Open Social Learning in Spain. Clarifying Concepts
Dolors Reig

Dolors Reig. Photo by Carlos Albaladejo

Traditional e-Learning: everything preset, all paths settled. The evolution has then been, from the web to the social web, and from the social web to the personal web (Nova Spivack).

New ideas that shape the social web:

• Intercreativity
• Collective intelligence
• Smart mobs
• Wisdom of the crowds
• Architecture of participation
• Sharism

Open Social Learning

• Digital natives: It’s problable, though, that the so-called digital natives they actually are “hanging out” online (danah boyd). Thus, the digital knowledge might not be that high within digital natives as we should expect.
• Connectivism: the Internet is so shaped to learning because it works as we do, we learn as networks, learning happens when connections are created, the ability to learn is more important than knowing, etc.
• Social learning: if markets are conversations (Cluetrain Manifesto), education and learning are also conversations, the prosumers and active students being the main characters of this era and peer-to-peer being the best way to acquire information and knowledge. From the “I think therefore I am” to the “we participate, therefore we are” (Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0).
• Informal Learning: Jay Cross states that 70-90% of corporate learning is informal. We have to enable this informal learning so that it can happen.
• e-Learning 2.0
• Generative Learning
• Communities of Learning
• Constructivism
• Edupunk

Creativity: We should be focusing in what motivates people (à la Maslow): that’s why social networking sites are so successful.

Autonomous learning: what really drives knowledge is the process, not the output.

Universal, free and democratic learning (Soumitra Dutta).

Minimally invasive education, taking the example of Sugata Mitra.

Lifelong learning, immersive learning, non-stop learning, ubiquitous learning.

An active role that is required to remix. At its turn, remixing asks for multiliteracies.

Metaverses: Augmented reality, lifelogging, etc.

Changes of roles: the student is not passive, but a participant. The teacher is a facilitator, a curator. And the information becomes a perpetual beta.

Technology becomes too a very important part of the equation: open APIs or all technologies that enable sindication (XML/RSS, Atom, etc.) are true drivers of this change.

Main conclusions

• A web simple to use
• People, collectives, interests, tags, twines, groups
• Real time web
• “If we know the exact cost, the exact agenda of a project, it is probable that it is based on an obsolete technology” (Joseph Gavin, Jr.)

In all this landscape, the e-Portfolio is very relevant, as it perfectly fits with and represents the digital persona. And, complementing to this, e-competences are the necessary tools to get on with digital life.

Q&A

Begoña Gros: We have to make an effort to link the newest technologies and applications with learning or education, and not separating them as if they belonged to different spheres. A: Agreed. Indeed, as we increasingly happen to know more and more uses of the Internet, people shift from “bad” practices (online gambling, porn, etc.) towards “good” practices (learning, communicating with peers, etc.).

Jesús Martínez: Teachers need to learn so that they keep being up-to-date and can keep on teaching. We should accelerate the process of change, of adaptation, or re-learning. A: One of the direst problems is not only that people don’t know, but that people (e.g. teachers) do not know that they do not know.

Open Social Learning en España: Diagnosis and Perspective
Rubén Díaz

Rubén Díaz. Photo by Carlos Albaladejo

Expanded education: Search for new ways of education that embed and adapt social and communicational processes that the Internet made possible.

Education can take place at every moment, in every place. Inside and outside the walls of the academic institution.

We can virtually access all the information that the whole World generates (and has generated), but: Will we have the need for that much information? (Nam June Paik, 1977). And we need to take control over the technologies that make possible the access to all that information and apply them to, for instance, Education (Noam Chomsky, 1998). Education is not, is being (Paulo Freire). Nobody knows it all, everyone knows something, all the knowledge lays on the whole humankind (Pierre Lévy). Today, the voice you speak with could not be your own voice (DJ Spooky).

Margaret Meads (Culture and Compromise) stresses the fact of the non-linearity of knowledge and how we are stuck to the books. Jesús Martín Barbero states the importance of oral and visual culture nowadays (i.e. cyberculture) in opposition with the traditional written culture of education during the last centuries.

Knowledge is delocalized. Everyone’s interested in education, and everyone’s capable of learning.

Learning takes place when solving problems by going through them using creativity. But how and why are people creative? And how can the environment negatively affect the learning environment? Is the actual educational system a learning environment that fosters creativity?

The learning environment is the source of knowledge. Active and collaborative learning environments enable learning by doing. We need to disclose communication channels so that motivation happens. We need to develop a pedagogy of the question. We are used to a pedagogy of the answer, where the teacher answers questions that the students never put (Paulo Freire).

We have to move towards the educommunication, avoiding the education of silence. Oriented self-education, expanded education. Expanded education is the communicative link between memory and remix to build the self from the world we speak from.

An adult assimilates:

• 20% of information heard
• 30% of observed
• 50% of observed and listened
• 70% of expressed by oneself
• 90% of elaborated by oneself

Experience: Platoniq’s Bank of Common Knowledge in the 3000 viviendas de Sevilla.

Q&A

Enric Senabre: What about expanded assessment? A: The problem is not only assessment, but the whole system. And we should begin with youngsters and schools, and later on with the University.

Q: what about beyond formal education? A: At Zemos98 we schedule a yearly Festival, where different people can meet different kinds of knowledge.

Silvia Bravo: If all these approaches and technologies are so evidently good, why aren’t they more pervasive? Where are we failing? A: The blame is maybe on the moral majority of the mainstream, the socioeconomic system where education is business. A second aspect is contextualization: how to use technology to work locally.

Open Social Learning?
Marc Alier

Open Learning: We use to define problems so that some structured learning outcomes happen, but problems do not usually have unique solutions, as life. If we open education, we have to be aware that problems and solutions have to be open too.

Social Learning: If we do not do nothing as a society, we do not learn as a group. The interesting thing is to participate and be engaged within the community. Social Learning is learning as a group. But it is also about learning how to be social, is about education training people to socialize and, at the same time, to define the society as is: education shapes society.

Learn in Community: Moodle as the flagship of community learning. Related with hacker ethics: passion for what you do; freedom; value and social recognition; information and knowledge accessibility; activism; social commitment.

Marc Alier. Photo by Enric Senabre Hidalgo

Open, social and hacker ethics lead us to Learning in community by doing and sharing openly.

When students are given control begin to feel confident on what they do. And things happen. People self-organize; new “solutions” or “answers” to pre-established problems/questions arise; and new knowledge emerges.

Some examples:

• Work on specific subjects but without constraints, being the output a collaborative text on a wiki + a presentation. Students take divergent directions from what one would expect, but with high quality output and high engagement.
• Collaborative (massive: circa 30 students) project management subject where the whole classroom defines a single project. Rules? Only traceability of work. Students would use all kind of web 2.0 applications to distribute roles and tasks, to schedule milestones, to distribute workload, etc. The teacher then becomes a mentor whose “sole” work is to monitor and guide the autonomous work of the students.

To be able to perform such a monitoring activity, the software needs to be prepared to do that monitoring. Tracing is a must and interoperability between applications another need so that different tools can be integrated and used during the learning (and teaching) process.

Q&A

Ismael Peña-López: what competences need teachers to become “open social learning monitors or mentors”? A: First step is accepting that the outcomes of open collaborative work is an open and unexpected outcome. And this is not a competence but an attitude. Once the teacher gives control away, they will bring in technology: the teacher does not need the technology to give it to the students, but to follow (and catch up with) them. The attitude is the key: what outcomes are you renouncing to in exchange of implication and satisfaction?

Dolors Reig: How to monitor? How to evaluate? How to make quantify performance? A: The important thing in technology is how you are going to evaluate, and then design the software. If the evaluation model is clear, technology should not be an issue… provided it is free software and you can edit its code and add new features.

Ismael Peña-López: Can we really always renounce to part of our syllabus, of our planned content? A: Are exams a real way to assess learning? Or are we teaching students to pass exams? If we want to transform the society we don’t need knowledge, we need abilities and competences. We need not to teach knowledge but to teach how to acquire new knowledge and to have a critical attitude towards the knowledge we reach.

