A newly discovered blog from West Lothian led me to a newly discovered project written by the brother of an old(ish) aquaintance, and whose company is also doing some interesting work for Channel 4. If this is a sign of things to come, then we're certainly advising the right thing on the C4 Education Board.
We Tell Stories is Six Stories based on Six Classics (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) told in Six Different Ways through the net and written by Six Different Authors (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), by the brothers Hon's company Six To Start. It's a dream for any English language and literature teacher, with one new story every week for the next six weeks.
The first week has a Google Earth-fresh lit mash-up from top Scot author Charles Cumming. The 21 Steps is based on Buchan's The 39 Steps and takes the reader on an intriguing mystery through the streets of London and up on the plane to Edinburgh. It's all a bit too close to home, but wonderfully done. There's a phone clue in one chapter which I've just called, but gutted that the solution to the clues lies in St Pancras Station - where I've just dashed from this evening on my way home. Had I been playing instead of working today I'd have been unable to unlock a seventh secret story. I just wonder if the Alice character is inspired by one inspiring gamer I work with occasionally.
Almost as intriguing as the story itself is the backstory to how these six (or seven ;-) multimedia Web 2.0-ey ARG-type games have been created, and the challenges both authors and coders came up against. It would make a superb literature project for the 21st Century student seeking out a dissertation subject:
Adrian Hon, chief creative of the online games company Six to Start, says:
“Authors don’t need to be great artists or programmers right now. They ‘just’ need to write. To make anything more advanced than a normal story, though, you need more skills.”
Most authors aren’t also computer programmers, and most programmers aren’t novelists. As Hon says:
“Web people come up with cool ideas, such as telling stories by web 2.0 series, wikis or e-mails. Twitter, but it fails because they can’t write a good story for it.”
This needn’t be an insuperable hurdle. We may see a new partnership added to the traditional artist-and-writer combination for illustrated books, or musician-and-writer team for songs. Writers could work with programmers in this new form of storytelling.
It also kind of puts claims that Amazon's Kindle is the innovation in e-books into stark contrast with where the real innovations can take place.
So what are these innovations? Well, the Hons see them falling into only six categories, around which one could start design one's own interactive literature. To see how this works in the context of the first story, you can read the process involved on the creator's own blog or get into even greater depth in the Gamasutra interview. Better still, see what others make of it from the project's airing at BarCamp Brighton (presentation below). One of my first ever non-edublog pals Rachel covers it all beautifully.
Thanks, Adam, for the initial tip-off and, yes, it's something we could, in theory, adapt for Modern Languages. Watch this space. In the meantime, I think there are numerous possibilities for the Frenchies and Germanists amongst us to exploit the playing/experiencing of the adaptations of the 1001 Nights, Hans Christian Andersen's fairytales (I know he was a Dane, but his work and 1001 Nights formed the basis of my Honours degree dissertation into the Fairytale Since the Time Of Perrault), and Zola's Thérèse Raquin .
The most exciting development in 21st Century Literacy this year? Probably.
Update: If you're a teacher short of time and want to try preparing something around this, Rachel and others have worked it out and provided some spoilers. Don't read, these, of course if you just want to experience the story.
Arthur C. Clarke passed away this week, and the activity on his Wikipedia page is something he would have been proud to see. All thanks and kudos to David Muir for the thinking that got me started on this blog post, which came from a chat we shared this week and his discovery of Clarke's death via Twitter.
What David noticed, and which has since astounded me, is the speed with which a holding message (pictured) advises readers of the page that information is likely to change quickly and be frequently updated for the next while, while the history of the page reads like a second-by-second data log. While alive, Clarke's wikipedia entry was edited at a rate of about three screens worth in six months (October to March). Since his death, edits have been occurring at a pace many times faster - nineteen screens worth in just two days.
This tells us a lot about sense of legacy, and about the unexpected nature of his death (newspaper journos with nothing better to do often get given obits to get back up-to-date in case something happens unexpectedly, hence the quick turnaround of most famous people in the inside pages).
