Ewan McIntosh posed a question in Twitter this morning, about the effect that social networks might have on education. Although there is a certain amount of appropriateness to using this avenue, 140 characters just doesn’t seem enough. I sent a string of tweets, but it made me want to pull out this piece that I’ve been bouncing around for a couple of weeks.
During one of our extended family visits over the holidays, I had my computer out, showing something to one of my brothers. When we finished, my daughter walked up and asked if my computer was online.
I had connected with my parents’ WiFi, so I said, “Yes!”
I got up and made room for her, assuming that she was going to check her e-mail. But no. She was checking her Facebook page.
I’m gradually coming to realize that e-mail is so ’90s. I think I’ve known for a while, somewhere in my head, that the communication tools that help me do my job are viewed by my children as archaic. But at that moment, I started to realize that maybe some of these tools actually are antiquated.
I don’t understand social networks yet. Not really. I’m too accustomed to the network I’ve hobbled together myself, to successfully wrap my mind around Facebook. But a shape is starting to form that I think describes one place where people connect in ways that seem so multidimensional compared to the experience of e-mail, or even to my aggregator, or even Twitter. When my communication tools, my work, my audience, their work, our collaborations, my very office, meetings and associations, are all available at one place — well how cool might that be? How useful?
Maybe it seems obvious to you, and I’m the last hermit to escape into the cave of my e-mail app every morning. But I think that one reason I hesitate to invest myself in Facebook (or Ning) is that I like to experiment. I regularly use three aggregators, each has its own function to me. I use two different wiki sites, because their feature sets are different, and I use the one that best helps me accomplish my job. I’m down to one e-mail app, but there is an almost regular itch that I experience to try something else. Social Networks seem constraining to me. Perhaps they aren’t, but I’m reluctant still.
My own cantankerous reluctance aside, I am increasingly coming to understand what an interesting question this is. What about social networks in education? Mostly, I skip over the pedagogies of collaboration and think about assessment. Even though there are appropriate times for multiple choice, most of us agree that assessment must be deeper and more authentic. We talk a lot about portfolios, and this is a lot closer. But in today’s increasingly participatory information environment, asking students to produce, archive, and organize artifacts of their learning, for the sake of assessment, seems almost as contrived as multiple choice.
Rather than evaluating consistently arranged artifacts, it seems to me that assessment should be more about going in to an information site, the information home of a student, and excavating that site for artifacts that help us to determine learning. Obviously, these ideas are still rattling around, disconnected, in my head. But I wonder if some kind of social network that students build and cultivate as part of their work as learners might be that place.
Anyway, Jeff Utecht posed some questions, the other day, for recruitment interviewers looking for networked teachers. Perhaps a good question might be:
Which do you check first in the morning:
- The news paper?
- Your e-mail?
- Your aggregator?
- Your social network?
For me, there’s not a correct answer, yet!
Price, Nic. “How to Social Network.” Betnic’s Photostream. 12 Sep 2007. 6 Jan 2008 <http://flickr.com/photos/beatnic/1365342276/>.
Dave: I rant from time to time about the majority teachers that still don’t know how to open or put an attachment on an email … but maybe as you state that is too old a tool now … maybe instead of using “email proficiency” as any kind of benchmark, we need to bypass that and get them involved in the the new info sharing applications that abound on the net.
Brian
Hi Dave, perhaps you saw it, but an interesting article, http://blogs.mediapost.com/spin/?p=1201 “Email blows away all other social networks” by Max Kalehoff posits that email is THE social network, and some of the companies are dipping into the linkages that address books can provide.
I like your 4 bulleted items on the bottom. I use the browser tab folder options to open these 4 things for me as my “home” page (plus a 5th… a wiki I work with) for my morning reading.
cheers, Demetri
Hi Dave, I like that interview question. I use the “tab sets” feature of the browser to open those four items (plus a wiki’s recent-changes) as my “home” page for early morning reading.
btw, You may have seen it, but there was a Jan 5 post by Max Kalehoff titled Email Blows Away All Other Social Networks http://blogs.mediapost.com/spin/?p=1201 which posits that email is THE social network and companies like Google are taking advantage of the linkages that address books provide.
As always, thanks for keeping my thinking,
Demetri
Dave,
Can’t quite get my mind around Facebook yet. It has too many distracting bells & whistles for my taste.
I check email first, Twitter second, Reader third. There’s an decreasing order of intimacy there that mirrors my personal inclinations: close friends/family to casual friends/colleagues to online/professional connections.
diane
Well, if you’re a hermit, then I’m right down in that cave with you, Dave. Funny that I read this today, as I’d just blogged about my own delayed start with Facebook. Like many, I’m not sure if it’ll be right for me, and I’m not sure about its role in education, but it’s intriguing, and it’s time for me to grapple with it. Thanks for the insights and questions.
