jill/txt

In lots of different departments at the University of Bergen there are students writing bachelors and masters theses about social media and digital culture - and they’re often quite lonely, not aware of each other, and often don’t have much support from their professors, who may not be very interested in digital culture. I’d love to get these students together!

Yesterday, after the book presentation, I met two of these studetns. Kristine Ludvigsen is studying pedagogy and finishing her Master’s degree on learning in Second Life. She had lots of questions about how to think about ethics in an online environment - she had permission from all her informants, but as the interviews had taken place in Second Life, sometimes other people had turned up in the middle of an interview - or someone simply walked past in the background. Her final paper is going to be a video paper, so she was wondering whether she could use material in the video paper despite there being someone in the background of the image who had’t formally given permission? I think it depends on the situation - but it does show the trickiness of online work. Kristine has already looked at the AoIR’s ethics guidelines: I think she’d find Charles Ess’s new book Digital Media Ethics useful - I only just saw it this morning and will certainly buy a copy. Charles Ess has worked on ethics on the internet for years.

I also met Carl Christian Grøndahl, who left a comment here the other day and just finished his master’s degree at the Department of Administration and Organization Theory. He’s put the thesis online - it’s titled Om nye mediers betydning for politisk aktivitet og deltagelse - en teoretisk drøfting og et casestudium. I haven’t read it yet but it’s certainly about an interesting topic.

It’s great that there are more and more students writing about the web and about social media - and at such diverse departments too. I’m thinking it’d be great to gather all these masters students together - both Kristine and Carl Christian mentioned that not many people in their departments are really very interested in social media and they missed having more people working on it around them. I’m sure our students doing their masters’ in Digital Culture would also benefit from seeing how people in other fields are approaching digital culture and social media. My plan is simply to have people meet up for an informal lunch at one of the campus cafeterias - say once a month - and have a chance to exchange ideas, brainstorm problems and so on. We could do more formal feedback groups if there were interest in it.

I’m planning on contacting the professors in various departments to ask them to let me know about social media/web/digital culture students - but if you are or know of a University of Bergen student working on these areas, leave a comment here or send me an email (jill.walker.rettberg@uib.no) so I can get in touch with them!

I’m presenting my book Blogging at our university bookshop, Studia, today at 2:15 pm. If you’re in town you’re very welcome to come! I’m going to talk for 25 minutes and Studia’s serving snacks of some kind, so I think it’ll be good. (I always appreciate snacks.) Oh, it’ll be in Norwegian.

Today is Ada Lovelace day, and along with thousands of others, I’ve pledged to write about a woman in technology who has inspired me. I was going to write about Grace Hopper, who was the lead developer of COBOL, the first “human readable” programming language, but thinking about it on my way to work this morning, it’s obvious that the woman in technology who has inspired me the most is my mother.

My mother wasn’t allowed to study physics at school - girls did home economics and dressmaking instead. Mum studied mathematics and biology, got a PhD in genetics and taught anatomy when I was very young (I vaguely remember the smell of formalin from the dissections) but when I was in high school, she decided enough was enough and physics was what she really wanted to do. So she took high school physics in the evenings, and then went to engineering college in her forties. After she got her engineering degree, she started on a Master’s degree in physics (acoustics, to be exact) and ended up working as an engineer in the oil industry.

Mum showed me that you can choose your life at any point. If you’re not happy with your career at forty, you can switch - even if it means going back to do high school physics. There’s an amazing freedom in knowing that at such a visceral level, having seen my own mother do it.

She gave me a love of gadgets and of science for its own sake. I still remember when she bought her first “engineering pencil” and how my sister and I shared in the pleasures of its precision. Or when she was learning to build simple circuit boards and brought materials home to make sure that my sister and I also learnt to build them. Then there was the year she gave us a toy race track complete with loop-the-loops for Christmas despite our being in our early teens - she wanted one to play with herself I think, though her argument was that she was horrified that we’d missed out on the simple physical principles of velocity and how a car can go upside down if it’s going fast enough.

And of course throughout my teens I saw my mother studying - working hard at her desk with her books, engineering pencil and her graph paper. She didn’t have a room of her own - though she did banish the television to the basement so her corner of the living room was a little less noisy.