But it also reveals how inaccurate and/or incomplete that page must have lain until his death. Just how much data has been landed there, edited, debated and finalised, all because, suddenly, there is more of an audience for the page than ever before, more of a prerogative to get it right once and for all? It's not filling me up with confidence on wikipedia entries unless, of course, the person I'm researching happens to be rather dead.
Of course, as John Naughton has pointed out, there can often be just as many inaccuracies post mortem as in life. Student researcher - and obit-writer - beware.
TeachMeet and I were in Tuesday's Guardian, which I managed to miss until I spotted this post on the Ode blog. Indeed, Emap and I have started planning TeachMeet09 (or unplanning it?) so that we entice more newbies and more teaching teachers to share their seven minutes of cool stuff at BETT in 2009.
It'll also help secure more sponsorship from a wider range of companies, and get it closer to the micro-sponsorship I've been trying to secure for the past two years, instead of large one-offs from companies (much appreciated, but rather unfair expectations from us of them, I feel).
Don't worry about the wording in the article. TeachMeet is not the property of Emap, it's the property of the people who make it happen - you. Thing is, they came to the table knowing just this and are excited by their changing role in this unconference-y world. What's more, they provide great support for the event which, I hope, will inform more of the actual BETT conference itself.
Just last week I was introduced to Ben Saunders, who responded with a courteous and short email along the lines of: "I'm a little busy at the moment but would love to meet up for a pint." He was, in fact, four days away from starting his 30-day dash to North Pole. Alone.
An attempt to set a new world speed record from Ward Hunt Island to the Geographic North Pole by Ben Saunders. The current record was set in 2005 by a guided team using dog sleds and numerous re-supplies in a time of 36 days 22 hours. Ben’s expedition will be solo and unsupported and on foot. This route has only ever been completed once solo and unsupported, by Pen Hadow in 2003. Ben aims to halve his time and complete it in 30 days. More than geographic exploration, Ben is exploring the limits of his own human potential.
You can follow the trip blog, catch up on his amazing Flickr stream (but probably after the trip ;-), and see what equipment one needs to make this voyage alone.
I'm hoping that, the next time, we might be able to help spread Ben's work to more school children, and bring their aspirations to a high with some of the motivating speak that Ben can offer. Maybe something schools on Glow can enjoy through Marratech video-conferencing, as well as in person. Don't know what I mean? Take a look at Ben's TED Talk, Three Things To Know Before You Ski To The North Pole, and be inspired to get cold and miserable yourself:
Does your technology make learning better? Does it make assessment better? Does it make learning more enjoyable? These are the key questions asked by Professor Richard Kimbell from Goldsmiths when he's looking at technology, and he found a problem with all three in e-portfolios. They need to change.
Currently, performance portfolios are created as an end result of project work. With teachers who are increasingly aware and communicating what will gain a good grade, we end up with a project and therefore a portfolio which are not real, which are fiction, which have no real sense. It is, says Kimbell, one of the reasons girls do better than boys - girls have more patience and creativity for presenting the results in a well-finished manner.
Cue Project E-Scape: this project was about generating real-time performance portfolios and finding new ways of assessing them. Initially, the idea began on paper.
A change in pedagogy
The tasks are real: repackaging lightbulbs to make the packaging reusable and multifunctional. The results: the box should be hexagonal, with a taper for the narrow end of the bulb. If you get enough of them you would end up with a sphere to surround the lightbulb. You can cut the ends to create lettering or animals which are then projected around the wall. Their projects are entitled "Your name in lights" or "Jack-In-A-Box light". You can see an example of project in this video.
Students, in their projects, are handed a script by the teacher, which choreographs their activity but does not dictate it. It's a scaffold for some improv. These students end up working like engineers, with the teacher in a technician role: "you could do it this way, or that way, or this way. It's your call". Teachers hate it, seeing their role reduced in some way from the sage on the stage to very much the guide on the side.
The need to make assessment digital
The project became digital as a result of an argument, an argument between two students about where their project should go. If only the teacher could capture that discussion it would make such a difference to the final assessment, providing a way to fill a gap in the learning process which is rarely assessed, if at all.
