Yes, I am aware that I am not the first person who has written about this, but perhaps someone out there is interested in my viewÖ Yesterday I joined Orkut. I had been given an invitation by a friend (and yes, she really is my friend) a while ago, but I didnít sign up until yesterday. My first impressions after this short, initial visit at the social networking site are quite positive (at least when comparing to other very critical comments). For instance I found my way to the community for internet researchers, and I assume that I will be able to get in contact with many interesting people this way. However, one thing that I find a bit obscure is how to define friendship in this context. The whole system is built around people inviting ìfriendsî to join their network. So, who do I invite? Only people I have met in real life and know really well, or people that I have met online or briefly IRL but I know are interested in similar things as I am? Would they accept my attempt of trying to become their ìfriendî? At the moment I only have two friends (in Orkut that is), both of which are my friends here in Ume, but Iím thinking of approaching people who have commented in this blog to see if they would accept my invitation (so bewareÖ). Also, by reading other peoplesí blogs, I sometimes get the feeling that I know the person behind the blog, even though weíve never met (IRL or online), and sometimes I have never interacted with that person even through commentsÖ I wonder how they would feel if I asked them to be my friends? (Bryan Alexander points to a paper by Anthony Hempell whoís done a study on Orkut, where he among other things discusses how he dealt with the friend issue.) Anyway, in order for this to be an efficient way of creating ìbusiness networksî I would prefer different labels for these functions. I also think it feels somewhat odd to try and make serious, work related contacts on a site where you can rate people on how sexy they are/lookÖ Also, this whole idea of trying to define whoís most popular by displaying the size of a person’s network feels a bit awkward to meÖ It often seems to be the case that the affordances of media that originally are used for social interaction are so great that people realize that they can be used for more work-related interaction or for learning. This implies, however, that not all features of the site/program will be applicable for the activities you have in mind. Another example of this is our use of the graphical 3D-environment ActiveWorlds for educational purposes, while this program originally was (and still is) used for social interaction. In here, your avatar can do immensely important things like dancing the Macarena (to avoid textual misunderstandings: Iím being ironic!), whereas other types of body language which might be more important from a language learning perspective are unavailable. But then again, it could be questioned whether being able to dance the Macarena is ever important in any setting…

These last couple of days I have attended a conference here at Ume University on writing for publication (organized by Gaby Weiner). The speakers gave many concrete examples of things to think about when trying to get your findings published in reviewed journals. Some of the most interesting suggestions, in my view, concerned always keeping the audience (journal) in mind when writing an article, and making use of positive and confident (although not exaggerating) language in order to make people realize that what you have to say is important, relevant and interesting. Youíre the expert! The new possibilities for personal publishing that the internet provides were only briefly touched upon during the conference. The question of whether articles that you put on your website or in your blog should count as published or not was only raised, not answered. In my view, articles that you post on your website/blog are published in the sense that they are made public, but considering that they have not been reviewed (other than sometimes by a supervisor) it is difficult to estimate the quality of the work. Of course it could be argued that the reader has to be the reviewer, and closely examine the suggested findings, something which always should be done, but I suspect not always happens. Even trickier, perhaps, is to define the status of a blog entry. Of course, by expressing your ideas in your blog, you give other people access to them and if someone wants to expand on them they have to give you credits. Also, by allowing for people to follow the thread of conversation that develops around your blog entry through comments and track-backs you do provide access to peer-review in a sense. Nevertheless, considering that blogs often are used to present work-in-progress and to develop your arguments I am not quite sure about the role of the blog in publishing… What are your views on this? Do any of you know of any good resources discussing blogs and publication? It would be interesting to learn more about thisÖ Unfortunately, participating in this conference caused me to miss Constance A. Steinkuehlerís seminar in HUMlab: Massively Multiplayer Online Games as Learning Environments. Luckily, all our seminars are streamed and archived on the internet, so right now Iím working on my multi-tasking skills, watching the seminar, blogging and talking to my colleagues in the lab simultaneously. I strongly recommend those who are interested in online learning and/or computer games to have a look (RealMedia).

Danah Boyd refers to an interesting discussion on ethics in online research over at the Association of Internet Researchers’ mailing list. These are questions that I always have to keep in mind in my own research (for some thoughts scroll to the bottom of my research page).

I have now gotten around to listing some of my favourite resources at my bookmarks page (which at the moment only can be found via the link to the home of this blog at the top of the side bar – I will have to think about redesigning my blog to make the static pages more easily accessible…). I have decided only to include online material, and instead of writing comments about each item I refer to the specific blog entry in which they are discussed. The page will be updated when I find new material of interest.

Update: I have now put links to all my static pages in the sidebar… That might be a better solution.

