This is really neat to see for a couple of reasons.

First of all it’s an example of sharing and reuse in action.  I release all of my contributions to this blog as Creative Commons Attribution licenses, meaning anyone can copy the work, adapt it and republish it so long as they attribute the source, which Watching the Watchers has clearly done.

The fact someone thought enough of the post to reproduce it is quite a compliment, and it’s great to see the practical application of openness in publishing.

The second significant aspect of this is the replication of the Wave itself.  The whole idea was to explore the idea that Wave could be used to distribute centralised discussions in decentralised spaces – namely, many people engaging in a shared discussion in different locations.

The fact Watching the Watchers has included the original Wave in their version of my post lets us examine how this idea would work in actual practice.  All of the comments in the wave have been reproduced, as will any future contributions to the discussion.

Effectively it doesn’t matter if someone looks at the wave on this blog, on Watching the Watchers, or in Google Wave itself – the contents of the discussion are one and the same regardless.

So thank you to Watching the Watchers for not only helping demonstrate re-use, but also establish a proof of concept in use of Wave to distribute discussions.

Number one offender on this list was my Techticker email address.  On average, 0ut of every 50 spam messages captured by Gmail 48 of them would have come through that address.  So I’ve also taken steps to completely remove my reliance on that and replace it with other mechanisms.

For instance you’ll now notice a contact page in this blog, which features an email form.  Historically I’ve been really against these because I felt they were far too formal and lacking in a human feel, but after dealing with literally dozens of spam messages every day from that address I’ve ultimately had to be practical.

The benefit of this particular plugin, at least in theory, is that it filters every message through Akismet, WordPress’ spam filter.  When I combine this with a second mesh of Gmail spam filters my hope is that I’ll only be dealing with real people on real matters.  That remains to be seen.

Realistically many of the people I interact with online have a plethora of options for contacting me regardless of this change – including blog comments, direct Twitter messages, etcetera – so this is unlikely to cut me off from my network in any substantial way.

Background

One of the ideas that came out of my latest performance review was the need to develop a communication strategy to facilitate engagement with the wider faculty community. Traditionally I’ve had little need for a communication strategy – or so I thought anyway – I’d just communicate.  However with the scope and scale of my role being as broad as it is I’ve come to realize that I need something more formally articulated in place to ensure I’ve considered everyone’s needs and perspectives (as much as possible anyway) – but more than that, to ensure the rest of the faculty is familiar with the channels through which I’ll be attempting to interact with them.

Importantly too, I’m finding that mediums through which I have traditionally interacted with others – most notably blogs – are starting to be neglected in the wake of a seemingly never-ending stream of day to day requests.  “I’ll just address this one last thing and then post a blog update” has a tendency to extend ad infinitum until I’ve run out of time – and when blogging is as much about modeling use as it is about communicating, there is an importance on embedding the activity in everyday practice and making it a priority.

This post, therefore, seeks to lay the basic groundwork for what will become the communication strategy.   It’s also intended to help gain a reality check on whether my aims are too ambitious or rather if it is something I can properly implement in a productive and meaningful sort of way.

I find the informality of blogging frequently helps get formal documentation going, so blog I shall.

The Bones

By both necessity and design, the communication strategy I have in mind will span a variety of modes and formats, each of which is included to facilitate different sorts of opportunities and outcomes.  These include online and face-to-face; individual and group; synchronous and asynchronous; text-based, audio and video.

• Face-to-Face: One-on-one – addressing specific needs or questions; brainstorming on ideas, projects or issues; supporting change agents
• Face-to-Face: Groups/Workshops – introductory information sessions for broader faculty community; training in use of technology; identify innovators and change agents; encouraging cultural change (slowly)
• Online: Announcements, updates and other information (blog); explode-list emails for important announcements/news
• Online: Workshop resources (wiki) – supplemental material; recorded sessions; aggregated blog; workshop schedule and sign-up/EOI sheet
• Online: Workshop recordings – Lectopia (podcast), YouTube (upload Lectopia podcast (get raw recording instead?).

