Recently I finished a remarkably useful book: Mizuko Ito, et al. Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning With New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009). It has some common ancestry with ours, since the first authors of both Hanging Out and Digital Habitats were at the Institute for Research on Learning in the 1980’s. There are many overlapping frameworks and insights. Hanging Out has pushed my thinking by setting the idea of technology stewardship in a larger context of the book’s themes of friendship, intimacy, families, gaming, creative production, and work. In writing this review, I’m liberally quoting from it since the entire book is online. (All the page references in this post are to that book.) I’ve made up this diagram to help bridge between some of the ideas in the two books.

Hanging Out uses “genres of participation” with new media as a way of describing everyday learning and media engagement. The primary distinction that the authors make is between “friendship-driven and interest-driven genres of participation, which correspond to different genres of youth culture, social network structure, and modes of learning.” (p. 15) “Participation” is an alternative to an internalization or consumption perspective. It has the advantage in not assuming that kids are passive, mere audiences to media or educational content. “Hanging out” refers to friendships and social interactions that are oriented to local networks. “Messing around” refers to exploring, playing, cruising around, “finding stuff” – intermediate between the other two categories. “Geeking out” is participation that’s more oriented toward expertise, delving in a particular topic or technology. “Transitioning between hanging out, messing around, and geeking out represents certain trajectories of participation that young people can navigate, where their modes of learning and their social networks and focus begin to shift.” (p. 17)

Megan Finn was the lead author in the section that discusses the “techne-mentor” in depth (on pp. 59-60). A couple long quotes describes the techne-mentor concept:

“In conceptualizing the media and information ecologies in the lives of University of California at Berkeley freshmen, classical adoption and diffusion models (e.g., Rogers [1962; 2003]) proved inadequate. Rather than being characterized by a few individuals who diffuse knowledge to others in a somewhat linear fashion, many students’ pattern of technology adoption signaled situations in which various people were at times influential in different, ever-evolving social networks. The term “techne-mentor” is used to help to describe this pattern of information and knowledge diffusion…. Techne-mentor refers to a role that someone plays in aiding an individual or group with adopting or supporting some aspect of technology use in a specific context, but being a techne-mentor is not a permanent role.

“In the Freshquest study we found many cases of techne-mentors. The kind of roles they played varied from case to case and situation to situation. On one hand, the techne-mentor may simply make someone aware of a technology. On the other hand, he or she may play an integral role in demonstrating the technology practice or even installing the technology and ensuring its status as operational. Sometimes students we interviewed had one primary techne-mentor in their lives, but in turn the students would take on the role when they passed this information on to other groups. In fact, it is this constant flow of information about technology among a student’s multitude of social networks that accounts for the fluidity of the role of techne-mentor. In all these socially situated contexts, techne-mentors were an integral part of informal learning and teaching about technology and technology practices.”

Techne-mentors show up in all the genres of participation but their role is probably more visible at the geeking out end of the spectrum. That is, as technology becomes a more central concern, learning and talking about technology also becomes more central and so does mentoring. It’s really important that the way Hanging Out uses the concept, kids are involved both in being mentored and mentoring others.

A “tech steward” is a specific kind of techne-mentor, working on behalf of a community, mentoring and being mentored in the context of that community. A technology steward is influenced by their social context. In geeky communities such as the Ubuntu community that Andreas Lloyd studied, everyone is concerned with technology in one way or another, although some people are more influential than others. In thinking about the “hanging out” end of the spectrum it occurs to me that the job of technology stewards is partly to make technology disappear. People really want to be hanging out with each other, talking about hawks in Central Park or milking cows in Portugal. The more intuitive and habitual a community’s technology infrastructure becomes, the more authentic and direct the experience of being in the community.

As we wrote Digital Habitats and began focusing on technology stewards who we encountered in different communities, we were struck by the fact that they came from many different backgrounds. That as far as their role was concerned, they were not “trained” in any conventional sense. Looping back to Hanging Out, that makes a lot of sense:

“Sociocultural approaches to learning have recognized that kids gain most of their knowledge and competencies in contexts that do not involve formal instruction. A growing body of ethnographic work documents how learning happens in informal settings, as a side effect of everyday life and social activity, rather than in an explicit instructional agenda.” (p. 21)

That’s a very polite way of saying that school is, in some important respects, irrelevant. It applies to kids as well as to grown-up technology stewards.

