Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
#freerangelearning #rhizo15 #pcwm7 Finding Your Tribe
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 04/24/2015 - 19:43It has been a very long day, spending time in a setting with people who seem to approach life very differently than I do. When I got home, I looked online to connect with people a little bit more like me. Some of this was preparation for Podcamp Western Mass 7, which happens tomorrow. Will parts of my tribe be there? What will we talk about?
I haven’t seen much discussion online this year from people going to Podcamp or topics they are interested in, so we’ll see who is there and what they are interested in.
After this, I hopped over to some of the #rhizo15 discussions. We’ll see if there are folks at Podcamp who are interested in #rhizo15. I suspect there may be a few, which would be cool.
Lisa Chamberlin tweeted,
So how do we reconcile #freerangelearning (my term for "learning is not a countable noun") with reportable results (and funding)? #rhizo15
It turns out that a #freerangelearning has been a pretty active hashtag over the past few years. Perhaps it captures some of the ideas I’ve talked about when I refer to myself as a wandering autodidact. Whatever meaning people are attributing to #freerangelearning I’ll try to do some of it at Podcamp, some of it as part of #Rhizo15, some of it by blogging, some of it by following the hashtag, and, if I get a little free time, I might even do a little light reading of Deleuze and Guattari before bed time.
P.S. Fun tweet from my wanderings "I told them we could measure learning." pic.twitter.com/kf4yWebDe3
#rhizo15 How do you measure a year?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 04/23/2015 - 21:44Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure, measure a year?
This week’s challenge for #rhizo15:
What can we measure that isn’t learning? Think about all the other facets of the human experience… can we do better? What about all the fancy tools we’ve seen… can they help? Should we throw it out all together? Can we help people measure themselves? Is there a better way of looking at it?
My first thought was about all kinds of things we can measure that don’t really tell us much. How many times was the letter ‘E’ used in Dave’s post? How many ovals does can a high school student properly fill in? Well, I guess some people think that the number of ovals that a high school student fills in actually tell us something about how much the student knows or how effective the teacher is, or something like that.
In truths that she learned
Or in times that he cried
In bridges he burned or the way that she died
So let us step away from more academic pursuits. I work in social media. I measure hits on my website. For those who haven’t heard, hits is an acronym for “How Idiots Track Success”. These days, social media ninjas, I think that’s what they call themselves now, talk about engagement.
Many years ago, I was at an online marketing conference where the topic was Return On Investment, or ROI. That’s how people in the world of business like to measure things. I titled my blog post, OMMA: The ROI of a Smile. It is a long and tedious blog post, but it ends off
Too many are still trying to calculate the ROI of being in control, instead of the ROI of a smile.
I don’t remember if it was at that conference or some other where I tweeted the question, “How do you measure engagement?” I expected replies about the number of retweets, likes, or comments. But the best response was from a woman I know who was waiting for someone to pop the question who replied, “the size of the diamond”.
Measure in love
(Measure, measure your life in love)
But back to Dave’s question, “What can we measure that isn’t learning?”
There are things that aren’t learning?
#rhizo15 Reflective Journal - 4/22
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 04/22/2015 - 21:37Recently, someone posted in the #rhizo15 group on Facebook, that they were 60 years old and guessed that they were one of the older people around. Soon, several people posted about being in their fifties and believing that many of the people in the group were. I wonder what the demographics really are. I also wonder to what extent it really matters. As we construct our online identities, how much do, or should constructs like age, gender, or even species really matter?
I am, however, interested in a different demographic. I get a sense that most of the participants are academics who read Deleuze and Guattari for fun. I imagine the Venn diagraph of academics and people who read D+G for fun. I suspect that the subset of academics that read D+G for fun is pretty small, relatively speaking, and the subset of non-academics that read D+G for fun is even smaller. (Is there anyone else reading this who identify themselves this way?)
As I write this, I suspect that the closest I get to being an academic is being a teaching assistant in the school of hard knocks.
There is also a discussion about the relationship between connectivism and rhizomatic learning. This sounds like a discussion for the academics. For me, I’m curious about the learning that exists outside of academia, that might be rhizomatic, or might be done better rhizomaticly.
How do we learn about political candidates in the twenty first century? How do we learn about what is going on in our government? How does journalism fit into all of this? I’ve kicked around the idea of setting up a learning platform, like Moodle to learn about and discuss legislation being considered in our state legislature.
#rhizo15 Wandering Autodidact
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 04/20/2015 - 20:09When I was young, and trying to think of something to do, I would often head into the hallway off of the living room. Across from the coat closet was a land of imagination. On the lower shelves were piles of paper from the paper mill where my aunt worked. I could grab some paper and write or draw. Above these piles of paper were various books. Some were specifically aimed at children. Others were field guides. There were books about birds, flowers, and I’m not sure what all else. Above these books was the encyclopedia.
