Starting to Get It?

There’s a conversation going on at Classroom 2.0, that was started by nlowell and picked up on by several other Ning members.  Cary Harrod’s comments got me to thinking more about social networks.,

I am fairly new to the world of web 2.0 and I’m still trying to wrap my brain around the whole idea of transparency. I still haven’t figured out how I could possibly contribute anything new to the conversations taking place right now, particularly in the company of such people as Will Richardson, Terry Friedman, David Jakes and yes, nlowell. What WILL encourage me to enter the web 2.0 conversations are people like Steve, Barbara and Alja who obviously understand the complexities of adult learning.

I’ve written about “not getting“ this SN thing. But reading your ideas made me realize that what I do is entirely about social networks. I’m coming to suspect, however, that there are many kinds of networks, and that they are, in a sense, part of one network, tied together (attracted to each other) through the conductivity of conversations and the  gravitational pull of logic.

I looked for a pictures of planets in the Creative Commons sections of Flickr, but found this one by Ollie Deakin — even better!

Attention is one of those words that is talked about a lot in conversations about Web 2.0 — the BIG deuce. In a sense it is a commodity. To get things done, we need other people, and to get them interested, we need their attention. One thing that’s concerned me is that as we talk about limitless bandwidth, limitless channels on the TV, limitless this and that in the world of information, what is not limitless is attention. There are only so many people and so many hours in the day. And each of us are only willing to give up so much of our day’s attention to others’ ideas.

I think that the reason that I don’t get things like Ning is that I started blogging in a time when there was an abundance of attention out there, looking for something to pay attention to, and they would latch on to almost anything. As more people started becoming interested in blogs, and there were only a handful of educator bloggers out there, they came to Will Richardson, Terry Freedman, David Jakes, and some even came to read my blog. It was like physics — attention gathering around Will’s voice built up mass, and the more mass gathering around a particular voice the greater the gravitational pull — and the more attention that was attracted to it.

There isn’t so much attention left, so newer bloggers have more difficulty attracting attention and building up mass. This may be where social networking services like Ning come to play. Within this Classroom 2.0 network, there can be a concentration of attention, such that what a newer blogger (participant/contributor in the conversational web) has to say can be heard and can spark conversation. The network builds up mass where it has become more difficult for individuals. Will doesn’t need a Ning, because he is huge. He is a planet Jupiter. I have a goodly amount of mass, though I’m a mercury, or perhaps more appropriately, one of the moons of Saturn (I love that planet).

Yet Will, and Jakes, and Freedman are also a part of Ning, because their ideas can be latched to from Ning, and spread, and Will can aggregate the conversations that spring up here and talk about them.

So I suspect that Steve Hargadon got it all along.  It is a place for beginners, but for reasons far more esoteric and potent than just having an easier tool.  It’s a place of more concentrated attention and more potency of ideas.

Or I could be entirely off my rocker!

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Image Citation:
Deakin, Ollie. “Planet.” Odeaks’ Photostream. 3 Jan 2007. 7 Apr 2007 <http://flickr.com/photos/bigdeaks/343935290/>.