Secondary Agenda

As I said before, this communication strategy is not simply about engagement with the faculty – as important as that is – it’s also about modeling the practical uses of different technologies and demonstrating how they can be integrated into everyday practice to enhance the overall experience as well as reach a broader audience.

In that sense there are some clear underlying objectives that should also be articulated, namely:

• Openness/OERs – Everything I produce to be licensed freely under CC-by; demonstrating sharing and reuse; contributing to global knowledge-pool; discussing why you share and what the benefits are;
• Interactivity/Learning Networks – exploring and supporting online learning as much as online teaching; diversity of information, opinion, and discussion; opening up the classroom;
• Distributed systems/Alternatives to the LMS – demonstrating different systems and models as an indicator of diversity and opportunity

Points to Consider

As I said, this is only my first go at articulating this strategy, so I expect it to grow and evolve over time.  That said there are one or two very important points to consider in all this that will really need to be present for this strategy to be successful.

Holistic Implementation:

First and foremost the strategy needs to be holistically implemented and integrated.  The offline elements will need to constantly reference the online elements in a relevant, meaningful way that clearly depicts a complete multi-modal cycle.

For instance, the wiki or blog should be referenced or used during workshops in a relevant way (not a superficial “oh yeah, there’s a wiki too”).  The purpose of this is to help people start to engage in and with these spaces as a matter of habit, to the extent that they start to become mediums rather than just sites or destinations.

Fostering Collaboration, Discussion and Networks is Phase Two:

Secondly, the online element of the strategy as it exists so far is still very logistical and content-focused – perhaps too much so.  There is little emphasis on soliciting feedback and/or inspiring discussion, or of anything collaborative – online or face-to-face.

It seems to me that these ideas introduce the need for an entirely different strategy that addresses not simply how to connect with the faculty, but how to encourage the faculty to connect with itself, and with others outside of it.

At this point I’m inclined to call that portion Phase Two and come back to it; it’s going to require a great deal of thought.  So perhaps I’ll focus my immediate attention on getting these preliminary elements in place and plan – in say 6 months – to develop a second strategy for fostering growth of networks and creating spaces and opportunities for relationships to develop.

More on this as I continue to ponder it.  In the meantime if you have thoughts, opinions, similar experiences or words of caution to share please leave a comment.

Just in the last two days I’ve decided to make some fairly sweeping changes to the commenting system on this blog and have installed the Disqus Comment System. This video is a basic overview of what Disqus is, how you set it up (primarily from the standpoint of self-hosted WordPress blogs), as well as a discussion on the implications that the framework has for readers as well as site owners.

Disqus describes itself as:

“Disqus, pronounced “discuss”, is a service and tool for web comments and discussions. The Disqus comment system can be plugged into any website, blog, or application. Disqus makes commenting easier and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community.”

How it works

Disqus establishes tremendous opportunities for both site owners/bloggers and readers/commenters alike in that it expands the available functionality far above and beyond the traditional text-based commenting structures found natively in most blogs.

Information from Disqus profiles is accessible from blogs and websites

This includes the option to link to personal profiles elsewhere on the web, connect with friends and colleagues and thus facilitate discussion, and ultimately retain far greater ownership over your comments than exists in traditional commenting frameworks since everything you say is aggregated against a profile on the Disqus website.  For example, this is my Disqus profile.

Network and Community Formation

One of the key outcomes of this framework is the opportunity for network development at both the blog level and the user level.  This is due to the fact blogs and users are equally represented in the framework and can thus become nodes in their own right.

As part of the set-up process each blog is given its own community area on the Disqus website (here is the one for this blog).  Not only does this enable users to quickly view and respond to comments (which are tied back into the blog), the community area also displays statistical information regarding Top Commenters and Popular Threads.  The increased focus on the individual in this framework means that readers are able to connect with one another – thus facilitating the development of networks and communities within and across blogs and sites.  Effectively the users start to become hubs for the discussion as much as sites are.

