocating that we should disregard social software and the affordances such technology brings to the learning table; I am just posing questions to think about when planning and utilizing social software for learning.

Does the use of social software connect back to the learners’ experiences and “real-world” environment (and yours)?

Largely through this blog, I am hoping to encourage educators to think about the implications of the educational process — a concept that is often left out of the discussion of schooling, learning, and pedagogy. More often than not, the discussion ends at “Learners need to know things” or “Learners need to know how to do things” without taking the next step of asking why. What social, political, and cultural implications are triggered by schooling and learning for both the learner and for society as a whole?

Ulises Mejias asks many of these questions and responds with his idea of a pedagogy of nearness. Drawing on the work of Paulo Freire, he posits that social software is a way to foster praxis. He describes praxis as an emerging and evolving “prescription for action,” formed by the confluence of reflection, interaction, and action. Interaction by itself, or even interaction and reflection, falls short in this framework. Furthermore, praxis keeps with the idea of nearness, that is, the relevant and imminent; activities within this framework include the idea that there can be communications about and communications with (ideas, causes, concepts) on a variety of levels: the personal, local, and global.

As Ulises writes in A Nomad’s Guide to Learning and Social Software,

…The challenge for social software users is to contribute to a social cause in a way that enhances and aligns with—not disrupts or fragmentizes—other forms of activism.

Ensuring that the benefits of social software reach all circles of society will require that we focus not on the virtuality of social interactions, but on their reality. For a long time we have lived with the misconception that what we do online is virtual, and that since virtuality is a lesser form of reality (or a higher form, depending on who you ask), the consequences of our actions there have little to do with the ‘real’ world…. Nearness, in the sense I am using it, does not refer to spatial and temporal distance, but to immanence: the desire for connection and understanding, the nomad’s learning as becoming.

Does the use of social software the encourage the development of depth of thinking, knowing, and becoming in addition to breadth?

Avant-garde theater director Richard Foreman laments in The Pancake People, Or, The Gods Are Pounding My Head,

But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available”. A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become “pancake people”—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

As young, impressionable, and forgetful as I am, a member of Generation X who remembers a world without the Internet and instant access and communications as well as a participant in and product of the “Information Age,” straddling nostalgia and prospection, these sentences strike a chord.

Connectivism is a theory which has spread far and wide across the educational blogosphere. The basis of connectivism, in short, is that learning can occur across people and networks and is the process of drawing connections between nodes. Far be it from me to deny that such skills and literacies are important, and the emerging nature of technology is making such practices ever more vital.

But is the idea that “the pipe is more important than the content within the pipe,” or that there are joys in shallow thinking the only way to conceptualize learning in the information age? Could there exist both breadth and depth? I am of the opinion that the two are not mutually exclusive, nor is it a “friend or foe” situation. As educators, we need to develop the skills to be able to recognize the affordances and drawbacks of both and to develop activities which encourage the development of both ways of thinking. We need both the cathedral and the bazaar.

*****

And that — after three days of on-again, off-again writing, punctuated by the necessities of real life with family — are my two cents. I hope that I’ve presented some questions to think about and to foster discussion, dialogue, and practice.

Apparently, I’m not. I found this wonderful podcast, The Myth of Multi-Tasking. Merlin Mann of 43Folders posits that when one says they are multitasking, they are really just slicing their attention into smaller and smaller chunks. It is well worth listening to the podcast (it is on the short side), he talks about the self-perceived ability to multitask:

We’ve really been habituated over the years to thinking of ourselves, we should basically be these parallel processing computers and our conscience mind should be able to be in ten places at once….

There is alot of pressure to “multitask.” I’ve even been described by a former supervisor as a good multitasker. But I still feel quite overwhelmed, so Merlin’s podcast really speaks to me.

