I watched Mubarak’s and Suleiman’s addresses, along with much of the Egyptian Revolution, in real time on my iPhone via a live feed from Al Jazeera–coverage currently not available to much of the US. As moved as I was by the events I was observing, I was also constantly aware of the role that social media was playing in the revolution–not just in the reporting of the events, but in the actual creation and facilitation of the protests. Given what I have read and observed, I’m not sure that the revolution could have occurred without Facebook and Twitter.

Even in a society in which the major media outlets are controlled by the government, Facebook and Twitter and other social media tools exposed Egyptian citizens to ideas and viewpoints other than those espoused by the Mubarak regime. Perhaps more importantly, these media tools allowed citizens to communicate with each other about these new perspectives and to coalesce around them informally and passionately, beyond the reach of government. The seeds of the Egyptian Revolution were sewn by free access to information. It became a leaderless revolution–not led by an individual or a group but by passionate adherence to the idea that the people could find their own voice and make that voice heard. It is significant that the Egyptian government shut off access to the Internet as a defense against the gathering uprising–a strategy that is happening in other regimes as well–and even more significant that people found ways around the lack of access by using modems and finding access in foreign countries to keep the information flowing. Ultimately, the Mubarak regime could no longer hide from free access to information and the exchange of ideas. The regime fell because it could no longer control the top-down message that was the government’s chief tool for controlling the people.

Political considerations aside, there are profound lessons that we can learn from the role of social media in the emerging change sweeping the mideast. The first, and most important, is that information can no longer be controlled by a news agency or a government. As long as people can freely communicate, it will not be possible to surpress an idea supported by passion and conviction. Information will find a way to be heard as long as the message is shared between people and not filtered by an entity with an interest in controlling the message. Media outlets in the US–from Fox to CNBC–shape messages for their audiences. Al Jazerra, at least in my recent experience with the English broadcasts, is far less guilty of this than are our major networks.

The second lesson is that access to information is no longer in the hands of a select few. Over 73% of the people in the world–that’s more than 5 billion souls–have access to a mobile information device. (http://bit.ly/eneE4J) Had that not been the case, the Egyptian Revolution would never have happened. Tools like Twitter–critical to the uprising in the mideast–work over the simplest cell phones via text message. Smart phones make the process even more accessible. Controlling Internet access is one thing, but controlling cell phone access is something else entirely.

The third lesson is simple–the genie is out of the bottle. As much as governments and news agencies might try, they will not be able to manage the message in the face of a connected populace who can see through their efforts and who can communicate with each other.

Educators at every level need to be aware of the lessons from Egypt. We should examine our attitudes toward social media and to information dissemination in general. There are so many questions to be researched and answered. How will the breaking down of information barriers affect the use of propaganda to control political messages or advertising? What are the implications for media literacy? How can we use social media to involve our students in engaging pursuits? And what are you personally doing with social media? Are you part of the solution, or part of the problem?

A little background information is in order here. I’m not a phone person. I prefer to communicate by e-mail or messaging. I don’t feel a need to always be in contact. In fact, I like having times during my day when no one can find me. I tried Twitter for a few months and came away thinking “so what?” I have a Facebook page, but I mainly use it to do something called “poking” which I really don’t fully understand.

Well, I’m still not a phone person, but the rest of that paragraph sounds like it’s describing someone else–a curmudgeonly Luddite not open to new ideas. The truth is that I did try Twitter when it first appeared and found it a fairly useless time-suck. I abandoned it before I understood its true potential as a professional development and communication tool. Since that time, I’ve become convinced that it’s the most important professional development tool that we have available to us. Much the same might be said of Facebook as a way to grow and explore professional communities (although poking still eludes me). These tools, along with LinkedIn, Diigo, Google Reader, and a few others have formed the nucleus of my PLN, and it’s difficult to imagine a professional life without them.

I bring this up because I still regularly encounter stiff faculty resistance to exploring social media solutions as professional and instructional tools, and for many of the same reasons I hinted at in 2008. Particular disdain seems to be focused on Twitter. How many times have you heard someone say “I don’t care what my friends had for breakfast” or “I don’t have time for meaningless chatter” in response to a question about Twitter? There is a deeper sense among many academics that Twitter will impact the ability of students to write essays, as if the fact that one engages in phone conversations somehow impacts one’s ability to give a speech.