E-Portfolios, though, have three core problems. Firstly, they are generally works of fiction, created in a sterile ICT suite or on a laptop in a students' bedroom, not in the workshop or art room where the action (and learning) was happening. Secondly, It's a secondhand activity, digitally constructed as an afterthought to the learning itself. Finally, what kids tell you they're learning is different from what they write down in a portfolio.
So, E-Scapes asked if they could capture, in a portfolio, the learning that was happening in typical, messy, complex classrooms. They answered with handheld learning devices and collaborative co-creation of ideas: ideas are created, swapped around and extended by team-mates. As work is done, step-by-step, the work is uploaded dynamically to the e-portfolio website. Each stage of the learning 'build' can be accessed in a browse mode, or examined in greater detail. It's real-time, so the teacher can see and hear everything, all of the time, act on the spot or react later. You can see more of the process in this video.
How can this be assessed?
One potential methodology is based upon the law of comparative judgement. Think about eye tests, where we are asked which spot is sharper, the one on the left or the one on the right? We've only got two options, so we answer which one is better, without considering or knowing why. Taking this further, the E-Scape team, with their especially hard-to-judge non-identical projects, is to use a comparative pairs methodology (pdf). On a very simplistic level, assessment from seven judges is carried out on pairs of projects at a time, each judge marking 17 pieces of work. The judges decide which one is better, and move onto the next pair for the first round.
In a second round, the 'core' of median performances are taken and worked on further to create a rank order of evenly spaced performances. Using the resulting curve of performance, grade boundaries can be created retrospectively to award a grade, and the margin of error between the highest and lowest opinion of judges can be seen as clear as a whistle. These large margins of error are down to judges disagreeing, so these portfolios need to be pulled out and looked at further. We can also look at the judges and how consensual each one is with the rest of the judging team (the principle of moderation, which Scottish schools already practice). Those who are too harsh or too 'easy' can stimulate discussion as to why a project might be more or less strong. So this formative assessment informs the judges and teachers.
The reliability coefficient of all this? 0.93% It's virtually faultless, and no assessment system anywhere else comes close to getting this realistic in its outcomes. The team are working now on the third phase pairs being selected automagically after each judgement has been made, making sure that the process is as efficient as possible.
If you want to take more away from this model, the innovation in teaching, learning and assessment, I cannot recommend highly enough the interim reports on the TERU website: Phase 1 and Phase 2. You might also want to watch this 30 minute programme on new e-assessment ideas, where the E-Scape project is featured, and follow Professor Kimbell in discussion on the assessment element of the project in this programme.
Pic: Moleskin PDA
The nice people at Atomic Learning are giving away their premium how-to videos on using Google Docs for learning, until May 1. These guys have plenty of Creative Commons how-to guides, really high quality step-by-step guides to using office, design, graphics and web applications, making it worth a dig around if you want to learn new ICT skills fast.
After a packed two-hour lecture at Napier University yesterday it was great to get chatting to some of the students afterwards in their practical seminar. What emerged was that there is so much to learn in new technologies, even for these software engineers, network analysts and business analysts, the specialists of the future. Degree courses by their (current) nature silo information so much that they can be experts in one thing, and know nothing about a potentially related technology.
For one small group, spending 20 minutes having a play with RSS feeds for the first time turned out to be a real thrill, especially since it's so much easier to manipulate than when our school was producing its first podcasts three years ago. I had great fun finally getting some more time to play with Yahoo Pipes, whose way of showing you where all your bits have come from is particularly charming.
I put out a quick Twitter 'miniblog' asking for my friends' ideas on what might constitute an 'interesting' manipulation of RSS, where the web is brought together into one place, and got the following: an eclectic bunch of RSS aggregations, single feeds and mashups. Feel free to add your own ideas in the comments below:
John Johnston provided a plethora of homemade products, from his del.icio.us links, which are normally pretty ugly to look at, being fed through into a prettier Tumblog, to the ScotEduBlogs aggregator, produced with Robert and Peter, which brings together educational blogs and allows users to subscribe to blogs coming from particular locations around the country. John also showed how we can take the tag of an event, for example, and create a portal around that in a few clicks: this is one for the TeachMeet07 event. Likewise, David Warlick pointed to his Hitchhikr, which aggregates information on a wide range of conferences.
