Do we need Google+?

Posted by: Michael Paskevicius on July 22, 2011

Categories: Collaboration Tools, Educational Technologies, Learning and Knowledge Analytics, Research, South Africa

I love Google. Their tools have really changed my life, in many ways making information management a pleasure.  Now they’ve launched a new social network meant to help us organize our social life by categorizing our contacts into ‘circles’.  The circles are meant to let you control who you share content with.  Just as you might traditionally share a link, thought, picture, or video on Facebook or Twitter, now you can designate which circle of friends gets to see that content.  Makes sense right?  Some content you might want to share could be useful only to your work contacts, or even a select group within your work contacts.  So Google has given us the tools to do this, and I like many probably started building this social fabric around circles of friends.

Then I got to thinking about what I was doing and other recent experiments with Facebook.  After exporting my social data from Facebook a few weeks back I was able to computationally calculate groups of friends based on the number of connections they had within my network.  I then applied a size metric to the people in my social network who were most central to my network.  These techniques worked quite well allowing me to confirm many of the clusters that the diagram presented. The technique worked well and my network was well defined both geographically as well as by the type of social circle they existed in (eg. work, friends, acquaintances)  Below is a diagram of my social graph showing the well clustered groups of people in my network.

So I am beginning to wonder why I am deliberately now creating a new social graph in Google+.  I do find the ability to organize contacts into groups very useful, but if I can calculate these groups using a few simple social network analysis (SNA) techniques, I would rather do it that way.

In a perfect world, we would own our own social graphs.  It could work something like this: I export my social network from Facebook, Twitter, or whatever social network I have invested in; I calculated the identifiable social groups using a SNA tool like Gephi; and I can then apply that social graph to any other social network I am interested in. I can take my social graph and apply it to an image sharing site like Flickr to see which of my friends, contacts, colleagues or family have public photo collections online.

Rather than building a social network in many places (eg. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Friendster, WAYN… and the list goes on and will continue to grow:) wouldn’t it make more sense to open up the social graph standard so that it could be applied wherever we desire?

Just thinking out loud really, Ill still be playing with Google+ in the future.  I have not yet found it overly valuable though, my stream feels very heavy.  It’s lacking the simplicity that Twitter brought us by limiting updates to 140 characters.

 

VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)
| | No Comments »

Playing with Video Street View

Posted by: Michael Paskevicius on February 2, 2011

Categories: Educational Technologies, Research, South Africa

I just couldn’t resist blogging about this Wednesday morning find!

I often use Google Maps to explore maps or find places. When Google Maps launched street view I was able to explore cities I had never been to, return to places I have been in the past, and check out places that were very familiar to me. Streetview was an awesome addition to the Google Maps experience, as it gave another perspective to the exploration of a map. You could actually see what was happening at street level.

I am sure many have explored cities by Streetview, navigating along by pointing and clicking in the direction you wish to go. Now I see that GlobalVision 360° from Geneva, Switzerland have taken this a step further by enabling video street view for selected areas of the world! The experience is like being able to drive along streets around the world. But you don’t have to keep your hands on the wheel, which means you can look all around as you drive through the cities!

On first glance I couldn’t quite believe it! It was a bit of a surreal experience. It looks a lot like Google Streetview imagery. So when I dropped the street view marker and saw a woman walk across the street, I nearly dropped my coffee! The picture came to life and I was cruising through the streets of Zurich. If not mesmerizing enough, I then noticed the video controls, not only am I moving through the map, but I can also look around.

I thought this project might be using the Google street view imagery, but it looks like GlobalVision 360° has taken panoramic photo cars and captured their own images. I think they must have captured the imagery at a higher frame rate as the video is quite smooth for most locations. I compared the image of a location in Google Maps and Video Street View to check.

So the quality is much higher in Google Maps but Video Street View has really added to the experience.  Check out the video above for a walkthrough of the Video Street View experience.  Imagine if we had this at high quality for every area of the world!  I suspect and hope that Google will buy Video Street View and make this a reality!

So far Video Street View has captured driving experiences in Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam.  I would love to see Cape Town represented as it has such a stunning coastline!

VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 9.7/10 (3 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: +2 (from 2 votes)
| | Tags: | No Comments »

Personal Knowledge Management

Posted by: Michael Paskevicius on November 11, 2010

Categories: Educational Technologies, Knowledge Management, Research

Developing a conscious strategy for managing information to avoid feeling overloaded (information overload) is an important part of being a knowledge worker.  While it can be said that access to web 2.0 tools such as social networking and social media contribute to information overload, I believe that they may actually enable us to organize and navigate our personal learning environments which may help us avoid information overload.  Because we can customize most of our information inflows using web 2.0 tools, we have the opportunity to select the best possible channels of information.  The key to doing this is through the filtering of information that we encounter in our daily lives and the curation of valuable information for sense making.

Information Overload

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the shear wealth of information available to us?  Perhaps you feel overwhelmed with the volume of information you have to process on a daily basis?  Information is everywhere and in great abundance in our information age.  Making sense of all of this information in order to be productive members of society throughout our daily lives can be a struggle.  Frand and Lippincott (2002) suggest that the wealth of information coming at us on a daily basis can be classified under four broad themes.

Relevance: Which information available to us is most relevant for our context?  When you switch on your computer in the morning you have access to more information than any culture has ever had before.  Do you check your email, explore the news, check what’s hot on social media, or meander around the web aimlessly?  Relevance is also subjective as one will nearly always be able to access an abundance of information on any given subject, but a choice has to be made about which of that information is most relevant for the moment.

Solicited or unsolicited: Much of the information we have coming at us on a daily basis has not been requested.  We are constantly inundated with unwanted emails, phone calls, posted mail, as well as time burglars around the office.  One must develop strategies to deal with silencing unsolicited information inflows so that they do not disrupt our ability to digest relevant and valuable information.   Those precious moments that we spend making the decision to regard or disregard a bit of information are important considerations in personal knowledge management.

Flow rate: How quickly information is coming at a person. In certain disciplines people are required to deal with vast amounts of information in an incredibly short time.  One must have a strategy for dealing with high rates of information flow in order to make sense of information quickly when needed.  One must be able to quickly select what information is important for them and what can be dismissed.

Value: How valuable is the information we receive and how do we make decisions about what is and is not valuable.  What we subjectively consider valuable ultimately becomes categorized and treated as high value information as we deal with it.  With high flow rates of information this becomes even more challenging.

Determining relevance and value seem to be the key selection points for selecting which information we digest and which we choose to ignore.  Flow rate and the issue of unsolicited information appear to be challenges we face in selecting the most relevant and valuable information for digestion.

Coping with Information Overload

Frand and Lippincott (2002) go on to describe how we might manage some of our information using file systems (folders and files) to organize data and information we have stored on our hard drives.  The way in which one organizes their local hard drive can say a lot about how they deal with vast amounts of information.

Organizing information on hard drives might have been sufficient eight years ago when most digital information was stored and curated locally.  Now with an increasing amount of information existing in the cloud, new tools are needed to curate and keep track of what is valuable and relevant to our lives and where it is located, either locally or on the internet.  I choose to keep my most important nodes of information in the cloud as it often seems like the safest place to store valuable information. Plus I can access it from wherever I am as long as I have an internet connection.

Some of the tools we can use for personal knowledge management are identified in the image below.  They are organized here by utility.

Elements for constructing social learning environments from UpsideLearning via Harold Jarche

The tools that I use most often for managing my own knowledge network are outlined below.

Email inbox - I keep most of my work and personal conversations going through email.  My email inbox is a vast and rich source of information on conversations past.

Twitter- Twitter allows me to connect to people who I do not know, but am interested in.  Twitter has become one my richest streams of information as I can quickly get a sense of what people in my industry are talking about.  All tweeters who post junk are quickly removed from my subscriptions.  It takes hard work to select a valuable group of people to follow, but once you do you can get access to amazing information.  The other massive benefit of Twitter is that each tweet must be under 140 characters, this ensures that people are concise with their wording, allowing readers to quickly scan and filter then investigate or disregard.

Social networks (Facebook, Linkedin) – Useful for keeping in a pulse on what people are doing around me.  Amazingly people who have been a part of my life years ago still have the ability to say things on Facebook which are interesting to me.  This is because we come from similar contexts and culture.  Most information coming from Facebook  serves to entertain only.  Linkedin is a network of work contacts, I have not used it extensively as of yet.