Then there is the public nature of social media tools that causes so much unease among academics, particularly the notion that students might “friend” them or somehow discover that they have interests outside of the classroom. These are often cited as reasons that “I don’t do Facebook.”

Such resistance can be daunting for those of us involved in professional development or in instructional technology in general. Moving into social networking does involve some major restructuring of one’s thinking, but isn’t that the essence of teaching and learning–the flexible exchange of ideas in order to grow and develop? Why is it that educators are often the most dogmatically resistant to this kind of shift in thinking? More specifically, why is it that some educators offer such resistance, while others adapt and learn and incorporate new models into their practice? Are teacher preparation programs helping or hurting in this regard?

Lots of questions, but change is possible. I did.

Tweet

C: I just want to do what I do now with technology. I don’t want to know about social networking. It’s too hard to keep track of everything.
Me: I…ummm…it’s…did you get the time for the next faculty meeting?

What I wanted to say, and what I’ve been thinking about for some time, is that there is no such thing as catching up. There’s no “now” with technology. If you’re not constantly moving forward, then by default you’re moving backward. Particularly with technology, moving backward is an express ticket to irrelevancy. I liken it to being the best typewriter repairperson in the world–you may be very good at your craft, but who cares?

Two years ago, we weren’t talking about Twitter, and not much about Facebook. In a bit less than four years, YouTube has gone from a cautious startup to serving over one billion videos a day. Fifteen years ago we were just starting to talk about the World Wide Web. The processing power used for the first moon landing is roughly equivalent to the processing power of a Furby, a toy that was interesting 5 or 6 years ago. As quickly as things seem to change, we’re probably still on the early curve of an exponential explosion of technologies that will vastly change the way we do just about everything.

But we seem to be stuck on viewing technology as an object and not as a process. Much of the daily work I used to have to perform on my laptop (which replaced my desktop when it became much more important to be able to carry my work with me) can now be performed on my iPhone. The vessel is irrelevant to me as long as I can do what I need to do. Technology isn’t my laptop, or my iPhone. It’s a process for communicating, collaborating, creating, producing, and (somewhat recursively) for keeping up with technology. For an educator, it’s simply a tool of the trade. If you don’t understand how to use it professionally and instructionally, you’ll soon be looking for an office next to the typewriter repair shop.

Tweet

That’s why I find the idea of embedding media so powerful. Most online content services provide ways to embed media into a web page of just about any variety. All you need is a bit of site-generated code and authoring access to a web page. Blogs and wikis are great places to publish embedded media. Even stodgy old Blackboard will allow embedding and display of most media types. Imagine–you no longer have to upload a PowerPoint slide show to Blackboard and have your students download it for viewing. You can upload it Google Docs and embed it on Blackboard as a content item. Any changes you make to your slide show through Google Docs are immediately available to your students (it may require refreshing the Blackboard page) and it doesn’t take up any of your limited Blackboard storage space.

Embedding media is simply a matter of copy a few lines of code from a content service and pasting it into your blog, wiki, web page, Blackboard course site, or any other web page to which you have authoring privileges. The code is automatically generated by the content service site.

Here are a few of the content services that provide automatically generated code that can be copied and pasted into your sites:

• Flickr (photos)
• VoiceThread (voice and video annotated stories)
• Panraven (online storybooks)
• Google Docs (MS Office compatible word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet files; requires a Google account)
• Flickr Slidr (generates code for embedding Flick slide shows
• YouTube, and virtually every other video sharing site (videos)

There are some potential tradeoffs when using embedded media. For example, PowerPoint slide shows uploaded to Google Docs cannot have sound or animation. Careful authoring with these limitations in mind, however, usually results in useful and effective documents.

Below is an example of an embedded VoiceThread project, which I’ve chosen to present in a small size for faster access. Because I have allowed public comment on this project, video or voice annotations added to my original presentation on VoiceThread will automatically be reflected here, and vice versa.

It’s in that context that I’m glad that this post from Alec Couros came across my virtual desk this morning. I needed to be jolted out of my complacency, and Alec’s post did just that.