Jesús Martínez: How do we cope with competition (in education and in society at large)? With inertias? A: The educational system is at stake, so inertias can be broken down in pieces if this is the general will or the general trend.

But the fact that the web is increasingly (a) providing best connectivity, access, searchability/findability, ease of use and capabilities of storage, and (b) more social tools so that people can collaborate, has made the debate around video-lectures worth revisiting.

A simple search provides a good bunch of articles worth giving them a look:

• Abt & Barry (2007) The Quantitative Effect of Students Using Podcasts in a First Year Undergraduate Exercise Physiology Module
• Cascaval, Fogler, Abrams & Durham (2008) Evaluating the Benefits of Providing Archived Online Lectures to In-class Math Students
• Whatley & Ahmad (2008) Using Video to Record Summary Lectures to Aid Students’ Revision
• Chiu, Lee & Yang (2006) A Comparative Study of Post-class Lecture Video Viewing
• Cardall, Krupat & Ulrich (2008) Live Lecture Versus Video-Recorded Lecture: Are Students Voting With Their Feet?
• O’Donoghue, Hollis & Hoskin (2007) Lecture recording: Help or hinder in developing a stimulating learning environment?
• Flores & Savage (2007) Student Demand for
  Streaming Lecture Video: Empirical Evidence from Undergraduate Economics Classes

The results from the previous papers can be summarized as follows:

• If the recorded lecture is just a substitute for the live thing, it might not make a difference or, in other words, the impact might be null.
• But the recorded lecture can be more engaging than the live lecture, as it allows for stops and fast-forwards, pauses to check other information, etc.
• The video-lecture can also enable people to attend lectures they would or could not attend, and even make them more efficient in their attendance (see previous point)
• The taped lecture can also be a trigger for teamwork, collaboration and other social learning methodologies, methodologies that, indeed, are normally not used in live lectures because of their (a) unidirectionality (b) time constraints and (c) crowded classrooms — let alone shyness from some attendees that just cannot speak/interact in public
• If students are more engaged, comfortable and willing to collaborate, the impact of having recorded lectures either as supporting materials or as a substitute for the “real thing” can end up having a positive impact and increasing academic performance in relationship with students not using taped lectures but attending classes

Educator.com

With this in mind, I happened to meet online Eric Hung and David Fan from Educator.com and had the chance to have a guest access to the site — while they invited me too to write this little piece about Educator.com.

Educator.com is a collection of academic lectures [...] helping students that do not have ready access to great education because of geographic location or socioeconomic status. Educator’s instructors are all experienced college professors and guide students through an innovative two video interface that simulates a one-to-one learning environment. In other words, people at Educator.com have put together good professors in front of the camera and taped their lectures, including their slides, whiteboard notes, syllabuses, readings, etc.

At first glance — which sticks at second and further “glances” — the quality of the materials is impressive (see, for instance, what’s being prepared to learn chemistry or Calculus BC), treated with most taste and sensitivity: content is good and is meticulously presented. Most materials include a video of the professor plus his slides and/or whiteboard, while keeping navigation very easy along the syllabus which features subtitles and time codes. Videos add up some quick notes and the possibility to comment them.

That said, and going back to what we stated before about video lectures, Educator.com makes a very good companion to either reinforce or to (maybe) substitute traditional lectures, and I see a lot of potentials in models like Educator.com’s.

Cons of video-lectures?

In my opinion, the cons — necessarily — go in the same line as the “accompanying measures” that the afore mentioned researchers already stated in their papers: while content can constitute a core and a good one, it is context and enablers what will make of a video-lecture a (potential) success — besides the incontestable fact of being able to reach a content you wouldn’t otherwise if not being able to attend live lectures, of course.

A first aspect is exercises, so that oneself can test a specific level of knowledge acquisition. This is something that’s already planned (though not still implemented) in Educator.com and that just seldom is seen in other academic lectures’ repositories.

Related to this, possibility of feedback or guidance should naturally follow. Being myself a professor teaching online, once content is made available, our added value is, simply stated, (a) guidance through path setting and (b) provision of specific feedback.

Which leads me to the third aspect: in distance learning, syllabuses, learning paths, etc. are a must. Much is done in this sense at Educator.com and much more is likely to be found there would their project work, reach a critical mass and enable them to put as many courses as possible.

Of course, it is not only a matter of setting up a learning path, but also help in blueprinting one’s own curriculum. Being able to create one’s own “playlists” (something that other content — not lectures — repositories allow) or be able to go offline by feeding your mp4 player would be interesting add ons to the project and to the freedom of the student.

In the end, sites like Educator.com should enable the student to create their own e-portfolios or, to follow the actual trend, their own personal learning environments.

These personal learning environments would, of course, interact with other students so that a learning community can emerge, be it to share hints, materials, doubts or, in the best scenario, to build together their own learning.

Summing up: initiatives like Educator.com take the best of technology to capture live lectures and make them available to a very broad public. I don’t think just taped lectures are “education”, but:

• They can be complemented with more content, context, guidance, classmates, etc. so that the resulting mix is a real and richest learning experience
• They definitely stress the weaknesses of the traditional lecturing style, challenging the suitability of such methods, and asking them for an urgent update… maybe a blended model were lectures can be supplied by someone like Educator.com and leave live meetings for debates, seminars or something were face-to-face makes more sense and ads real value.

See also e-research tag.

A collaborative experience to visualize social networks
Tíscar Lara, Mariluz Congosto

Blog analysis based on journalists that have a blog, as a middle ground between pro and personal. Of special interest how is the identity built: Identity building: domain name, about section, personal photography, affiliation, etc.

The network of blogs gets complicated with other Web 2.0 services. There’s a need to manage the increasing data with a model: Barriblog.

The model is based on two axes — content affinity and intensiveness of relationship — and measures links, conversations/comments and citations, adding them up in a relationship index.

Improvements on the model: time series, how have other web 2.0 applications (e.g. Twitter) impacted on blog usage and blog networking, etc.

How to visualize?

• Content
• Time
• Maps
• Relationships

Allí me reencontré con Edgar Gómez recién llegado de México y dispuesto a escribir su tesis

(see also: Gathering of visualization tools)

Visualizing Transnationality
José Luis Molina

How can we map transnationality? Focusing on flows; focusing on active contacts with people with the same origin; focusing in the geographical distribution of all active contacts.

For instance, a visualization of Chinese immigration in the Barcelona metropolitan area shows that there’s more relationship with the country of origin (China) or the US, than within immigrants; that immigrants mainly settle in Barcelona and have poor relationship with Catalan rural areas; and that within Barcelona, they move around relatively few places. Visualization allows immediate glance to these facts while raw data does not.

Many ethical issues arise in an ether that covers all, where everything we do is registered/tracked.

Use visualization to make better research questions, to get qualitative observations after quantitative data.

NOTE: difficult session where to take notes, as everything was so… visual.

As the presentation shows, the speech is made up of four parts or general ideas:

1. The industrial era — or the industrial economy — is based (among many other things) on two main issues: scarcity and transaction costs. These two limitations have shaped the world as we know it, especially institutions: schools, parties and governments, firms, civic associations… When shifting towards a knowledge based economy, both issues of scarcity and transaction costs fall down into pieces. Will institutions, and intermediation in general, follow?
2. Second part is an overview on some of these institutions, and how their models and, sometimes, their sheer survival is threatened by these radical changes on costs and scarcity. Some will violently disappear, some will just fade, some will suffer adaptations along the following years. All in all, it’s about the risk of exclusion from society — not digital exclusion —, the risk of becoming worthless.
3. Thus, there might be a need for new (digital) competences to face the present and the nearest future. These competences (to be acquired both by individuals and institutions) will be necessary to interact with each other and rebuild how we learn, work, or engage in politics or everyday life.
4. To foster the acquisition of these competences some policies to foster the Information Society will have to be put to work, and the role of the government seems to be a crucial one

I will conclude that it all is a matter of bringing on changes while making sense of them.

