ICTlogy

Keynote Speech: Charles Leadbeater
We Think

The Ideas Commons.

Within the next years, lots of people coming from developing countries will be online: what does this mean? The place you come from matters, as it’ll shape the Internet.

Some organizations are built for the distribution of labour, but if creative work is not that easy to manage, what’s the role of organizations? Collaborative, distributed work and ways to perform it will reshape the world.

Recognition: what do people want…

Changes in the way we consume. Lots of ideas will come from the consumers, not the producers. New participative ethics in consumption, participative consumption… quite complicated to manage. The Apple store is not a shop, is a cathedral.

New models of leadership and ownership, with no more centralized, pyramidal models of leadership, and models of ownership not centered in retaining but in opening, sharing, let away.

New models of work, innovation, consumption.

Don’t look at politics but at creativity and creation engaged in political issues.

There’s a link between development and democracy: is the web bringing more deveploment through higher democracy?

Collaborative, participative media is spreading capabilities.

The freedom of creative work, of being creative.

All this pumps up creation as one of the main important things that are happening and are going to happen in the nearest future.

Comments & Debate

What are the conditions that make smart mobs really smart… and not populist or just stupid/useless?

Greg Hale
Pumping up the fun on Web 2.0: Can psychology give a helping hand?

“They” will use user generated content
What is user generated content — and who are “they”

Problem on doing research on films: everyone’s an expert on films.

Work with schemas, structure and cognitive structures.

Schema cluster: structural, behavioral, entities, actions.

Schema as a psychological regularity. Familiar schemas help people share experiences, identify patterns and situations, and thus congregate around user generated content.

Ismael Peña-López
The personal research portal: web 2.0 driven individual commitment with research diffusion

There is unchallenged evidence that both researchers and research interests in developing countries are underrepresented in mainstream academic publishing systems. Reasons are many but publishing costs, research infrastructure financing and the vicious circle of researcher invisibility are among the most mentioned. Efforts have been made to mitigate this situation, being open access to scholarly literature – open access journals, self-archiving in institutional repositories – an increasingly common and successful approach.

It is our opinion that focus has been put on institutional initiatives, but the concept and tools around the web 2.0 seem to bring clear opportunities so that researchers, acting as individuals, can also contribute, to build a broader personal presence on the Internet and a better diffusion for their work, interests and publications.

By using a mesh of social software applications, we here propose the concept of the Personal Research Portal as a means to create a digital identity for the researcher – tied to his digital public notebook and personal repository – and a virtual network of colleagues working in the same field. Complementary to formal publishing or taking part in congresses, the Personal Research Portal would be a knowledge management system that would enhance reading, storing and creating at both the private and public levels, helping to bridge the academic digital divide.

• Dowload presentation
• Dowload article
• video + slides streaming recorded by the University of Lancaster
• some other vide + slides recordings

Elisabetta Cigognini, Jose Mangione, Chiara Pettenati
Favouring a critical, creative and ethical use of the network resources through Web 2.0 applications

How can Web 2.0 strategies provide significant support towards a better personal knowledge management?

Context: connectivism (is not the content, is the pipe that matters), lifelong learning, web 2.0, empowerment through “individual” knowledge.

Why Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)?

• Knowledge is a key asset
• PKM is focused on helping an individual to better learn/know/work
• The overall goal is to enable individuals to operate better in social networks

PMK Skills

• Create
• Organize
• Share

Higher order abilities basic for a personal growth oriented to a lifelong-knowing approach: criticism, ethics, creativity

To find what we need we rely on taxonomies […], computer-assisted ways of localing what’s relevant [and] recommendations made by people we trust, David Weinberger

Ethic-quette: adoption of a code that govern the expectations of social behaviour within the network society.

Creativity is a mental attitude which needs to be nurtured: Serendipity 2.0.

Teemu Arina: Serendipity 2.0: missing third places of learning.

• Serendipic learning
• homo contextus
• parasitic learning.

Awareness 2.0: traces so an individual can place himself in the knowledge pipe.

David Cummings
Personalised Learning, Foucault and the Web 2.0 Revolution

Shift to student centered learning.

Learning management systems still have the instructor at its center, with the student never really interacting with the teacher nor other students. LMSs lock things out: if you’re not logged, you cannot access. Not meant for community teaching. You can’t have spontaneity, it’s a frozen space.

What do we want for our students? To be creative, flexible, student generated, collaborative, engaged, etc.

Digital identity mapping.

What about the Personal Learning Environment?

• Instant messaging vs. chat
• Collaboration not directed learning
• Online communities that look like real communities
• Students’ ability to create peer groups from other institutions
• Ability to bring information in from the outside world
• Reflective not just demonstrable
• Interpretive rather than repetitive

Students supporting students through wikis, Elgg…

Wilson, S. (2005). “Future VLE – The Visual Vision”

Jane Secker & Gwyneth Price
Libraries, distance learners and social software: providing social spaces to support learning”

The Lassie Project: libraries and social software in education (blog). Trying to find out what the “participatory library” could be about.