Elizabeth came up with a portal around all recent things to do with the Wikinomics book, and a digital ethnography portal which would be useful for anyone trying to get under the skin of why we love these new technologies so much.
LTS and Glow colleague AB points to an app that allows YouTube homepage to be used in a flash environment, underpinned by RSS, while Will pointed to his Darfur news portal, bringing information, pictures and video from there and, at the moment, Tibet.
Finally, Caroline points out new service FriendFeed, which aggregates your life and the lives of your friends, in one page.
What are your favourite examples of RSS being used in useful ways? Let us know; I'm sure the developers of tomorrow would appreciate your tips.
Pic: RSS pipes
When you're designing a new piece of kit, a platform for the web or a nifty widget for Bebo, it's vital that you have an audience in mind, an understanding of what might be possible, and the ability to change your plans frequently without sacrificing the integrity of your project. That was the main message at my lecture to the BScs and BEngs at Napier University, Edinburgh, today.
Why the 'users' are different
The generation of 21st Century 'users' would not appreciate the title. They are contributors, creators, co-creators, participants... 90% of 15-25 year olds have visited their social network in the past month, vast numbers of these Bebo Boomers using the platform in ways the platform engineers hadn't dreamt of.
Expertise comes in different forms from before. It won't be long before PhDs will be submitted on YouTube. Wine buffs don't need to wear particular clothes and visit stuffy vineyards; you can be an expert on your own blog, or have your passion facilitated and encouraged by the platform itself. You don't have to visit a pub to feel like you're a regular. You can join its Facebook group or take a peek at what's going on through its Flickr photo pool.
The main global shifts affecting innovation
With technology providing a means for consumers, users, participators to take part in the co-creation of products, services and knowledge (think Dell's community, Seesmic's relationship around product development with its users (as many follow it as it follows; its users are fanatical) and educationalists around the world, or Wikipedia, even), it means that competition in the space to have your voice heard and your service used has never been greater.
Daniel Pink notices what technology has allowed to happen, and sums it up with the three 'A's.
Asia
What happens in Asia won't take long to happen elsewhere. At the moment if it's mobile, it's happening, yet so few software engineers start out by thinking how they'll make a mobile app usable on the web. Instead, we see companies struggle to make mobile products from the web. The one exception to this: Twitter. Asia's not only a growing market but a global one: China will soon be the number one English-speaking country in the world, its top 5% of graduates numbering more than the whole population of the UK. They have more gifted and talented students than we have students. Change is on the cards, with tomorrow's teens facing over 29 jobs in their lifetime, which means long-term planning and big budget developments risk more failure for software engineers than small-scale, agile, flexible development.
Abundance
The need for being mobile has never been greater. What's this? Or this? Try this then. With 426,000 mobiles being chucked out every year in the States alone, the signal is this: mobile telephony and internet access is not only burgeoning, but consumers are becoming fans, and want to engage with the latest, most powerful kit. They need apps that push their devices and they will be ready to chuck the device before they chuck the web service that makes their mobile tick (think iPhone).
Automation
Automation of search has probably been the one most important automation to have taken place since the net was born. Everyone has become a cataloguer, but people still need help understanding the stories large amounts of data can tell. To prevent information overload, we need computer designers and engineers to come up with ever more ingenius ways to find and present information to the 'user'/co-creator. Jonathan Harris is getting there, showing us some degree of geography in the way we feel (the web's never been great at location or time) or time and pace in a photograph.
Automation of copy and paste has also meant that we have the potential to be more creative - or a lot less creative. It might be down to software engineers to design interfaces that make it more fun to be original than to be a copy cat. Adidas seem to be having some success on Jumpcut with their sneaker remizes.
We also talked about the role of the engineer in adoption strategy, especially when such a strategy feeds back into the development of further fuctionality, and how privacy issues, which can sometimes be the death of a project, can lend itself to structuring social media projects for particular groups of potential participants. Case in point: ARGs and Voluntary Computing.