Synchronised Comments

Of critical significance for WordPress users (which forgot to mention in the video) is the fact that Disqus now synchronises comments between your WordPress blog and the Disqus site.  In the past when you replaced the native WordPress commenting framework with Disqus, all comments were stored on the Disqus website.  Personally this is the reason I never adopted it earlier; it seemed too great a risk to store the comments elsewhere.  With comments stored on both Disqus and WordPress, if you decide to revert to the native comments  at some stage – or otherwise need to deactivate the plugin – you are not going to lose all the discussion that took place while Disqus was implemented.

Many Platforms Supported

This is not to say that Disqus is restricted to WordPress.  The framework supports a variety of other platforms, including Blogger, Movable Type, Tumblr, and hosted WordPress.com blogs.  “Hacks” for other platforms have been developed as well.

There is a plethora of information available on the Disqus website so I encourage you to take a look if you’re interested, or take a look at the comment area of one of my posts here to see the framework in action.

Update: Apologies for closing comments on this post; it’s just been getting too much spam.

By and large the bulk of the online conversations I engage in these days take place on Twitter.  Sure I blog, and I post comments elsewhere, but these tend to be fairly one-off threads.  I’ll write a post here and perhaps receive a comment or two in response every once in a while, but there is rarely many-to-many discussion on anything.

Twitter

Twitter does tend to facilitate this with far more regularity to a degree.  The problem is the 140 character limit.  You can say a fair amount in 140 characters if you’re efficient in your wording, but my experience has been there are definite limitations to the depth that can be explored and maintained.  This is especially true given there are no clear ways to tie conversations together.  When you comment, it appears as a largely independent contribution, making the prospect of easily skimming through a thread exceptionally difficult. Hashtags are useful for consolidating topics and tracking trends, but in my experience they don’t do a great deal to further the conversation.

Twitter is great for link sharing, and fairly superficial conversations, but not for deeper more lengthy discussions.

Facebook

In the absence of something better, Facebook has started to become the place where this has been happening for me, however I’m not particularly happy about that.  For one thing I really don’t like Facebook.  Above and beyond the sheer volumes of rubbish and distracting applications and advertisements that are so prevalent across the site, I have always had huge issues with their user management policies, the stance they’ve taken on photos of breastfeeding, and also the fact that it is a private environment where conversations are not easily viewed publicly.

It’s a place I visit occasionally when I want to kill time on something fairly shallow and mindless, not where I’d like to go to engage in meaningful discussion.

FriendFeed

The topic Gina and I were talking about was FriendFeed.  FriendFeed has been around for a couple of years now and has a fairly passionate user-base, but not one that has seen anywhere near the levels of notoriety that Facebook and Twitter have.  In the same way that the stream of updates on Facebook’s default page displays recent contributions of your contacts,  FriendFeed is designed as a way to aggregate and share your activities, track those of others, and engage in discussions.

You’re now able to organise your contacts into different lists for easier browsing, as well as create groups for more contained discussion and sharing of information.  Importantly it’s not plastered with ads and unwanted applications in the way Facebook is; content is kept to what is shared by your contacts – and you have a great deal of control over what you choose to view in terms of other people’s content, or alternatively what you decide to conceal from your view.

Like Twitter, you can also engage in discussions from 3rd party clients like Twhirl.  This means you don’t have to be constantly on the site to remain plugged into the discussions.

On the surface you’d have thought that I would have quickly adopted FriendFeed a long time ago – but in truth that’s never happened.  I see a lot of discussion taking place amidst the Silicon Valley crowd, and technology focused people in general – but seemingly very little communication in the educational, edtec or elearning sectors. Sharing, sure; just not discussion.  Without a network to engage with, a useful application like FriendFeed fails to yield much value for me.

Fostering Long-form Discussions

Nonetheless the peppering of discussions I’ve enjoyed on Facebook lately have made it clear how much value there is in long-form discussion.  Having a thread emerge that you can easily track, link to and share with others, while not being confined to character limits has proven to be an extremely liberating experience.  So I’ve been inspired once again to try and find a way to cultivate this outside of Facebook.

There are people on Twitter I greatly respect who flatly refuse to use Facebook, and I’d really like to bring them into the fold if possible.  Friendfeed seems like at least one reasonable option there.  The fact you can now embed discussions seems to open the door to distributing conversations more widely.