So is there any scientific basis behind Merlin’s astute observations? As a matter of fact, there is. I did a little digging and found the report Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Provides New Constraints on Theories of the Psychological Refractory Period associated with an American Psychological Society’s press release entitled We Weren’t Made to Multitask. It turns out that Merlin’s observations are actually validated by fMRI studies; as a person moves back-and-forth between tasks in a “multitasking” environment, they are “passive-queuing” the unfocused tasks rather than “active-monitoring.” The authors further discovered,

…no increase in the sort of activity that would be involved in keeping two thought processes separate when subjects had to switch faster. This suggests that there are no complicated mechanisms that allow people to perform two tasks at once. Instead, we have to perform the next task only after the last one is finished.

Could it be that even slicing our attention into tiny little slices could be detrimental to the task at hand? Likely, as the more we switch, the more we passively queue — rather than actively — engage with the task. This, I believe, has an impact as to how we approach learning and teaching, as we look for ways to encourage active learning.

But for us as people, Merlin gently reminds us,

…once you realize you can only ever do one thing at a time, an amazing thing happens. You discover that all this anxiety that has been acting as a spackle in your brain to turn all of your tasks into one ginormous task, the anxiety goes away. Suddenly, the tasks break down back into the single activities that they really are. And your brain spends more time on creative efforts instead of generating more anxiety for that monster in your head. And that can be really powerful.

George Siemens of the Connectivismtivism blog — almost always thought provoking — just posted an item entitled “The Joys of Shallow Thinking….” The idea behind this post is to move the skills of, as one commenter puts it, “scanning and gisting” into a primary position in the learning sphere. Will Richardson, who seems to have an overall positive view of “shallow thinking,” writes,

I’ve started to feel guilty about the way I read these days. My wife gives me grief because I don’t spend as much time with books as I used to. And in some ways I miss that.

The Knowledging across life’s curriculum blog refers to a techno-determinism aspect of connectivism. I would agree with this analysis; posts proclaiming the joys of shallowness of thought would seem to support this. To remind us all that the Internet may not be ushering an age of new ways of interacting, communicating, and doing things, “…only about 10 percent connectivisme on the planet are familiar with the Internet and what it can do,” according to Taking the Internet to the People by Tony Salvador and John Sherry, two ethnographers for Intel. These two scientists describe stories people in developing countries when introduced the Internet solving immediate and necessary problems, often for their personal and economic well-being. They do not have the luxury — or the need — of scanning and gisting. They are not participating in shallow thinking; they are deeply, fully immersed, learning and doing for their own benefit, the benefit of their family, or of their community.

Instead of designing instruction (which we assume will lead to learning), we should be focusing on designing ecologies in which learners can forage for knowledge, information, and derive meaning. [...] An ecology is dynamic, rich, and continually evolving. The entire system reacts to changes – internal or external. An ecology gives the learner control – allowing her to acquire and explore areas based on self-selected objectives. The designer of the ecology may still include learning objectives, but they will be implicit rather than explicit.

Once again, I find it hard to disagree in theory with the sentiment. I wonder if “designing” a learning ecology, however, is the proper term. John Seely Brown, who I would give credit for coming up with the term and concept in a learning context, similarly discusses ecologies in terms of design.

It seems that ecologies, learning or otherwise, exist whether or not educators design them. The idea of “designing” an ecology, to me, seems like it still imbues educators with power — not necessarily the same kind of obviously explicit power inherent in a didactic classroom setting (at least to astute obsevers), yet magistral nonetheless. In some ways, the very subtle and nuanced power structure in a “designed” ecology may be more dangerous.

If, as educators, we are to start thinking about learning ecologies, it seems that the role we assume should be to recognize and participate in these ecologies and act as attractors, borrowing from dynamic systems lingo. Rather than “design,” educators should be up to the task of fostering and encouraging connections and especially recognizing the possibility of new possibilities as the process unfolds.

