PLN Consulting

As we finish up the class and you’re all thinking about your PLN papers, I had my own PLN consulting moment this morning and just wanted to share.

I’m visiting my mother right now, as I do at the end of every summer, and we were talking about her career plans. She’s close to retirement age, and not ready to retire, but ready to shift the focus of what she does. She runs a restorative justice center and has done various related things along the way. In addition to handling local restorative justice cases / running community circles, she has worked as a mediator and ombudsperson. She leads parenting classes and restorative groups for people who were convicted of domestic violence. She knows a lot, and is looking to parlay that into a consulting business. She also told me that she has 3 related books outlined and she needs to work on them.

Online networks have not exactly been mom’s thing. She doesn’t avoid them. She’s on Facebook and Insta, connecting with friends and family. Professionally, however, she’s not used these tools. She doesn’t really need to. Everything she does is locally based (although she’s given workshops in other countries, so clearly she’s got something going on). As she transitions to consulting she will need to build out the professional network.

This morning at breakfast mom said “I’m going to get you girls to help me. Once my books are done and I’m ready to quit the job, I’ll probably need to set up a web site and LinkedIn, right?”

Ummm. No. No, mom. You need to start building that presence NOW. You need to establish that network so that when the book comes out you have people to help spread the news. You need a web site with a blog, and you need to start posting teasers of sorts on the blog, like short essays on relevant topics from the books. Then you spread the word about the blog on your network – announce new posts on LinkedIn and Twitter. Let people follow wherever they engage online. As you go to conferences and visit neighboring centers, collect people’s info and connect to them. Right now you can’t promote the workshops and such that you do as your own business, but you certainly can promote your center. And if you put these things online for your center, then you can share and promote via your networks (e.g., tweet: Excited to give a workshop @thisplace for @mycenter on #topic slides online at URL

To this last bit, mom said that doing this for the center has been on her to do list for a while. And then she asked me to help her get it all set up this weekend and give her some tips.

Should I have just told her to “take the class”? ;-)

Social Media & Society - debrief

Lauren B. and I were at a conference in Toronto over the weekend, and it was fabulous. It was an interdisciplinary group of scholars coming together to discuss issues related to social media. We presented a paper on a panel that focused on youth and social media.

To learn more about our paper, click here:

https://studentssocialmediaschools.com/2017/07/29/social-media-society-2017/

That's the web site for our research project. (Interested? Email me!)
Our paper went really well -- and a lot of folks were tweeting about it.

The conference itself was fascinating! So much good research going on!

My Produsage Projects

So, I mentioned on twitter recently that I have two produsage projects of sorts. I do! Very exciting, actually.

They’re a bit different from the ones you’re all working on in that the purpose isn’t necessarily to support learning, and also they are tailored to specific (and defined) communities. Still, I’m working on setting up some technologies so that groups of people can use them to support their activities, and in both cases there will be a core group of people who are produsers and commenters/audience/interactants also will be welcome.

Project 1: Research Group
A research project that I’ve been working on really needs some help bringing it all together. We have done a great job of collecting data, and when we meet we have great ideas, but we are not the most organized group in terms of setting tasks and following up on them.  Also, we realize that it is time to start communicating about our work with the rest of the world. So far we’ve used email to communicate between meetings and we have a group dropbox (sort of disorganized, but it works for sharing files). We meet face to face, and the other group leader and I try to take notes although sometimes we lose our notes or fail to follow up on them.  What’s on deck for us? It’s a combination of internal and external communications. Internally, we’ll still use our dropbox, but we’re adding trello so we can document our project plans (including future research projects that we have brainstormed), figure out who will do what, and track progress between meetings. I’ve used trello on ISD/software development projects in the past, and I’m confident that it will work well for this group. That’s the inward-facing parts, but externally we’re starting to share our work with the world. Last year we hastily created a video and put it on youtube to share with the UROP program, as we sought an undergraduate researcher to work with us. I feel like maybe I even put it up on a blog, but now I can’t recall (how sad is that?). But now we need more. I’ve created a blog for us, and we will use it to announce our work, updates, etc. People can follow us there. Slides will be up on slideshare. Individually we’ll tweet about updates, linking back to the blog (our hub). It doesn’t make sense to have a dedicated twitter account or hashtag. This isn’t a huge project – but it’s a start.