“One of the key innovations of situated learning theory was to posit that learning was an act of social participation in communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991). By shifting the focus away from the individual and to the broader network of social relationships, situated learning theory suggests that the relationships of knowledge sharing, mentoring, and monitoring within social groups become key sites of analytic interest. In this formulation, people learn in all contexts of activity, not because they are internalizing knowledge, culture, and expertise as isolated individuals, but because they are part of shared cultural systems and are engaged in collective social action.“ (p. 14)

Learning to learn about technology (in particular) from this point of view is a fundamental skill that results from hanging out, messing around, and geeking out. To me this suggests that people who learn about technology in school are cheated because they miss out on some fundamental hanging out experiences. In this sense, the “digital divide” between older people who have been subject to training and younger people who came by their knowledge more socially may be more of a “learning divide.” That makes a lot of classroom instruction about technology irrelevant.

Beware of any technology steward who tells you that they learned how to do it in school.

Several people from the Fall 2009 Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop have continued meeting every few months to catch up with each other, find out what people are working on, and swap stories. In a way it’s a CPsquare dream that people should connect so much during a workshop that they would want to keep in touch afterward. Dreaming and wanting it is not enough, so we do work hard to plant the seeds, and when it does happen it feels great! And in fact it’s a valuable conversation, as this blog post tries to show.

During the Foundations workshop we try to establish the practice of using a teleconference to think together in a very open, self-organizing and relaxed way, allowing the conversation to turn in whatever direction seems to make sense. And we support that practice with MP3 recordings and a chat that captures the main point of our meanderings. It turns out that the logic of the conversation may not be clear at all in advance, but in retrospect you can always see how it makes a lot of sense. I personally have learned a lot about myself, how I facilitate or participate and how I interact with different people by listening to the recordings we make (primarily for the benefit of people who didn’t make it to a meeting). The chat transcripts are very handy for looking up ideas, getting URLs, or making a summary of the conversation. All of that collective context and experience is the base from which we could cantilever out.

At one recent meeting of this group someone was talking about using video for community meetings. We decided to hold a more focused meeting this last time where we experimented with one tool.

Last week we experimented with TokBox.com, a video meeting tool. It’s a free tool that sets up a “Hollywood Squares” kind of format where everyone can see everyone else who has a video cam. In a way *the way that we explored it* is was as interesting as the tool itself. Two people met on TokBox beforehand and found that they had some audio feedback problems, so we decided to use the CPsquare phone bridge for the session’s audio channel. Someone sent out an email invitation to all the workshop participants, (whether they’d participated in these interim check-ins or not). It named the phone bridge as the initial meeting point and the first thing each person had to do when they arrived at the TokBox meeting page was find the mute button so that anything they said (or heard through the TokBox audio feed) wouldn’t disrupt the conversation. One of the people who had explored the tool beforehand sent out session invitations during the call by email as people showed up on the phone bridge.

It’s obvious that to explore a social tool like TokBox you can’t do it alone. You need partners. But to find out how it supports a conversation, you need to have a conversation. So you need other people who share your language, are willing to explore the tool, and can connect (and re-connect when you fall off the call). In particular it’s helpful to have a back-channel, whether email or a Skype chat. Several back-channels are helpful, actually. Our phone bridge was a back-channel and the backbone of our conversation. We cantilevered out from there. And the standard against which we measured the tool was known to all: our previous conversations on the phone bridge.

In addition to the phone bridge connection, during the session several of us were also connected via a Skype group chat. Most but not all of us were on the TokBox site. Several people didn’t have a video connection (or maybe they were having a bad hair day?) and one just listened in on the phone (e.g., a mobile phone while driving). At different points we experimented with TokBox’s auxiliary tools like its chat tool, its etherpad, and some others. All of that makes for a very complicated group structure. All of us could hear, but what each person could see was not the same.

The conversation was very much about observing out loud what we were seeing, considering how it worked for us, and thinking about how it would work for the several groups that each of us work with professionally. Was there value in seeing other people’s faces via the group video? (Answer: for some, but not all.) How would the tool work for a lecture or for a more horizontal conversation? What were the set-up issues in terms of inviting other people to join on the fly? Was there a difference between using the TokBox email invitation tool and sending the URL by some other means? (Answer: not much.) Although some web conferencing software completely lock down the structure and shape of the interface, TokBox lets you float video windows around, open and close apps like etherpad, and much more. What are the benefits of that kind of malleability? Does it also cause problems? (One of us kept getting dumped from the video connection whenever we entered an etherpad window. We never figured out why.) We compared TokBox to others that we’ve been exploring, including:

• Google’s Open Meetings
• Adobe Connect
• Elluminate
• DimDim

(there are more tools mentioned on the CPsquare wiki)

From this example, I’m left thinking of three different overlapping questions:

• How does a community explore existing variance in the use of a tool? What are the benefits of or problems with uniform competence in using a tool once a group has settled on it? In this example, some people didn’t want to use video at all or found that it didn’t add much to their experience of closeness beyond what our phone bridge provides. For others it added quite a bit of context and sense of closeness that was useful.
• Is it always clear what tool we cantilever from? Does that matter? Different groups might use different technologies and will have different amounts of trust or determination to explore. In this example, we used email to get everyone on a phone bridge from which we all got into TokBox. Stragglers got caught up via Skype chat. This is related with the “one more tool” question that Patricia Arnold, Beverly Trayner and I asked in the paper we gave at the Networked Learning Conference 210 a few weeks ago.
• A final question is about what this process of exploration does to the group itself. Can it be outsourced? Can we leverage the experience of others? What are the implications of having others do the exploration for us, be they experts in your company’s IT department or technology stewards or whomever? In this example we were very much doing it for ourselves and that certainly colors our experience. How important is first hand experience of exploration?

TokBox came out looking really good! And it was great to see our learning companions!

Photo by Pete Lewis.

One of the great things about the sustained connections we make through CPsquare is that when you bump into people in other settings there’s such a strong connection. There are common interests, common vocabulary, and an extraordinary willingness to share insights. Last week during the Yi-Tan Tech Call 274: on Digital Habitats, I noticed LaDonna Coy tweeting about it. Afterward I wrote here, asking:

I’ve seen your tweets off and on and wondered what you’re up to and was really excited to see that you were on the Yi-Tan call.

How was it? What was surprising? I was wondering if you’d be up for sharing some reactions & thoughts — possibly even on the CPsquare blog.

Here is LaDonna’s response:

Hi John,

I’ve got a colleague I work with (Ken Homer) out in CA and he has encouraged me to join in on the Yi-Tan calls for some time — when I saw it was you, Etienne and Nancy engaging in a convo about the new book — I just knew the time had come for me to be there. Now that I’ve had the experience I’m wondering how I can fit the call in more often? If we don’t get a respectable outcome with our CoPs work, I may have significant free time on my hands, sigh.

Surprising, provocative, intriguing — very much so. Here’s my takeaways..

• Considering the important truth that no matter what tech we choose (or don’t choose) we include some, exclude others. Not an easy space to stand in.

• thinking about Nancy’s statement, “technology is designed for group but experienced by the individual” .. pondering .. she’s given voice to my wiki experience.

• Challenge of navigating and negotiating the spaces with broad continuum of experience, knowledge and skills. What a challenge it is even when some are adept with the the tech while others remain timid or right-down resistant. Not so much critical mass but critical intention.

• What if tech development were guided by tech steward rather than IT peeps? (great question, huge wish, especially in state gov where all things are Sharepoint. Wrestling with how to make Sharepoint do what the groups//community need it to do, sigh.

• Tools in “tech stone age” … not so sure, maybe bronze age … at least I don’t have to know and be able to write code to engage my colleagues – I remember when it was that way, when one had to be 90% geek not 10%. Now, 10% geek will do in most cases.

• Difference in perspective between “what can we make/do with these [tools, platform]” versus what do we need the [tool, platform] to do for us? One feels resigned, adaptive to what exists while the other creative challenge for what could be.

Seeding?
What we didn’t talk about is something I’m facing and wrestling with still. Seeding (where there is little or no real community) and supporting engagement in our withering attempt to engage community sectors online. The Provider Network is doing a bit better but not by much. Thinking about why — conditions, capacity, attitudes, and what we are learning mixed with disappointment.

Measurement? (still)
I’ve also been thinking a lot about measurement, and what I think of as the core about what CoPs are about about. Seems the main thing about online community is 1) relationships and engagement... wondering how to measure, has anyone actually done it … so went looking for tools and resources — found two instruments that measure relationships that I’m thinking of tinkering with and using with my group in KS (want to tinker?). Grunig-Hon here and in Katie’s book, Measuring Public Relationships and attached paper and instrument from Vern Larsen’s work on collaboration (research shows quality of collaboration has a direct impact on the quality of the outcomes).

Not sure this is what were looking for or whether appropriate for the blog – but if it fits, point me that away I’d be happy to share and learn with everyone.