More information

• Browse: Darwin a la societat de la informació: adaptació (i beneficis) o extinció
• Browse: Darwin at the Information Society: adaptation (and benefits) or extinction
• Download: Darwin a la societat de la informació: adaptació (i beneficis) o extinció ( 10.4 MB)
• Download: Darwin at the Information Society: adaptation (and benefits) or extinction ( 8.68 MB)
• Slides from previous sessions, at Generalitat de Catalunya’s Slideshare
• Briefings from previous sessions, at Generalitat de Catalunya’s Sessions Web website.

I want to heartily thank Jordi Graells for giving me the excuse — actually, to push me — to sit down and put together some ideas that had been rambling on my mind for some time. The title is his and it was great inspiration that helped me in weaving those ideas together. Not surprisingly, his work with the Catalan e-Justice Community (Compartim) is a most inspiring one too.

Rachel Gibson

All politics is both personal and local… and national… and… Have to manage the way to connect the personal to the local.

Emergent e-campaign strategy: depends on infrastructure and the tools; and of the logic of networked communities, whether they are autonomous or not. A difference between building “real” communities, or populist platforms addressed to many in general (to the “herd”).

A major challenge: how to measure actions, people, quality, etc. A need to modelize “digital natives” and the way they interact between each other and through technology.

Main research approaches in Politics 2.0, all of them interrelated:

Víctor Sampedro

We should not embrace the discourse and language of marketing or consultants, of populism, of counter-hegemonic collectives.

We have to assess the validity of our data, and collaborate both with the industry and the subjects of our studies.

We have to clarify what we understand by counter-power measures of ICTs and also, the concept of empowerment, and the concept of mobilization.

Is it a grassroots approach really a better system? Shouldn’t leaders lead? Is there still a role for leaders to “educate” the voter or to find “better” solutions and show them to the citizen?

Brian Krueger

Everything that’s great can be used against you: we should be thinking about Internet surveillance and monitoring. We know little about it and should be paying more attention to it. And this includes the sheer sensation of being monitored, as it has behavioural effects (e.g. self-censorship). Evidence shows that people feel monitored if they’d type “impeach Bush” or “assassinate Bush”. Open political criticism is tied to the feeling of being watched. And this sensation of being watched most probably changes your own behaviour, even if you’re not actually watched. And it’s likely to change how and how much you are participating.

Bruce Bimber

Motivation, attitudes, trust… the umbrella were to begin exploring participation. And then focus also on the changes that the new media are infringing to the landscape.

How would the landscape look like when “all” the people would have been socialized with these new media?

How different Web 2.0 tools differentiate one another? What different specific applications do they have?

We’re right to talk about choice, but we do still have not good models how to measure how choice happens and why.

More effort should be made in analysing how citizens can affect agenda-setting, on a decentralized and bottom-up communication scheme. And also how horizontal communication happens, how peer-to-peer can pass the message on.

Should focus more not on how people mobilize, but what the specific motivations and contexts are. What keeps people awake at night.

Andrew Chadwick

We need more appreciation of social network environments (i.e. tools), and balance technological determinism with social determinism, keeping in mind how technology did change some human behaviours.

How do we contextualize a campaign or social movement, specially when social movements increasingly look like parties and parties increasingly look like social movements, and borrow each one’s instruments and techniques.

Look at how citizens cognitively negotiate information overload in an age of information saturation (not scarcity).

Can we do politics in a space owned by the market and private interests? Can the citizens build their own forums, create their own network effects and avoid commoditized online spaces?

We do need to start looking in more sophisticated ways how people are exposed to online content, including accidental exposure.

There are many cross-section analyses, but few panel-data analysis, which are usually acknowledged to be more robust (though more difficult and expensive). And we should use more the “free range” data that people automatically create with their actions (e.g. logs) instead of “battery raised” surveys. And combine methods.

We should be aware of how mobile technologies might be changing the economy of attention and politics.

Discussion

Bruce Bimber: mobility is more about time, more about “always on” rather than physical space or ubiquity (Chadwick fully agrees).

Rachel Gibson & Bruce Bimber: there are places where the local factor really matters and shapes how the institutions work or are built and managed.

Granularity in citizen’s online engagement
Andrew Chadwick

Dissatisfaction with the debate around e-Democracy and the concept of the public sphere. A new approach is needed and it would be worth looking at it from Yochai Benkler’s point of view, who states that granularity (of collaboration) determines the success of a (collaborative) project.

The online scenario has change with the appearance of the Web 2.0. Thus, online politics should be reshaped accordingly, and make possible more granular ways to participate.

Usability is one of the things that have radically changed in recent years. Web 2.0 platforms are simple and more easy to use. It is also easier to aggregate simple and small contributions together.

Low threshold political behaviour is central in most Web 2.0 political websites.

Web 2.0 do not solve the trust issue, but they have no doubt addressed this subject and they are far better than other solutions (newsgroups, IRC, etc.).

Community engagement requires third places not explicitly political/politicized (squares, bars, etc.) and this is going online now too. Facebook-like platforms are places where politics can piggy-back other conversations and meetings.

More granularity does not necessarily means less quality (i.e. because there is “less effort” and “less commitment” in just e.g. sending a single petition to the Prime Minister). Numbers matter. And, indeed, more granularity implies less risk.

Granular participation needs reconceptualization of decentralized politics. How to measure this? What’s the role of the intermediaries? Do we need them? Will political content be created?

How to support new patterns of interaction between politicians or policy-makers and the citizens? Will this interaction take place in third places? Will people welcome politicians in these third places? Will politicians be willing to enter these places?

Participation in online creation communities
Mayo Fuster

Online Creation Communities (OCCs) are collective action performed by individuals that cooperate, communicate and interact, mainly via a platform of participation in the Internet, with the goal of knowledge-making and which the resulting information al pool remains freely accessible and of collective property.

Political relevance: they are spaces for civic engagement in the dissemination of alternative information and for participation in the public sphere; and citizen engagement in the provision of public civic information.

Two cases: Openesf.net and Wikimedia Foundation.

There is very strong inequality in participation: active participants (1%) that heavily contribute and are responsible for most of the content; contributors (9%), a low percentage of participants that make small or indirect contributions; and lurkers (90%), a large presence of individuals that do not participate. This pattern repeats everywhere and everywhen.

For Openesf.net the distribution is: 82% lurkers, 14.3% contributors and 3.7% active participants. Distribution of profiles varies depending on what is understood by participation.

97% of participants in Openesf.net presented themselves as individuals, not as members (or even representatives) of organizations.

Participation as an eco-system:

• Participation is open, the system is open to participation
• Participation has multiple forms and degrees which are integrated: a critical mass is essential to initiate the project; weak cooperation enriches the system; lurkers provide value as audience or through unintended participation that improves the sys tem
• Participation is decentralized and asynchronous
• Po is public
• P is autonomous, each person decides which level of commitment they want to adopt and on what aspects they want to contribute
• Participation is volunteering

Norms, technology and information: Pondering the infrastructural choices of “e-participation”
Anders Koed Madsen

Analysis of portals to gather political or public-service-like content: How do the different portals shape and materialize the abstract pormises of citizen participation? Which elements give promises of new modes of citizen-engagement?

1st dimension: Structured semantics vs. unstructured semantics. This is a basis for both transmission and deliberation, though there is a trade-off between noise-reduction and diversity of inputs. There are also differences in how interaction is facilitated. Reacting citizen vs. proactive; moderated vs. unmoderated; agenda setting vs. open agendas; etc.

2nd dimension: Rationalistic content vs. non-rationalistic content. Differences in forms of content. The semantic choice can constrain the dialogue.

3rd dimension: Loose moderation vs. strict moderation.

How the election of these dimensions can affect content?