For example, I posted the following status update to FriendFeed (embedded at the end of this post), where people who follow me can read and respond to the comment. By enabling me to embed the entire discussion here – including all future updates – I’m able to circulate the discussion more widely amidst a community of people who may not be FriendFeed users. This is a far cry from the site-specific discussions you see on Facebook, as well as more traditional discussion forums.

There are a number of additional thoughts, issues and considerations floating around in my head about this at the moment, so I may post more about this later. The significant thing to me is the idea that I’d like to engage in more in depth discussion than I have been on Twitter and need a framework that will enable me to do this – preferably in a distributed fashion.

I welcome any thoughts on this in the meantime.

Embedded FriendFeed Discussion Thread

As I’ve said before, I am very interested in observing how new media is used across education – especially amidst the local UNSW population.  Twitter in particular is being increasingly adopted by both staff and students alike, and we are now beginning to see some wonderful networks evolve and grow.

So in order to track what’s being discussed I have subscribed to the RSS results of a Twitter search for the term ‘UNSW.’ Anytime someone mentions UNSW in a tweet, it shows up in my feed reader.

An unexpected by-product of this has been the opportunity to observe discussions and opinions that are being shared publicly about UNSW-related topics – not all of which are positive.  At this stage I do not actively respond to most tweets from students, barring those that are asking for assistance.  This is largely due to the notion of the Creepy Treehouse, and a concern that students will feel as though their personal space is being encroached upon.  I want people to feel comfortable exploring and experimenting with the possibilities of new media without thinking someone is watching over their shoulder.

This may or may not be a realistic concern – I just don’t want people thinking they’re being spied on.  I see new media as a flat landscape where everyone is equal – staff or student, Vice Chancellor or causal employee.  I just worry that not everyone sees things in the same light.

All that said, there have been times that comments coming through the search results are very suprising.

Just today someone posted their glee for the uni’s wireless network because it facilitated the download of illegal material.  I was absolutely stunned.  The post was publicly visible and tied back to the individual’s first and last name.

If this person proves to be a student of the uni, their admission could have significant implications for their academic career – if not legal ones as well.  Yet it was expressed in a very off-the-cuff and matter-of-fact manner.  This indicates to me that the individual didn’t have the slightest clue that people outside their immediate Twitter network would ever see the statement, nor the potential consequences if they did.

Yet with the structure of the internet being what it is, that simple statement has now been indexed, stored and replicated across countless sites and servers by now – so even deleting it won’t make it disappear.  Once you say something on the web there’s no going back.

By saying all this I’m not trying to cause paranoia; just to encourage the use of common sense in what you say online, because you never know who is listening.

The article indicates

“A survey of Australian journalism students found 90 per cent of students do not like reading the newspaper, preferring to source news from commercial television or online media.”

Notably absent from the article was any mention of the specific forms of “online media” that are supposedly being used by students.  Instead the article highlighted largely superficial responses that paints young journalism students in a very unflattering light, saying only that they feel:

“…that newspapers are impractical, they fall apart, you have to buy them, [and] There are too many long-winded articles, there’s no search engines and worst of all they get ink on your fingers.”

To make matters worse, the only two real examples of “online media” cited were the Fairfax Group’s online newspaper presence, and Twitter.

“Newspapers are on the way out, Twitter’s on the way in,” the article said.

No mention was made of the differences in opportunities afforded by one medium versus another.  No point articulated that Twitter is geared largely towards short, organically developing discussions amongst a massive network of highly engaged, participatory people. Nothing about the ability of newspapers to expand on a concept in a more involved way that features a more single-flow of information.  Newspapers favour longer, more detailed depictions of events; Twitter favours rapid-fire, interactive one-liners.

The two are not the slightest bit alike and yet Twitter was implied to be THE natural next step in a progression away from print-based newspapers.  Yes there have been a number of instances when significant news stories broke on Twitter first – and the papers have been scooped – but that doesn’t make it the next generation of newspapers, nor does it need to be.