Now Mum makes sure my kids have age-appropriate books about evolution, frequent trips to the science museum, and kits for building robots and conducting science experiments. She does a fabulous job. And you know how research has found that most women mathematicians have fathers or close male family members who are mathematicians? (I’ve read research on this but right now I can only find an anecdote.) And how women need to see female role models more than men need to see male role models?

Having a mother who loves technology is a wonderful basis for loving technology yourself.

I thought knitting was an example of a visual kind of social media topic - knitting blogs generally have photos in every single post - and so knitters wouldn’t bother with text-and-link-centric Twitter. I was wrong.

I’ve joined numerous Facebook groups to protest against or campaign for causes, and I’ve noticed the mainstream media using the number of people who’ve joined such groups as evidence of popular pressure on the powers that be - whether it’s to preserve the local maternity ward, to fight silly copy-protection of books that are out of copyright, or to pressure the government into updating the customs limit from 1976.

Obviously people find it easier to join a Facebook group to make a political point than to march the streets. Perhaps it’s actually more effective, too. Right now, it’s entirely possible that you get more press, and thus more national notice for a Facebook group with 2000 members than a demonstration of 500 people. And it’s a lot easier to get 2000 people to join a Facebook group than to get 500 people to show up at a particular time and place with banners.

Actually, the traditional kind of demonstrations - the first of May demonstration for all matters of importance to workers and social-democrats, and the eighth of March demonstration for all matters of importance to women - have been in stark decline for decades. The only physical demonstrations that have been successful in Norway in recent years are about very specific issues: the war in Iraq, for instance, or the attacks on Gaza, which is what the people in the photo above are protesting.

Perhaps politics no longer has many of those big issues that drew crowds in days of yore to fight for the womens’ vote, against segregation in the US, for the eight-hour-day and workers’ rights. Perhaps today’s politics, at least in Norway, largely exists as many small issues. Which can’t really be dealt with in a monolithical manner by marching the streets with banners.

Rather than poo-pooing the presumed laziness of all those Facebook users who join groups to fight for their causes, perhaps we should look at this as a perfectly valid and effective way of being politically active in today’s world.

I’d love to see a study of this. There are lots of research questions you could work with to understand Facebook politics more clearly. What are the relationships between Facebook campaigns and the mainstream media? Or, what is the history of how regular people protest or campaign for issues? The workers’ and womens’ movements of the late 19th and early 20th century may be the most familiar, but no doubt there are many others. What of earlier protests? Were they impossible because of a feudal society? Obviously more contemporary “smart mobs” protests and campaigns would be relevant. A case study of one or more actual campaigns would be fascinating - who started the group? Was it connected to other online or offline campaigns? To political organisations? How did the group grow? How was it picked up by the mainstream media? Did that feed back into the social media discussions? How did politicians and bureaucrats respond? Did they directly mention the campaign on Facebook or other social media?

If you know of work on this already or if you write something about, let me know!

I wrote a few weeks ago about Store norske leksikon (SNL), the well-established Norwegian paper encyclopedia that’s gone digital with a mixture of Wikipedia-style user-generated content and experts for different topics who put the “quality assured” stamp on certain, specially-vetted articles. Now it’s still early days and presumably the system’s not quite, well, quality assured yet, but there are some embarrassing mistakes at this point. Such as this: a “quality assured” entry on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning that gets the acronym wrong. It’s collaboration, not communication, as UiB researcher Frode Guribye pointed out on Twitter a few days ago.

And yes, I clicked the comment button, so presumably the expert in question has received a note about it.

But seriously, with this many errors, SNL should definitely put the beta stamp on the whole site, as Eirik Newth suggested a while ago. It really damages their long-term credibility when we see all these mistakes - and personally I find the ads hard to swallow for a site that’s supposed to be serious public information. Makes me realise how I love that the Wikipedia has no ads. And the discussion pages where you can see other peoples’ comments in Wikipedia - awesome! As it is, someone coming across that “quality assured” page would have no idea that it’s wrong, and that several people have pointed that out.