I know what you mean about email. My son is 14, and spends most of his time text messaging on his phone, IM-ing on the computer, or “socializing” with his friends on MySpace. He rarely uses email.
Me? Email, Twitter, Bloglines – not necessarily in that order. Coincidentally, just before I read your post, I posted a question in Twitter…How do I get all this stuff in one place. Now with a Pownce account, I just can’t imagine how to keep track of all this stuff. There aren’t enough hours in a day. Is MySpace or FaceBook evolved enough yet to let me have all my online activities accessed from one site?
I’ve made a couple for recons into Facebook – for a time connecting with a number of my adult learners (basic adult upgrading). What I was struck by was how little conversation there was. People would forward the same jokes, warnings, inspirational posts and funny/cute photos to one other. Often, they would forward to a batch of contacts, with the result that one person would receive the same chain-mail from five or six others. I’ve had several learners turn away from Fb (and blogging) because they couldn’t find “real” conversation there. On the other hand, old issues of our class newsletter still get read and talked about by the learners.
I know that other facilitators use Fb in to share news and information with learners. It can be done: I just don’t seem able to do it. In the end, I gated my Fb account, making it family only. I’d dump it altogether, but my 70 year old mom uses it as her chief means for communicating with us kids.
Dave,
I believe the international teacher might be one of the first to really embrace Facebook. I took a poll the other day at my school and across our K-12 school about 50% of our teachers use Facebook. Which comes out to just over 100 teachers or so. I was amazed, but then started thinking about what Facebook, and social networks, allow us to do. They allow us to connect, and in a profession where you make and loose teaching buddies on a yearly basis Facebook has become that place to stay connected. The most interesting part is it is not my most techie teachers that use it! It’s across the board on the techno teacher scale. Two teachers I know don’t even have e-mail addresses anymore they just have a Facebook page. When I asked them why they said, “That’s where my contacts are, everyone I want to stay in contact with is already there.” So they use the Facebook inbox as their e-mail that keeps them connected in a multitude of ways with their community of friends and colleagues.
On another interesting note, I was contacted by a school through Skype for a job. Over a three week period of time we only used Skype to communicate. Sometimes live chat, sometimes leaving a chat message when one of us was off line, and other times talking in real time. We did not send one e-mail, I sent my resume via Skype, and we video conferences directly into the school via Skype. It was a weird experience. I’ll agree that Skype chat is not the best tool for leaving a message, but it did allow us to communicate and that was the app we used to connect.
I believe it has to do with connections and where your contacts are at. Increasingly for our students Facebook is that place. You no longer ask, “What’s your e-mail address?” you ask, “What’s your Facebook name?” A small shift with a potentially huge impact.
David,
This blog follows a familiar pattern. It seems that each time you consider a new idea or software application, you expect to choose the new thing and abandon the “old” thing. Why do you view the world in such a reflexivr zero-sum fashion?
Some ideas and practices are timeless and endure. Some technologies are a fad or may be of little value.
In the case of communication tools, I suspect that Negroponte was right a dozen years ago – ” bits are bits.” I am very close to all of info bits I need converging in one place or device. Why is that so profound??
I’m sitting in a sports bar watching the NFL while blogging on my iPhone. Like all good tecnology, the iPhone allows me to waste time without thinking about the tech. It just works. No pd, workshop, tech team or advice from Tom Friedman is required.
Although I disagree with your characterization of me, your question is actually part of my question. If my children’s generation is skipping e-mail as the central online communications point that it has been to me, then might there be more value in wrapping myself up inside of a social network?
I’m not suggesting that this is true, but that it might be true. I need to know more about social networks. We all need to learn more about that experience. Some things will be dropped. Some won’t. I have difficulty imagining working without e-mail. But I can’t think of a single time that I’ve used Usenet in the last year, and Newsgroups use to be pretty central to my online experience.
What I’m willing to say is that something new, even something identified and in some ways invented by my children, might be better.
I’m speaking as an educator/learner here.
I’m involved in several networks, the most active is http://classroom20.com. The benefit, as I see it is the ease in following conversations of interest. People pose questions or voice ideas and you can join in or not, but it is easy to follow the thread.
