Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

"People act different behind cameras": strangely disturbing cartoon

Via Graham Linehan's blog and Techcrunch is This American Life examining our attitudes to censorship, citizen journalism and how people change when they're behind a camera.

Young and addicted to social networks: and they've never written so much

Clive Thompson in Wired has summed up some definitive research that backs up what many of us have been saying from our guts for years: kids have never been reading and writing so much, and with the proliferation of social networks and mobile messaging this stat will only increase with time:

Andrea Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

Not only that but the writing is of an excellent technical standard, with status updates training our youngsters in the kind of "haiku-like concision" that their verbose parents could only dream of.

It's the kind of research that would have proven handy 18 months or so ago, when I had helped colleagues design some of the most forward-thinking literacy policies in the world, where text messages, computer games and blogs were deemed suitable 'texts' to study alongside the great classics. I got a bit of a hard time for condoning this at the time, and still get a rocky ride in believing that iPhones and iPod Touches could be amongst the digital toolkits in which our most reluctant readers might find the reading bug.

But it still felt right, and feels more right than ever now. Go read, digest and share.

Pic by Mads Berg in Wired.

Why we might not want Twitter to grow (when we want something done)

A while back Charlie Beckett wrote from the BBC's Beeb Camp about how Twitter, though still a minority sport, still mattered as it was more creative than the other main ways (email, SMS) people got in touch within the mass medium of television. There are fewer people on Twitter (though this is growing healthily, especially in the UK) and this, in turn, means that there is a better quality of dialogue between "the programme" (or the journalists/presenters/interviewers/interviewees), the audience, and between the members of the audience:

So expert Twittering journalist and Channel 4 News Presenter Krishnan Guru Murthy can appeal for question suggestions via Twitter without getting swamped by replies. If it gets any bigger then it becomes email. Channel 4 has enjoyed some stimulating uses of Twitter to help audiences get more involved in live surgical operations, as well as to comment on the taste of the channel's home (re)designexperts.

Playing along on Twitter, having a conversation with friends as well as strangers who are sharing a common moment, is becoming a common activity amongst Twitters of an evening, using Twitter search or, for example, 4iP's own Hashdash. We've even done some work with the Channel 4 On Demands (4oD) back catalogue, taking 10,000 hours of television archive and making it accessible through a Facebook Connect platform, Test Tube Telly. Go and have a play, see what you're friend are watching and share your thoughts on it all. However, Charlie's point about Krishnan, that "if it gets any bigger then it becomes email", shouldn't be an 'if'. It will happen.

Ray Kurzweil's anatomy of exponential growth tells us it will become bigger, a lot bigger (until 2020, at least), and therefore it almost certainly becomes another form of email: something to avoid on holiday, something to ignore wherever possible. The same thought came to me recently as I was having a bit of bother getting my new home fitted out with a telephone and broadband line. Being a new house, we had been warned by the building site manager that British Telecom would not want to send out an engineer because, from their call centre, the home would appear connected when, in fact, it wasn't. Insist on the engineer, he said.

An engineer was en route until the very last evening before he was due to appear. That evening I wasn't at home, invited instead to an the weirdest dinner I've ever had (a perfume dinner) and ended up sat alongside JP Rangaswami, Confused of Culcutta, one of my blog heros and, as chance would have it, Managing Director of BT Design at British Telecom. He assured me it was easily sorted and that, if I had any problems, I would just have to send a tweet to @btcare and he and his colleagues would sort it out.

I did have problems. @btcare and @jobsworth did sort it out. Really quickly. Really nicely.

I was a happy surfer but started wondering what would happen, when, inevitably, Twitter became THE place EVERYONE started to get their telecoms problems sorted. And it wouldn't just stop there - it would be the place to have your gas line reconnected, get your oven repaired... Would I have to find a new geekerati way to get my stuff sorted out, or simply join the masses in the Twitter queue listening to the Twitter Muzak equivalent of Beethoven's Ninth before I got seen to?

Originally posted at 38minutes.

Time for a jerk of the knee: reasons to ban mobiles #54

"Fighting between Millwall and West Ham football fans was planned weeks before the match, the BBC understands.

"A Millwall supporter who organised some of the violence said rival fans arranged to meet via mobile phones."

The same situation within a school: what would the school do?

Pic: Millwall/West Ham

FestBuzz: Crowdsourcing reviews from Twitter

The 2009 Edinburgh Festivals are all about tweeting as newspapers cut back on their reviewer staff. Earlier this year in my work at 4iP I commissioned FestBuzz, a really clever piece of artificial-intelligence-sentiment-detection-twitter-search, to make sense of what people were tweeting about each show in all seven Festivals.

