Archive for October, 2009
My Four Facebook Roles – Friend, Professional, Parent, & Gamer – Part 2
Posted by lou in Uncategorized on October 19th, 2009
In my first post on this topic, I explained my observation that I have multiple roles that I take on as I use Facebook. I ended the post by asking the question “What is it about the social networking experience with Facebook that promotes all these roles being used?” In this post I will explore some opinions born of our experiences with our Connected.info product as well as other research into the topic.
Let’s consider what drives us to have friends in the first place. Anthropologists and biologists may point to the desire for relationships as a basic instinct to reproduce to continue the species. Others will point to our evolutionary roots and claim that the pack / herd mentality of other mammals is born out of a need for security, i.e. there is security in numbers. A few generations ago, neighbors formed the basis of our “pack” and our neighborhood became a place of safety and support for those who were part of the “hood”.
As our culture has evolved and the physical threats to our existence become less, our need for “protection” may have evolved into a need for emotional protection and thus our need for friends. However, as humans move into cities and other locales where their neighbors are less likely to be our friends, and our friends more likely to live some distance from us, our need for emotional protection is less likely to be filled. So, as people have become more knowledgeable about the features of social networks, they turn to them for emotional “protection”. But, how does sharing a photo on your Facebook page get you emotional protection? At some level, what it does is nurture the connection with someone, who when you have a need for emotional protection, will be “there” for you.
From one point of view, this seems incredibly sad. Our society has become a place where people who live close by are not known well enough to depend upon and our families live so far apart that we can’t provide support for our loved ones. However, from another point of view, by sharing what we share on a social network, we tighten the bonds with those people that live farther away.
Students entering their teen years are psychologically proven to need friends. For many, their friends are more important to them then their families. When we first build Connected.info, we did not put much stock in the “friend” role, instead focusing on the role of “classmate”. After 3 months of real use, when we did our focus group sessions again, we learned that the friend role was critical to widespread use of the service. If we wanted more than just students signing in, checking their homework and grades, and signing off, we needed to integrate the idea of friends into the product.
How about our professional lives? What is it about a social network that motivates us to use it in our professional lives? Well, there is the old saying that “It’s not what you know, it is who you know”. Or, put a different way, unless someone knows you, they can not think about you when an opportunity comes along. Reaching out to colleagues, customers, and important people in your chosen field through a social network can be a convenient way to keep those people informed. However, by using the same social network for both personal and professional purposes, one runs the risk of losing credibility in the professional world. Or, worse, your personal points of view may be so divergent from someone you value as a colleague, that they may decide not to interact with you on any level. Another saying is “Religion and politics have no place in the workplace”.
For Connected.info, we went a step further. We made the tool an integral part of the “profession” of being a student and teacher. We provided workflows in the application that facilitated information sharing and supported the assignment out / submission returned model in digital space. While Facebook and MySpace do not currently incorporate tools to conduct business within the social network, it is only a matter of time before they figure out that the opportunity exists to do so.
How about being a parent? At some level, services like Facebook and MySpace when used normally, provide a way to stay close to your children when they no longer are living in your home. There are numerous examples of this – photo albums of grandchildren, etc. But, by being able to “observe” your children’s interactions with their friends, you are able to learn more about them as another adult.
With Connected.info, we again went a step further. We created features in the application to engage parents back into the learning process. We were told by high school principals that their number one issue is being able to communicate with parents during the school year. Take home flyers are lost or thrown away by the students. Email gets pushed into SPAM folders. Web sites go mostly unread. However, when a parent is able to see on a regular basis their child’s grades, homework assignments, and attendance, the dynamic changes. Answering the question “How is my child doing?” is a basic parental need, that we are able to fill. “How can I help my child do better?” is a basic parental need that the ability to easily collaborate with school officials can fill.