I have finally found some time to read and reflect on a paper which Stephen Downes mentioned in his newsletter OLDaily (May 12.): < i>Communication Management and Control in Distance Learning Scenarios, by Freimut Bodendorf and Manfred Schertler, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (a paper from the upcoming InSITE conference) The major issue presented here is that students, and in particular those who are not used to working with computers, will benefit from scheduled processes, that is ìa precise and detailed placement of learning and teaching acts within one educational scenarioî ìmainly based on a tight time structureî (p1-2). In his newsletter, Stephen Downes claims that he has difficulties agreeing with this conclusion, and in a way, so have I. One of the advantages of distance education is that it is supposed to be flexible and that students are to be able to work when it best suits them. However, in my view, certain time limits seem necessary in order for the collaboration between students and with the teacher to function. Further, I can see many reasons why scheduled synchronous meetings should be supported and accommodated for. As a language teacher, the most obvious one in my case is that synchronous communication tools and (scheduled) meetings are a prerequisite for practicing synchronous communication skills, something which students of foreign languages should acquire. However, also in other subjects, synchronous, and thus at least to some extent scheduled, communication activities will help facilitate discussions and allow for direct feedback, something which I see as immensely important in the distance education scenario, not least when considering the high rate of student drop-outs. Other interesting issues discussed in the paper include the role of anonymity, which, somewhat surprisingly, the students had not rated as particularly relevant (c.f. this previous post), and studentsí tendencies to prefer communication tools with which they had previous experience before new ones.

This looks interesting:

“Gender Similarities and Differences in Online Identity and Language Use among Teenage Bloggers”, Masters thesis by David Huffaker, Georgetown University.

(Via weblogg-ed, where you’ll find some of the most interesting passages.)

Returning from three intense days at the Netlearning 2004 conference in Ronneby Iíll try my best to summarize some of my impressions hereÖ Even though the topic of the conference was interactivity and user perspectives much focus was on technology itself, as often seems to be the case. However, some presentations and discussions did focus on content rather than on technology. Interestingly, but not very surprisingly, content related issues often present old truths in a new light. Some, as for instance keynote speaker Elsebeth Korsgaard Sorensen, referred to the power of dialogue and reflection in knowledge building, something which not only Vygotsky would agree on, but also SocratesÖ Much of the pedagogical discussions centered on collaboration, interaction and flexible learning, well in line with the constructivist paradigm. Even if this paradigm has started to replace traditional instructive methods in many physical classrooms, I believe that it is important to remind teachers using ICT of the fact that there is a risk one might return to the old paradigms if the computer is used in the wrong way. However, when using the right methods and tools, ICT can be a facilitator for constructivist learning (for some examples of this see my degree assignment for teachersí ed), and I believe that this is one area in which further research is needed. Since Iím particularly interested in questions to do with language learning, and since I attended the conference as a representative for ITAS, a Swedish national network dealing with these issues, I tried to visit as many language related presentations as possible (not that there were all that manyÖ). One by Lars Borin and Leif-Jˆran Olsson was on ìIT-based collaborative learning in grammarî through corpora, but, as it turned out, not so much on how they can be used as on how they had constructed their own. (By the way, we are having a live streamed seminar and a workshop on corpora in language education in HUMlab on May 26-27 with Ylva Berglund, University of Oxford). Another presentation by AnneLi Aven‰s from from CFL dealt with how to teach volunteers foreign languages with ICT tools in short time. For instance, she talked about how to translate methods which have worked well in face-to-face settings so that they would work also online. This was exemplified by showing how they had tried to use suggestopedia pedagogy by stimulating different senses (for instance by getting to watch how Arabic letters are written in Flash or similar). This did seem interesting, even though I have to say that it came across like a ìlightî version of the theory. I also had a poster presentation of my own in which I described the activities of the ITAS network. Apart from the more traditional tools we have used, such as mailing list, web page and discussion forum, I also presented our work with graphical virtual environments. Especially Traveler, where you communicate in real-time with your own voice, caught peoplesí attention. I had an opportunity to talk to both language teachers, teachers of other subjects and developers, and we had some fruitful discussions on the role of presence in the communication situation, as well as that of social realism vs. perceptual realism. In my view, realistic communication situations can be created without perceptual realism, as long as there is social realism, and participants experience a sense of being in a shared space. Network member, and my good friend, Paola Eklund Braconi from Hˆgskolan Dalarna was also at the conference, and had a poster about her experiences from a distance course in Italian in which she among other tools has made use of Traveler. It turned out that she did such a great job presenting this that she won the price for best poster. Congratulations Paola As far as blogs are concerned, I did not find anything in the program regarding this topic. However, Peter Giger talked about Social Navigation. I also had some opportunities to discuss what I see as the greatest potential of blogs in knowledge building (networking, collaboration etc.) with some of the participants, and apparently I was not the only blogger there. I suspect that there will be more of us next conference (2006), and also that more presentations will discuss blogs in education. In summary, I would have to say that meeting people from diverse backgrounds with the same interests as yourself is the most rewarding aspect of conference participation.