If I am interested in something you’ve blogged about I have to remember to check back to see if the conversation is progressing or to see if you have responded to my thoughts–with the ning networks I receive an email regarding any addition to a discussion I’m involved it. A quick peek at the network lets me know if any new discussions have started and with 5000 members there is always someone hanging around with the expertise you need or the support you want.
email first (I’m old!) then blog because it has links to aggregator, newspaper, etc. It’s my social network of choice for now because it is open in the district (we worked hard getting it so) and other choices…Facebook, My space aren’t yet and won’t be anytime soon probably …if I can’t use it at work then it really doesn’t do me any good to have it for home …not enough time to operate in two “worlds.”
Just wanted to explain why I used Twitter:
1. Speed – I have a tight deadline and wanted to get a flavour from around the world.
2. I wanted to push people on what they were saying, because I could almost predict the replies. Having them there, and having only 140 characters makes people think hard about being concise, about saying what they want to say, getting to the kernel of their idea.
Ideas don’t have to be long. Explanations do sometimes 😉
I understand, Ewan. It’s what Twitter is good at.
I check RSS first, then email. I’m also using RSS to track changes on wikis that I’m administrating. It’s faster than opening and deleting emails.
I haven’t got on the twitter bandwagon, yet. As a classroom teacher, I find I need to limit my social network use during the day to put appropriate focus on students.
Hey Dave, if you haven’t read the latest Pew Internet Study about Teens and Social Networks, it is well worth it, and fits right in with what you are talking about.
Specifically with teen communication it says only 14% of teens use email to talk with friends every day. (Page 5)
Dave,
As we can see from the responses here, there is no single correct answer to your questions. People will continue to use any and all means of available communication and networking – some methods more than others.
I view the current crop of social networks as resources to connect, not converse, with others. Once a connection is [re]established, preferred methods of communication take over. That is to say, one might reconnect with former classmates and colleagues, or initiate new relationships using Facebook, LinkedIn, Classmates.com and other social networks, but once the connection is established, communication takes place in a user’s preferred medium for conversations -typically email, IM and text messaging.
This behavior will evolve as social networks become better integrated with applications optimized for communication. For example, there is absolutely no reason Facebook should continue to support its own separate email application. Members should be able to connect to their preferred application such that the application is Facebook-aware…and vice-versa.
I have some 5000 business and personal contacts in my Exchange address book, a subset of 276 in LinkedIn, and a subset of maybe 6 in both Plaxo and Facebook. I began building my LinkedIn network as a central resource to proactively keep tabs on friends and colleagues as they move from job to job, town to town. Synchronizing the changes with Exchange is a time-consuming activity that would never scale to 500 contacts, let alone 5000. I’ve abandoned the effort in the sense that I do not actively try to locate and invite my contacts to connect via LinkedIn. While my LinkedIn network continues to grow, I hope that LinkedIn will eventually provide an integration with Exchange beyond its current address book import features.
Like many business people, I have no desire to log in to a site like Facebook or LinkedIn whenever I wish to communicate with my network. And I have no desire to log in to the sites on a regular basis.
While many of its older members may be reluctant to admit it, Facebook is still primarily a destination for goofing off…that is to say, socializing for the sake of socializing. One need spend only five minutes browsing the so-called “applications” created by hundreds of developers to understand that my claim is correct. Funwall, BumperSticker and compatability tests are not tools for the enterprise.
I anticipate the day a researcher publishes the lost productivity due to today’s social networks.
“it seems to me that assessment should be more about going in to an information site, the information home of a student, and excavating that site for artifacts that help us to determine learning.” – love this quote..and umm, this is exactly what we are doing via Teen Life projects..allowing the students to build the learning site, create the learning artifacts and experience, engage in conversations and challenge their thinking in ways that are, frankly, well beyond the 20th C models.
And yes, the first think I check on my computer is one or other of my social networks…email is last, but I still have to check it because for so many people it is still their main means of communication. There are many of us now who do as the kids do! and see it as natural and indeed essential. However, the relevant question for me is to discover how to encourage and effectively integrate the use of social networks into education. More on this in 2008 I think.
Joseph,
Thanks so much for taking time to comment here, and I’m very glad that you have contributed so much to this conversation. You’ve given me new reasons to dig in and try to make sense of Facebook and Linkedin — and to make use of them.
But I have to disagree with your idea that they are only for connecting not for conversing. At least, as I observe my own children’s experience, it seems more like a meeting place to work together. I may certainly be wrong.
I do not know how old you are, Joseph, but I suspect that you did not use social networks when you were a teenager. For me, desktop computers hadn’t even been invented yet. We are going to approach the experience in ways that make sense to us, as people who are trying to accomplish a job or a goal, and use the tools we are comfortable with.