Discussion

Brian Krueger: does really a bigger size in the network implies a more useful network? Isn’t there a trade-off between size and usefulness? Is there a way to create networks that are useful to share knowledge?

Ismael Peña-López (re: Chadwick’s): One variable missing in the equation of how Web 2.0 have changed the landscape is the focus of most Web 2.0 platforms, or who benefits from them, shifting form the organization to the individual. Contributing to newsgroups benefited the community, uploading photos on Flickr benefits me; participating with a political party benefits… the party, but participating in TheyWorkForYou or FixMyStreet benefits… me! It is, again, a switch from push strategies (be engaged, then work for the party/candidate) to pull strategies (work for you, then be engaged). In some way, the Web 2.0 allows for including the concept of utility in the equation of political engagement.

Ismael Peña-López (re: Krueger’s comment on Chadwick’s): useful for who? the bigger the network, the more useful for aggregate purposes (more data, more content) though it can be overwhelming at the individual level. In fact, the ideal would be huge networks made out of many small personal networks. Indeed, to share knowledge there must be that shift from working for the others (push) to working for oneself (pull) and then reuse/aggregate this content so that it is connected with other content and people, building a network up.

The Political Knowledge Gap in the New Media Environment
Eva Anduiza, Aina Gallego and Laia Jorba

Knowledge gap hypothesis (Tichenor, Donohue and Olien, 1970, 159-160): As the infusion of mass media information into a social system increases, segment of pupulation with higher socioeconomic status tend to acquire this information at a faster rate than the lower status segments.

What is the impact of new media on the knowledge gap? There’s much more information of any kind; more choice and possibilities, etc. Two approaches:

• Cognitive abilities are more relevant, so the knowledge gap is due to capability; same with motivation.
• On the other hand, serendipity (when surfing the Internet at random) can play an important role in decreasing the knowledge gap

A survey on Internet uses and political knowledge showed that Internet users are more knowledgeable in political issues (leaving aside age, education and other variables that could influence political knowledge).

There is also a positive interaction between Education and Internet use, meaning that more educated people can learn more about politics in the Internet. But also a negeative interaction between Interest and Internet use, that is, less interested people learn more on the Internet about politics than interested ones. Why is it so?

Reinforcement and mobilization: the influence of the Internet on different types of political participation
Marta Cantijoch

What’s the impact of the Internet on political participation? We’re seeing a decrease of representational forms of participation and an increase of protest and other extra-representational activities. Reasons could be dissatisfaction, disaffection (as less involvement) and apathy, discontent (but eager to get involved), etc.

Three theoretical profiles:

• Disaffected: low levels of involvement, dissatisfied with the political system, low feelings of engagement. Expected not to participate whatever
• Critical: High political involvement and feelings of engagement, but low satisfaction wiht the sisyte. Expected to get involved in extrarepresentative activities
• Institutionalised: High political involvement, and feelings of citizen duty, matched by the political system. Expected participation in representative models.

What happens with these three profiles when the Internet comes in? More information available, higher diversity of discourses, unplanned exposure to information. If the Internet fosters extra-representative forms of participation, Disaffected and Institutionalized citizens will be mobilised, but Critical ones will find their eagerness not to mobilize reinforced.

A survey+analyses were performed to measure turnout, representational and extra-representational participation according to Internet use, and voluntary search for information and proclivity to be exposed to serendipitous political information.

Findings are that the more the Internet use, the higher the probability to be mobilized at al levels. In other words, using the Internet increases the likelihood of participation in extra-representational modes, though it has minimal effects amongst disaffected (mobilizing in institutionalized and reinforcing amongst critical citizens).

On the other hand, being exposed to more political information also increases the probability to mobilised, regardless of it being voluntary (active search) or involuntary exposure to political information.

Political participation, alienation and the Internet in Spain and the United States
Mike Jensen

Political alienation can be explained, from the demand side, by several reasons. Putnam (1995, 2000) states that it might be because of a loosening of personal ties with the civil society. Also due to a generational shift in participatory repertoires away from hierarchical political engagement.

On the supply side, Stoker (2006) or Hay (2007) explain it by the increasing complexity of politics. Political marketing could well be another reason.

Does low specific and diffuse support negatively impact participation? Are there differences between offline and different online forms of participation? Is there evidence that the politically alienated offline are participation online? Do we find differences between Spain and the US?

After two surveys (Spain and US), we test trust in the central governemnt, in political parties and the local government, responsiveness of authorities, complexity of politics and elite interests domination. In both countries we can group (principal components analysis) the variables in two factors: diffuse support (concerning the former three) and specific support (latter three).

US: In general, either diffuse or specific support seems not to affect political participation. Only diffuse support has a weak association with offline political participation in the US. Reading online political news does have a political impact in participation at any level. And there’s a segment of the population that expend a lot of time surfing the Internet as a way of expressing aspects of their lives, participating in Web 2.0 related platforms.

Spain: A negative relation between being for a major party and online participation. Diffuse support is positively related with online participation, while specific support is positively related with offline support. Again, reading political news leads to higher probability to participate, whatever the means.

There is either no or a negative relationship between participation and support. We find evidence of younger cohorts particularity participation oin Web 2.0. Some evidence for cultural shaping of the Internet as there are difference sin how the major parties relate to the Internet.

Discussion

Bruce Bimber: What happens with long-term participation and whether we believe it is good or bad? Is it really useful so treat the Web 2.0 differently from online participation? For older generations there might be a difference, but is that difference there amongst younger generations?

Ismael Peña-López (re: Aina Gallego’s paper): reasons why less interested learn more through the Internet could be that more interested have a wider range of information sources and rely not on serendipity. On the other hand, because their threshold for new information is higher than non interested. It would be useful, then, to add a couple more variables: (1) do you rely on other sources to get political information and how many (2) how well do you think you are informed on political issues.

Rachel Gibson: It might also be a case that the information you find on the Internet is low quality and thus it has a negative effect on your knowledge level.

Assessing Internet Mobilization – A Methodological Approach for Integrating Web Analysis and Survey Data
Camilo Cristancho and Jorge Salcedo

Analysis on two demonstrations against the crisis: how were they organized and how were people mobilized.

How did you find out about this protest rally: face to face (44%), e-mail (31%), traditional media (15%), website (10%).

Online mobilization is received by the same profile of individuals who get mobilized by offline channels: participants are both activists and Internet users.

Online contact is limited to association networks. Organizations are more likely to use face-to-face and less likely to use e-mail.

Past participation types have an influence on future ways of contact: people that have taken action online are more likely to get e-mail. E-mail mobilization is linked to past forms of online engagement, though there is no previous consent to get these e-mails.

Surprisingly, on a second order mobilization, activists contacted online shifted to offline to propagate the message.

Associations which mobilize the majority of people do not have a high presence in cyberspace: there is an inverse relationship between presence and e-mail mobilization.

Internet mobilization has a great potential for expanding participation. On the other hand, need for visibility leads to clusterization and concentration.

Opt in or Tune out: Online Mobilization & Political Participation
Brian Krueger

There is a huge difference between solicited contact between online and offline models: online contact from mobilizing institutions is 62% unsolicited vs. 38% solicited. In offline contact, 24% is solicited and 76% is unsolicited. It thus looks like online activists are always “the same people”, and it is easier to expand your base for mobilization by going offline. At least in theory. At least in a first order of things.

Expanding participation by online means would then depend on several things, and it depends whether you want to activate the active (mobilization from solicited political e-mail) or you want to activate the inactive (mobilization from unsolicited political e-mail).

So, does unsolicited political e-mail induce individuals to participate in politics?

Unsolicited online mobilizing measures do not seem to have an influence on being actually mobilized. Same with offline, though, if it has any impact, it is more due to the system (being offline) than because of it being solicited or unsolicited.

There’s another point to be made: major institutions (parties, political organizations) do not normally engage in unsolicited mailing. This might be another reason why unsolicited e-mail is not effective: because it is used by already “marginal” organizations, so it’s the organization (not the means) what does not matter.