Project 2: PTA
The PTA at my daughter’s school needs help with their online presence. Right now they have a few dispersed accounts – a page controlled by the school, a volunteer signup, a Facebook page. I volunteered to help set things up so that the PTA controls their own site. I’m using wordpress for a web site / blog. There will be sidebar links to the signup and lunch order sites, Facebook, membership info, etc. I’m setting up a calendar that people can subscribe to. The blog will be used for news items, and people can comment there as well as on Facebook. I’m investigating additional things people might want to use to bring us all together. Flickr group? Maybe, although there can be issues with children and photo sharing. Etc.

These are just basic plans, and both sites will likely evolve over time and with member/leader feedback. They’re perhaps not quite as interactive/prosumer oriented as one might try to foster for a learning experience, but ideally both will be fostering rich interactions (and not just dissemination of information).

Tour de blog #5 (I procrastisurf edition)

Good morning! (although it may not be morning as you read this)

This morning, as I suffer my AERA proposal writing hangover (it's a thing! but I got my proposals in last night before the deadline), I'm a bit slow to get started on the work of the day, so I grabbed a cuppa and headed over the blogs for some interesting morning reading (MUCH better than the news).

I was not disappointed. Here's some good stuff that's going on.

• Jerome learned about the wider (than wikipedia) world of wikis and he has a produsage idea! (Not necessarily what he's doing for class, but nonetheless a great practical application.)
• Jonathan uses wikis to get help.
• Anne's rockin' a produsage ideas about crystals, and I bet she would love your ideas and feedback.
• Josh documents how his thinking about social media has progressed.
• Trixie's wondering about share buttons -- who decides which ones appear? which order?
• Johnny's already tried IFTTT - so learn from his experience!
• MorningEvening offers early thoughts on MERLOT / OER Commons.
• Have you had social media regrets? Go tell Laura about them.
• Jorge's thinking about anonymity. What do you think about it in a learning context?
• Do you know about micro learning? Go learn from Becky.
• One time at band camp ... Mallory applied instructional design!
• Kyle is tying together gaming and ID, and he's excited about it. 

OK, my desktop is cleaned, my teacup is empty, and I need to move on to other tasks. Go visit some blogs, learn with each other, and leave some comments!

Tour de blog #4: Curation, Produsage & Intellectual Property Edition

We've been thinking and discussing curation, produsage, and intellectual property in week 3 and 4. I enjoy reading all your thoughtful posts. Here is a collection of your posts about the three topics (not an exhaustive one).

• As a new fan of Pocket, Alexis talked about advantages of Pocket. (Have you tried this tool? )  
• Alvin discussed the concept of produsage by citing Bruns Axle's (an Australian media scholar) book “Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage”. If you are interested, you may want to check this book. Alvin also talks about the potentials of produsage in transforming education and democracy.
• Cathryn told you "To share or not to share. That is the question. " (How often do you share your content online?)
• Devlin enjoyed her morning as a wiki contributor to our EME 6414 wikispace . (How do you like contributing to our wikispace? I hope you will offer your skill set where you can.)
• Ginny asked one interesting question “Are there social media faux pas? If so, what are they?”
• Heather talked about the Fair Use Law and its four guidelines. 
• Jerome gave 10 reasons for content curation and did a mini review of curation tools. 
• Johnny reflected on the concept of produsage, and a related interesting concept of "Attention economics"---"Attention is a resource—a person has only so much of it."  
• Jorge discussed who should own a remixed visual art. 
• Joshua did some digging for the four related terms: intellectual property, content curation, folksonomy' and 'ontology'. 
• Lauren asked a good question “Does disconnecting from social media reconnect you with life?”
• Melissa talked about how BlockChain Technology was used in MOOCs.   BlockChain Technology is the same technology that was used for Bitcoins. Check it out! 
• Taehyeong shared his experiment: Instructional Design for Periscope: A Personal Live-video Streaming App which is something similar to "Facebook Live”. Students loved that learning activity with Periscope. Check it out!
• Vanessa wrote an open letter to our class about "disconnect". (After reading it through, I like the idea of keeping disconnected for some days a lot. What about you?)