I do agree with you that, for most users, social networks are a place to goof off. It’s because teenagers need a place to goof off. But what I think is important to educators (and extremely interesting) is how are their information and communication experiences, the impressions they are building for community, and the habits they are developing going to influence how they work (and play) in their future — the future we are preparing them for? And how do we adapt how and what we teach to make the most of that future, in light of the habits and impressions they are developing today.
As you say, it’s all going to evolve, and this is an important thing for educators to be paying attention to and discussing.
Thanks again…
Well, the first thing I check is livejournal, which has characteristics of blogs and social networks. If I have any more time than that, I read my aggregator and email. I am on the old end of the millennials-who-are-now-teachers, but the majority of my age-peers and friends use livejournal, AIM and facebook for online communication. (I’m sure the popularity of AIM among us is because so many of us grew up in the era of AOL’s dominance.) Oh, and we periodically create forums on free sites like ezboards to organize group activities.
We all still use email, it’s just not the main method of communication. Most of my ‘net-using students have email addresses, as well. I think the perceived death of email may partly be due to the new methods of communication available (although instant messaging is not really new) but is probably more due to the level of spam. As that has risen, people have sought out methods of communication that don’t need spam-blockers to be kept relevant. The example I saw recently was with twitter–after all, all you have to do to ignore twitter “spam” is not follow someone.
Hi Dave,
You’re very welcome. I enjoy your topics, and I’m glad I recently stumbled upon your site.
I didn’t mean to imply that everyone views social networks as a place only to connect, not converse. That’s just a personal view that I happen to share with others in my line of work. As high tech consultants, that’s the way we tend to use social networks.
I’m 37. I used listservs and VAX to communicate as a teenager, and eventually IRC in the late 80s.
The primary problem I have with instant messaging and text messaging, as modes of communication, is the lack of a record – an audit trail, if you will – of what I’ve written and what I’ve read. Some IM applications do permit logging, and I’ve read that some Telecoms do log text messages, but vendors have yet to create a more efficient way for users to locate past comments and conversations of interest in log files. File attachments are another source of frustration as the attachments are physically disconnected from IM conversations, and I’m not sure if it’s even possible to associate a file with a conversation while texting.
For me, these are important features of continuity and accountability in a business context, particularly in light of current laws and regulations governing data protection, privacy and retention. I apply the same basic expectations to my personal conversations. (Do I sound like fun or what?)
Teenagers and college students (and apparently quite a few adults) are able to enjoy a completely different experience online. With the exception of homework, outside the classroom there seems to be little connection between modes of communication and task-related work. In fact, a majority of teenage conversations are best described as Seinfeld-like. That is to say, they tend to have conversations about nothing particularly important. Ahhh, I remember those days well. Five minutes on MySpace and, dare I say, you will have experienced the depth of 95% of MySpace conversations.
I believe we must be cautious as we observe the ways in which younger generations communicate and the habits they develop. Young workers should, in my opinion, communicate (and conduct themselves) in a manner which is appropriate for business – not the other way around. Just imagine if business was conducted in a manner consistent with the way kids communicate today. Would anyone accomplish anything?
We’re already experiencing the impact of IM and the Internet on today’s workforce productivity. A 15 month old Salary.com survey found that “employees spend an average of 1.86 hours per eight-hour workday on something other than their jobs, not including lunch and scheduled breaks. Based on those averages, employee time-wasting costs U.S. employers an estimated $544 billion in lost productivity each year.”
That is billion, with a B. Just to put that figure into context, lost productivity (as estimated 15 months ago) is 8.1 times the entire FY2007 budget of the Dept. of Education ($67.2 billion). And that’s with our current crop of workers.
The report went on to state, “More than half (52%) of the 2,706 people surveyed admitted that their biggest distraction during work hours is surfing the Internet for personal use. Other distractions cited by respondents included socializing with co-workers (26.3%), running errands outside the office (7.6%) and spacing out (6.6%).”
Given the habits of today’s teenagers and modern society’s tendency to avoid properly managing the expectations of its children, we cannot begin to imagine the potential impact as they enter the workforce. A trillion dollar productivity loss is not unimaginable.
I firmly believe we are taking steps backward, not forward with regard to our children, and the influence of technology in their lives. I’ll leave that for another discussion, another time.
I, like so many others, check multiple information/connection sources each day because each has its own purpose. I also know that VERY few of my colleagues check more than email. There are those of us that read blogs, keep up with social networks, and like to experiment with new applications. There are still many more who look at me like I have three heads when I mention something like an RSS feed which I take for granted as commonplace. I think that for at least the next few years, it will be necessary for a large percentage of us to still use multiple online communication tools. When the best of each can be combined together, we’ll have a real shot at converting those who are still email only.