Research should be made on a 2-step mobilization process, where more focus is put on the role of friends and family, so that to avoid the appearance of spam. Need for more studies on peer-to-peer engagement.

The Impact of Online and Offline mobilization on Participation Modes
Sarah Vissers, Marc Hooghe, Dietlind Stolle and Valérie-Anne Mahéo

Is mobilization tool-specific or is there a spill-over effect of online mobilization on offline participation and of face-to-face mobilization on online participation and visa versa?

An experiment was designed with two organizations trying to mobilize (online and offline) two different groups of people (+ control group) to rally for environmental issues.

Results show that in the long run, mobilization rates drop, but for the group belonging to a lower socio-economic profile, the web (web tools) has a positive impact in maintaining mobilization rates.

For face to face, it always has a positive effect on both groups regardless of their socio-economic profile, but web mobilization has a negative effect in the long run in the higher socio-economic level group.

Conclusions

• Effects of mobilization processes tend to be tool-specific.
• Pre-existing levels of Internet skills had no effect on the mobilization potential of Web mobilization.
• Strong differences between students and participants with lower socio-economic status. Mobilization most effective for least-mobilizsed and least-interested.

Discussion

Andrew Chadwick (discussant): A distinction between impersonal unsolicited e-mail and interpersonal unsolicited e-mail. Where’s the line that separates spam from “ambient information”? What about the economy of time? We should do more research on the availability of time amongst activists, and see whether they go online because they cannot attend face-to-face meetings, or they precisely go online because they have plenty of time to commit in more ways. And also use time as a proxy of the degree of involvement of a specific individual in a specific action, and thus be able to compare offline and online activities with a common “currency”.

Youth, Online Engagement, and the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election
Bob Boynton, Caroline J. Tolbert and Allison Hamilton

With the Internet, political activity that was hidden — the voters’ — comes to the surface. Things that you could only know through surveys, now you can know it by looking at how many people looked at this or that video on YouTube.

And the information about the candidates has also boosted: from an average of 15 TV ads that lasted 30″ each, to 150 videos you could watch on YouTube.

And not only importation about what voters passively do, but also what actively do, their political action or engagement.

The “celebrities video” by McCain was viewed circa 2 million times, while the spoof/answer by Paris Hilton was seen by circa 7 million visitors. What happens to our understanding of politics when the unofficial beats that much the official message?

65% of visits to Obama videos in YouTubre came from the campaign official website. The top referrer to McCain’s videos in YouTube came from The Hufftington Post, who was against McCain.

The average of comments in the Obama site was 75 while in McCain’s it was 25%.

“Technology is a Commodity”. The Internet in the 2008 US Presidential Election
Cristian Vaccari

Research questions

• Technological vs. social determinism: Is the Internet a channel of social-political dynamics, or can it be a driver too?
• Post-bureaucratic political organizations (Bimber): How do campaigns resolve the trade-off between bottom-up spontaneity and top-down control?
• Hypermedia camp and the managed citizen (Howard): Does data-driven selection and direction of volunteer engagement change the campaigns’ organizational incentives and practices?

Methodology: focus on the meso (organizational) level, 31 interviews to political consultants.

Two main conditions for an online campaign to work: content, based on the character of the candidate; and organization, based on committing to a volunteer-centered model rather tahn a marketing, command-and-control model.

Obama’s campaign worked more at the organizational level, building relationships, than at the marketing level, sending out messages and ideas.

There was no evidence found of a trade-off between organization and empowerment. But the grassroots revolution is still to be organized.

The Obama hybrid model: based on trust and authenticity, and with data assisted guidance.

From mass communication system to mass community system. From message control to message guidance. From a marketing paradigm to an organizing paradigm. From top-down vs. bottom-up to data-driven, targeted relationship management.

Research must be carpenter-driven rather than hammer-driven (Marshall Ganz).

New Media and Horizontal Politics in the Obama Campaign
Bruce Bimber

Obama’s was both the best-run new media (horizontal) campaign adn the best-run traditional (vertical) campaign in recent history. On the other hand, the election would likely have been won by the Democratic Party candidate in any case.

Why did Obama do better with new media than his opponents?

New media were used for two things: to mobilize; and to raise money that was spent in traditional media to dominate them. New media were used to contribute winning in the traditional media arena. McCain did not integrate both media.

Obama supporters used new media better in general, as measured by MySpace “friends”, Facebook supporters, etc.

Obama’s was really a much candidate-centered phenomenon.

Has Obama created a model for new-media campaigns by others?

Not really.

• We do not know which new media technologies were more important and for what. Is there a core technology (the website, as Rachel Gibson states) or is there a swarm of tools? In general, parties tried everything that was at hand.
• We’re not sure which organizational structures are best suited for which functions.
• We do not know how public interest in a cause or campaign can be sustained over time.
• We do not understand how the inflationary effects of new media on communication work. How much information is good and how much is saturating the audience? Will less be more?
• Where are the limits of online organizing? How much face-to-face will it be necessary?

Some conclusions or what we know about horizontal politics and new media

• Collapse of boundaries between news, political talk, campaigning, political action, gaming
• Network effects are very large: network-style growth, social preferences, virality
• Impetus toward hybrid organizational structures
• Micro-targeting of communication works
• Media appeal interacts with candidate/cause

Discussion

Mayo Fuster: what kind of hybrid models?

Andrew Chadwick: We need detail on micro-targeting, specific usage of technolgies, etc. Indeed, we should be careful with soft data coming from interviewees that have professional interests in what they’re talking about.

Rachel Gibson: there is a real need of hub-like tools where people can go to get all the info they need, despite it is really spread around other platforms.

Ismael Peña-López: If new media is about community building, and there is a collapse of boundaries between political activities, then we should expect that campaigns work less than working on the long run, to build political communities instead of armies of volunteers for the elections. Would it be reasonable to think that the long primary election process in the Democratic party helped Obama to build this community, and that it was this community what mattered more than online campaigning? In other words: did online campaigning really mattered at all? Or was it the community building process during the whole primary election (+presidential election too) that mattered?

Jorge Salcedo: Do people really want to bring change in? To transform the system?

Bob Boynton: the long-tail has been able to reach beyond the physical boundaries. In terms of American politics, the long-tail means that you access more content, wherever… and, reciprocally, you can micro-target this audience.

Bruce Bimber: I agree that it would be much more interesting to see how Obama beat Hillary Clinton during the primary election than to see what happened during the presidential election.

Bruce Bimber: people might not be willing to bring in technological change, but cultural change.

Citizen-Campaigning, New Media and the Revitalisation of Politics?
Rachel K. Gibson

Some changes in politics: not only at the participatory level, but especially changes in the style politics are made. Normally, focus has been put on how new media can change everything that is outside of the sphere of conventional politics (parties, parliament, etc.). But the 2008 US Presidential election has shown that the system can also be changed.

Obama’s campaign integrated web 2.0 practices and tools within the main website, so that people could participate without going “outside” of the main/official website.

New structure for e-campaigning:

• Hub: main website
• Spokes: email, RSS feeds, instant messeging, SMS, campaign blog
• Third party platforms: blogosphhere, social networking sites, photo/video sharing sites, etc.

Web 2.0 devolves power to the user, to the voter, and challenges traditional positions (Dalton’s) that ellites can lead campaigns and messages.

Caveats:

• Who are the citizen-campaigners? are ICTs simply creating “hyperactivists”?

• Is it truly decentralised? Or was it actually a case of better localising the central command?
• How far was money and not “people power” the great driver?
• How far can it work outside the US?

Some requisites:

• Broadband: necessary but not sufficient
• Democratic culture based on civic voluntarism
• Party-strengths: candidate-centered systems more suited for a “shared-responsibility” model vs. stron party systems that allow no autonomy.
• Role of money in campaigns: if raising money is no incentive, will there be incentives at all to engage in a conversation?
• Rules on data protection

Cyberdemocracy: dividing or merging factor
Monica Poletti & Victor Sampedro

Research based on six groups divided by age (18-40; +40), ideology (right; left) and activism (traditional partisans; cyberpartisans) during Spanish Presidential & Parliament Election 2008.