LaDonna

We are going to “interview” each other to save from falling into talking AT instead of talking WITH, but we have a few slides with definitions and URLs to pull out as needed. We’ll also be playing with Twitter using the #SIKM tag. As a back up, we also have an Etherpad because John and I like having a back channel!

• 5,000 Watt FADECO radio station
• Small blue “sensor” or integrated circuit audio recorder
• Mobile phones

Of course the key to making all of this work is the network of people around his project in terms of friends and collaborators, farmers who participate via recorded interviews or mobile phones. (A lot of stories about innovation in Africa were floating around my head from the special report on telecoms in emerging markets in the September 24th 2009 issue of The Economist: Mobile marvels). One thing that was striking about Sikeku’s project is that it’s sustainable because it’s so local, so passion-driven, and has a long time horizon. Not that external help wouldn’t make a difference, but it’s important that his project that’s not donor-controlled. Its beginning and end is not timed by an external donor. Here’s a 7 minute interview:

Sikeku’s story got me to thinking about the polarities that we discuss in Chapter 5 of Digital Habitats:

• Radio broadcasts are a remarkable technology for bringing people together across great distances. It’s so prevalent as to be unremarkable.
• But radio is a very group-oriented tool, so tools like an audio recorder or a mobile phone pull the community’s configuration toward the individual end of the polarity.
• An audio recorder supports the asynchronous side and the mobile phones (either as audio devices or for text messages) support the synchronous.

It seemed to me that the technologies that Sikeku mentioned all balance each other nicely when you consider that we developed these polarities studying communities that are quite different from his. That’s one of the exciting things about this project: finding out whether the ideas we’ve developed apply (or can be extended to) very different settings. And the final question: will these ideas be useful?

I captured the interview on a little Flip camera, since I’ve been exploring video and social reporting for the last several months. I used the interview the very next day in a “huddle session” about technologies and local development, gathering a small group around my laptop to look at the video, without editing or uploading it anywhere (there wasn’t really enough reliable bandwidth to upload a video file at the conference). The huddle conversation had been difficult because of all the different meanings and instances of “technology,” of “local,” and of “development.” But having one instance to focus on helped the conversation get much more concrete and much more productive. A conference on the role of media in the agricultural and rural development that’s running right now suggests just how much is going on out there in this area, so the benefits of being able to focus on Sikeku’s specific case make sense.

The next day we had an open space session on business models for learning communities. Sikeku participated in the discussion, which tied some of the issues from his experience to other examples where donor funding for a community had turned out to be quite problematic. At the end of that, Sikeku remarked to me, “As a result of these conversations, I don’t feel so isolated.” That was very gratifying.

(Cross posted from my blog at Learning Alliances.)

Marshall read (out loud, from the slide on the screen) that:

“Nothing is more commonplace than the experience of reading, and yet nothing is more unknown. Reading is such a matter of course that at first glance, it seems there is nothing to say about it.”

She went on to argue that many of our commonplace assumptions about reading are wrong. As an activity, we may think that reading is:

• stationary
• information-centric
• passive
• immersive
• individual

Instead, Marshall argued that and illustrated how reading is really:

• mobile – where we chose to read something matters hugely and we tend to take our reading with us from place to place.
• material – our physical circumstances contribute to the experience of pleasure or attention.
• interactive – we annotate pages and act upon them.
• interrupted & variable – we skip, skim, circle around, re-read and act upon reading material according to the circumstances.
• social – we share, forward, save, refer, discard and burn books and magazines in our invisible but very real social context.

There’s no problem having naïve assumptions about reading unless we’re intending to design an electronic replacement for the printed page, in which case we have to look a lot more carefully at what’s going. That’s exactly what technology stewards need to do because, whether we’re configuring technology or planning to add a tool to a community’s overall configuration or even just supporting it on a day to day basis, we need to understand the experience of use, not just “how to use the tool.”

So we can learn a lot from the different ways that Marshall and other ethnographers have devised for getting at these commonplace experiences. We take the ordinary as strange. Nothing is more common than participating in a community, but a community’s configuration has a significant effect on the experience of community.

“It is also worth noting that solitary reading always was, and still is, inherently social: how we read is ultimately determined by social conventions and community membership”

You can learn a lot by observing. One piece of research that Marshall reported on examined just how complicated it is when someone reading an article in The New Yorker turns a page. They peek forward, check an advertisement, read the cartoon, go back to verify what they last read, etc., and then continue. There’s a lot happening that we may not bother noticing on a day-to-day level but which matters a lot when we’re thinking about designing a new electronic device.

