Serendipity35

Whether or not you feel that social networking and Web 2.0 applications like Facebook and Twitter have any educational legitimacy or not, teachers are experimenting with using them in their courses.

In some cases, students might welcome their use in a course. The teacher might be seen as innovative. But some students find teachers in these areas to be an intrusion into their private space.

A term being used for the latter reaction is the "creepy treehouse." Chris Lott might be the person who coined the phrase. Jared Stein offered several definitions of the term on his blog, Flexnologoy. I don't agree with the ones that talk about "luring kids in" (that's the way urbandictionary.com also defines it, as in "It's totally creepy treehouse that Professor Jones wants me to be his MySpace friend.").  I lean more towards Stein's "Any system or environment that repulses a target user due to it's closeness to or representation of an oppressive or overbearing institution."

I do believe teachers can use these social tools without entering the creepy treehouse. Michael Staton (who founded Inigral, Inc. and is working on a free CMS on Facebook) posted on his blog about that same sentiment.

...need to debunk the Creepy Treehouse,as it seems to have become some sort of rallying cry and is pulling people in the wrong direction. I'm going to debunk it with contrarian metaphor: the Functioning Mall.  (If you come up with something more catchy, let me know.)

First off, let me tell you that the metaphor of the Creepy Treehouse is powerful. There are many different ways you can build a Creepy Treehouse. Instructors crossing lines by getting into personal or social settings where they are not particularly invited is totally creepy treehouse.

However, this in no way suggests that instructors should not be using innovative, even social technologies to engage students. Adults and Teachers and Parents are allowed to and should get on the Social Web, but they must do it carefully and obey the general laws of coexisting with teenagers.I don't think it's the treehouse that is creepy. It's who is inside and what they are doing there. It's not very different from that literal treehouse that some kids built out in the woods near your house.

Reading about all this actually set me to thinking about an older term I was familiar with from animation and is also used in robotics. That term is the "uncanny valley."

From Wikipedia

"The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The "valley" in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's lifelikeness. It was introduced by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970, and has been linked to Ernst Jentsch's concept of "the uncanny" identified in a 1906 essay, "On the Psychology of the Uncanny." Jentsch's conception is famously elaborated upon by Sigmund Freud in a 1919 essay, simply entitled "The Uncanny" ("Das Unheimliche"). A similar problem exists in realistic 3D computer animation, such as with the film The Polar Express and Beowulf."

In simpler terms, it's when the animation or robot gets so close to looking real that we start to feel uncomfortable. It's an idea Steven Spielberg touches on in his film Artificial Intelligence: AI. It's Pinocchio wanting to be a real boy.

When the creepy treehouse is erected in the uncanny valley, there's going to be trouble. Second Life might be such a valley. With all it's fantastical inhabitants, there are also those who want super-realism in both the avatars and the settings. When teachers and schools build their treehouses in Second Life, I think it immediately takes some of the charm/fun/interest out of the place. Who wants to play where the grownups are? When the teacher is using Facebook, it's time to find something new. Maybe...

Probably, some of my feelings on this come from having started teaching in a time when the line between teacher and student was clearly drawn. All my early mentors warned me "not to try to be friends" with my students, and I saw teachers who did cross the line - and it bothered me. But that type of impropriety is not my fear with the new technologies and I don't see these social areas as dangerous in that way.

I have a MySpace account (rarely used) and a Facebook account (checked most days) and a bunch of others that I signed up with so that I could see what was going on there. There are some former students of mine that are my "friends" there, and it's actually nice to keep up with their lives. I'm not surprised when they make me a "limited view" friend. They post things online that they should keep offline. It's interesting to see that when some of them graduate from college, they begin to delete photos, leave groups, delete postings.

Maybe the creepiness increases as the age of the students decreases. I imagine this is more of an issue in the upper levels of K-12 than it is for higher education.

I keep reading that Facebook is developing its own course management system. That's creepy, and I think it just might kill Facebook for students. Without any good statistics and just anecdotal evidence, it seems to me that students want Their Space to be separate from School Space. Like my sons when they were much younger, they want me to stay out of their clubhouse. When mom and dad start hanging out in the clubhouse and redecorating, it's time to find a new place. When parents discover the band you love, their music seems a lot less cool.
 

Way back in 2004, Facebook launched. It was for students and it centered around schools. In 2006, they opened up to everyone else and the school aspect moved out of the center.

Facebook has crossed the 100 million users mark. That's big. For comparison purposes, MySpace hit the 100 million mark in 2006 after 3 years. It took Facebook 4 and a half years.

At Passaic County Community College, MySpace is bigger with students than Facebook. (There's a good study waiting out there on why students choose one over the other, or use some other social network like Orkut.) MySpace offers you a kind of web site with tools and connections and lots of freedom to hack the design (hence the large number of really ugly sites). In Facebook, you always know you are in Facebook. There are lots of applications to add, lots of ways to connect. You can pull in your outside blog, but you can't have a blog there (as you can with MySpace).

Facebook has a new program called Schools being tested that literally connects to their school. It allows students to view their course calendar. Drop/adds show up in Facebook as soon as the registrar’s office reports them. Schools can also include ways for student groups to have pages within Schools where students can interact. The Schools program was developed by Inigral and it is being tested at Abilene Christian University.

from PC World:

The Facebook application is managed by the institution not the students and is plugged in to the school's database giving educational institutions more control over how and what information is shared.