Can't. Keep. Fingers. Quiet. And other observations of the week.

I've had two social media "moments" this week that occurred as I've trudged down the path (and it was a trudging week -- too many meetings for my taste, deadlines looming large, contractors invading my space and making me make decisions that I don't feel qualified to make and so I have to go online for a crash course on stain vs paint and best tile for wet environments -- but I digress). Thought I might share them with you.

The first one is a funny one: I was going through DiggReader, and had it set so I could see all unread items in my feed -- from every source, not just EME6414. However, my intent was to read your blogs, not other feeds. I was ... confused. And then I got very confused. I came across this post: http://www.openculture.com/2017/07/russian-history-literature-come-to-life-in-wonderfully-colorized-portraits.html. I didn't click through (at first). Saw the author listed as Ayun Halliday.

My thought process went like this:

1. How cool! And Chekov!
2. What the heck? What is a student doing writing about Russian portraits? And is there anything related to social media / Web 2.0 in this post?
3. Who did this? Ayun Halliday? Who the heck is that? Did someone go rogue and change their pseudonym?
4. OMG, it's worse than I thought! Someone got hacked! I can't believe it! This has never happened in one of my classes. Now I have to figure out WHO got hacked.

Then I went to check the URL to see whose blog it had been. Oh. Wait. Openculture.com. Yeah, I subscribe to that feed and it has nothing to do with this class. Oops. 

The second experience brought me right into the thick of living through what we are talking about in this class. I'm part of a Facebook group. It's a large group. The members have a few very general things in common, but then delves into topics well beyond. The group is, aside from the two common demographic characteristics, quite heterogeneous. And this week tensions have flared. People have had conflict. Different opinions and experiences have led people to feel attacked, to leave the group, to hide other people, to delete threads (their messages and other peoples' messages). It's been a challenging week for this group (<-- intentionally calling it a group, not a community). As a subset of members discussed their feelings around people quitting the group and deleting threads, it was clear that the stated group "rules" were not being followed and that not everyone was aware of or fully understood them. It became clear that people make an investment when the compose a message, that message writing is labor, and it when someone else throws out the fruits of their labors. It makes people feel less inclined to interact when they know people can do that. Also, the rights of the lurkers were discussed (someone else's uncomfortable lesson should be left up so others can learn from it).

As someone who researches in this area, I couldn't keep my fingers quiet -- even though I didn't want to be in the midst of the conflict. I jumped in to talk about trust, reciprocity, shared repertoire, infrastructure, communication infrastructure. Then I thought "Oh, is this my community observation project?" because really I was looking at what this group was experiencing and writing it up (only writing it up to the group, to help the members see what was going on from a community/communication perspective). And now ... knowledge sharing/tracking and produsage ... the group is talking about how to archive and record the knowledge that is shared there, how to develop new guidelines, determine tool settings, etc. to help the group move forward. 

A side observation: Part of the struggles are because Facebook is not the best tool for this group to use. It's convenient and everyone is on there, but in terms of tools for a discussion group, ability to moderate, to delete and undelete, etc. it's just not there. Also there's no easy sub-dividing for topics (e.g. different forums), and so everyone is confronted with all posts / they can't filter out things they don't want to see. Other tools would allow this. Just something to think about, especially as you all start to select tools for your produsage projects.

We Changed the join codes for Wikispaces and Edmodo + A pinterest page for features of Edmodo

Hi, everyone

Note

The old codes for joining each expired after a few days. So, Vanessa reset Edmodo, Zhongrui reset Wikispaces. If you have not yet joined the groups, you will need to do so using a new code. DO NOT use the one posted in the week 4 announcement. It will not work.

The correct codes are posted in Blackboard --> Week 4 --> Tools (Edmodo shuts down the code if posted publicly so it cannot be posted here).

If you have problems send an email.

Features of Edmodo 
Here is the Pinterest page for features of Edmodo. via https://www.pinterest.com/edmodo/edmodo-features/?lp=true. If you are interested, you are welcome to check those features.