Use a framework. One point we try to make in Digital Habitats is that it’s useful to have some framework to organize our observations. Marshall uses the CSCW matrix (that we call a polarity in the book) to look at some different instances of reading:

One interesting point she made was that people often feel like it’s creepy when they are observed doing something so simple (and personal) as reading. As technology stewards we often have to enlist people’s cooperation, sometimes as fellow-researchers and observers of their own experience.

Compare (lots of) individual instances. In one of her studies Marshall bought multiple copies of a popular textbook and compared how students had annotated the text. Turned out there was a lot of variation in what was important to different readers, but also convergence on the main point. But the key idea is: how can we find ways of seeing how different people see?

This is similar to a tech steward’s practice of observing how different communities use the same software, or how they might configure it differently, or how they might even decide upon using it for quite different reasons.

One interesting thing about Cathy Marshall as she spoke to a group that’s mostly concerned with design was that she always spoke as a researcher — not venturing to speculate widely, but reporting on her own rigorous research. Even though she committed apparent faux pas such as reading her slides aloud and there was very little (if any) “how to” in Marshall’s talk, the CHIFOO folks hung on her every word. It reminded me that professional, hands-on communities like CHIFOO are very sophisticated when it comes right down to it.

Tech stewards as ethnographers. Of course there are big differences between tech stewards and ethnographers. Front loaded education is the norm for people who call themselves ethnographers, whereas most tech stewards come to their craft almost by accident – pressed into service and learning as they go. Having Microsoft and other companies fund your observations like Marshall has enables a great deal of care and depth; most tech stewards are in a hurry and have to act on their hunches. And yet, the opportunity for observing change in human experience and contributing to its evolution (over shorter- or longer-terms) is common to both. What tech stewards have lacked is a common literacy to talk with each other and the community context where their conversations can add up.

(Cross-posted from my blog at http://LearningAlliances.net)

I’ve been doing a  series of podcast conversations on my Full Circle blog about the use of social media in international development. As I was recording  this week’s with Gauresh Rajadhyaksh, I realized I was talking to a type of technology steward and I should cross post here on the book blog.

Gauresh works with the Development Prospects Group (http://www.worldbank.org/prospects), a central think-tank unit within the World Bank. The unit monitors economic indicators, analyzes developments in real and financial markets and produces World Bank forecasts for the global economy (http://www.worldbank.org/globaloutlook)
Much of the group’s work relies on collaborating with colleagues situated across the world. This collaboration is much more than email exchanges — so they have developed a web-based system: “iSimulate @ World Bank” — http://isimulate.worldbank.org — that allows users to access and execute simulations on some of our simulation models. This is an attempt at leveraging Web 2.0 features to increase collaboration and create a “community of practice” of economists. They have a blog that has some more background information: http://isimulate.worldbank.org/blog. The blog is a great place to start to learn about iSimulate. I’ve also embedded their “how to” YouTube video below.

Gauresh’s role has been in managing this system creation and its strategic planning as a tool for collaboration and communication. He also build some of the actual economic models that have been added to the system.

In the podcast Gauresh talks about how iSimulate was created, adopted and plans for the future. As I reflected after the conversation, Gauresh has been serving as a technology steward for this community of practice of economists in and outside of the Bank, noticing what is needed, developing a prototype that blends with the way people are already working, then takes things to the next level. Take a listen!

Gauresh_Rajadhyaksh_Sept14 (about 18 minutes MP3)

“The opinions expressed in the podcast represent those of the speaker and do not necessarily reflect the view of the World Bank Group, its Board of Directors or the governments they represent.”

Gauresh wrote in advance of our conversation:

We intend to use iSimulate in two ways:
1. Provide an environment for the creation of a global community of practice for economists.

Though we are currently focussing on an internal World Bank community, we hope to use all the “collaboration” features of the system to reach out to a much broader audience. We see this as an avenue to engage in a much more meaningful two-way dialogue with our colleagues and clients.

2. Provide real-time access to data and simulation models.
The iSimulate system is the first-of-its-kind in allowing users to execute “custom simulations” on World Bank models. While most systems provide simple data-access with some visualization features, iSimulate allows a lot of flexibility in experimenting with the assumptions, etc. We see this as a crucial step in increasing transparency and disseminating our work in a more effective manner.

Here is a video tutorial of the iSimulate platform.