Students who opt in to the application can view their entire course calendar within Facebook and if they add or drop a course at the registrar's office those changes will be immediately reflected in the Schools application.

Does Facebook want to reconnect to its base (the political season has me thinking in these terms) of students? Or, is Facebook looking to become an enterprise level higher education software package? Would the latter actually make them so mainstream that they would lose any cool factor that students find appealing?

I used to hear, in the days of Web 1.0, that email was the killer application. The past few years I have heard that email is dead. Our students prefer text messages, IM, Twitter and other social networking tools.

We added ShareThis to Serendipity35 this year so that readers could share a post or the blog with others using Facebook, delicious, Digg, Twitter or even that old time email. (It's that link & image at the bottom of this and every post.)

Well, ShareThis recently posted on their own blog the chart that I show here about the ways  people are sharing content using their service.

I don't know that their stats would match those for Serendipity35 (that information isn't available to us), but it's interesting to see that good ol' email is still getting the biggest slice of the pie.

65% of the sharing is happening with 2.0 tools (with Facebook getting the most action - 10% of the pie), but the results are fragmented with no other tool/service dominating.

How about you? Are you still most likely to share online content with others via email or some other application? Is this something that varies more based on user age?

Back in April 2006, Tim & I helped organize a a day-long seminar on podcasts, wikis and blogs at NJIT. It was designed for non-technical business professionals to learn about these new tools and how they might be used in a corporate setting . Though I had been blogging for a while elsewhere, Serendipity35 was a new thing. I had been doing podcasting in preparation for NJIT to enter iTunes U. Still, we ended up doing the session on wikis.

Though the term "Web 2.0" had been around since 2004 when Tim O'Reilly defined it as business embracing the web as a platform and using its strengths, you didn't hear the term being used that much. My post has had 25,000+ reads since then, probably just because of it containing the keywords podcast, wiki, blog and business.

Three years ago, Business Week did a cover story on blogging called "Blogs Will Change Your Business." It was one of their first big pieces on "bottom-up media" and "news as conversation." Many people, especially in the business world, associated blogs with "trivia, banality, venom, and baseless attacks."

"Beyond Blogs: What Business Needs to Know" was one of their June 2008 cover stories. Like my old post, that 2005 article continues to draw many online readers. Type in "blogs business" at Google today and the story comes up at the top of the results. 2005 was before YouTube, Facebook was a college baby and no one could Twitter, but the magazine warned that "Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Catch up...or catch you later." Business Week set up a blog at Blogspotting.net that is still going.

So, let's update that seminar a bit here. They started their new article by crowdsourcing the research. They posted questions on Blogspotting and asked what needed to be updated in the 2005 article and readers makes lots of suggestions. So they annotated the original article and added lots of notes and clarifications and created an updated version. But, being that they are still (this year) a print magazine, they had to publish a new print version too. In that version, they admit to having missed a part of the blogs story - the 2.0 part.

Sure, blogs would become the new printing press making lots of folks publishers, journalists and editors. But they also would be just part of the revolution. The other DIY tools (podcasts, wikis...) and social networks (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn...) would actually grab more people than blogging. (They cite a recent study from Forrester Research saying that only a quarter of the U.S. adult online population even bothers to read a blog once a month.)

Not all of what they see going on is good for business: rivals become "friends," share company information, post pictures of products and employees, spend hours on Twitter, YouTube. IBM set up its own social network for employees called Beehive and it has 30,000 employees on it. Good for business?

What changed in that updated version of their old cover story? The first thing to change was the title - delete "blogs" and go to "Social Media Will Change Your Business."

How many are there out there? Technorati was indexing 112 million blogs early in 2008 and reported that 120,000 new ones appear each day - BUT only 11% of blogs have posted within the past two months, so the real number is probably more like 13 million blogs. (Other sources say it's more like 4 million, but that's still a lot of blogging going on.)

Do you count the microblogging hit Twitter in there? Personally, I don't see the appeal of these 140 characters maximum posts, but more than a million people do.

What about wikis? The British telecom giant, BT, has more than 16,000 employees collaborating on wikis. They use the same open-source software that Wikipedia and Tim & I use for our wiki. Their employees use them to write software, map cell-phone base stations, launch branding campaigns and allow engineers in Asia to pick up a project as Europeans go to bed.

Business Week found that "An intern can amend the work of a senior engineer. Meanwhile, some 10,500 employees at BT are already on Facebook. BT is also offering an internal social network. But just like Facebook and Twitter, it won't work unless it attracts a crowd. [They] can't force anyone to use it. It would be fruitless to try... [all they] can do is provide tools and watch."

That leaves podcasting. Podcasting hasn't caught on as dramatically. According to some sources, "podcast awareness" has increased from 22% of the public in 2006 to 37% in 2007 and may reach 50% this year. More than 70% of all podcasts are still heard/viewed on computers and not on a portable media player like an iPod. (Remember that the POD originally meant "portable on demand.") The listener market is currently estimated at over 6 million. A number of traditional media sources offer podcasts (The New York Times, Forbes, The Scientific American, Time etc.) Podcast advertising is perhaps the best indicator of where this medium is headed in business. The predictions are for a compound annual growth rate of 154% from 2006 to 2010. ($3.1 million revenue in 2005. The iTunes software still dominates podcasting and is the big (but not the only) podcast distribution point for content with 38 million iTunes users.

We'll check back in a few years and see what else we all missed.