I would often pull down a volume of the encyclopedia and randomly find a word that I knew nothing about. I would read the article, which would inevitably reference other articles, and I would go from one article to the next. I knew the structure and where to find things, but I didn’t know where I would go, or what I would find.
Later, I would make similar journeys around the town library and eventually the college library in the town where I grew up. Today, another person who grew up in the same town posted on Facebook about the demolition of that library.
"Much of my education happened by wandering the stacks and reading whatever titles sounded interesting."
After college, I spent eight months travelling. My first stop in Europe was Paris. I had “Let’s Go, Europe” which I had read and reread, so I had a sense of the layout of the city. I explored it in a manner similar to how I read articles from the encyclopedia or books from the college library.
When I got online, I approached exploring the Internet in a similar manner, so much so, that I took to referring to myself as a wandering autodidact.
Now, I’m participating in #rhizo15 and everyone is trying to determine subjectives or objectives or whatever. I’ve talked about the value of finding tools and techniques to manage the overwhelming flow of information coming at us. I’ve thought about the developing a love of learning.
Yet perhaps the underlying reason to participate is the same reason writers write, because they must.
Deanspace, #rhizo15 and the Singularity
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 04/19/2015 - 20:49I’ve spent a bit of the day immersed in the #rhizo15 discussions, and for my own sake, as well as for people who aren’t involved on Facebook, I’m pulling some of my comments together into a slightly more organized set of thoughts here.
Much of today’s discussion focused around Lenandlar Singh’s Facebook post pointing to a blog post listing #rhizo15 blog posts. I had been building up a #Rhizo15 Wiki designed to do some similar things. Lenandlar’s effort morphed into a Google Doc listing #rhizo15 blog posts.
There was a discussion of RSS feeds, and I tweaked the wiki to pull in posts via RSS. I also gave a little bit of a discussion about how RSS forks
There was also a discussion of using Storify and Paper.li I had set up a #rhizo15 Paper.li, so I shared that link. Paper.li is a bit weird with its automatic gathering, categorizing, and distributing information, but it is a good tool in a situation like this.
All of this made me think of the Deanspace days. I commented:
As an aside, all of this is very reminiscent of the Deanspace days back in 2003 where we tried to find ways of enabling and organizing volunteers creating content, mostly on blogs, in support of Gov. Dean's presidential bid. We used Drupal for RSS aggregation as well as tracking individuals. We used FOAF for some of our tracking of people. I plan on writing more about this soon.
Later on in the discussion, Penny Bentley asked the question, “is Rhizo15 an accurate representation of the external world?” She expressed her skepticism, and I returned to my Deanspace idea.
I'm finding many ways that Rhizo15 represents my experiences. I suspect the experience of desperately trying to keep on top of incoming information, and failing to do so is fairly common, perhaps note unlike Toffler's Future Shock. I've run into this in the world of politics [Deanspace]. I've run into this in the world of health care [The idea that doctors can no longer stay abreast of advances in medicine simply by reading peer reviewed journals. There is too much to read]. I've run into this in the world of finance [In many ways trading is an information business. You need to get as much information related to a stock as possible to make a good decision]. So, we learn to cope, with new tools, with new modes of behavior, to try and get by.
Penny responded that this was helping her tease out her understanding of objectives and subjectives and asked if what I described in the comment was my subjectives.
I explored this a little more with
I wasn't particularly thinking in terms of subjectives or objectives when I made that comment, and I'm not positive I know what my subjectives are. As I think about it, I go back to my blog post "#rhizo15 A Primary Task?" where I try to think about subjectives and objectives in terms of a primary task of a group relations conference.
There, I described what may be my overarching subjective, in the form of a primary task. "The primary task of this learning organization is to explore, experience and learn from the development of learning networks, content, and the use of technology in promoting online learning."
If that is, in fact, my core subjective, finding ways to manage an ever increasing amount of incoming information may be another facet or component of my subjective.
As I wrote this, and thought back to the issue of subjectives and objectives, words from Randy Pausch's Last Lecture
experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted. And I think that’s absolutely lovely. And the other thing about football is we send our kids out to play football or soccer or swimming or whatever it is, and it’s the first example of what I’m going to call a head fake, or indirect learning. We actually don’t want our kids to learn football. I mean, yeah, it’s really nice that I have a wonderful three-point stance and that I know how to do a chop block and all this kind of stuff. But we send our kids out to learn much more important things. Teamwork, sportsmanship, perseverance, etcetera, etcetera. And these kinds of head fake learning are absolutely important. And you should keep your eye out for them because they’re everywhere.
I think this helps a little in thinking about subjectives. They are the experience we get when we don’t get our objectives, what we wanted. They are the things that those encouraging us to pursue something hope we will learn, like teamwork, even though they may not tell us that this is what they really want us to learn.
To switch from the inspirational to the futurist, perhaps another way of looking at the possible subjectives I’m considering for this is, learning how to process information in the singularity. Information is expanding faster than we can track or process on our own. How do we deal with it?