Gauresh’s Bio

Gauresh Rajadhyaksha is a Research Analyst with the Development Economics department at the World Bank in Washington, DC. He is primarily involved with macro-economic modeling and manages some of the Bank’s development data systems. Gauresh has been a part of the team that set-up iSimulate @ World Bank and he is currently the Project coordinator / Program Manager for the initiative. Gauresh holds a B.E. in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Mumbai and a M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. He is also currently an MBA candidate at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

More podcasts!

I’ll have an additional podcast with Gauresh talking about how he got support for this project within the Bank, a large, fairly traditional organization. That will be part of my next series, “Why Web 2.0?” So stay tuned. The next podcasts in this series will be from Dr. Steve Eskow and Sarah Blackmun on the cultural and gender related aspects to bringing external (web 2) technology to communities in development contexts and Simon Staiger on planning and facilitating online e-consultations. I was hoping to get transcripts of all of these, but ran out of time. So if anyone wants to transcribe….?

Previous & Related Podcasts:

• Social Media in Intl. Dev: Podcast with Bill Anderson on Twitter
• Social Media in International Development Podcast: Bill Anderson

• Simon Hearn on Online Community Facilitation
• Sam Rose on the Social Media Classroom
• Howard Rheingold on the Social Media Classroom
• Blended Facilitation Podcast from Matt Moore (with Ed Mitchell, Matt and I)
• Using “the clock” on telecons

Recently I wrote a post on my blog that received a lot of attention – more than I would have expected: How I use social media. At the end of the post, I promised to write about WHAT social media I currently use.

I  think of the constellation of tools a person uses as their configuration of tools. It is both what they use, how they use them, and how they fill the range of needs as a whole. I have saved a few delicious tags about individuals’ technology configurations if you want to browse with they use.

As I was tracking down all my tools I had this little “aha” moment about technology stewardship. By looking at one’s personal technology configuration, you can get a sense of what a community’s tech configuration might be.  It is sort of a microcosm.

So here it goes…

I started making a list of all the social media I use. I realized there is an important distinction between the media I use regularly, and the media I try, dabble and experiment with. Part of my work requires me to do a lot of experimentation, so I have accounts on scores of social media sites – more that are forgotten than are used. So I want to focus on the tools I use regularly, the tools that make a difference in my work. Now some of you may say a few of these don’t qualify as “social media” – old school things like email. I’m including them because I think social media predates the label.

I also wondered if it would be worth organizing them in the categories of “use” I used in the previous post. This would clearly create duplicates, so I resisted that impulse. It would have created too much duplication if I tried to sort them into:

• Learning
• Getting work done
• Finding and connecting with people
• Getting stuff (search, content, etc.)
• Exploring and pushing my own boundaries

So here are the tools.

• Email
  • Eudora (business, family and close friends) – Eudora was my first email program and you know how it is, you get used to something. Eudora is no longer a paid product, now Open Source. I am not an Outlook fan. What can I say?
  • Gmail (two accounts, one to back up my Fullcirc email and one for everything I don’t want in my main in box.) I considered moving all my email to Gmail but decided I don’t want all my eggs in one basket. However, most of my email lists and social media accounts use Gmail so I can keep my other inbox manageable. This has made a BIG difference in the efficiency and effectiveness of my email practice.
  • I still have a Yahoo mail account and perhaps a hotmail account… who knows?
  • Old fashioned web access from my ISP for when nothing else works (always have a back up) – When you depend on email and the internet, you want more than one way in. I also still have a dialup service I can use on a per minute basis but knock on wood, I have not used it in years.
• Browsers
  • Firefox - my day to day browser, but I have weeks where I trip on over to Chrome. I haven’t opened up IE in months.
  • Chrome – because I can…
• Blogging
  • Word Press plus plugins – A friend (thanks Jon!) helped me set this up and I have been very very happy.
  • (I used to use Blogger). I left Blogger unhappy. I hosted my own blog and had mountains of FTP problems, and from the forums, I was not alone. Never got a stitch of help from Blogger. That was the end of what once was a happy relationship.
• Microblogging
  • Twitter – I want to look into Laconi.ca because I’m getting more and more convinced that decentralized apps are the way to go if you want resiliance.
  • Twhirl as a Twitter desktop client because I find Twitter on the web tiresome.
  • Tweetdeck when juggling Tweets at events, hashtags. Otherwise it is too much and it hogs a lot of resources on my older desktop computer.
• IM and VoIP
  • Skype (chat function might be listed as a tool unto itself. I’ve abandoned MSN and AOLIM.) What would I do without Skype? I work with people all over the world. The free VoIP, the presence indicators, the chat, file transfer, etc. –> central application for me, second only to email.
  • VOIP phone service with a web interface provided by my ISP. I can pick up my voicemail via the net or via email, transfer calls away from home etc. I also get unlimited long distance in North America and certain European cities, but I still use Skype.
  • HighDef Conferencing (paid service) for large audio meetings because it scales well and allows entry by both Skype and telephone and has some local numbers in other countries. I have global networks and groups!
• Chat
  • Skype
  • Etherpad but I sure wish you could have more than 8 people on at a time or that they had a paid hosted service. It is a sweet combo of real time wiki and chat room that pairs great with a Skype call or telecon.
  • IRC (yeah, still IRC!)
  • Google Talk sometimes
• Co-writing & Publishing
  • Google Docs has become my primary shared writing and spread sheet space. I need to try Zoho ! (See here for more alternatives. I don’t know about you, but I get worried when I rely too much on one company. So much for integration, eh?)
  • Wikispaces and other wikis, including MediaWiki. I am a wikispaces fan girl for sure! Easy to use. I also like PB wiki, now called PB Works
  • Etherpad (also for chat during audio calls)
• Live meeting tools (Often I don’t have a say in what is used.)
  • Elluminate – a paid service, but worth it when there is budget. You can get a free 3 person room to try it out. I like it because you can devolve controls way out to participants and have multiple moderators. WebEx and Live Meeting– take note! I am floored the MS Livemeeting does not have integrated participant chat. You can only chat with the moderators. I am not into top down controlled online meetings, thanyouverymuch!
  • Dim Dim (I’ve only used the free version)
    