Finally, there is the gamer role. Well, recreation and the ability to escape from the day to day has always been a part of what the Internet is used for. Providing games that allow a player to play against and with other people has made lots of game console developers rich. Social networks allow you to have fun with the people you care about without them having to be in the same physical place as you are to do so. The Facebook game Farmville went from a few hundred users to a few million users in less than 4 months of availability. The classic definition of viral growth. What is it about the game that make playing it on Facebook better? Well, besides the fact that the social network facilitated the viral usage growth, the game incorporates your friend network into game play. This combination of game play and friend connection is very powerful. For example, the game may send a user a message that “James Brown has given you 10 apple trees to plant on your farm.” This registers as a call to play and registers as “Oh, I better plant the trees otherwise James will think I am ignoring him”. This is a very powerful tool to encourage game play. However, it can go too far. As more of your friends play the game, the number and frequency of messages increases and at some point a user will turn off the messages and eventually, lose interest in the game. It will be interesting to see how long the franchise of Farmville lasts.
I hope this series of blog posts illustrates a main point; that social networking is not really a single thing / feature / service. It is an element of many things and can have both a positive and negative impact on our use and satisfaction with on line products.
As always, we welcome your comments….
Ed Week article: Socialization in Virtual Education
Posted by lou in Internet Education, US Education on October 16th, 2009
I came across this interesting article in Ed Week which discusses a report commissioned by K-12, Inc which was conducted by the New York City-based Interactive Education Systems Design in collaboration with the Center for Research in Educational Policy at the University of Memphis, found that students in full-time online programs had social skills that were equal to or better than their peers in traditional brick-and-mortar public schools.
Since we discuss these topics as well, I thought our readers would be interested in the article and the report. I am not a believer that 100% virtual schools are the right model in general, but I do believe they have the place and it is good to know that their introduction is not having a negative impact on a child’s ability to socialize with others. I do think that the blending of virtual or computer based learning within a traditional brick and mortar environment is a better model. But, if school systems ignore the trend towards virtual learning, they do so at some cost to their own viability.
As always, let us know what you think.
The coming socialization of everything digital
Posted by lou in Internet Education, Technology on October 15th, 2009
Most people tend to think of social network “sites” or “services” such as Facebook, Friendster, and MySpace. They are destinations, places you go to interact with friends, co-workers, etc. But, what is coming is essentially a melding of the idea of a social network into everything we do online. Social networking will be a tool or a feature vs. a site or a service.
Examples? Consider web browsing. The “browser” is becoming immersed into all sorts of tools now. The iPhone twitter client Tweetie 2 embeds the Apple Safari webkit into the application so that a user does not have to leave the application to resolve a linked URL while viewing a tweet. Email tools such as those from Apple and Microsoft also provide a way to view HTML content (essentially a web page) from inside the email too. This evolution has really just started. The introduction of Google’s sidewiki service allows a user who is viewing a web page to share their thoughts about a web page in a panel on the side of the page. Other users can view the page plus the comments in their browser, which as I mentioned earlier is becoming embedded in all sorts of applications. So, not only are users sharing links with other users, but they are sharing their comments about those links in a number of ways.
The “feed” is another example of something that has become better with the addition of social networking. RSS feeds for web content have been around a relatively long time. RSS requires that you subscribe (sign up to get notified) to a feed so that when something new is posted on a site, the tool you use to read the content is notified and thus you are able to see the new content from the place you choose to view it. Readers such as Google Reader provide a common place to view all your news. Soon, however, the capability to view RSS feeds was added to web browsers and the requirement to have a separate application was removed. This evolution continues in many ways. I observe that much of what is posted on Twitter is information gleaned from some RSS feed by someone and then shared with a group of “friends” called followers. The value this provides is that people you associate with and hopefully respect, have reviewed the information and deemed it interesting enough to share. This is socialization of RSS in effect. As the web has increased in scope, by that I mean the amount of easily accessible information has grown, so has the “noise” level of the web. There are so many things that you could possibly look at, how do you find what you are really interestefd in? Socialization represents one direction that solutions to this issue has come from. As I mentioned, being able to leverage the judgment of people you respect to “help” you find news or information you care about is a solid strategy.