Ultimately, as we started, we saw that the potent power of the net is not in code, but in people. If we can code to bring people together, the right people at just the right time, then we release the potential. It's hard to do this, with most software engineers working in groups where the ideas and direction may come from mere mortals like myself ;-) Communication, therefore, remains a key skill, and one that is often underdeveloped until the engineer is summoned to Demo and given a course by Shel. I love the way some developers express themselves in presentations at the likes of Demo or BarCamp, or in YouTube videos: this SecondLife development is more beautiful in its development than in the final product, I'd argue.
The easiest way to communicate with potential clients, employers or programming peers? A blog. In this case, if you're developing software for the web, for the social web at that, there's no excuse to be towards the end of a university career with no means to market yourself and build contacts in the slightly less cossetted world out there.
Software developers need to jump on every bandwagon going, to see if it's headed anywhere (thanks, Mike). They need to make sure that, using the tools of the ambiently intimate, they are at the front of the minds of everyone who matters to them now and into the future.
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The guys from Wikio got in touch today having seen eduBuzz.org/support, the training and support wiki we created for teachers and learners in East Lothian Council in 2006, become the 176th most popular 'business' wiki in the world.
The wiki sums up a lot of the ethos of eduBuzz and the East Lothian Teaching and Learning Policy: openness, collaboration and the inclusion of all in the decision-making process. One of its highlights was the co-creation of safe-use guidelines for social media in the classroom by teachers, parents, students and managers over a two week period back in 2006.
eduBuzz isn't just the wiki, but a collaborative online space of over 1300 blog users and countless readers (1.3m page views per month) based on WPMU. While the online project was greatly enhanced by LTS funding some time and effort in an initial year-long period, this is a just another sign that the project goes from strength to strength in a sustainable fashion. Real community-building built on realworld tools.
You might only hear the irony if you're a Scottish football fan, but this example of mobile blogging minute-by-minute match reporting in The Guardian shows what creativity (and cheek) is possible with only a few hundred characters to play with. I reckon the reporter was a Rangers supporter. Thanks to me cousin Dougie for the tip.
A vague title so that I could get away with pretty much anything that I wanted to at last night's killer slot, 8pm, after dinner and before the next time Naace delegates could get to the bar. They did pretty well to make it through to the end and have some energy to talk about the issues I ended up raising. John, Ian, David and the Naace livebloggers [link?] managed to capture elements of what I cobbled together.
I could have done something zingy around the whizzbang technology that really is engaging our kids (and offer delegates the chance to view that presentation in full now that they've done the serious thinking). In the end, I took the strands of thought that have been hurtling around my head this past week (community, participation, tipping point or not, and a bit of the "We're adopting" talk) and wove them together with one common message:
The people who will make the difference in the classroom will not be the national organisations, the regulators or the civil servants. It will not be the QCA, Becta or various exam boards in England (though I think the leaner Learning and Teaching Scotland has potential to offer an extension of expectations that our counterparts on the border have failed to yet deliver). It will be the teacher, the one actually working with the child, who will make the difference.
I'm preparing some ideas for our Chief Executive on what today's kids are about, based on various 'serious' reports as well as countless interviews and chats with youf over the past month. However, the one bit of media which sums up the expectations of young people hit me this morning on the music channel Box, just as I was getting ready to head out.
Now, it's been a while since I've been to a proper rock or pop concert, especially since this one came along. I think the last biggy was U2 in Murrayfield, back in 2005. Back then I didn't notice what I saw this morning in a clip of Take That performing live at the O2 Dome, for New Year 2007/8. I first thought the audience were holding up glowsticks or cigarette lighters (highly unlikely now that a) smoking is banned in public spaces and b) cigarette lighters probably constitute a terrorist risk for our ever-paranoid spooks).
Of course, the young and not-so-young Take That fans are all holding up and pointing, disciple-like, their digital cameras and mobile phones to record the performance. There was a day when, if you walked into a concert with a video camera it would be confiscated. I wonder now that digital video recording devices are wallet- or pen-sized they've just given up and, even, see the YouTubing of the performance as more free advertising and buzz. Given that the official videographer gives a few good closeups camera-on-camera makes me think that music promoters, if not all educators, have understood that they can't stop what used to be the 'audience' becoming the 'co-producers'.