Go help a great Edinburgh startup by telling all your mates about it and, if you're at the Festival, tell us what you think of the shows you're at ;-)

FestBuzz analyses what Twitter users are saying about Festival shows and creates crowd-sourced reviews and "five star" ratings that are available on the site or through its API. As printed reviews in traditional media start to emerge, the site will help users identify the differences between the views of established reviewers compared to the Twitterer on the street using its combination of reviews and star ratings.

It allows users to get to the bottom of the ‘word on the tweet’ and get honest reviews of shows by the people who have forked out cash to see the show.

Fresh features are being tested and will be released in the remaining three weeks of the Festival, and provide a means for 4iP - and others - to test how this kind of technology is used by the public, and their demand for it. So far, #edfest tweeting is proving, in some cases at least, to be as entertaining as the shows our twitics are watching.

Why is 4iP investing in FestBuzz?

The site and API is being produced by Affect Labs Ltd, a small Edinburgh University-based startup led by founder Jennie Lees. It was funded after a call-to-action earlier this year around how the artistic spread of nearly 70,000 performances in August could be made easier to navigate. Thanks to its unique back-end technology, FestBuzz is able to accurately work out what shows Twitterers-turned-critics are talking about and how they feel about them with even the most sporadic, misspelt of Tweets.

In addition, users who join FestBuzz don’t need to use special hashtags or keywords to have their messages picked and turned into a star-rated review, making the site incredibly easy to use and picking up the maximum number of tweeted reviews automatically.

As well as the chance to make the Festivals more accessible, FestBuzz is amongst a couple sites putting the traditional notion of the "Expert Critic" under the spotlight. 4iP is also investing in a small, young startup getting its technology out into the public domain for the first time, and hopefully helping to stimulate some more action in the future from this and similar companies.

"FestBuzz was set up specifically to identify hidden gems, looking for hotbeds of emerging talent that are generating buzz on Twitter but slipping past professional critics," says Affect Labs' Jennie. "Our aim is to help people discover shows that they might otherwise overlook, and provide a true, honest opinion that reflects the thoughts of the masses, not just a few people. Having produced several Festival shows in the past, I'm all too aware how a published review can make or break a show; we're trying to level the playing field."

Crowdsourced reviews and revenue potential

FestBuzz is the first live application of Affect Labs’ core sentiment detection technology and, like all 4iP projects, we were keen that it have the potential to support itself into the future. The application can generate revenue through an analytical dashboard that shows performers, venues or show management how their performances were received each day. Affect Labs is also happy to make the API available to partners who want to use it in interesting ways on their own sites and services.

FestBuzz is one of several Twitter-related offerings that have sprung up in the days before the world’s largest arts Festival in the Scottish capital. Some only go as far as showing you pretty simple ‘thumbs up, thumbs down’ stuff around shows, or providing summarised reviews from the many tweets we’re expecting throughout the Festival. Any activity FestBuzz or these other sites stimulate around critiquing shows on Twitter only helps make the aggregated reviews better. Critically, though, the age of crowd-sourced reviews has arrived and is being lapped up by Festival-goers.

Follow FestBuzz on Twitter: http://twitter.com/festbuzz

Visit the site for crowdsourced reviews during the Festivals: http://festbuzz.com/

Twitter for learning in extremis: Surgery Live and, erm, Big Brother

Adam Gee, Channel 4's Cross-Platform Commissioner for Factual, last week helped bring together one of the most bizarre, insightful and exhilarating learning experiences I think I've ever taken part in on television: watch a surgeon perform his art/science live on television and ask him questions direct through Twitter.

Open heart surgery, awake brain surgery (i.e. patient awake as well as surgeon and us the trusty viewers), keyhole surgery, tumour removal – alive&direct thanks to Windfall Films in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust. Wild enough in itself I hear you say but that is not all, oh no, that is not all…

We will not hold up the cup and the milk and the cake and the fish on a rake, but as the Cat in the Hat said, we know some new tricks and your mother will not mind (unless she’s etherised upon a table, as that other cat-lover said). The plan is to tip our hat (red and white striped topper or whatever) to that increasingly common behaviour of Twittering whilst watching TV and encourage people to tweet away during the live operations, sharing their thoughts and asking questions. The big difference here is that this is live TV and you can make an impact with your tweet on the TV editorial. The best questions tweeted will be fed through to the presenter, arch-Twitterer Krishnan Guru-Murthy of Channel 4 News, who will swiftly pose them to the surgeon at work. So a matter of seconds between tweet and the question being uttered on live TV.

There were, of course, thousands of questions put through to the programme, helping the Surgery Live hashtag #slive hit the 3rd, then 2nd then 1st position on Twitter's trending, but there was also a great deal of conversation about the live operation between complete strangers who had found each other through the commonality of the hashtag, and their shared experience of learning what goes on inside our hearts/brains/stomachs.