Age

Generational divide still exists.

Similarities: political and media interests matter; importance of non-virtual contacts; negative evaluation of uses, that it, not intrinsic feature of ICTs.

Young people appear to have a less structured and more autonomous use of ICTs, with a more proactive attitude. They also are more optimists about the future of cyberdemocracy.

Ideology

Ideology cleavage blurs with more electoral use of ICTs. In general, right- and left-wing parties share the reasons that led them to develop cyberstrategies; the evolution in tools and organization; successes of party cyberstrategy; optimism on pro-democracy tone, etc.

Activism

Both groups (traditional activists and cyberactivists) are against electoral and party bureaucracy and traditional media. While cyberactivists see the good points of ICTs in political campaigning, traditionals also point at their weak points.

General findings

No difference technophiles/technophobes; virtual character of Internet; no strcitly technological determinism, as users determine evaluation. ICTs allow for more specialized groups, but the Net is used by similar typologies of users.

Internet as part of the world, not as a separate world; pro-democratic effect ascribed directly to ICT; Internet is merging differences and blurring barriers but possibilities of a cyberdemocracy are distorted; citizens might have a minor margin of manoeuvre while parties model techno-political applications.

Cyberactivism, campaigning and party change in the Catalan parties
Ana Sofía Cardenal, Albert Padró-Solanet, Rosa Borge and Albert Batlle

Research based on the demand-side, driven by the irruption of the Web 2.0 and the fact that parties are increasingly fortresses difficult to penetrate. The Spanish case has indeed shown that voters and activists are doing things outside of parties.

So, how are party activists using ICTs? Are there differences amongst parties? Why are doing it (determinants)?

In Catalonia, parties’ membership of major parties (PSC, PPC) is quite an aged one, centered in their fifties. And half of them have also been long-term members of the party.

The relationship between age and having a profile in Facebook is really strong, but it is not that strong for other ICT uses (writing on a word processor, generic Internet uses, etc.). Indeed, a factor analysis show that there are two main factors that group Internet activities: (1) taking part in social networking sites and (2) using the Internet for political activism (sending e-mails to the candidate, maintaining political blogs, using video/photo storage sites for political issues, etc.)

Every little helps. Cybercampaigning in the 2007 Irish General Election
Maria Laura Sudulich and Matthew Wall

In general, candidates’ perception of personal websites as a campaigning tool ranges lower than all other campaigning tools: personal flyers, campaign posters, office hours/clinics, etc. Same with how electors consult media to get political news: the Internet ranges way below newspapers, TV or radio; and, indeed, electors trust less the Internet than other media, though it is astonishingly high the rate of people that “do not know” whether they trust the Internet to get information on politics.

But things, have they changed? During the 2007 Irish election — the first one to use intensively ICTs for campaigning — some hypotheses were tested: candidates who engaged in cybercampaigning, got more votes; if control on campaign expenditure tightens, candidates with personalized websites should not receive a greater portion of votes; high levels of Internet penetration matter for the impact of cybercampaigning.

Evidence was found that personal websites provided more votes. Hypothesis on control for candidate expenses also proved right. Last, constituencies with above-media levels of Internet penetration show that personal websites have a higher impact (than compared with the aggregate population) and that in below-media consituencies personal website almost have no differences in the chance of getting votes.

Discussion

Q: In the Catalan case, it will be very hard for activists to democratize the party, as parties are oligarchic. Ana Sofía Cardenal: Not only members where eager to participate, but were also openly critical about how the party worked.

Q: If people find out that most online polls are fake, why are they still willing to participate in these polls? Why even still be a partisan? Monica Poletti & Victor Sampedro: not only will they not take the exit door, but use evidence to criticise the party from within, and try to change it. And, indeed, the more conservative parties’ members are more critical about the non-existence of democracy inside parties than progressive.

Rachel Gibson: Maybe it’s not exactly the website which matters, but the fact that candidates are more directly implied in the campaign, personally maintaining the website (e.g. their own blogs), etc.

Ana Sofía Cardenal: major parties are addressing with their websites neither the voters nor the partisans, but mainstream media.

Eva Anduiza: all this criticism, are they claiming more rights? a change in the structures? specific claims to be included in the political agenda? what? Monica Poletti & Victor Sampedro: most claims are to promote democratic procedures inside the party.

New and old strategies of political communication. How to build a 2.0 political movement
Jordi Segarra, Segarrateres

End of a model to do politics. Now, politics is personal, is individual, is targetable, is viral.

Individuals, thanks to user-friendly Internet, have become their own news reporters, and the market can segment at the individual-level targets.

Politics: From a monologue to a dialogue, to a conversation. And messages are no longer aimed to the group, but to the individual. And the individual has a conversation with the campaign. 35% of adult Internet users have a profile in a social networking site (SNS).

Targeting

Segmentation and targeting. Clear differences between who voted for Obama and McCain: Obama got clear majorities amongst youngsters, women, non-whites (african-americans, latinos, asians and others), lower-income classes, lower-educated (and higher- ones too) voters.

A major difference: 69% of first-time voters voted for Obama (vs. 30% for McCain) and two thirds decided long before the election that they’d be voting Obama.

Through technology, everything is targetable, and the tech-toolkit of Obama’s campaign was really wide.

Through targeting, all politics is viral. Let the campaign flow instead of trying to control it.

Video: Crush On Obama, 100% non-official.

Logobama’08: everyone could create their own Obama campaign logo based on a simple official logo. But the results, were unofficial merchandising that pervaded everything.

In general, Obama directly contacted more people (26%) than McCain, reaching an average of 8-point gap in contact rate.

Virality

Politics are likely to become viral, but maybe not in the short run. TV remains dominant… though no longer exclusive. But, 30% of people surfing the Internet are watching television at the same time.

Twitter surges past Digg, by Erick Schonfeld: will it kill Facebook?

His Choice ad.

Old Media Transformation

Rapid response campaign: using old media (TV) in new ways, creating ads in few hours as responses to other ads or to public debates.

The Path to Change

The center of the campaign is the candidate.

You can change the tactics, but not the strategy.

50 states campaign, aimed towards mobilization.

Don’t try to convince voters: involve people on the campaign. The key to victory was a grassroots campaign.

13 million e-mails on my.barackobama.com database, 2 million volunteers working on the field.

It’s the network, stupid!

Government vs. Campaigning

Is governing different from campaigning? The answer is The White House 2.0, with pages in Facebook and MySpace, profiles in Twitter and Flickr and Youtube, blogs in the website, etc.

Discussion

Q: How could Obama’s campaign be transposed in Europe? A: Negative campaigning and unofficial merchandising are very different to translate into Europe. The problem being that there are no emotions in politics, people (in Europe) do not put emotion into campaigns or messages.

Q: What will happen to “the list” (the 13 million people list on Obama’s database)? How will they keep engaged? A: It’s difficult to act in campaign-war-like times during government-times. Aiming for hope and change is much more difficult from the government than during campaigning — especially if you were in the opposition. In the government, people want more answers, real ones, than engagement. But the least you could do is not let the website die, to keep on contacting the voter, etc.

Q: Isn’t it a bottom-and-up approach instead of a bottom-up approach only? It is my guess that what disappeared was not the top of the pyramid, but the middle of the pyramid.

Q: Is it really true that there was more and new people voting, an increase in the turnout, or just that SNSs were used to squeeze the most of partisans? A: The results in fundraising might tell that it is not true that no new voters came and voted: partisans engaged in fundraising and did it from outside the boundaries of the “usual suspects”.