Greenpeace’s ship the Rainbow Warrior 2 was in Bergen yesterday, and we went on down to have a look. The very friendly crew showed groups around the ship, explaining how the navigation system worked, how they’d had sails put on the ship (it can go faster by sail than using the motor when the winds are good) and how they’re going to be using a submergeable video camera to document the deep sea coral reefs outside of Bergen - both those that are intact and those that have been destroyed by bottom-trawling fishermen.

When I googled “rainbow warrior bergen” to find out when the tours were held I came across the captain of the ship’s blog, Mike Mate. Apparently they’ve had the internet onboard for a few months now. One of the deck hands said that people were more social before they got the internet - now more time is spent hanging out in their cabins. But it’s pretty cool that they’re blogging.

The top photo shows how they store various banners for various kinds of campaigns, and the two below show a sign they’re going to use in their coral reef campaign and the wall by the stairs down to the hold, covered with stickers.

It’s not that Demi Moore’s my favourite actress - but since I was fourteen or fifteen, she’s been one of those Hollywood icons that that in sum have defined beautiful for me. I don’t read gossip magazines except in waiting rooms or waiting in line to pay for my groceries. I needed to google Ashton Kutcher to remember that he’s Demi Moore’s husband. But reading Tama Leaver’s recent post about celebrities on Twitter, I had a look at Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter stream and noticed that his wife uploaded her first video to Qik yesterday.

So of course I clicked the link. And found myself gobsmacked at how someone so incredibly beautiful as Demi Moore, who has been one of the inaccessibles for my whole life, can be doing the YouTube/Twitter/Facebook thing just the same as the rest of us. Why does this affect me so? Obviously Demi Moore isn’t suddenly my best friend. I still can’t really reach her, touch her or connect with her in any meaningful way, or at least not in any reciprocal manner. But suddenly Demi Moore’s status changed for me. She’s no longer an almost fictional icon, distant way that only Hollywood stars can be. No: now she’s fictional, present, theoretically accessible in exactly the same way as we all can be on the internet.

It must feel rather strangely empowering for a Hollywood star to be in full charge of his or her own contact with fans as well. You can post that video instantly if you like. No need for an agent or interviews with a womens’ magazine or for photographers to traipse around your house doing the staged exclusive. As Tama notes, Stephen Fry (another Twitter celebrity) said the same thing in a recent interview, pointing out that this is yet another nail in the coffin of traditional mass media: “And the press are already struggling enough - God knows they’ve already lost their grip on news to some extent. If they lose their grip on comment and gossip and being a free PR machine as well, they’re really in trouble.”

I guess I got lazy about egosurfing, because I only just noticed that my book has two reviews on Amazon, and both are horrible. My average “grade” is 2 1/2 stars, and the review currently at the top of the page starts with the inauspicious words “This is an incredibly miserable book”. God, I wouldn’t buy my book based on that. But heck, you know what, I don’t think the book is that “miserable”. I actually think it’s pretty damn good.

I actually wondered whether “Edwin C.” had something personal against me. Perhaps he’s just, as he writes, “really upset to have wasted my money on this trash” that he thinks may have been “written by a college student”, full of “superficial dribble filled with lame cliches and suffocating amount of block quotes”. “Edwin C.” himself is a college student, according to his profile. Maybe he was assigned the book and didn’t like having to read it?

Ah well. I don’t know about the clichés, but I like block quotes myself - I love actually getting to see the stuff itself, and I love it when authors give me lots of examples and show connections between them and to theory rather than just theorising in abstract. People like different things.

I think I’ll take the other review as a compliment, despite it’s less-than-euphoric three stars: “Expected more. Not bad. But there is more to study about blogging. I should write it. In fact, I will.” Click through to the reviewer’s profile and you’ll see he has lots of really interesting books in there - google him and it’s Michael Hemmingson, “Michael Hemmingson is a novelist, short story writer, literary critic, cultural anthropologist, qualitative researcher, playwright, and screenwriter who has been called “Raymond Carver on acid” by literary guru Larry McCaffery and “a disciple of a quick and dirty literature” by the American Book Review.[1]” Even three stars by someone like that is pretty awesome - and I’d love to read a semi-fictionalised, autoethnographic criticism of blogging. I hope he does write about blogging.