This is going to be a short entry, because what you really need to read is Alec’s post. In it, Alec poses some powerful questions about what it really means to be a good citizen in a world saturated with social networks, virtual acquaintances, viral videos, instant fame (or infamy), cyberbullying, large-scale hoaxes, and issues of personal privacy. It is one of the few articles I have ever seen on the responsibilities of digital citizens as opposed to their rights. There are many powerful ideas discussed here.

Enough said–read the article and  make sure your colleagues and post-secondary students read it as well. And keep the discussion going. This is important.

As my university students and I delve more into the phenomenon of social networking, I find myself looking for research that addresses the reasons that so many folks find social networking so compelling. Many of my students have an almost palpable fear of being un-connected to their network of friends, be that realized through cell phone, text messaging, instant messaging, Facebook/MySpace/LiveJournal, and even e-mail. Some of my students maintain contacts in more than one of the aforementioned media simultaneously. The rapid rise of Twitter (“what are you doing right now?”) as a communication platform is further evidence of the need for constant affirmation through social contact. But how does this compare to “real,” face-to-face contact?

Evolutionary psychology may give us some clues. Michael Rogers, a columnist for MSNBC, recently reviewed a book by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar called “Gossip, Grooming, and the Evolution of Language” [Amazon link]. In this book, Dunbar examined the behavior of humans long before civilization or language developed. His basic premise is that understanding one’s place in the social hierarchy of early hominid groups was critical for survival and that this was largely accomplished by the same kind of grooming behavior that we currently see in apes, chimps, and monkeys. As these early hominid groups became larger, mutual grooming of every “tribe” member became impossible. The vehicle that replaced grooming as a social contact was language. Language facilitated quicker communication and the ability to communicate with multiple individuals at the same time. As Rogers puts it, “we haven’t stopped gossiping since.”

Intriguingly, Dunbar points out that there is a practical limit to the number of individuals with whom a single individual can maintain this kind of contact. That number is about 150. Large scale groups have developed a series of ways to compensate for this limitation by forming bureaucracies, social stratification, or other mechanisms to keep the numbers down to a manageable size, but the limitation still exists.

So–is social networking the next evolutionary step in increasing the number of contacts that an individual may have while still being able to understand one’s place in the hierarchy? Are we “wired” to have a Facebook page? It’s clearly too early to tell, but these are interesting times…

Who Are Your Friends?

“Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace do not help you make more genuine close friends, according to a survey by researchers who studied how the websites are changing the nature of friendship networks.”

That quote is from an article by Guardian science correspondent James Randerson titled “Social Networking Sites Don’t Deepen Friendships.” Citing results from a survey about the nature of friendships and how they may be influenced by social networks, Randerson concludes that, while an individual may have thousands of friends collected on MySpace or Facebook, these friends are not the same as friends developed in traditional face to face situations. Researchers found a distinction between friends made through a social network and “close” friends made by traditional means.

This is probably not a surprise to anyone. Trust engendered through traditional friendships is difficult to build and maintain through a medium in which it is so easy to misrepresent yourself. However, it appears to be the case that the generally accepted limit of 150 acquaintances (or 5 close friends) may be expanded through social networks by making it easier to keep in touch over distance and making it less expensive–both financially and in terms of effort expended–to maintain a large number of social contacts.

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• 49% have uploaded original photos or pictures
• 25% have personal profiles posted on a web site
• 22% have uploaded original videos
• 17% have blogs
• 16% have visited virtual worlds such as Second Life

Perhaps most interestingly, 50 percent report that they use social networking tools specifically for schoolwork. Anne L. Bryant, NSBA’s executive director, sums up the findings this way:

“There is no doubt that these online teen hangouts are having a huge influence on how kids today are creatively thinking and behaving. The challenge for school boards and educators is that they have to keep pace with how students are using these tools in positive ways and consider how they might incorporate this technology into the school setting.” [NBSA online article | Complete article as PD file]

From my perspective, truer words were never spoken. If it wasn’t clear before, it should be obvious now that many of our K-12 students are developing their learning styles and preferences in environments that look far different than the classrooms in the schools they attend. They are not simply consumers of online content–they also create it.

The questions that schools need to address involve what to do when students come to school and expect to use their technologies to communicate, research, create, and collaborate. Do we ban these technologies, or do we use them as teaching and learning tools?