Generation Y isn't interested in watching any more. They want to participate, too. When you're teaching, running a meeting or training session today why not keep a tally of how much 'performing' you're doing compared to how much participating your 'audience' are. If Take That can manage 100% and 100% on both accounts, surely we can.
John Connell puts forward some sound reasonings behind why a national intranet like Glow is still needed in 2008, even with the permeation of free, accessible collaborative or community tools such as Skype. In his closing comment on the post he points out that, for him, the safety aspect of having everyone authenticated as a bona fide student or teacher plays second fiddle to the potential for kick-starting more collaborative work:
For me, however, the central function of the authentication system within Glow is nothing to do with security and everything to do with the collaborative power it generates. We need to see past the ’safety’ aspects of authentication to the more important capabilities for community building that it infers on the overall system.
But here's the question that's been bugging me for the past few years with Glow, VLEs and online community projects in general: why should I put the effort into building a community at all?
I discovered the joys of having a burgeoning online community almost (OK, completely) by accident, having started blogging with students on foreign trips to keep the parents back home reassured. The community we tapped into through this was a happy accident, not the intended outcome but a welcome one nevertheless. At that point, we started to worry about how to cope with tens of thousands of visitors per week to our school blog and podcast, how to cope with hundreds of comments each week.
Being in a community doesn't mean you're part of it
The same is true of the face-to-face communities we live in through meatspace. Some communities are burgeoning, others are dormant. We are either born into or move into villages, towns and cities for reasons completely unconnected to the wonderful-or-otherwise communities that can be found there: employment, to get away from/move closer to family, the proximity to places of work, we can afford it... Only after we have entered the community do we experience the real reasons for 'joining' the community - or sitting psychologically outside it.
An example: In my own community of Leith, in Edinburgh, I am limited to the psychological community of three restaurants, two pubs and my stairwell. I do things for me and my family, not for the community at large. That's just the way I feel about things. In London, even though I don't live there, I feel part of a burgeoning, exciting community of like-minded individuals with a common aim, for whom I am ready to give up my own time and effort for the greater good.
The problem with large-scale education 'community' projects and even television programmes, as Matt Locke was saying over a drink on the Parliament terrace last week (had to get that in), is that those proposing, creating or running online communities spend months or years worrying about scaling participation without every considering how they're going to get people there in the first place.
A virtual community can be close to work, cheap and contain all the conveniences we need to get through our day, but so can some pretty dead meatspace suburbs, where there is no inclination to declare 'community spirit'. Glow, like many 'VLE' online filing cabinets of content before it, could become like this, though I hope and believe it will not. Likewise, some of broadbandless villages in Scotland, where nothing seems to work properly on a windy day and the 'conveniences' work on a timetable all of their own end up having some of the most enviable community building I've ever seen. For me, this type of village is the socially connected, rather messy world I inhabit online, made up of people living in blogs (houses), wikis (bothies) or Twitter (village notices).
So, what is it that a national intranet offers teachers that they don't or can't already have with existing web technologies? Is it a convenient but boring suburb for the 21st Century or an exciting village for the future, with its gossips, town halls and bothies? And how are you going to explain this to someone who's never gone beyond the BBC homepage?
Pic: Bothy near The Cullin, Skye
HeyJude tagged me a while back with the "passion quilt meme", and while I doubt I'll ever find the 'perfect' pic that sums up my passion, I thought this one I snapped while having a glass of champagne in a Copenhagen park at last year's Reboot9 was as good as any.
I've used it along with a quote as the end slide of a few presentations recently. John Hunter was one of the Renaissance Scots who helped set out anatomy in the terms that we understand today (before he came along people still thought the human body was made up of four gases). He believed in rigourous experimentation, lots of it and by as many people as possible, setting up his own anatomy school for that purpose. Through this he discovered how the lymphatic system worked and undertook the first study of the growth of fetus to child. Yet, for all this experimentation and rigour, all this scientific breakthrough, his lasting motto is one with a far more playful timbre, one that this girl sums up as she plays in the slippy, wet grass:
"Don't think, try".
I hope that those of us working in education continue to just try as much as we can, play a little in the hope that once or twice in our careers we might just make a difference. Go on, I dare you.