I do agree with “Edwin C.” on one thing, though: “just use the “Click to Look Inside” feature on Amazon and check out the content and style and judge for yourself.”

I’m going to make sure I write more reviews of scholarly books I’ve found useful. Just so that Amazon.com isn’t full of reviews by the people who had to read a book for class and hated it.

And you know, if you’ve read my book and liked it, I’d love a review on Amazon.com or elsewhere. Even if you hated it, I do appreciate feedback.

Amnesty Norway is campaigning for activists who’ve been imprisoned and tortured for what they’ve written on the internet. I’m all for their campaign, but as a scholar of social media I’m particularly impressed with how well Amnesty is working to encourage supporters to use social media in the campaign.

They have a website, of course, and have assigned the campaign a specific day - today. Then there’s a blog post listing twelve ways we can help, from sending everyone you know an email (they suggest its wording), through posting a note to Twitter or your Facebook profile (”support persecuted net activists: ytringsfrihet.amnesty.no”), using google.cn for a day and finding out what it won’t show you, comment other peoples’ blog posts about freedom of speech, go to the central square of one of Norway’s biggest cities and join in the appeals, write down what freedom of speech means to you on a piece of paper, take a photo of yourself holding the paper and mail it to them and they’ll blog it, say nothing for a whole day, ask your employer to add the banner to their website for the day, read their guide with more ideas, leave a comment to the blog post with more ideas. This is great for people who want to do something and aren’t quite sure what!

So far there don’t seem to be too many blog posts about the campaign, despite all this great work from Amnesty. I’m going to be searching them out though, and trying to leave comments. So might you.

So many new scholarly articles out there on blogging, narratives online and social media. In the next week or so I’m planning to read the following:

• Lindemann, Kurt.
  Live(s) Online: Narrative Performance, Presence, and Community in LiveJournal.com. Text and Performance Quarterly, Volume 25, Number 4, October 2005 , pp. 354-372(19)
• Scheidt, Lois. Diary Weblogs as Genre Her qualifying paper for her PhD.
• van Dijck, Jose. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Standford University Press, 2007.
• Halavais, Alex. Search Engine Society Polity Press, 2008.
• boyd, danah. Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Contexts (PDF)

I’ll report back when I’ve read them! Oh, and please, if you have suggestions as to good stuff I should read, let me know!

Michael Wesch is speaking in Bergen a week from today at Scandic Hotel here in Bergen - at the It’s Learning conference which costs 4000 kr. Do you think they’d notice if I just sort of snuck in and pretended I’d forgotten my name tag?

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Michael Wesch, he’s an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State who does digital ethnography, but the cool thing about him is how he makes these YouTube videos that get the point about social media and web 2.0 across in such a beautiful way - talk about merging form and content. See, here’s his most famous one (and yes, I’ve raved about it before):

Or you might like this video of a talk he gave about YouTube - with a lot of video in it.

So, twitter’s advanced search lets you do things like, oh, see all tweets in a 15 mile radius of Bergen, for instance. And if you do that, you might see a tweet from junebre who turns out to be June Breivik, the project manager for digital schools in our area. And who has a blog, with many interesting posts (the video in this one had me roaring with laughter), among others one about Del og bruk, a Ning network that in the course of a few weeks has gathered nearly 500 Norwegian teachers who use the social web in their classrooms. I love web serendipity - and it looks as though Twitter can aid it.

Did you see the US Government have posted an “Interactive Travel Map” of Hillary Clinton’s travel? It’s nothing like as pretty as the personal reports Dopplr generates for you if you tell it about all your travel - here’s Clinton’s travel map next to the the report Dopplr made for Barack Obama’s 2008 travels.

I’ve been using Dopplr sort of half-heartedly for a while, entering most of my trips and carefully not making my profile public because I’m a little paranoid about the entire world knowing exactly where I am at any given time. Did you read that article in Wired about location tracking websites and privacy? The guy saw a woman taking a photo on her (GPS-enabled) iPhone in the park, went home, searched Flickr photos by location, found the photo, looked at the rest of her photos, and through the GPS location stamped on her photos of “home” figured out exactly where she lived. Mind you, I was talking with NRKbeta’s Øyvind Solstad last week - he loves these kind of services, and pointed out that a simpler way to find out where the woman lived would have been to simply follow her home. You don’t necessarily need technology to be creepy.