In more formal education circles there have been attempts this year to engage audiences across education districts in, for example, live dissections of animals, where students are encouraged to put forward their questions. I think the Channel 4 Twitter experiment reveals some different behaviours that can only be encouraged in these more formal learning situations:

1. Twitter offers a certain degree of anonymity, which can be incredibly helpful in illiciting honest, high value questions from an audience (think other Channel 4 examples like Sexperience and Embarrassing Teenage Bodies, and my forthcoming You Booze You Lose). Where people know who you are, it can be inhibiting ("is my question stupid?", "should I know the answer to this?", "oh, I'll just wikipedia it afterwards"...)

2. The restrictions in place around a 140 character question or message mean that people cut to the chase and avoid the redundant language that clutters thinking in classrooms (and blog posts, VLEs, bulletin boards...). This is something found by the UT Dallas experiment highlighted in Derek Wenmoth this week.

3. Twitter helps you bump into people outside your learning/social circle, which in turn helps you emphathise, and see an issue from someone else's (very different) perspective. The one challenge with any Virtual Learning Environment in a school or country is that you are, more or less, sharing like thought with like thought, shaped by the culture and curriculum around it. When you take the questioning and answering global, you have an almost infinite number of conflicting perspectives to challenge your thinking.

At 4iP my colleague Lucy Würstlin took Twitter to a more entertainment-based medium (Big Brother) with her new product, Hashdash. The Hashdash Big Brother 10 launch night might have seemed pure entertainment, but it indeed helped a number of new Twitterers find their voice by educating the masses in Twitter etiquette, how to use hashdashes to have your message seen by more people with the same passion (in this case, #BB10).

Of course, at 4iP we have bigger plans afoot for this baby to help more people learn how the anonymity of Twitter can improve their learning (and their entertainment) with each other.

Obama's filtering frustrations... you are not alone

When bureaucracies kick in the real world stops. Obama started work for proper last week and hit the same problems that teachers, administrators and civil servants hit every day: the technology with which he and his advisers are so fluent, the technology that helped them win the election is blocked and filtered.

What does it mean? According to a fascinating piece in the Washington Post, no Facebook to communicate with citizens including his supporters (apparently 80% of the country at the moment), no outside email accounts or address books to maintain contact.

"It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs...

By late evening, the vaunted new White House Web site did not offer any updated posts about President Obama's busy first day on the job, which included an inaugural prayer service, an open house with the public, and meetings with his economic and national security teams.

Nor did the site reflect the transparency Obama promised to deliver. "The President has not yet issued any executive orders," it stated hours after Obama issued executive orders to tighten ethics rules, enhance Freedom of Information Act rules and freeze the salaries of White House officials who earn more than $100,000.

Officials also hit that well-trodden path of many a creative educator:

One member of the White House new-media team came to work on Tuesday, right after the swearing-in ceremony, only to discover that it was impossible to know which programs could be updated, or even which computers could be used for which purposes. The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos.

Jeff Jarvis makes a separate but related point, based on discussions he had two years ago as Britain's opposition party prepared digitally for an eventual (and as yet unheld) election: if you're going to win democracy with technology, you've got to continue governing with technology.

It leaves an interesting question for Obama in office, but also a question that filters down through the country's schools, hospitals and bureaucracies: if the White House and Downing Street increasingly rely upon social, mobile and gaming tools to survive and carry out their business to their best abilities, when will the obligation hit our other public institutions?

Obama is now the first ever President to have a computer in the Oval Office, in the form of the 'BarackBerry'. He's doing what millions of teachers and students are obliged to do - use mobile devices to circumvent the slow-moving load of bureaucracy.

Is it not time that this question is asked loud and clear and repeatedly by the lobby of millions of vocal teachers already thriving on the web: when can all our public institutions join the free world?

Follow Rich's pain and heroics on the Vendée Globe Twitter

 While still at Learning and Teaching Scotland I had hoped the national schools intranet, Glow, might help highlight an amazing story of heroism, and encourage Scotland's young people to follow, question and work around the adventures of solo skipper Rich Wilson as he battles alone around the world in his yacht in the Vendée Globe race. Alas, nothing seems to have arisen from the potential.

However, the social web being as simple to use as it is, even when you're balancing a sat phone to send text messages as you nurse a broken rib, Rich, on the recommendation of superb Boston-based teacher and BLC-buddy Lorraine Leo, has taken the initiative with his SitesAlive colleagues and is now Tweeting very regularly as he sails alone through the dark waters of the Southern seas this Christmas. His latest messages read:

Had an albatross crash land on the boat. Not sure which of us was more surprised. It struggled a bit to take off, but it finally flew away. about 1 hour ago from mobile web

Have 35-40 kt winds for foreseeable future. Making good time if boat & skipper can sustain tension of rocketing down waves. 10:33 PM Dec 21st from web

Harrowing sea conditions. With just mainsail, boat is less stable directionally than if we had a jib up front. 6:53 PM Dec 21st from web