  • Vyew – free, visually a bit messy, but works well for small groups.
  • Adobe Connect – quite a few of my clients use this, especially in the academic realm. I’ve never managed it, but it was a pleasant experience using it.
• Images
  • Flickr (including third party Flickr toys) – I love flickr. I love the ease of posting my pics, of finding creative commons pictures to use from other Flickrites and the general sense of camaraderie that emerges around images. Damn cool!
  • Picassa and Picassa web albums – I manage and edit photos with the desktop application and then use Picassa when I want to easily, more privately share pictures. I use this a lot with my clients.
  • Picnik and Snagit (hm, where does the line between software application and social media sit?) for capture and editing.
• Aggregating
  Because I don’t want to use just one integrated set of tools and because setting content free and making it useful to others are two core practices of mine, tools that make it easy to syndicate and aggregate are essential. Even if I never fully understand how they work! These all leverage RSS.
  • Bloglines
    – where I subscribe to and read blogs. Alas, I’m spending less time reading. Where does the time go?
  • iGoogle – nice as a start page, especially for when I’m on the road.
  • Netvibes – another nice start page tool that I am using less since iGoogle. I’m fickle.
  • Feedburner – to help manage the feeds FROM my blog.
• Conversational, content management and “Learning” platforms
  This is a very messy lump from a technology standpoint. It used to be that online events and work spaces were very tidily held within one application. Then these tools were stand alone and indispensable. Now it seems I use part of them – the part that works well – and I often ignore the rest. For example, WebCrossing has a fabulous email interface for when I need web based discussions that can be used offline for low bandwidth settings. The rest I can ignore. Moodle, while pretty visually ugly, is easy to set up and is fabulously open source, as is Drupal. And despite rumors to the contrary, email lists are alive and well and in fact critical in low bandwidth settings.
  • Moodle – open source “learning management system” but I use it simply as a collaboration space. Please, someone tell them to improve their blog structure!
  • Webcrossing – known fondly by some of us oldtimers as the cockroach of online conferencing as it just doesn’t die.
  • Drupal – powerful open source content management system. Know what you are getting into and it can do a lot, or use specific pre-configured packages such as the Social Media Classroom.
  • Yahoogroups – oldie but a gooie.
  • Googlegroups
    – my more technical groups prefer this over Yahoogroups and I can’t seem to figure out why, but it is consistent feedback.
• Bookmarking
  I am a bookmarking addict and to be frank, I’m not sure why. I think I’m afraid I’m going to miss or forget something, but truth be told, I don’t use my bookmarks once I’ve created them!
  • Delicious
  • Diigo – I particularly like that you can bookmark on Diigo and set it to automatically add the bookmark to delicious. However, I use it less because it appears to be down more than delicious.
• Video
  I don’t use video much – nor as much as I might like to. I get content on Youtube but prefer posting on Blip.
  • Youtube
  • Blip.TV
  • Netflix – for renting movies. I like movies!
• Music
  • Blip.fm
    