The landscape of media – both new and old – is vast and diverse and there is plenty of room for many different players.  It’s not a competition.  In fact the prospect of cultivating and maximising diversity demands that information be conveyed and discussed through as many different media channels as possible – be this printed newspapers, radio, television, blogs, Twitter, or the oldest medium of all: face-to-face conversation.

The issue that newspapers need to address is how to retain their appeal in the face of increasing alternatives, substitutes and changes in reading style.  Society is no longer is a state where the news is delivered or controlled by a small group of media barons.  We can find information anywhere an everywhere – and as far as I’m concerned, that’s a good thing.

Professor Knight is quoted as saying “Newspapers are important, and journalism is important but not just to democracy but to governance, to the broader operations of our society.”

This is quite true, however personally I’d expand that statement to say that the sharing and discussion of information – regardless of media, regardless of format – is important to democracy and the broader operations of our society. The more diversity, the more choice, the more freedom, the stronger the Democracy.

A waffler is someone who takes paragraphs to get to the point, meanders through a multitude of different tangents and unrelated topics, and seems to use complex multi-syllabic words for the mere sake of doing so.  Academic wafflers are exceptionally difficult to read, let alone understand; and yet seem to exist in vast numbers in academia.  Simply look at your average journal publication and you’re bound to see at least a couple.

In my defense, I find that I waffle when I’m afraid of offending.  So rather than pursue the short, sharp point that risks putting me in direct opposition to other people I mince words, walk on egg-shells and try ever so carefully to make my point without controversy. But recently I seem to be taking this to the extreme to the extent that any point I once had is lost amidst a sea of dithering.

My last post discussed the notion of synthesising more radical views in a way that ‘dilutes some of the potency of the idea’ in order to make it more accessible to others who may not share the same perspective.  Today I flatly disagree with that statement.  If you can’t say what you mean in a manner that clearly articulates your true views or position, then you do yourself and your beliefs the ultimate disservice.  Honesty is the best policy  even at the risk of disagreement with your fellows.  Without straightforward discussion or debate there can be no real communication.

Identity Crisis

A few years back the blogosphere underwent a fairly significant identity crisis.  In a relatively short period of time several services emerged, including Friendfeed, that began to facilitate the discussions of groups of people regarding content that was located elsewhere.  Other sites went even farther, harnessing the aggregative power of RSS to reproduce whole posts, and effectively circumvent the original authors of the content.

Certain bloggers – especially those with a financial interest in their sites – were up in arms about the hostage-taking of their hits, and the fundamental fracturing of the discussions into a myriad locations across all corners of the web.  Lamentations of brands being undermined and devalued were common.  People pontificated that this was the end of blogging, and there was no longer a point to maintaining a blog since hits and comments were doomed to descend into mediocrity.

What this represented is an old-world view of the internet, where conversations revolved around, and were restricted to, the content and platforms that originally inspired them and a distinct social hierarchy existed that placed content and author over reader.

Platform agnosticism

Then Robert Scoble made the statement “I go where the conversations are,” and it immediately put things into perspective for me.  The old-world view focussed on content; the new-world view on conversation.

Discussions are platform agnostic.  They occur anywhere and everywhere; online and offline,  irrespective of the original source or location.  They are fluid and dynamic; subject to the opinions, beliefs and needs of the participants, and ultimately highly fractured.

Thus, to a fair degree, platform-centric perspectives perpetuate a content-centric view of communication in which artefacts of conversation and reflection are more important than the conversations and reflections themselves.

Certainly, this isn’t to suggest we all abandon our blogs and go home.  Rather, it’s to emphasise the notion that the fundamental nature of any medium – be it a video, blog, whiteboard or even scroll of parchment – is to facilitate a dialogue between one person and another and establish continuity of communication.  The conversations are the important part – they transcend technology – the medium is just a vehicle.

Therefore to a certain degree, my call yesterday for a blogcamp was a platform-centric view of communication.  Blogs facilitate a great deal, but they aren’t the end-all and be-all for communication.

Networks

On the topic of networks, at this stage the cynic might say: “If discussions are platform agnostic, highly fractured, duplicated, replicated, and personalised, how can we expect any network structures to develop?  What’s to prevent the web from descending into amoral narcissistic anarchy?”