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It’s interesting to consider this in light of existing and emerging technologies. As teachers of teachers, those of us in schools of education (if we practice what we preach) should be meeting our students where they are in terms of their learning styles and preferences. These styles and preferences were typically developed in a world of ubiquitous technology in their homes, in a world in which e-mail, the world wide web, and computers have always been there.

That’s why a recent article on CNET caught my attention. In “Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead,” Stephanie Olson writes:

The future of e-mail might be found on the pages of MySpace.com and Facebook.

Just ask a group of teen Internet entrepreneurs, who readily admit that traditional e-mail is better suited for keeping up professional relationships or communicating with adults.

“I only use e-mail for my business and to get sponsors,” Martina Butler, the host of the teen podcast Emo Girl Talk, said during a panel discussion here at the Mashup 2007 conference, which is focused on the technology generation. With friends, Bulter said she only sends notes via a social network.

“Sometimes I say I e-mailed you, but I mean I Myspace’d or Facebook’ed you,” she said.

There is a lot to digest in those words. How many terms did you encounter that refer to something about which you know little or nothing? Facebook? MySpace? Podcast? Mashup? Social networks? Does this suggest that your students–the ones in your university classes, studying to become teachers–know about something very important that you don’t? Read on:

“If I’m talking to any friends it’s through a social network,” said Asheem Badshah, a teenaged president of Scriptovia.com, an essay-sharing site that launched this summer. “For me even IM died, and was replaced by text messaging. Facebook will replace e-mail for communicating with certain people.”

Not only are some of the methods of communicating changing, but the devices used to communicate are also evolving. Facebook runs on cell phones. There are more than 15 billion cell phone in the world today and only a third as many computers, most of which are sitting on desktops [citation]. Most cell phones can capture video, send and receive text messages, and even work with e-mail.

Butler replied that she uses Facebook on her cell phone. “I need (Facebook) everywhere I go, but I log into e-mail only once a week,” she said.

More and more, social networks are playing a bigger role on the cell phone. In the last six to nine months, teens in the United States have taken to text messaging in numbers that rival usage in Europe and Asia. According to market research firm JupiterResearch, 80 percent of teens with cell phones regularly use text messaging.

Social networks may or may not be the future of communications–things change quickly these days. But that’s not the point of this post. The point is that we–post-secondary educators–need to be conversant with the tools that our students use and the learning styles that are fostered by them. We may tell ourselves that we’re using technology for teaching because we use Blackboard and send e-mail to our students. We may ask them to look up topics on a web page instead of a textbook or use a discussion board to post threaded comments. But to our students, this is probably neither engaging nor is it technology. It was all invented before they were born.

It’s soooo 20th century…

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“University 2.0” is an outgrowth of the Teaching 2.0 concept. Practitioners are dedicated to using Web 2.0 concepts to transform teaching at the college level through enhanced course design, teaching methods, and student expectations. A question recently posted to eLearnSpace nicely summed up the need for examining University 2.0:

“…what are universities across the world doing about this information revolution? How are we demonstrating to our future students that we are not only a part of this human network but that we are leaders in the movement? Most universities were built and designed to function effectively in a single geographic location to a specific group of people in a print based environment. Now that we can communicate with people around the world instantly and access books, journals, presentations, videos, and more online, we should think of the world as our classroom. Future students understand this information age and expect universities to be on the front lines. As the world moves toward a global economy and information can be accessed from anywhere in the world, universities need to think more critically about how they want to proceed in developing leaders of this brave new digital age.”

Ken Yarmosh offers some additional insights into the effectiveness of University 2.0 with a post to TechnoSight. I was particularly drawn to this quote:

“University 2.0 or perhaps Education 2.0 is the ultimate way that we can ensure learning really never stops. I’d love to read the blogs or listen to the podcasts of some of the professors and teachers I had throughout high school and college…”

In the real world of UAF SOE, it has often struck me that we need to figure out some way to support our students once they have their own classrooms and are looking for current information about issues relating to their own teaching. How cool would it be to be able to read a favorite instructor’s blog on current practices, to listen to a podcast or view a video that kept the former student connected to the university and also provided him/her with current information? Further, what if that former student could respond with real world observations from his/her classroom that could enhance the instructor’s insights into teaching practices and expectations? They can, of course, if the instructor and/or the former student maintains a blog…

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