Q: How one can tell what technology will work or will be just hype? A: Every campaign, candidate, city, etc. are different. Putting all your eggs in one basket is simply a bad idea. All campaigns must begin with research and find your potential target — not the other way round. Numbers, figures and data. And research must be embedded in the campaign, iterative and being nurtured with the feedback of the campaign itself.

Eva Aduiza: In Spain, you tend to mobilize supporters, not swinging voters and even less opponents. Is it the same thing in the US? A: The problem with this approach is that the database is it a drawer. What is needed is datamining, knowing who’s on your database. And then, we can start working either on supporters or in swingers. But there’s a previous and much more important stage that is usually forgotten.

More Information

• Manuel Castells: Politics and Internet in Obama era, blog-post by Ismael Peña-López on a Manuel Castells seminar.

This lecture is part of Manuel Castells’ new book Communication Power.

Politics and Internet in Obama era
Manuel Castells

Internet Usage

Was what truly surprising and unpredictable was not that Democrats won the election — most likely to happen after the crisis, the wars and so — but that Obama won the primary elections. And the Internet was decisive. If Howard Dean leveraged the power of the Internet in the benefit of his campaign, in Obama’s, it was not only leveraged by determinant.

But it was not only the Internet, but also additional factors in the design of Obama’s campaing.

A first reason the Internet played such a role, was Internet usage, that has hugely increased compared to the previous elections four years before: 46% of adults used Internet or cellular phones to get political information, twice as much in Howard Dean’s times. And, indeed, there also were more Democrat voters using the Internet than Republican voters. And social networking sites (SNS) are just pervasive — even more than “standard” website usage — in general and, specifically, among youngsters. 40% of SNS users used SNSs to engage in political campaigning: social networking on the web is social networking with political connotations.

A huge discovery was that 58% of youngsters used the Internet for political mobilization, while only 20% of people over 65 did: the Internet help mobilize young voters, which normally have a lower voting ration than elder people.

Fundraising and web interaction

The campaign was centralized in MyBarackObama.com plus a myriad of sympathising websites. But fundraising was centralized: any event, any action, led towards raising funds that inevitably led towards the Internet and the central website. Obama refused to be mainly funded by federal lobbies, which enabled him to propose political measures that went against specific lobbies’ interests. And this financial independence was made possible by the total (micro)donations raised and collected through the Internet. On average, Obama got US$250 per donor, 62% of which were through the Internet.

But, besides money, a huge database was created with people contacting Obama. Profiles were created and, thus, mobilization could be made almost on a personal basis. And this database was way better than the one the Democratic Party had.

Contacting the profiled people required a constant accountability of what Obama was doing with the money. It was all based on interaction, not just sending information out.

The turnout of Iowa’s campaing was 90%, but the overall campaing’s turnout was 135%: the young people were mobilized in a proportion that had never been seen in previous elections in the US.

The convergence of very important people around Obama’s campaing made it possible to bring it to a higher level. Experts from the Web world and, specifically, the SNS world, helped to design a campaign perfectly fitted for a Web 2.0 environment, being the flagship the “Yes We Can” viral video.

Indeed, web campaigning was also used in offline campaigning: the level of detail in the supporters’ profile allowed to identify who was supporting Obama in the territory, who should be addressed to, who was willing to vote, to engage… or who was “in need” of a final push to join Obama. These people knew each other, met on the Internet, and self-organized.

This self-organization meant that the message was delivered not by the “candidate” or the “apparatus” but by “normal” people, by neighbours, that explained why were they voting Obama, on a personal basis.

Mobilization

Despite the fact that “most” people is connected to the Internet, it is also true that intensive Internet users (read online, interact online, are heavy SNSs users, etc.) are below 40. This meant mobilizing the youngsters.

Indeed, Obama used the campaign not only for campaigning, but to send out a social message. And this was a major difference in relationship with Hillary Clinton.

On the one hand, Obama showed a different attitude towards the Iraq war, being against it from the beginning.

On the other hand, Obama detached himself from the mainstream powers of Washington, detaching himself also from John Kerry’s campaign who would never made it clear, for instance, whether he was for or against the Iraq war. Obama addressed people that were outside the political system, or disenfranchised from the whole system.

Organizing strategy

Triggering the social movement, socializing the campaign, bringing it to the grassroots level was crucial. The values of campaigning were transformed.

Saul Alinsky, based in Chicago, created the modern way of organizing communities. Barack Obama entered political mobilization when joining in churches in Chicago that worked in the Alinsky-like way of mobilizing communities. And Obama organized his campaign this way too. He applied Alinsky techniques to mobilize voters… and increase the voting rate. And he adapted it for the Internet age.

The platform is the message

Obama himself was a message. If Hillary Clinton decided that “she was a woman”. In Obama, he was the message and words mattered. And words were “hope” and “change”. Not gender, not race.

“Hope” became a framework, a framework within another framework characterized by crisis or war. And in this framework, he would bring “change”.

Obama mastered communication. A first pint was to dismantle Hillary Clinton’s attacks (HillaryAttacks.com) on his person. But this was a minor issue.

But most attacks, Obama fought them by being himself. And he also responded by bringing the level of debate to higher grounds, to more “philosophical” levels, avoiding personal reasons or personal confrontation.

Simonetta Taboni develops the concept of ambivalence, on how people innovate without being trapped in their approaches: I want to change the world, but I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I will try, and I will experiment. And, in this sense, Obama is ambivalent. Why is it so important to be ambivalent? Because goals are clear, but they leave enough blank spaces that citizens, experts, politicians, can fill in and participate. The means are collectively constructed… but led by the leader. People are engaged, people are involved through constant interactivity to go through constraints.

Discussion

Ismael Peña-López: how narrow is the line that separates the theory of ambivalence from the theory of ignorance? What makes the difference between being ambivalent and simply incompetent (i.e. really does not know what to do)? Manuel Castells: the fundamental difference is that most political parties (e.g. Spain’s) have clear goals and clear means: to stay in power and do it at all costs. There’s no room in the political apparatus of the party for engagement or debate, less for collective construction. The major difference from ambivalent approaches is that parties write the full script. In ambivalence, something originating from outside the party is embedded in the discourse and even can transform the system. In an ambivalent approach, the Internet fuels the debate; in a non-ambivalent environment, the Internet is yet another bureaucratic tool. And the shift from non-ambivalent to ambivalent is almost impossible, and only likely to happen in a situation of total political crisis, where a deep change is needed (e.g. the case of Italy and Berlusconi that, ironically, mobilizes the voter against the established political parties).

Rachel K. Gibson: to what extent can Obama act like he did during the campaign now that he is the President? Will involvement still be possible? Manuel Castells: A simple observation is that the campaign still goes on, especially on the Internet. It is likely that engagement and mobilization will fade out, as it normally happens. The question is how much degree of change, how much demands will be put into practice before the system metabolises the inertia triggered during the election campaign. The secret will be how to keep this feeling of “revolution” or “change” alive for as long as possible.

Mike Jensen: Did Obama really transformed the system, or just a new campaign? Why cannot Obama’s model be extrapolated to Europe? Aren’t we seeing “politics 2.0″ in Europe? Manuel Castells: he did change the system, as he brought inside many new voters and from different strata. And these new people do feel that they can change the system, which, at its turn, inevitably changes the political landscape. There is a true opening up of the system while, at the same time, avoiding to enter in a “civil war” against the establishment, which he needs to “professionally operate” the country. About transporting Obama’s model to Europe: it’s true that there is an Obamization of politics, and that there are shy approaches towards Web 2.0, but they are mainly technological, not conceptual. Everything remains under the control of the party machines, including the leaders — especially because there are no presidentialist elections. Power must be taken from political parties. And this will only happen under a sever catastrophic crisis of politics and political parties. Will this happen in the next UK elections? Will the Conservative Party be able to do it? Not only to beat the Labour Party, but to transform the whole political system.