My argument here relies on several points:

First of all, George Siemens argues that there are several criteria characteristic of every learning theory.  In particular these include:

• We have a need to externalise;
• We have a need for frameworks or structures for sense-making;
• We have a need to socialise and negotiate around knowledge;

These three points suggest that people naturally turn to others to help make sense of the world and their place in it; to come to terms and make connections with complex topics and concepts, and effectively gain a better appreciation for who we are as individuals and a society, and where we’re going.

Furthermore, particularly in the context of the internet, there are additional concepts to contend with, namely the complexification of information driven by a climate of abundance.

These two concepts emerge from an age when a combination of free online services coupled with the increasing ubiquity of web-access is such that virtually anyone can make their thoughts known on any subject they wish, and present it in any format, using virtually any medium.  This has served to exponentially increase and diversify the aggregate knowledge pool to the point where an individual is absolutely incapable of filtering all relevant sources of information themselves.  Whatever we choose to call them, we need networks to learn.

Not if, but how

The issue then is not a matter of “if” growth of networks is beneficial, but rather how to effectively facilitate and nurture their development.  Thus we once again return to the notion of network literacy.

There is little doubt that the landscape of new media, and the Internet more generally, is vast and complex.  As such the prospect of navigating the many connections and nodes, pathways and backchannels can be a daunting one for new users.

Moreover, given the natural habit of conversation and communication to transcend technology, and the inherently individualistic and personalised nature of the new media landscape, we would do well to avoid platform-centric approaches that inadvertently place content over conversation.

Communication is universal, and in a sense, timeless – platforms are not.

Furthermore, economic rules of scarcity still hold true.  Organisations and institutions do not wield infinite resources to support an infinite combination of personalised learning environments.  So it would seem that the most effective means of empowering students and staff to cultivate their own healthy networks, is to help them realise the process by which they do it.

Inevitably networks will build upon new media and therefore require the development and acquisition of technical skills, but inevitably they will also expand outside of technology as well.  The importance for holistic network development is recognition of its wider and more fundamental purpose of connecting people, conversations and concepts, rather than platforms and content.

In a time of information abundance, when drastically reduced barriers to contribute and share content equate to a myriad of sources of information it can be incredibly difficult to stay on top of subsequent conversations. RSS and content syndication offer tremendous opportunities to facilitate this process, with many blogs now offering feeds for both original posts and subsequent comments. This means users can have content and comments delivered to them instead of having to visit each site one-by-one.

Yet taking advantage of these comment feeds requires you subscribe to each site or even post individually, and you receive all subsequent posts to the site from all users. This can result in a tremendous increase in the amount of information flow. While this is nonetheless a useful way of acquiring and tracking conversations, there are other ways to do it.

Backtype, demonstrated above, is one such example. It’s a form of aggregation in which user comment contributions are tracked and aggregated. According to their about page:

“BackType is a service that lets you find, follow and share comments from across the web. Whenever you fill out the “Website” or “URL” field in a comment form when you publish a comment on a blog or other website, BackType attributes it to you. We give comment authors a profile featuring all the comments they’ve written on the Internet.”

Comments can be tracked against both the activities of individuals on disparate blogs or on the activities of many individuals within a single blog or website.

Personally speaking, there are valuable conversations occurring everywhere, yet I don’t want to be notified about every one – just the ones I’m participating in. Tools like Backtype enable users to automatically track the contributions they make, and therefore provide a quick reference of their location to refer back to later.

Options are also available to follow others, embed you recent comments in a widget, and create alerts and subscriptions.

Backtype is available at: http://backtype.com

CORRECTION: As shown in the comments area, Christopher Golda has pointed out the information I included in this video on Facebook is incorrect:

“we don’t actually aggregate comments from Facebook; instead, we allow you to claim the comments you publish on blogs using your Facebook credentials (via Facebook Connect).”

Similar to OpenID and others, Facebook Connect is another means of authenticating using a single set of credentials. Certain sites will enable you to sign on via your Facebook username and password as opposed to creating another locally stored account. More information on Facebook Connect is available here: http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php

Thanks for the correction Christopher!