But my Dopplr profile is still private and I only let friends see it. And on Dopplr I only have 21 friends, which obviously limits its functionality - a main point of it is to be able to see which people you know who are in the same city as you when you’re travelling.

And then I saw my annual report for 2008. Oh, how I love it! It’s not entirely accurate - it thought I lived in Bergen, New Jersey (5734 km from Bergen to Barcelona?) and there’s 20 days in Chicago last July that I guess I hadn’t entered into Dopplr, so they’re not there - but it’s pretty awesome anyway. The minute I saw it I printed it out and hung it up on my office wall.

Years ago I was out on the balcony at a party and noticed a girl fiddling with a GPS, setting her coordinates. She told me that most people didn’t get why she liked to do that. But her grandmother did: “Oh, I see, love,” the grandmother had said, “it’s like a diary!” And that’s exactly how this girl (whose name I can’t remember) used her GPS - as another way of documenting her life, of keeping memories.

With the annual reports, Dopplr turns my raw data into a visual diary, and it does it beautifully. It lets me see connections and trends that I hadn’t even thought about before - I hadn’t realised I was away from home for 97 days last year, for instance. That’s a lot!

There are lots of other kinds of data-collecting sites that visualise your data in different ways. I thought Dailybooth and Dailymugshot were pretty weird when I first saw them - social network sites built around taking your own photo every day? But Dailybooth generates YouTube videos from the photos, even using the same music as Noah takes a photo of himself every day for six years, which I think was the first of this kind of video to hit YouTube fame. Dailymugshot.com generates animations that are pretty similar. I love Flickr’s calendar view in the archives, where you see a photo for every day of the month (if you uploaded every day). And I’ve already written about the baby sleep visualisation at Trixietracker.

I recorded a short video lecture on using blogs in teaching yesterday, for an hybrid online/f2f course in e-learning for teachers of social work in higher education being developed by Høgskolen i Bergen, along the lines of their Virclass.net. When the video’s ready, I’ll be able to post it here as well as give you guys a link to the actual learning module, which will be freely available online.

They also asked me for some links to good e-learning blogs. And I discovered that I really don’t read many dedicated e-learning blogs, although many of the blogs I read include posts about teaching and learning - as my own blog does. So I asked my Twitter-friends (yes, I’ve been twittering more after Jon Hoem and Thomas Brevik berated me for not using the social communication of 2009…). Here are a few of the blogs I’ll be adding to my RSS reader:

• Steve Wheeler: Learning with ‘e’s. Steve Wheeler is a senior lecturer in education and information technology at the University of Plymouth - he writes about his research, about stuff he does with students, and more, and in a humorous style.
• Cathy Moore’s blog Making Change came recommended for those interested in e-learning in the corporate world, and there are some interesting recent posts - now I kind of want one of those bird-scanning things!
• I really like the look of Kim Cofino’s blog Always Learning. She calls it “a place to reflect on my teaching and learning as the 21st Century Literacy Specialist at the International School Bangkok in Thailand.” Recent posts are characterised by how generously she shares interesting techniques, videos and ideas she’s found, and throughout, she explains how to do what she does. Definitely going in the feed reader.
• Jorunn also recommends Steven Downes (despite the odd blog format) - I’m not sure I can get past the format, but will try and have a look.

And then finally there’s the Edublog Awards, with a selection of the best blogs about education and learning in a number of different categories over the past several years.

But I think maybe the find I’ll use the most is this Flickr group of photos with quotations about learning - CC licenced and ready-to-go for that kind of presentation I always want to make (but that often ends up less perfect in the daily grind of things). There’s some inspiration here - and also the pool makes me want to go through my own presentations and find a few slides I could add! The photos in this post are from the pool - and I found it through Kim Cofino’s post about how she makes her presentations.

Do you have any more great e-learning blogs I should let the students know about? I couldn’t find any blogs about social work or teaching social work - there must be some but it’s just really not my field.