Google Wave is brand new and is generating a lot of buzz. After using it a bit over several days, I see it as a step to something vs. a destination. It is a fine example by some talented engineers and creative people of what can be done with available technology. For what it is, I see many uses. I think of a lot of times in the past where as an engineering manager I needed to interact with a project team. I would call a meeting and get everyone into the same office. This is just not reality anymore. Project teams are global and rarely are available all at the same time for a lot of really valid reasons. Combining synchronous communication methods (chat – video & audio) with asynchronous communication methods (IM, chat logs, content sharing), Google Wave is a tool for modern collaboration. It makes more sense to me as a tool for the workplace at this time, but by blending socialization, I could see it expanding into other areas as well. One thought I had was that it would be great for the Wave tool to think of everything posted in a wave as a search term. Thus, if someone in the Wave said, “We need another PHP coder”, a list of free lance PHP coders (who are available for work & have been vetted in some way) would show up. Now, that would be cool 
.
Bringing this back to earth, let’s examine our traditional sources of news. A newspaper is a collection of information provided by people we have come to respect (a reporter for example) and then delivered to us in a convenient form. We read the news and then we may look up from the paper at our spouse and say something like “Can you believe what ‘they’ want to build down the street from us?” This sharing of the news you just read is a form of socialization. Your spouse now may choose to read the article themself because you brought it to their attention. Whether it is interesting on its own merits or because you found it interesting and your spouse values your opinions is not important in this example. Moving into the digital space, we find that this same process applies to information exchanged in social networks. But, this evolution continues. Suppose, continuing our real world example, your spouse is not present with you when you are reading the paper, but the information strikes you as so worthy of being shared you want to tell them. You might send them a text message using your cell phone to let them know what you just read. They might respond asking you how you found out and you would respond, I saw it in the Sacramento Bee (insert local paper here). If it was interesting enough to them, they would then go to get a copy of the Bee to read. In the digital space, this is what happens with Twitter. Now, let’s consider what happens when I am reading an online news story on the Bee’s website. I am now able to share the story directly by pressing the Twitter button at the bottom of the page, but soon, I will be able to see all of the people who have either shared the information on Twitter or Facebook or wherever, while I am reading the article. And, soon, I will be able to set my favorite notifier to alert me to the top stories read and shared by the people in my social network. Logically, my notifier will learn which people in my network I seem to “care” more about by watching how often I actually read things they have “recommended”. Then, the notifier will rank the news stories by how many of the people I respect have read and recommended the story.
I wonder if this will lead to more examples of “group think”, where the only things people care about are what their group of friends cares about? It is entirely possible. Could propaganda move more quickly to influence national thought? Of course it can. I know a lot of people who will decry this evolution on the basis of this. They will shout that this is another example of what is bad about technology and the Internet. I have the same response to them about this as I have had for the past 20 years, “Nothing is a substitute for being able to think and form your own opinions”. What I like about the place called the web now is that it is an outlet for my natural curiousity. Perhaps I grew up listening to too many people tell me to “Question authority”. I am not sure of that, but I am sure that I like where this is headed.
This blog is mostly about the intersection of technology and education so to tie this post back to that main topic, I have some ending comments. First, the goal of education should not solely be to fill our brains with information, but instead to provide us with the skills necessary to think for ourselves. As a reminder, let me point out that the reason that the public education system is so important for us in the United States is to insure that our populace is informed enough to preserve the grand experiment of democracy. For democracy to be successful, our citizens need to be able to think independently. I believe that the reason we hold politicians in such low regard is that they tend to believe that they should lead rather than represent and decide for us instead of listen. So, the opportunity for educators in the evolution of technology to be more inherently social is that we can teach our children how to use the tools to help them make their own decisions, and impact their own lives through what they learn. The threat is that this evolution may just make it easier for them to let others decide for them and that would be a shame.
As always, let us know what you think…