• Filesharing
  • Drop.io
    
• Social Network Sites
  • Ning – not so much that I would choose it, but many of the groups and networks I belong to have chosen it. I specifically dislike the content-empty email alerts. You have to click in, sign in and then find out the message wasn’t of interest. Ick. Also, there should be more ability to link between Ning communities, IMHO.
  • Facebook – more because many people in my life use it centrally and if I want to be connected to them, I have to play the game. Otherwise I would probably avoid it.
  • LinkedIn – I use it again because peers I care about do. I think I’m pretty well linked in already!
• Mindmapping
  • Mindmeister and have also used Mindomo and bubbl.us
    
• Other Stuff
  • Carbonite back up (I include it because I learned about it from my network!AVG Anti virus would fall into the same bucket. I have both a local and online backup. Yup, back it up friends, back it UP! If
  • TinyUrl.com
  • Google translate (used to use Babelfish)
  • Wordle because it is visually fun and easy to make tag clouds. It is a lazy way of making discussion summaries as well. Shhhh… don’t tell!

What is YOUR configuration? If you are a technology steward for a community, how does your personal configuration inform the configuration of the community?

In the end we hired Michael Valentine to do the diagrams and book design, Peter + Trudy Johnson-Lenz to help with the editing, and Sunday Oliver to produce the index. Even with complete professionals on board with the project, we still maintained a do-it-yourself style. But I’m not sure about “fast” or “easy.”

An example of how doing it ourselves makes things not so fast was when we were looking at the “completed” index recently. We found that we had an entry for “folksonomy” in the glossary but it had disappeared from the book itself. Should we remove the entry from the glossary even after it was type-set? We decided that the index entry should point to the glossary and also say “See tagging,” index an entry that still had several mentions in the text. All well and good except for the fact that Etienne took it as a challenge to improve on the index. And he did find an instance where we had misspelled Marc Coenders’ name along the way and he will undoubtedly improve the index. But, working on the index do-it-yourself style has to get squeezed between hosting visitors from Hong Kong and Sydney, flying across the Atlantic Ocean at least once, and finishing overdue reports for less forgiving entities than you, the potential reader of the book.

So if not “so fast” or “so easy,” does self-publishing still seem like such a good idea? I think so. We’re still going to use a print on demand service and sell the book through Amazon and other channels. But we’ve decided to have CPsquare be the publisher of record in order to segregate the work from other projects and streamline it. Who knows what surprises lurk in the segregation and streamlining? As Jean Lave said, “That learning occurs is not problematic. What is learned is always complexly problematic.”

Jean Lave, “The Practice of Learning”, p 3-32 in Seth Chaiklin and Jean Lave (eds) Understanding Practice; perspectives on activity and context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

As part of CPSquare’s “Connected Futures” workshop exploring the use of web technologies in the service of communities of practice, we (John Smith and I!) asked Howard Rheingold to share a little bit about the Social Media Classroom (SMC) he developed as part of a MacArthur Foundation Award (A HASTAC award specifically).

We were interested to hear about the development both because we are using a hosted version of the SMC as our “home base” this iteration of the workshop, and because Howard’s project is a nice example of community technology stewardship. Every platform has its lineage, the experiences of the designers that inform design choices during development. What needs is it trying to meet? How can it do this in the simplest and elegant manner?

SMC is created on a Drupal base but customized to reflect what Howard thought would be useful for educators. But it is not just a technology platform. There is also a rich library of new media literacy resources and a community of practitioners. From the SMC website:

The Social Media Classroom (we’ll call it SMC) includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes—integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets , and video commenting are the first set of tools. The Classroom also includes curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos.

For communities picking or even building platforms for themselves, there are some nice pearls from Howard.

Click here to listen in: 30 Minutes with Howard Rheingold on the Social Media Classroom… and other stuff!

Some of the things Howard talked about included:

• the importance of an on-ramp to new media – with integration of tools being an important early experience that helps us be more confident when we start using tools in a more “free range” manner.
• the need for a new media literacy – just because we are all online doesn’t mean we understand and know how to use it. What are the essentials that make a difference?
• the origins and inspirations of some of the tools in the SMC
• Howard’s exploration of teaching at this phase in his career and the importance of a constructivist, participatory approach.

If you are interested in SMC for your learning context, you can download the software to your server, or if you don’t have access to a server or IT help, the project is offering a limited amount of hosted space. If you want to learn more and engage in the SMC c ommunity, join the community of practice.

Photo credit:vagawi