Some librarians view social software as a way to enhance services, to innovate and engage library users. Some concepts cause unease in the library community e.g. tagging vs. metadata.

Real examples from libraries:

• User comments & reviews in the catalogue
• Libraries using social networking sites: MySpace and Facebook library accounts; Groups for libraries and librarians; useful for professional networking e.g. Ning and
• LinkedIn
• Library success
• Penn Tags
• Libraries using blogs

Social software presents information literacy issues: new tools, new skills needed

Libraries as social spaces: not work, not home, but a third place.

PREEL Project: developments in information literacy, developments in e-resources and e-learning.

Paz Peña Ochoa
Education for Public Individuals: the possibilities of web 2.0

Web 2.0 as a relationship device.
Has public education something to do with the development of individuals? Is education a pubolic matter?

Hanna Arendt: education as a space into which action takes place, people legitimate themselves, appear in front of others

Learning to be implies the application of knowledge in the development of skills to achieve a role into the society. Under this train of though, Web 2.0 apps. seem to perfectly fit into this purpose, as they are social networking tools per excellence. But can really Web 2.0 help the public development of individuals?

Folksonomies describe my relationship with the world through me tagging same “objects” that other people, thus generating a consensus.

Comments and debate

• David Cummings states that Learning Management Systems where created to manage the massification of education. Hence, the problem is not that shifting to a Personal Learning Environment puts stress in the University system, but in the social arena: how are we going to cope with this raising need for personalization, increasing costs of it, and the highest amount of students (increasing too, ’cause they learn along their lives)?
• It’s true that we have to engage students, make processes flexible, appealing; and it’s true that “power” has not to be retained at all costs, and that power retention strategies have blocked other ways of doing things. But, if we forget about “power retention strategies” it might well be legitimate to try and fix your educative goals and don’t let them be a matter of debate, while the means can. So, is the wisdom of crowds that wise? What if I think this is the best book even if zillions of students tagged as better another one (stress to the librarian)? What if I can debate how to learn things but not give up on you learning integers?

Keynote Speech: Scott Lash
New Media and Knowledge Ontologies

We should think of a broader scope of Web 2.0 beyond just media but into knowledge. Globalization is quite a complex thing, being web 2.0 both a consequence and a cause.

Ontologically being digital. What is the new media ontology?

Heidegger, revisiting Aristotle, talks about the cost of technology: formal cost, material, efficient cost, final cost. So, how should we handle new digital media (e.g. Facebook)?

Technology for Heidegger: an instrument, for selfish uses; but also technique can open objects, and people, reveal new layers of meaning.

Kittler: wants to empty out the object, empty out the form.

Lots of new media objects can be explained through the Gestalt paradigm, as open, productive objects.

Francisco Varela: closed networks. You’ve got your network in your pocket, i.e. in your mobile phone, your digital agenda, etc.

Web 2.0: decreases production, increases representation

Epistemology: you cannot know the things by themselves, but through their categories, their qualities; those categories are somehow subjective, inside the observer. Phenomenology, on the contrary, is about knowing the thing by itself, presuming a general, external, objective categorization.

The Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0 is taking place at the University of York, organized by the Social Informatics Research Unit. Here come my notes.

Keynote Speech: Bernie Hogan
Capturing Online Social Networks: Techniques, Insights and Challenges

Network Analysis

Importance of network analysis. How to tell who’s the most connected, who’s connected to who and how

• Degree: number of links
• Betweenness: shortest paths
• PageRank: links to high degree
• Positions: blockmodelling

Networks can be made up of subgroups/subnetworks, even multiple spare networks somehow connected one to each other by a common node that just bridges them.

Personal Networks

• Comparative
• For sampling large networks
• Often regression-based
• Visualizations of networks rarely show person

Network Analysis Tools

• Scraping: Python, Perl, PHP, Java (JUNG)
• Cleaning: same as before + databases
• Analyzing: UClnet, Pajek, JUNG, Egotistics
• Visualizing: NetDraw, Pajek, Guess
• http://www.insna.org

Social Bookmarking

Social news: people will filter news for each other. Slashdot, reddit, Digg. Based on collaborative work/research and ways of voting the news/user.

Distribution of stories made popular in Digg: power curve, but really steep.

Limits of Social Networks

• What’s a friend?
• Multiplexity
• Time
• Convenience
• Entity resolution

Comments from the audience

• This social networks are kind of a popularity contest
• Where’s the threshold that separates being in the network and being outside of it (in terms of traffic, contributions, etc.)? Ain’t we, in some way, acknowledging… trashholding and not real participation in the network?

More Info

• Hogan, B. (2007) Using Information Networks to Study Social Behavior. In IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin. 30(2). Pp.6-14
• Hogan, B. (forthcoming) Analyzing Social Networks Via the Internet. In Fielding, N., Lee, R. and Blank, G. Sage Handbook of Online Research Methods
• Egotistic, via Knowbie’s Weblog, by Maria Chiara Pettenati