Bookmarks - My bookmarks are stored in the cloud and are tagged using keywords.  I can quickly bookmark a webpage I am interested in and return to it at any time.  I will usually only bookmark static content such as an interesting article or paper.  Dynamic content such as blogs are subscribed to using RSS readers.

RSS Readers - Whenever I encounter a blog which seems interesting, I subscribe to it. The reason for subscribing is so that I can get the latest stories written on the blog  as it is published, rather than having to check back to the site every morning for updates.   I can read all of the blogs I subscribe to in one place, via my RSS reader.

Media sharing sites - Youtube (videos), Flickr (photos), Slideshare (presentations), Soundcloud (audio) are places in the cloud where people put certain types of media.  Interesting media can be bookmarked or tweeted about, to create a record of interest for future reference.

Blogs - My blog is a place for reflection, sense making and sharing what I have experienced with the world.  I keep a blog so that I do not have to tell each person I know what I have experienced.  The blog is a great platform to compile media, links, and ideas and present them in a personalized way.

Analytics - Using tools like Google Analytics and URL shorteners like Bitly I can monitor which of my shared content online generates the most interest.  Analytics are the next wave of performance measures.  It is remarkable to witness how a blog post gets picked up, linked to, searched for, and broadcast on the web.  Using analytics I can see where in the world users of my website are coming from, how long they stay, which pages they visit, how they found my site, and which search keyword bring them in.  Don’t worry, analytics do not actually expose one’s identity online, they just expose anonymous user interactions with content.

Collaboration - I use tools such as Google Docs and Skype to communicate and collaborate with others online.

Hey what about people?

I’m not locked in a room with just my computer!  I also converse with colleagues and friends every day in casual and formal meeting environments.  I try to make notes of all of the interesting information we discuss and integrate these ideas into my online knowledge management tools so that a record is kept.  Its quite standard for conference goers to tweet at a conference to let their followers know what is going on.  I also think this creates a valuable record of interactions that a person can look back on.

This also applies to other forms of information we encounter on a daily basis.  If I read something interesting the newspaper, on television or in a book I may compile a blog post about it or create a quick bite sized tweet.  In doing so, I manage the information I have experienced in the world by creating a digital entry in my online knowledge network.

Activity Streams

What’s even more challenging with social media in the cloud is the presence of what George Siemens identifies as “activity streams”.  Activity streams are things like your Facebook news feed or your Twitter friends feed.  These activity streams are constantly flowing, constantly changing and one could argue really only relevant at any given moment.  Fortunately tools like Twitter enable you to “Favorite“ or “Retweet” bits of information you find valuable which can then become attached to your record of interests.

Beyond Coping: Sense making openly

Knowing how different information in various formats can be connected is perhaps an even bigger challenge.  Jarche suggests a process of sense making through filtering, validation, synthesis, presentation, and customization.  Many of us do this by writing academic papers, blogs, having conversations, or simply performing well in what needs to be done in one’s context.  Its really nothing new, people have been keeping journals and notes for ages now.

Managing the wealth of information we interact with on a daily basis is tough work.  I have found huge benefits in managing that information in an open environment.  So rather than keeping a private diary of what I am experiencing, I am sharing it all through Twitter or my blog.  This allows others to share in my experience and make my externalization part of their own sense making experience.  I have also engaged in dialogue, been directed to relevant information, and formed new networks online as a result of this open sharing.

References

Frand, J. & Lippincott, A. (2002) Personal Knowledge Management: A Strategy for Controlling Information Overload.  Working copy posted February 4, 2002  Available online

#plenk2010

VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)
| | No Comments »

PLE/Ns Tools – What Exists, What is Being Built?

Posted by: Michael Paskevicius on November 1, 2010

Categories: Change in Higher Education, Collaboration Tools, Educational Technologies, Knowledge Management, Research

10.26.05 Double Carrick Bend by M J M, on Flickr

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic License by  M J M

I am running a bit behind.  This is my reflection for last weeks PLENK topic; PLE/Ns Tools – What Exists, What is Being Built?

The ability to personalize one’s online experience is not new, each Internet user creates their own personal web by deciding which sites to visit, which blogs to read, which news sites to trust, and which to ignore. However, in recent years a growing number of free technologies have become available that have made personalization possible on a grander scale. Free and easy-to-use technologies offer new ways to find, organize, create, and interact with information.

McElvaney & Berge, 2010

Increasingly people are sharing useful content online using these social media tools such as Facebook, bookmarks (Delicious, Digg, etc) and Twitter.  We have always been interested in how our students make sense of the content we recommend for their studies.  So it should follow that we would be interested in how they contextualize them amongst others on the web.  Traditionally we give them resources and then expect a formal written paper detailing how they understand the content.

With a steady stream of information coming at all of us on a daily basis, our reflections are needing to be shorter, quicker, and much more frequent.  Students need to know how to deal with masses of information and build up their filtering ability.  They need to filter content quickly knowing what is important, what to forget, what to bookmark, what might be uiseful to others, and how to tie it all back together.

My personal thoughts on the power of Twitter is that it forces you to contextualize a web resource or idea in 140 chracters or less.  This means others can scan thousands of tweets and make sense quite quickly of what could be on the other end of the link, or tweeted idea, and whether it is something that needs investigation.

The best resources in a community of users get shared, reshared and linked to.  What is under developed is the ability to discuss, connect, and mashup web resources once they have been shared in an organized way.  One can use URL shorteners to see how many people clicked through to their shared link but less is known about what those who clicked think of the resource or how/if they found it useful.

Last year many of the URL shortener services offered a service which wrapped clicked links in a “Social Bar”. The Social Bar allowed them to reshare, or relink the content to more people, access comments, and like or dislike the content.  Basically when you clicked on a link from Twitter or Digg you would go to the link but have access to the Social Bar to add some of your own meaning to the content or to share it further.  The Social Bar was not popular and was ultimately discontinued by Digg, Houtsuite, and ow.ly.  I believe that it is still available from StumbleUpon as a browser add on.  I wonder if we cant use some of these principles as a tool for aggregating online interactions in a PLE?

The Social Bar sits at the top of the page on top of the visited website

I think a Social Wrapper around online content could be quite useful in the context of a PLE.  Maybe it is an entirely new type of web browser that is needed to allow users to start tying web content, interactions and sites together.  Maybe its as simple as the Social Bar example and just sits atop all content visited in the context of a learning situation or webquest.

The social wrapper for the PLE could potentially allow students to:

  • Identify resources which they found relevant to their learning
  • Discuss resources and create links to new content
  • Share content through other social media channels such as Facebook
  • See how a piece of content was understood by their peers
  • Track changes in the interpretation of content over time
  • See all interactions with a piece of content at a given moment
  • Expose other interactions such as email or forums for more open discussion
  • Attach discussions to content
  • Mashup every web site they play in

The Social Wrapper could allow the instructor to see:

  • What content was accessed by students
  • Where they went to next
  • How the students associated content with other things in their lives
  • How discussions around content took place
  • How students scrutinize web resources
  • What marvelous mashups are created
  • How the students interact with others on the web

I think the organization of PLE’s is mostly about tying together all of the interactions people have with content and people online .  Its not ust about the tools, but the systems of activity in which the tools are applied and how the interactions lead to making meaning.

References

McElvaney, J. & Berge, Z. (2009) Weaving a Personal Web: Using online technologies to create customized, connected, and dynamic learning environments.  Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology V35(2) Spring 2009 Available online

#plenk2010

VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)
| | 1 Comment »

Using PLE/Ns effectively: skills, mindsets, and critical literacies

Posted by: Michael Paskevicius on October 19, 2010

Categories: Change in Higher Education, Educational Technologies, Knowledge Management, Research

I made it to week 6 of the PLENK 2010 course and this is my 6th blog reflection.  I feel like I have gained a great deal from this course and the issues it has raised and required me to reflect on.  Much of my blog posting this far drew on writings I had constructed for my masters coursework, and it was nice to be able to recompile and share them on my blog.

This week we looked at media literacy, which has prompted me to explore what people have been saying about what we should be teaching at schools.  Should we be teaching students that they need to remember hard facts?  Or should we teaching them how to find information using modern information and communication technology where and when it is needed?  Furthermore how can we teach them to identify high quality information?

I feel quite privileged to have studied information systems management in my undergraduate degree.  My studies there taught me how to use the tools of modern society in the business world.  The program combined the scientific concepts of accounting, finance, and human resources (and more) to modern information technology systems which facilitate the most effective way for coordinating these business systems.  This put me in a good position as a user of modern tools and ways to apply them.  Effective learning should not only exist ‘inside’ the person but in their ability to use a particular set of tools in productive ways for particular purposes (Saljo, 1999).  This also means that students need to learn how to scrutinize tools and artefacts to ensure they are appropriate for any given situation.

Critical Literacy

From my vantage point specifically in higher education, I generally assume that students enter higher education with a certain degree of critical thinking ability.

Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skilfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness.

Michael Scriven & Richard Paul

Critical thinking is the ability of a student to scrutinize and organize resources in such a way that they can formulate and defend an argument or justify an action.   Critical thinking should enable a student to take a position behind arguments or methods that have been made and consider alternatives from multiple perspectives.

What should we be learning?

Coming from a socio-cultural perspective on learning, I wanted to include this wonderful quote from Roger Saljo’s seminal piece “Learning as the Use of Tools”:

The sociocultural view of human learning is the conscious attempt to avoid seeing knowledge either as purely mental (idealist/rationalist tradition) or as physical and independent of human activities (realist perspective) … a sociocultural view builds on the assumption that learning has to do with how people appropriate and master tools for thinking and acting that exist in a given culture or society.

Wertsch quoted in Saljo, 1999

So what we should be teaching and learning is constantly changing in line with the tools available to a given culture.  Students need to use the tools of today to be best prepared to innovate for tomorrow.

Critical thinking was likely a simpler thing to teach before the dawn of the information age.  The advent of the printing press changed not only the way we learn but also what was considered important for students to learn; i.e. from memorisation of texts to organizing and structuring texts (Saljo, 1999). Life in the information age again changes what’s considered important for knowledgeable people and the tools they have available to make sense of the world.

Scholarly texts were easier to identify in the age of print   Nowadays students are inundated with texts from all over the web.

The locus of responsibility for determining the accuracy of texts shifted from the publisher to the reader when one of the functions of libraries shifted to search engines.

Robin Good, Howard Rheingold

Rich resources such as Wikipedia are constantly under scrutiny because of the collaborative nature in which they are created.  While Wikipedia articles potentially can contain excellent information, one needs to know how to scrutinize the text for bias, validity, and completeness.

There is a good argument for a focus on media literacies in schools.

Media literacy is the notion that learning how to use new media technologies, online collaboration tools, personal publishing and live video streaming gear is not just about being cool and hip but it is a set of fundamental skills every young person should be equipped with to be able to navigate the digital realities increasingly surrounding us.

Robin Good, Howard Rheingold

Students need to be able to construct meaning from the world around them.  In the information age Google can provide answers almost ubiquitously, from web, to mobile web, to embedded web.  What a person does with that answer is another question.  How do they make meaning from the million results displayed by Google from a web search?

I like the idea of students constructing texts and other forms of rich media to demonstrate and think through what they have experienced.  Downes says “when people construct artifacts they are constructing media with which to think”.  If this media is shared in an open ecology such as a PLE, more conversations can take place around what a student has learned, and how that lends itself to ‘meaning making’ for other students.

References

Downes, S. (2009). Speaking in Lolcats, Take 2.  Presentation November 24, 2009. Delivered to ECI 381 (Alec Couros), Online to Saskatchewan via Elluminate.  http://www.downes.ca/presentation/233

Good, R. & Rheingold, H. (2007). New Media Literacy In Education: Learning Media Use While Developing Critical Thinking Skills. http://www.masternewmedia.org/learning_educational_technologies/media-literacy/new-media-literacy-critical-thinking-Howard-Rheingold-20071019.htm#ixzz12ot4iHL1

Säljö, R. (1999). Learning as the use of tools. In: K Littleton, P Light (ed); Learning with computers: analysing productive interaction. Routledge

#plenk2010

VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.13_1145]
Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)
| | No Comments »
Page 1 of 212
View in: Mobile | Standard