Eduard Aibar: what happened to television? Manuel Castells: television still is the most important way to get (political) news (though this is not true for young people). And Obama paid a lot of attention to television, especially in the last days of the campaign, when he got a lot of money left and little time to spend it. On the other hand, he got a lot of air coverage, in part because it reported profits for TVs to cover his campaign. But TV was information and would have never been able to raise a grassroots movement.

Jasmina Maric: Internet propelled Obama… or Obama propelled the Internet? Manuel Castells: The huge difference in Internet adoption from the previous election and Obama’s was crucial. He boosted it, but the terrain was prepared to.

More info

• A webcast of a similar lecture at the Oxford Internet Institute: Communication Power in the Network Society
• Understanding the Alinsky Method of “Community Organizing”, by Bob Dill
  ]]> http://ictlogy.net/20090526-manuel-castells-politics-and-internet-in-obama-era/feed/ 3 http://ictlogy.net/20090522-perspectives-of-the-future-and-prospectives-about-the-role-of-the-net-in-educational-innovation/ http://ictlogy.net/20090522-perspectives-of-the-future-and-prospectives-about-the-role-of-the-net-in-educational-innovation/#comments Fri, 22 May 2009 10:00:22 +0000 Ismael Peña-López http://ictlogy.net/?p=2222 On Friday May 15th, 2009, I took part in a round table about Educational Innovation in the framework of the ForumRed’09, a meeting about education, the Net and the collective web organized by the School of Communication, University of Seville (Spain).

  The round table was cleverly chaired by Juan José Calderón and participated by Julen Iturbe, Tíscar Lara and I.

  After a first exposition from each of the participants about the topic of the title, Juan José Calderón would drop his questions on the table and then they’d be more or less answered or commented by some or all of us. What follows are the notes I took during the event, unedited, uncut, as raw as they came. They are nor complete or comprehensive, so important data might be missing. My apologies to the other speakers for not make justice to their insights here — fortunately, the event was taped and will hopefully be soon released online.

  Tíscar Lara

  Should we be talking about teaching innovation or about student/learning innovation? Isn’t it the student the one that is innovating? Where are people socializing one to each other? Where is learning innovation happening? What’s the role of expanded education? Of informal learning? How do we integrate these phenomena?

  Isn’t there a crisis in the segregation of roles between teachers and students? How do teachers learn? Aren’t teachers also learners, and learners that are learning on the Net?

  Ismael Peña-López

  We’ve been living in a world based on transaction costs: enterprises (the transaction costs of production and distribution), political parties (the transaction costs of direct democracy), schools and universities (the transaction costs of gathering all knowledge)… The Internet cuts down to almost zero most costs of transaction related to knowledge management. And, hence, the need of intermediaries: end of some industries? end of political parties? end of universities?

  A new role for knowledge workers: to monitor knowledge, to hub it towards third parties, to enable these third parties and empower them in knowledge management terms.

  Julen Iturbe

  We’re living a shift from a lab that acts as a simulator for entrepreneurs towards real engagement in the economy and real entrepreneurship. The student is empowered with a more active role enabled by this crisis of intermediation and the fall of transaction costs.

  • A change in the idea of student: responsible of their own learning processes. There are no handbooks, no syllabuses, etc.. It is the student who defines the syllabus and seeks their own learning resources.
  • The teacher is no more a teacher but a tutor, and normally an entrepreneur themselves.
  • The classroom has no more sense in this model, especially as a physical concept that increasingly implies constraints (of time and space). Students can design physical spaces themselves according to their own needs.
  • What’s the sense of time? How do we measure the amount of hours required for a specific “subject”? How do we fit all the hours spent — offline and online — working on a project/subject?

  No maps for these territories?

  Juan José Calderón: there are new territories for which we have no maps [a statement which reminds me of William Gibson's No maps for these territories]. What should we do? Are we in a crisis?

  Julen Iturbe: there are (new) generations that feel comfortable enough without maps. That even feel uneasy when the whole path is paved and would rather have more freedom to define their own ways.

  Crisis? There’s increasing evidence that students know more than teachers or experts at large.

  Ismael Peña-López: I see three “evolution” patterns (simplified):

  • Darwin: species change as better phenotypes survive and worse phenotypes extinct
  • Lamarck: species change by adapting themselves to the environment
  • Meteorite: a meteorite directly kills species by overturning the landscape and some species survive and reign

  We have to assume that a meteorite will fall on some “species” (e.g. paper journals, the distribution of CDs). And that some other “species” might just die out and leave no trace (one or two generations of “digital immigrants”). But we have to work the Lamarckian path so to minimize casualties: learn to learn, learn how to map territories or live in unmapped ones, teach competences that enable skills acquisition, bridge old an new… No revolution but evolution.

  Tíscar Lara: think with a mobile phone logic: traditionally, switches have one and only one purpose (turn on the radio, switch on the lights, connect the washing machine). But mobile phones have keys with several purposes or functions. And trying to teach each and every function of a single key is useless. We have to teach the rationale behind the multifunction switch. There is no need to know the whole map of features, but learn how to take decisions with incomplete information, and learning in the process.

  Put the focus on the purpose, and then discover the tools that can help me in achieving this purpose. And this is risky, and we are risk-averse, reluctant to change. But we have to learn to live with risk and failure. And we have to acknowledge that we are living in critical times, which will help in surviving this crisis.

  Collaborative networking

  Juan José Calderón: Are we ready for collaborative networking? Can we produce open content?

  Julen Iturbe: content will increasingly be open, and this is an unstoppable trend. We should, nevertheless, put the stress on the difference between information and knowledge. In social networking sites the focus is in the “social”, and it is not about content, but networked people. And we learn not through content, but through people: content (publications and so) are but means to identify and reach people.

  A problem with the actual system of acknowledgement of diffusion of science is that it is not related with the reality. The practitioner and the scholar do not share the same agoras where to exchange knowledge, and open publications seem to be bridging this chasm.

  Ismael Peña-López: we are prepared to collaborate and teamwork and is has historically been this way. The problem is that we are assigning two different goals (diffusion and assessment) to the same tool: journals/papers/essays.

  Open content has made diffusion quick and free, and creates tensions with the other goal: assessment. We should focus on assessment methodologies, which are dragging collaborative work as we do not know how to assess it (or are not able to).

  Tíscar Lara: we have forgotten how to collaborate and teamwork. And we have to teach again how to, teach how to get over learning routines, already known and comfortable to be carried on.

  On the other hand, scholarly journals have played havoc on knowledge diffusion in two ways: On the one hand, they are more focused towards assessment/accreditation than to diffusion. On the other hand, it does not catch knowledge that is produced outside of the system.

  Indeed, we should acknowledge all the effort to produce and publish/diffuse knowledge made outside of the traditional/mainstream means, and use it to give credit.

  Next steps?

  Juan José Calderón: how to go on? next step? what is going to happen?

  Julen Iturbe: use the judo philosophy: benefit from the energy and novelty that the student is bringing in, use the “difference” to approach the “different” (the new practices of the younger students).

  Ismael Peña-López: we should try not to do the same things in different ways, but novelties should come with no disruptions. An option could also be radically innovative changes but in controlled and piloted projects, in just part of the subject, in just part of the traditional activities, in parallel lines (the revolution within).

  Two key aspects for this approach to succeed:

  • the sandbox: a place where to experiment without blowing up everything if it fails
  • the wildcard: a person, or a team, whose only purpose is to be available to help others’ innovation, with relevant information on state of the art instructional technology and methodologies, being able to set up a “sandbox” in hours/days, etc.

  Tíscar Lara: promote “full-contact”, because of the idea of contact, of hands-on. Try to bring back emotions and personal interests into the classroom. Try to avoid knowing our students once they’re given their marks… way too late for corrections. Build spaces where to just meet, as persons.

  And the web 2.0 (blogs, social networking sites, etc.) do provide valuable tools to make this contact happen, to build affective links and emotional learning. And, by this, break the artificial rivalry between teachers and students, and amongst students and colleagues themselves.

  See also:

  Julen Iturbe: Innovación Educativa = Bronca.

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