I’m passing this meme on to five like-minded learners:
DK of Mediasnackers
Andy Gibson from the The School Of Everything
Steve Moore - he has no blog, but I'll lend him a post here.
Jamie Buchanan-Dunlop of Digital Explorer and a zillion other Google Earth projects
Meme: Passion Quilt
The rules are simple.
1. Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
2. Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
3. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
4. Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.
There's new research from a Yahoo mathematician researcher which shows that Malcolm Gladwell's 'Tipping Point' theory, where small groups of influential people tip new objects or ideas into the mainstream, may be mere whimsy. In my experience, he may be right.
This provides some further thought not only about why people might (not) join online communities in the first place but who might join online communities. Duncan Watts is published in the latest Fast Company magazine showing how the notion of the Tipping Point, from its incarnation as the "opinion leaders" thesis of 1955 through to the notion of 'six degrees of separation' in 1967, can be proven less persuasive with some maths:
"In 2001, Watts used a Web site to recruit about 61,000 people, then asked them to ferry messages to 18 targets worldwide. Sure enough, he found that Milgram was right: The average length of the chain was roughly six links. But when he examined these pathways, he found that "hubs"--highly connected people--weren't crucial. Sure, they existed. But only 5% of the email messages passed through one of these superconnectors. The rest of the messages moved through society in much more democratic paths, zipping from one weakly connected individual to another, until they arrived at the target."
I subscribe to many ideas from Gladwell's Blink and Tipping point books, mainly the notion that people thin slice (make up their minds on something the instant they see it) and that good ideas require a small targeted group of people to help it spread initially. Gladwell's example was a bunch of influential fashionable hippies who spread the wearing of Hush Puppies around Manhattan in the 90s. My example is of good teachers sharing new ideas about how we can do our jobs better.
It's not how influential you are...
However, I've never believed that the influentual-ness of those individuals is particularly important. It's more been a case of finding people who believe in the notion, idea or service that I believe in and helping them spread the word on whatever it is to others. Influential people already come equipped with presumably equally influential contacts and that way of explaining things to others, but that doesn't preclude 'non-influentials' (yuck, horrible term) from becoming influential in their own right, simply by being passionate to their friends, colleagues and community. And here's the plus side: with influentials probably 'selling' stuff to other influentials there comes the risk that your idea simply remains in its echo chamber. Get some regular folk together and you have a chance that your idea hits the mainstream.
In the eduBuzz community, where rapid growth in the numbers of teachers sharing their work on blogs and other collaborative sites was initially linked to the Tipping Point notion, we quickly realised that, in fact, there was a chaotic blend of classroom teachers, parents, librarians, students and managers taking the lead - not necessarily our "Top 10% Influencers" that we may have identified beforehand; just good learners or teachers who found plausible the idea that sharing learning experiences was a good thing.
Ultimately, we would understand from the Fast Company story, it has little to do with the person trying to propagate the trend, and everything to do with the trend itself. If a community is ready to embrace a trend then anyone can help kick that trend off. If, however, the culture of a community prevents people from easily getting 'infected' with the new idea, then whether persuasive influencer or Average Joe, you stand little chance of getting that idea to spread.
Ed Keller, author of The Influentials, disagrees with this based on his own experiences, where top 10% influencers happen to be five times more likely to dispense advice, and they're early adopters, too, using mobiles and the net years before anyone else.
If being influential isn't important, wherefore professional organisations?
But he concedes an important point: "Duncan is making a straw-man argument. Because nobody, including myself, thinks that Influencers are the only group of consumers who matter."
This, again, puts a compelling question mark at the foot of communities. What is being part of a community? Tonight I speak at the annual Naace strategic conference, a professional organisation which prides itself on being influential, having that cachet as a group of innovators, the Hush-Puppy wearers of the Education ICT world. Does this stand up in an age where anyone with ideas that society can grasp can take on an influence of their own?
Gareth Davis of Naace already has some ideas on this, although in the light of this research it would be interesting to see them developed further. I think there may be a case of what Mark suggests, that we distort what actually happens in the light of retrospection.
Pic: Uncensored