Hammered yet again, big seas, breaking, barograph descended, then steadied as front came through with gradual windshift, not sudden. 6:51 PM Dec 21st from web

Had albatross around the boat today. They are amazingly large and also serene birds. 4:15 AM Dec 20th from web

Past the Heard Islands. Saw Iridium satellite fly fast overhead tonight among the bright stars, with its solar panels reflecting sunlight. 4:11 AM Dec 20th from web

Had a nice chat with Jonny Malbon on the Iridium last night. Good to talk, especially with what happened to Yann yesterday. 12:30 AM Dec 20th from web

Off the Kerguelen Plateau at last, seas much smoother. 8:22 PM Dec 19th from mobile web

I am devastated to hear of Yann Elies broken leg. He's a great sailor and a kind man. 2:47 AM Dec 19th from web

Contact with the 'outside world' during this time must mean so much, so I'd like to encourage you all to wish him well, add him as a contact for the duration of the final half of this race and be amazed at what a former maths teacher, close to retirement, is able to achieve.

danah boyd on handheld social networking

"New technology is the devil incarnate. We should go back to the good old days"
"New technology is the panacea we've been looking for."

The reality is much more nuanced than that. It's not about the good or the bad (it's not about pedagogy vs technology, the unfortunately entitled panel session I'll be on later).

danah boyd is talking about teaching young people to think, by taking a look through the viewfinder of social networks and the mobile devices we are already and will increasingly use to access, connect and share on.

It's about teaching young people to think. The reason we taught literature, film, mathematics in the past was to provide a reason for people to think. The introduction of technology alone will not necessarily help young people think. Worse still, technology is seen as a means of unleashing new cash, in a cynical way ("we have all Macs")

We don't just teach algebra to teach algebra. We teach it to help understand the world around us. When we think about teaching (with) technology we have to think about how it fits into this world around us.

That's hard.

Technology is fundamentally taking apart the world around us. Technology opens up the potential to access much stuff around the world, with the teacher and their rear view mirror allowing the context and meaning of that to be brought to light.

The contexts of social networks
Social networking sites have three core structures that make them work:
1. Profile
When we enter a room we tend to take some thought about decorating ourselves: what we wear, do we put on that tie...? Online we are an IP address, a rather undecoratable unappealing code. Therefore, where we create a SNS profile we're taking some care to create a presentation of ourselves within a space. Bedroom culture is the same, but on social networks it's amplified.

2. Friending
There are three clusters of behaviour: 30-40 friends, worried about their nearest and dearest. 300 friends are all the people they met at school, at church at the youth group. Very few teenagers collect Friends (politicians, music), reaching into the hundreds of thousands of friends. Mostly they're boys, collecting "hot girls". They're creating that list that, apparently, lots of boys used to make on paper.

But whether someone is your friend or just your Friend becomes socially awkward. In girl culture girls grew out of the habit of exchanging friendship bracelets to work the equivalent online.

3. The Wall
Comments, testimonials, the wall... in the early days of SNSes, people spoke in the third person about their friends (and still do on LinkedIn, inhabited by older professionals). Later, it began to be used as a space for conversation that complimented other places where conversation was going on (IM, chat).

Looking at it as a stream of text one could be mistaken as meaningless "how are you", "fine", "you?", "OK"...
What's going on is "public social grooming": it's a way to upkeep your social status as friend which, after all, is only a check box at the beginning of the online Friendship.

Why are young people spending so much time on MySpace?
We used to have permission from our parents to roam really far. Nowadays, the circle of navigation has been greatly reduced to the garden, out of public view. We've also tended to programme the lives of our young people more than we ever did, meaning we leave less time than ever for them to socialise.

Other characteristics of online interaction

• Persistence
• Replicability
• Unexpected scalability and visibility
• Invisible audiences
• Searchability. collapsed contexts (type of audience, rules of engagement, social scripts)
• Convergence of public and private

danah reckons than social network structures will go mobile soon, within two years. I would bank on them coming a lot sooner than that, given that many of those with the better phones can already and do already interact on their various SNSes through mobile. In the UK, 3G is cheaper and more ubiquitous than most places on the planet, so we can expect it sooner here.

Location-awareness is increasing, making the network part of social networking even stronger.

Knowledge is online, and when we don't know it first time around we access just in time when we're mobile.

Notes of her talk, as usual, riddled with errors and unreliability.

Watch out, or you'll be TwitterSnoozed

Ever get fed up of some of those you follow on Twitter going on with their mindless rants on delayed journeys or cups of coffee? Well, you can put them (temporarily) to sleep now with TwitterSnooze. Melikey.

If it all gets to much then you might consider changing status update network altogether, and trying out the frightfully funky Plurk, web-based only as far as I can see but designed for a younger gamer audience than Twitter is attracting. That must be why I like it ;-)

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