Another potential pitfalls of a “designed” ecology, and this is a perspective I have adopted just after reading Education and Event: Thinking Radical Pedagogy in the Era of Standardization by Daniel Cho and Tyson Lewis, is that there is a danger of expecting “truth” (whatever that means) to be contained within the system. They argue, successfully in my mind, that educators and learners should agree to together seek out “truth” in the world, thereby transforming it. A “designed” learning ecology could be seen as a “Practice Field” while a fully participatory learning ecology with educators as attractors could be seen as a “Community of Practice” (the Practice Field/Community of Practice distincition I hope to discuss in a future post).

Perhaps this whole semantic and wholly academic argument is based on the fact that as an American I’m touchy about the intersection of “design” and “ecologies” because of our national intelligent design debate….

According to Wikipedia,

Trope comes from the Greek word, tropos, which means a “turn”, as in heliotrope, a flower which turns toward the sun. We can imagine a trope as a way of turning a word away from its normal meaning, or turning it into something else.

In the same vein, the Greasemonkey script Trope provides an opportunity for the user to turn to a new type of source based on a descrete packet of information, the tag. A user can start out looking at a photograph tagged with the word “outdoors,” just as an example, on Flickr , and easily be “turned to” a podcast discussing “outdoors” and environmentalism on Odeo.

These scripts are not perfect. I will be improving them over time, and encourage people to check out the “To Do” List and take a stab as well.

One particular sentence in his introductory paper on connectivism really stuck out for me, and seemed rather broad and a little too utopian in nature:

The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe.

Hmmm. Even though I have previously stated that dialogue should really be the primary driver for learning, I wasn’t quite ready to give up on the importance of content. While I consider myself “content agnostic,” I feel that content and purpose are certainly intimately intertwined, allowing for meaning making in a much more important self- and society-serving manner. Putting the focus on the conduit is almost as dangerous as putting the focus solely on the content. Anthony Cocciolo points to this idea in his review of the book Everything Bad is Good for You:

…Problem-solving is only one aspect of life (and in my opinion, not particularly the most important). Too often, contemporary discourses, backed by psychology and cognitive science, over-emphasize the importance of problem solving skills to the detriment of other aspects. I came to this awareness through my years as a Computer Science undergraduate, where the program demanded constant problem solving and the students were more than willing and particularly apt in fulfilling this demand. Despite their aptitude for solving problems, the students were one sided: they could solve a problem, yet failed to formulate a vision for society where they took into account why such problems were being solved. Questions such as why x technological widget should be produced and what is its value to humanity were rarely asked.

This is why we continuously must look back while moving forward. In my mind, the work of John Dewey can provide a useful framework for thinking about purposes in learning and education, as well as that of Paulo Friere. Learning should serve a purpose, and should not be relegated to only content recall, problem solving, nor information sifting and sorting (even if its collaborative).

Even George Siemens has made mention of these problems, albeit maintaining a pipe-focused outlook, while discussing “centering agents”:

What happens when we no longer share centering agents? What happens when all of my information comes only from sources that promote view points I already hold? I am concerned that this process is creating a serious divide in the ability of people to dialogue and share common understandings. Now, if I’m so inclined, I can listen only to perspectives of my own political party. If I follow Rush Limbaugh or Daily Kos, I can receive a constant message that assures me that I am right, and the other side is wrong. I think this is dangerous. The breakdown of common understanding and dialogue poses a real risk to the civility of society.

No one was concerned about what the Exxon Valdez was carrying until she grounded on Bligh Reef. The conduit, content, and purpose are all connected; we need to consider them all.

The Flickr Tag Convergence Script

A contribution to Web 2.0. Flickr Tag Convergence is a Greasemonkey script for the Mozilla Firefox browser which allows you to search for any tag on a Flickr photo page on either del.icio.us or Technorati with one mouse click. The script places small icons (one for del.icio.us and one for Technorati) in front of each photo tag (see the screenshot). Clicking on one of these icons will launch the appropriate search.

You can start using this script by: