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The Timing of the One Purple Tweet

Friday, April 27th, 2012

This is the story of one Tweet’s journey.  Friday, April 13th, 2012, was a day people were encouraged to wear purple in support of Military Kids.  Across the nation, communication services in the Cooperative Extension system went to work promoting the event. Twitter bird sending a tweet that looks like a t-shirt News releases were published and a social media effort was pushed out encouraging everyone to wear purple.  We often ask ourselves what is the payback or “reach” of off these new outreach methods.  This is where the story of one Purple Tweet started.

On April 5th, one person saw a Tweet about “Purple Up” day from the Military Families Learning Network Twitter channel.  This one person sent one email to the superintendent of one school district in Texas.  The superintendent of Gatesville Independent School District sent one email to each one of his campus’ administrators sharing the hope that staff and students would wear purple on Friday the 13th to support military kids on their campus’.  This may have been the end of this one Tweets adventure, but it wasn’t.

On Friday, April 13th, in what was a separate journey, one soldier was finally returning home to his family after finishing his deployment.   Unbeknownst to his children, he was headed home to Gatesville to surprise them.  At 11:30 a.m. he walked into the building and the classroom of one of his children.  He was happily reunited with his child and opened his eyes to find one classroom full of purple on this one special day.  The local newspaper was there to capture the moment.  A few hours later, after everyone had laughed – and cried a little – the superintendent of the one small town, of the one school building, of the one purple classroom, of the one happy family, sent one email back to the person who sent him to message about the Tweet,  “timing is everything!”  Sometimes, all it takes is one!

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Posted in military families, network literacy | 1 Comment »

What is Open Source?

Friday, April 20th, 2012

In 1999, Rob McEwen, the CEO of a struggling Canadian gold-mining company named Goldcorp, Inc., did something totally unexpected and radical at the time, especially within his industry.

In an effort to locate more gold for extraction, he opened his company secrets to the world — all the geological data Goldcorp had compiled for decades — with an offer of $575,000 in prize money to the people who used this data to work out the best prospecting plans.

Picture of Linus TorvaldAs it turned out, a Finnish computer programmer named Linus Torvalds (pictured right) was a driving influence behind this radical idea.

A generation ago, before the Worldwide Web had been invented, the Helsinki programmer created a simple version of the UNIX operating system, dubbed it Linux, and shared it with other programmers on a computer bulletin board.

Anyone was free to use Linux and even to improve it, providing they shared these improvements with everyone else.  An informal structure emerged to manage ongoing improvements of this software.  In time, though, something even more significant occurred:  because it was free, reliable and convenient, Linux became the basis for many Web hosting services and ultimately, databases.

In time, it also became embedded in the technologies and products of many highly profitable companies.

Torvalds was scarcely aware of it at the time, but his creative inspiration formed much of the basis for one of the most far-reaching innovations in recent decades, and a new mode of economic production: open source.

Even so, while Torvalds was a major influence, the single biggest factor has been the advent of Web 2.0.

As Donald Tapscott and Anthony Williams contend in their bestselling book “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything,” the rapid acceleration of scientific and technological progress following the development of Web 2.0 has demonstrated  to growing numbers of companies and other entities that  holding resources and assets close to their chests is often self-defeating.

Indeed, as McEwen discovered more than a decade ago, companies are increasingly finding it more profitable to share information in hopes of enlisting the diverse expertise available through virtual networking.

One of the most noteworthy and potentially far-reaching examples of the new open-source approach is the Human Genome Project, an international research effort through which the sequence of human DNA will be stored in databases available to anyone on the Internet — an effort that is expected to benefit medical science in ways we can scarcely imagine.

 

Author: Jim Langcuster (@extensionguy)

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Parenting at a Distance: There’s an App for That!

Thursday, March 8th, 2012

 

There's an App for That!

Parenting at a Distance: There’s an App for That!

The role of parenting during deployments can be difficult to maintain across time and space but in the world we live in today, there’s an app for that!

There’s an old saying, “Once a parent, always a parent,” but as many military families can attest, parenting at a distance can be quite a challenge. Finding ways to connect, maintain parental roles and keep up with some of the daily activities our children are engaging in can be difficult when at home, much less during deployments. This is where the marvels of a technological era come into play.

Welcome to the age of technology! While we are not advocating that deployed soldiers sacrifice their work responsibilities, if being a more involved parent or caregiver while deployed is what you seek, a virtual trip to your mobile or online application store may be just the ticket.

Staying Connected

Serviceman Talking to Family

Serviceman Talking to Family

 

According to child development professionals, maintaining a sense of connectivity with your child(ren) “is key” to building strong parent-child relationships. But what happens when a parent or caregiver is deployed? In these situations, developing and maintaining those close parental or caregiver bonds may take some additional effort from all involved. Phone calls, letters, emails, Skype, Yahoo IM, Google Talk, or Google+ Hangout conversations are all excellent ways to communicate with loved ones via long distances and there are other options for maintaining the ties that bind as well.

 

 

 

Bedtime Stories

Storytime

If you find yourself missing your child’s evening bedtime stories, there is a great app called A Story Before Bed that may help you out. And, for a limited time, military service members can record a bedtime story for their child for FREE. The site has a great selection and hundreds of recordable e-book titles. To record, simply use your webcam to capture a video of you reading the story and once you are happy with the recording you can save and share it with your little ones via the website, iPad or iPhone (free in iTunes). If you have an ipad2 you can create the recordings on the go! You can also record while reading the story with your child before you are deployed and your little one can cherish your story time together until you return.

And Android users, we aren’t leaving you out. If you have not yet taken a bite out of the Apple, Zoodles is another great app that also has a companion Kid Mode app (free on Android Market). Currently they have 13 recordable storybooks, and a ton of age-appropriate games and art project s. If you sign up you will get weekly reports of what your little one is up to while playing with the application. Their introductory book Three Little Pigs is free, but you can also buy other books for $2.99 or with a premium subscription get them for free ($7.95 per month, $39.95 for six months or $59.95 for a year).

For those who want something a little less techie, Hallmark, Reader’s Digest, Publications International and many others offer recordable storybooks (from $10-$35) that provide built-in voice recorders to capture your voice as you read the story to your child. Each page has a separate recording device and you can record as many times as necessary to create the perfect storybook. When the child opens the book, special sensors determine which page the child is on and play back your recording. You can also lock the book so it cannot be accidentally erased. Titles include “Guess How Much I Love You” and “Hey Diddle, Diddle!” and “Goodnight Moon,” and there are even books based on licensed characters such as Cars, Thomas the Train, Disney Princess and Elmo.

Also remember that everyone loves bedtime stories. So think about recording your own family bedtime storybook to send to your soldier while deployed. Your soldier will love hearing the voices of the ones (s)he loves reading their favorite story.

Video Cards or Messages

e-Card

If you are craving something a bit more personal (such as creating a personalized video card) try creating and editing your own video with the Pixorial app. Creating memories that last a lifetime has never been easier! Pixorial believes it should be easy to create, edit, and share videos across time and space using multiple devices (including both IOS and Android). You can also share your videos via all your social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or YouTube. The free service offers 1GB of video storage space or for a minimal $19.99/year you can have 10GB of video storage. You can even choose to order DVDs of your favorite clips.

If you want something a little less involved, create a “Starring You” e-card. JibJab is a web-based e-card development site that allows you to create animated e-cards for any occasion by integrating pictures of your family and friends into the cards. Membership is $12 per year ($1 per month) for unlimited access to the e-card development site.

Parental Responsibilities

Apps can do much more these days that just help us to connect. They can also help us be better parents. For military families deployment often means parental responsibilities rest on the shoulders of the parent or caregiver at home. But now, even deployed parents can get involved with some of the responsibilities of parenting.

Keeping up with Household Chores

Chores

If you want to help your partner ensure your children are doing their chores, there are now apps like Epic Win and Your Rule Chores that help keep track of the chores your children complete. With Epic Win, once you install the app on your iPad or iPhone ($2.99 on iTunes) you get a full-featured to-do list that supports repeating tasks, reminders for overdue events, and time-critical events that can be assigned to specific days of the week. Each time a task is completed it is destroyed by your child’s Avatar. Further, Epic Win integrates into your Google Calendar so you know when your child has completed a chore.

With You Rule Chores, simply install the app on your iPad or iPhone ($3.99 on iTunes). Each child gets their own avatar and as chores are completed, the children earn coins (similar to an allowance), level up (new gadgets and powers), and the first one to complete ALL their chores Rules! With parental controls such as password protection, chore creation, wish list approval, and daily reminders getting the children to complete their chores has never been easier. While multi-device synching is not yet available, the developers promise it will be delivered in the near-future.

Homework

Homework

 

Homework can be a daily battle for many parents. But now many schools have begun to implement parent portals that allow parents to access their child’s progress reports online. These portals are secure and allow parents access to all work the child has completed as well as incomplete and future assignments. So the next time you ask your child what they learned in school, you will know exactly what your child is studying. To inquire about a parent portal, email your child’s teacher or call the school.

 

 

 

Schedules and Routines

Digital Calendar

Being a parent requires quite a bit of scheduling. For deployed parents, feelings of being left out are not uncommon. One way to help the deployed parent or caregiver feel they are a part of the daily activities of the family is to create a family calendar using a web-based Google Calendar. Because Google Calendar syncs with all devices, it offers a perfect option for families on the go. Simply create a shared calendar, download the Google Calendar to your device, and sync. Once everyone has the calendar on their device, each member can add things that all family members can view or edit. Color-coding, email or text reminders, event invitation and tracking, email integration, and interesting calendars make Google Calendar a great tool for connecting families. And as illustrated above, some of the apps highlighted here even sync with your Google Calendar making it easy to keep up with the family’s schedule with just one glance.

Whether you are looking to record a bedtime story, share a special moment, create a video card, celebrate a special event, or enhance your parental responsibilities across time and space, the technology to help you bond with your loved ones is only a click away. Because now, there’s an app for that!

So what are we missing? What apps do you use to stay connected to your loved ones across time and space? Share your ideas in the comments below!

Posted in family development, military families, network literacy, parenting | No Comments »

Perspectives on privacy – foundation

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012
Disco ball

Disco ball - used under Creative Commons license from http://www.flickr.com/photos/30946603@N04

Headlines about privacy breaches, companies gathering data without informing users, and companies changing privacy policies seem to be a daily occurrence. While future blog posts will look at what you, as a user of online tools, can do to protect your privacy, I wanted to step back and examine what we mean by privacy. It’s important to know what privacy means and how we perceive the privacy of certain information to understand how we want to handle such information.

To help get at the ideas behind privacy, let’s use a fictitious example:

Joe

Joe is a mid-career civil engineer and construction manager at a large firm. He earned his degree from a Big 10 university and was active in intramural athletics and his fraternity. He is married to Cathy and has three children.

Joe loves the song “Dancing Queen” by the Swedish band Abba, but worries about what others would think of him if they knew. While he’ll sing the song when he’s alone in the car, he hasn’t shared his feeling with anyone else.

Joe’s love of “Dancing Queen” is private. As long as he doesn’t share that information, it will remain private.

Let’s look at some ways Joe might share that information, along with some possible ramifications.

Joe tells Cathy

Suppose Joe tells his wife Cathy that he loves the song. Joe trusts and loves Cathy, and her knowing about “Dancing Queen” doesn’t change the way she feels for or behaves towards him. Therefore, there’s no direct harm from Cathy knowing his private information. Indeed, he could benefit, because now she may let him know when it’s playing on the radio, buy him an Abba album for his birthday, etc.

Cathy tells a friend

At a party, Cathy hears “Dancing Queen” playing and tells her best friend, Nell, who’s married to one of Joe’s co-workers, that it’s Joe’s favorite song, but not to tell anyone. If Nell doesn’t tell anyone else, then there is still no harm to Joe. However, suppose Nell mentions to her husband that Joe loves “Dancing Queen” and the next day, as a joke, he blasts the song on the loud speaker at the construction site. Joe may feel harmed, because the information he considered private and embarrassing is now known by his co-workers and is being used to poke fun at him.

Joe uses the Internet

Goole search for Abba

Joe wants the lyrics to “Dancing Queen” so he goes to the Google website and searches for “Abba Dancing Queen lyrics.” He finds the lyrics, and also looks at some other sites related to Abba. He does a couple more searches for Abba information, and ends up buying an Abba compilation album from Amazon.com and downloads an MP3 of “Dancing Queen” from iTunes. Then he uses the online service Spotify, to listen to a bunch of Abba’s music.

Here we have moved away from the familiar interpersonal sharing of information, and are instead dealing with corporations and large databases. So what information has Joe shared, and what are the possible effects?

Because he did a bunch of searches for Abba-related information, it’s quite likely that Joe will begin seeing advertisements for Abba-related items on Google sites. The advertising services on the sites Joe visited probably set a cookie in his browser, so that when he goes to other sites they serve, they may present him with Abba-related advertisements. Amazon and iTunes may begin promoting to him items similar to the Abba album he purchased. Spotify will recommend similar music, and if he has connected Facebook and Spotify, his listening to the Abba music may be shared with his Facebook friends. In addition, there are other indirect players that know about his interest, including his Internet Service Provider and credit-card company.

The actions Joe took online have many diverse effects. Some may be viewed as positive, e.g., if Joe ends up seeing an ad for the Blu-Ray release of “Mamma Mia,” which features music by Abba. Other effects are neutral; e.g., the service or company having a record of Joe’s interest in a database somewhere has no measurable impact on Joe. But if his preference ends up being shared on a network like Facebook, Joe may view it as potentially harmful.

Use of information vs. possession

The above stories illustrate that having someone else simply possess information we think of as private is not the real problem. Instead, it is how that information is used. Does it change the possessor’s behavior or feelings? Does the possessor share that information with someone else? Are we even aware of how that information is used or shared? These are the real questions we should should take into account when we decide what we do with our private information.

The love of “Dancing Queen” is a silly example of information one might consider private, but it’s easy to see how this story might apply to other concerns such as health issues, financial information, and other important data. The only truly private information we have is information that we keep only to ourselves. Once it is known by others, we have to trust that they will use our information only in ways we wish.

The concerns about privacy are really concerns about what a person or company will do with our private information. Therefore, when we make a decision to share data we consider personal or private, we must consider how that information will be used. We trust (or don’t trust) other people based on our existing relationships with them and our expectations of what they will do with our information. Sometimes, but not often, we may have a written or spoken agreement about how our information will be used.

With companies, particularly online, we are dealing with entities that are typically, not a single person, and that we may not have dealt with before. We therefore rely on other factors before deciding to share personal data with them: reputation, transparency, written agreements, cost versus benefit, etc.

Consciously or not, each time we share information or browse sites, we weigh the risk that the information we’ve shared gets used beyond our desires compared to the perceived benefit we get from sharing the information or visiting the site.

Future blog posts will examine these issues in more detail, particularly the factors we consider when sharing information in an online space.

(If you’re not familiar with the song, you can view the music video of Dancing Queen on YouTube)

Author: Stephen Judd (, @sjudd)

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Explaining AleX NetLit: Fictional Personas & Online Learning

Tuesday, February 21st, 2012
A picture of the fictional Alex NetLit

Alex NetLit

The Network Literacy Community of Practice (NetLit CoP) has received some questions about AleX NetLit, the fictional persona we created to help military family service professionals, Cooperative Extension professionals and others learn more about using online networks in their work.

We thought it might be helpful to explain how and why we came up with AleX NetLit.

Background on fictional personas

Fictional personas are representations of a major user group of a particular device, system or product. They can also be representations of a major group within an audience. The purpose of a persona is to get away from generalizations about a group of users and focus on the needs of a specific representative user.

Personas typically have names, pictures, and demographic details based on the larger audience’s demographics such as age, education, ethnicity, and family status. Usability.gov, a guide to developing usable websites, says personas can also include “the goals and tasks they are trying to complete using the site and their environment (i.e., physical, social, and technological).”

Using personas in website design and in other areas of user experience design (architecture, software development and product design) has become accepted practice. Personas are also used in marketing to consider “the goals, desires, and limitations of brand buyers.” (Wikipedia, Personas (marketing))

Inventing AleX NetLit

The NetLit CoP has three target audiences: service providers who work with military families, Cooperative Extension professionals, and the general public. As Extension professionals ourselves, we felt we had a pretty good understanding of the extension audience, and we have experience reaching out to the general public through our extension work.

However, most of us involved in the NetLit CoP had little or no understanding of the work of professionals who work with military families. We wanted to learn more about this audience and its needs. We also wanted to find a way to connect extension professionals with military family service professionals and these professionals with one another.

As we learned more about the demographics of military family service providers, AleX NetLit began to take form. AleX’s gender, age, and education were all taken from what we learned about military family service professionals. AleX isn’t every military family service professional, nor is she an “average” of them. She is a representative of the audience designed to reflect characteristics of the audience that allows the NetLit CoP to connect with them.

AleX is a 30-year-old divorced mother of two who works as a federal agency professional, providing educational information and other types of self-help to her clients. She uses, but has been wary of, social media tools like Facebook and Twitter. She is skeptical about using social media in her work, but she is starting to see their potential for helping her clients.

That brief profile helped the NetLit CoP begin to develop a plan for helping military family service professionals understand and use social media tools and online networks. Instead of finding ways to help a faceless group of varying demographics, experiences, and abilities, we could focus on finding ways to help AleX, a busy single parent looking for ways she can grow in her profession. That’s the purpose of a persona.

Making AleX Public

Most personas for user-experience design and marketing serve as internal tools that guide development of products and messages, but never see the light of day. (e.g., Matthew Johnson Program Staff Director, USDA, is a fictional persona created by the  U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Economic Research Service (ERS). You can read a portion of this persona at the bottom on the “Develop Personas” page on Usability.gov.)

We decided to take AleX public. We created a Twitter account for her and began writing blog posts addressed directly to her. Knowing how helpful AleX had been to us, we wondered how she might be able to help others.

AleX was made public in the hope that she would provide a persona military families service professionals and others could relate to. Let’s face it. Most of us in Cooperative Extension are used to being the expert, the educator. Try as we might, it’s difficult to avoid playing that role. AleX is intended to give people someone to connect with whose goal is not to teach them, but to learn with them.

The Debate

Trust, transparency and authenticity are important in building relationships in online networks. We debated whether launching AleX NetLit undermined those principles. The thought that AleX might be seen as an effort to trick people or a facade to hide behind definitely made us uncomfortable, but, at the risk of sounding like a self-help book, change doesn’t happen in your comfort zone.

We are making every effort to be sure people know AleX is a fictional persona. We intentionally gave her a name that was not typical. AleX’s Twitter bio clearly states she is a fictional creation of the NetLit CoP and links to our blog page explaining AleX and her purpose.

That’s not to say we have done everything right. We planned to send periodic tweets letting AleX’s Twitter followers know she is fictional, but we have not held to that plan. We also have not been clear about exactly who is tweeting on Alex’s behalf.

AleX’s Twitter followers will start seeing occasional reminders that she is a fictional persona. There will be information about who is tweeting for AleX in occasional tweets and in AleX’s Twitter bio.

AleX NetLit is an experiment. She is a new tool for learning in the changing knowledge and communication landscape. Will she make an impact? We’re not sure, but we will keep trying to use new and innovative tools to help people understand and harness the power of online networks.

What do you think?

Do you think that a persona like AleX NetLit could be an effective tool to help others learn as she learns?

Please share any feedback with us via the comments below, your social network of choice, or email.

Authors: The AleX NetLit Team – Anne Adrian (@aafromaa), Bob Bertsch (@ndbob),  Peg Boyles (@ethnobot), John Dorner (@jdorner), Molly Herndon (@MollyCHerndon), Stephen Judd (@sjudd), and Jim Langcuster (@extensionGuy)

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Should I be a “Curator”?

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

“to select and “preserve” or share resources, often within a particular topic area. The term is drawn from the work done by curators at museums, who use their knowledge and expertise to select particular works to bring to the museum, purchase, or organize for public display.” – Curation article, eXtension.org

Should you be a curator? If you can answer yes to any of these questions, then you should be curating.

  • Do you have an area of interest where others look to you for advice?
  • Is there a topic in which you would like to be perceived as an ‘expert’?
  • Is there a topic for which you would like to share information with others?

Tools to use to curate:

All of the tools mentioned here are free (or have free levels) and are incredibly easy to learn and use.

Pinterest Board screen capture

Pinterest

The new kid on the block and has been generating a lot of interest recently.  Pinterest lets you categorize web pages and write a little about each one.  You can also upload pictures and write about them as well.  One requirement is that the web page you “pin” has a picture larger than thumbnail size.  Followers can repin or post comments to what you’ve pinned.

WARNING: This site can be addictive.

Learning Guide: Pinterest from University of Wyoming Extension

Professional development opportunities:

Scoop.it

Create your own ‘gorgeous magazine’ with Scoop.it. Articles you scoop can have images or not.  They don’t have the ‘social’ aspect and are more formal than Pinterest. Followers can subscribe to your Scoop.it page and can get an email each day you post a new article.  You can post articles you find and get article suggestions that are relevant to your topic to add to your magazine for others to see.

Scoop.it sites that are relevant to Extension and education

Delicious & Diigo

Also known as social bookmarking, these sites have been around for years and have many of the same advantages as Pinterest and Scoop.it. They just don’t have the pictures and pretty layouts. You use these sites to bookmark particular webpages, and add tags and descriptions. You can chose to make the bookmark public, which enables others to see the pages you have bookmarked and tagged.

One advantage of Delicious and Diigo is that they use RSS to allow followers to use other tools (Google’s personal home page, feed readers, or many others) to get the content delivered to them without having to return to their website.

Learning Guide: Diigo from University of Wyoming Extension

Blogs

These have been used for years and are easy to create, maintain and post.  Some examples of popular free blog hosting sites are: Blogger, Tumblr, and WordPress. Many blogs have evolved to include static pages, content management and many more features so you can use a ‘blog’ as your own website.

Blogs also generate RSS feeds for followers to subscribe.
Learning Guide: Blogging from University of Wyoming Extension

General Curation Resources:

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Posted in military families, network literacy | 1 Comment »

What is a Platform?

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

Within a technical context, platform has typically been used to describe the ways computer hard wiring and software frameworks are designed and combined to enable software, particularly application software, to run.

More recently, though, the term is being used to describe the sorts of open, freewheeling communications environments that produce significant, often far-reaching intellectual, scientific or technological innovations.  While the term platform within this context typically is associated with the social networking that has grown out of Web 2.0, some writers maintain that platforms have essentially been with us throughout the modern age.

In his book “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural Science of Innovation,” science writer Steven Johnson cites Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) as one of history’s best examples of a significant platform, though there have been many others.

The shock that followed the Sputnik crisis in 1957 prompted two young physicists employed by the laboratory, William Guier and George Weiffenbach, to test a series of hunches related to the launch, which first involved tracking the satellite’s 20 megahertz signal with equipment available at the lab. This led to another observation: that they could use the Doppler effect to track the satellite’s precise speed and location.

Several weeks later, at the prompting of one of the lab’s administrators, they also reverse processed what they had learned: in other words, they discovered that it was possible to locate a ground position based on the precise location of an orbiting satellite.

This insight ultimately enabled the Americans to hoist the Soviets with their own petard by developing technology that enabled U.S. Naval submarines to use an orbiting satellite to deliver nuclear-tipped missiles into Soviet territory with devastating accuracy.

However, this was only the beginning: these insights formed the basis of what we know today as GPS (Global Positioning Systems), which affects all of us in our everyday lives, from printing Google maps and navigating cars through congested streets, to enabling mountains climbers to negotiate treacherous ascents up steep inclines.

Reflecting back more than 50 years later, Guier and Weiffenbach credited the open, freewheeling intellectual environment for producing the conditions in which these sorts of ideas could connect and spawn new ideas and innovations.

The APL had served not only as a laboratory, but also as a highly generative, highly innovative platform.

As Johnson stresses, one of the remarkable things about platforms is their open-ended nature.  The effects that grow out of these environments, while typically unpredictable, often confer humanity with significant, if not immense, benefits over the long-term.

Within this networked era, platforms have taken on greater significance. The increasing levels of social networking that have followed Web 2.0 have also rapidly enhanced and accelerated the formation of these types of open-ended platforms.

Johnson and other technology pundits believe that the highly generative platforms that have emerged from this networking are only the beginning of a process that will confer immense benefits on humanity throughout the next century.

Author: Jim Langcuster (@extensionGuy)

 

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Your Next Big Professional Leap

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012
AleX NetLit

This is part of the “Hi, AleX” series — advice to AleX NetLit about enhancing her levels of network literacy through day-to-day personal and professional social networking. AleX Netlit is a fictional persona created by Network Literacy Community of Practice to serve as a guide to Military Families Service professionals, Cooperative Extension educators and others seeking to learn more about using online networks in their work.

@AlexNetLit on Twitter
More about Alex NetLit

 

 

Hi, AleX:

I know you’re making great headway understanding this whole networking thing, and I venture to say that you’re close to your next professional leap.

However, before you take this leap, you need to understand how this new networked environment is changing the way you work with your clients.

leap

leap - used under Creative Commons license from http://www.flickr.com/photos/jhf/3448454258/

You will no longer be serving the normative role you once did.  Before the advent of networking, you were essentially one among a relatively select handful of vanguards who helped define standards on behalf of your clients.

Now, you, like countless other people all over the world, are making the transition from a normative to nodal professional.  You be one of millions of nodes within a vastly extended informational network in which all sorts of people — experts and clients, or more accurately, former clients — interact within an information landscape that is more open and democratic than ever before.

But that doesn’t mean you will lack value or that your role will be diminished. Far from it: you’re better prepared than many of your peers to operate in this new world because you have always prided yourself on building the skills that best equip you for your next leap.

The new information order values people like you — the reason why you are well suited to serving two emerging and important roles as editor and curator.

In case you haven’t noticed, despite all the remarkable strides that have been made in organizing and prioritizing knowledge on the Web, plenty of people are still threatened by it. They view all these algorithmically generated pages and they’re led to wonder: Is all this really what I’m looking for? Are these pages really the very best the Web has to offer me?

Small wonder why the late Steve Jobs observed that there will be a greater need than ever for skilled editors to sift through this content and to improve it on behalf of end users.

Many of your end users are no exception: they need help sifting through all this dense information.

That’s where you have a valuable role to serve, AleX. You’ve spent years striving to be a trusted professional — that’s your strong suit.  The times are calling on you to take an even greater professional leap by transforming yourself into both an editor and curator.

As writer Britanny Morin related recently, it takes a special person to be an editor, someone who can improve the Web-based content of others.  But it takes an unusually special person to be both an editor and a curator. By curator, I mean someone who can choose among the different sources of information to provide the best ones available to your end users, often adding new ideas and perspectives.

Yes, skills and professional convictions fully equip you for this role, AleX.   As Morin so aptly describes it, you are one of those special professionals whom people can “relate to and trust and who have expertise, real life experiences, and the ability to filter through and share bold perspectives.”

You are a natural-born editor and curator, AleX.

Now go out and set the world on fire.

Author: Jim Langcuster (@extensionguy)

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The Value of Lurking

Monday, December 19th, 2011

In typical contexts, the word “lurk” carries unsavory connotations, of both stalking and voyeurism. But in the online world of social media, lurking, or hanging out and tuning in to a social network without actively participating, is a primary and popular activity that can benefit the lurker, the active contributors and the network itself.

No-risk learning
Many  people lurk on a social network long before they decide to participate. It’s a no-risk way to climb the learning curve, learn the ropes, the features and the special lingo. Lurking allows people to learn more about the individuals who participate actively, and to discover the common threads and interests that animate the conversation.

In short, many people use lurking as their primary way to become comfortable with the tools, topics, culture and talkers before joining the conversation. Some lurkers never participate.

Lurking hippo

Other reasons to lurk
People lurk for many reasons. Depending on the nature of the network, they may lurk to study trends, download resources suggested by active contributors, search for informed opinions or varied perspectives on a topic, or to look for like-minded partners in disciplines outside their own.

Lurkers fall into several broad classifications. Long-term lurkers visit the blog, discussion group, wiki, or support network regularly for months or years without joining the conversation. Serial lurkers come and go from time to time on a schedule that fits their needs or curiosity. Transient lurkers drop in once or twice to check out the network, but don’t come back.

Lurkers also add value to the network and its active contributors
In serving their own needs, lurkers can add value to the network itself. For example:

  • They may recommend the network to others, broadening the network’s reach. (A recommendation from a trusted source is more likely to produce a loyal network member or follower than one from an unknown source.)
  • They may follow a link or download a paper and share the information with others, broadening the influence of the linked site or downloaded information.
  • They may learn about, and attend a face-to-face meeting or webinar, or pass the information about the event along to others they think might have an interest in attending.
  • What people learn while lurking may correct misinformation they’ve picked up elsewhere, increase their awareness, expose an unexamined assumption, or make them more generally informed about a particular topic.
  • They may contact one or more of the active participants directly, creating new relationships or partnerships outside the network.
  • They may visit a community support blog and pick up answers to their questions, reducing traffic to the phone support system.

Finally, site managers can track traffic to various features of the network to learn about lurkers’ interests and values, then try to reconfigure the conversation and/or features to reach a wider following.

Lurking is a logical, perhaps even vital, first step in engaging with an online network. Lurkers will come to understand the social mores and norms of a particular network, enabling them to join in the conversation appropriately when they feel ready. Most of us don’t enter a crowded room and start talking right away; we listen to the conversations going on around us, gravitate to those we find most interesting, and start talking when we feel we have something to contribute. Online networks are no different.

 

Author: Peg Boyles (@ethnobot)

 

(The photo, ‘Lurking in the Zambezi’ by Kristen Laas is made available under a Attribution-Noncommercial license.)

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Why the World is Shifting under Your Feet

Monday, December 12th, 2011
AleX NetLit

This is part of the “Hi, AleX” series — advice to AleX NetLit about enhancing her levels of network literacy through day-to-day personal and professional social networking. AleX Netlit is a fictional persona created by Network Literacy Community of Practice to serve as a guide to Military Families Service professionals, Cooperative Extension educators and others seeking to learn more about using online networks in their work.

@AlexNetLit on Twitter
More about Alex NetLit

 

 

Hi, AleX:

I know you’re dealing with a full plate struggling to acquire network literacy in the midst of daily work demands.

Still, I wanted to share another example to illustrate why acquiring literacy is critical to your future.  It involves the startling discoveries of a scholar named Sugata Mitra, a world renowned educational technology expert who now works at Newcastle University in England.

I can think of nothing that more aptly demonstrates the power of collaborative learning and networking.

A few years ago, Mitra wanted to see how children from remote villages throughout India with no previous exposure to networks reacted to embedded Internet-accessible computers.

What he uncovered both amazed and startled him: The kids began learning from these computers by themselves with no adult oversight.

Video recordings Mitra collected from one village show an 8-year-old boy demonstrating to a 6-year-old girl how to browse the Internet. In another village, children, after only four hours exposure to the Internet, learned how to record their own music and play it back to themselves, sparking a reaction of awed delight.

The discoveries inspired Mitra to create even more difficult challenges to see how quickly resourceful children overcame them.

His next experiment took place in Hyderabad among children who spoke English with an unusually thick accent.  He turned over a computer with an English-to-text interface, casually informing the children that he was leaving and that they were on their own.

The children were frustrated because the computer initially responded to their thick accents with gibberish, Mitra recalled later. However, when he returned couple of months later, things had changed radically: The children had learned to speak in a manner remarkably similar to the neutral British accents the computer was designed to detect.

Buoyed by these results, Mitra decided to up the ante. In what is now known as his Kalikkuppam Experiment, he wanted to determine if Tamil-speaking children could learn biotechnology on their own and despite all the online instruction being in English.

In only two months, he noted that the students increased their scores from zero to 30 percent.  After enlisting a volunteer teacher to employ the “granny method” of teaching — merely looking over the children’s shoulders and providing frequent encouragement — Mitra discovered that the children’s average scored increased to 50, which was what children in “posh schools in New Delhi” were earning.

Mitra turned up what are arguably the most remarkable results of all in Turn, Italy, in 2010.

Only 15 minutes after he walked into a classroom of Italian-speaking children and wrote the English phrase “How did dinosaurs die out?” on the chalkboard, the children secured the answer using Google first to translate and then search the phrase.

Mitra followed this with a somewhat more difficult request again phrased in English: “Who was Pythagoras and what did he do?”

Twenty minutes later, right-angled triangles began appearing on the screens.

“It just sent shivers up my spine,” Mitra later recalled.

Nothing I can think of better demonstrates the power of collaborative learning, AleX — the growing ability of ordinary people from diverse backgrounds to find answers on their own.

In fact, based on these new discoveries, Mitra believes “learning is now an emergent phenomenon.” In other words, thanks to the Internet and Web 2.0, education is now a self-organizing structure that appears without any intervention from the outside.

Think about that for a moment, AleX: Education is now a self-organizing system that is occurring on its own.

Back to that theme again: liberation.  Your clients are, frankly, no longer clients.  With each passing day, more of them are equipping themselves to learn on their own — with or without you.

There is still a place, a very valuable place, for you and other trained professionals in this new information landscape, AleX, so long as you step up to the plate.

The sooner you understand what’s happening — the sooner you understand how the world is shifting under your feet — the better equipped you will be to think, act and thrive within this new landscape.

Author: Jim Langcuster (@extensionguy)

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