So little reciprocity?
Posted by: Paul Beaufait in B4B/B4E/LwC, BloggingCommentary, CognitionReflection, CommunityGroup, DiscussionThreading, IdentityPrivacySecurity, blending, blogospheres, blogs & wikis, tags: authorship, collect, connect, online, readership, reciprocity, web2.0, writingIn a Blended Learning and Instruction discussion of Social Networks, Marielle expresses belief in common and continuing desires to maintain individual spaces for online postings, and in increasing ease of cross-posting and cross-referencing from and to multiple venues. In the same post, she points out risks related to diversification of networks and multiplication of personal writing venues (blogs) diluting “critical mass that is key to their success” (Comment 18741, 2008.07.24, JST).
While Marielle recognizes strengths of networking technology that enable people with common interests to form networks, if not communities, easily and quickly; she also points out amplifications and caveats to those bent on rapid diversification of networking sites, and similar migrations from one to the next:
With the viral spread of online networks, we must take care not to dilute them so much (by rapidly migrating to new ones) that they lose their power, which derives from the quantity and quality of their membership. With the proliferation of blogs, we must take care not to get lost in a plethora of solipsistic silos, speaking without listening, reinventing rather than building upon each other’s ideas and deepening the collective dialogue.
(mpal3, So Many Nodes, Not Enough Reciprocity (Yet), 2008.07.03)
At present, lacking (or simply ignoring) great automaticity in propagating connections from one blog or network to the next, it remains a matter of choice where to establish or maintain a toehold on connected writing. For me, the choice this morning was easier done than said, or written about. Anyway, here goes - a short story long:
I’d followed Marielle’s link from Blended Learning to her blog (Authorship 2.0), previewed her post about reciprocity, and decided on the spot to bookmark it in Diigo, highlighting the passage that I’ve quoted above, sharing it with a Diigo branch of the Learning with Computers community, and sending it to a list of friends weblogging in Kumamoto. When I finished bookmarking, commenting on, and description of the post that I’d flagged, the description had grown to such an extent that it seemed almost more suited for blog commentary.
There I was, in Edublogs, ready to leave a comment for Marielle, when it dawned on me that I didn’t recall, immediately, what in a flurry of early morning activity had lead me there. Once I pasted the overflow from the Diigo bookmark description into an Edublog comment window, with no, “Hi, I found this interesting post on your blog through…” (no thanks to hot de-caf. coffee on a sweltering morning before the air-conditioning kicks in), I noticed how impersonal what I’d originally written for a bookmark description sounded as a stand-alone comment.
That inkling led to a quick poke about the Authorship blog to see who had written the post So Many Nodes… (above). However, finding little more than mpal3 on edublogs (and Bmused on del.icio.us) there-abouts; I decided that, rather than leave my names, email address, and an impersonal comment on an unknown author’s blog (if knowing an author requires knowing her name), it would be easier to dump the description I’d clipped from Diigo into a new, full-featured blog entry here, then retrace my steps backwards through multiple browsers, tabs, and drop-down histories, in order to suss out what connections I could.
In short, I got lost, and wrote my way back. The remainder of the coffee is chilling, the air-conditioning is working now; I’m heating the world, and writing solipsistically. What else is new? I’ve rediscovered, in a very personal way, what so many nodes mean. I surmise that initial connections in or via writing, whether in the head or on the web, are necessarily loose, and that virtual connectedness is just that - virtual.
July 31st, 2008 at 3:02 am
[...] across the world, Paul Beaufait responded to my post in two different blog posts of his own, So Little Reciprocity? and Balance, on all fours, as well as bookmarking it in Diigo and discussing it in a forum within [...]
July 31st, 2008 at 10:24 am
Marielle, it is a pleasant surprise to find a shared interest in learning from experience. If I recall Dewey correctly, it is possible to learn from experience only by reflecting upon it.
For educators, at least, opportunities for reflection may be at the root of “the blog-o-mania” you mention (Authorship 2.0, Blogging to Learn, ¶1, 2008.07.30). That’s certainly why I endeavor to maintain the blogs that I do, for teachers, learners, and myself. You’ve spelled it out quite succintly, “Blogging … is extending my learning and informing my teaching and my research enough to make the time and effort worthwhile” (¶3).
Like you said, writing serves to clarify and deepen our thinking, even if it is not immediately or particularly illuminating for (all) readers. In spite of the time and trouble required to make thoughts clear through writing, how could I endorse student blogging for those purposes, if I didn’t appreciate, personally and socially, the benefits and extraordinary potential that blogging entails?
When it comes to blogging and the choices it entails, in and among multi-mediated learning environments, I perceive beyond a drive to acquire a voice as an author, or perhaps more fundamental to it, a desire for ownership in terms of control over the words that I write. In the interplays of technological affordances, blended with rhetorical and social conventions, such a desire for ownership my constitute a cause for what you call “communication interference” (¶3). At the moment, I’d rather call it dissonance, yet grant that we may not be playing by the same rules.
Elsewhere I believe you describe writing as an indefinitely manipulable medium, all the more so now that we’ve replaced carving and engravure with digitalization and syndication processes Though I’m uncertain whether large proportions of learners feel the same way that I do, it pains me to find something I could rewrite better locked down in a disucssion forum 15 minutes after I post it, or locked into a blog comment offering little or no choice but to delete it wholesale and replace it.
Once again, I have a choice of posting this follow-on as a comment on your blog, where I may be unable to revise it, or add links to it later – in effect playing by unwritten blog rules. However, I’m going to post it here, where trackbacks to your post seem functional, and I am free to tweak, stretch, or amplify it virtually indefinitely. Now that I’m learning what my preferences are for online interactions, I feel I’m ready to explore and respond conscientiously to those of other learners with whom I work.
August 4th, 2008 at 1:50 am
It’s great to converse with you at this level, Paul. While I fully follow your rationale for posting on your own blog instead of commenting on mine, I did not get notification of this installment, but rather stumbled upon it when I looked once more at your original post. It appears that pingbacks may not work with comments, but only with posts, which means that this rich exchange is visible to those reading your blog but not those reading mine.
Often it’s hard to discern what “the rules” are except by trial and error. What I meant by “communication interference” is what happened here. I came very close to never knowing that you had responded so thoughtfully to my blog post, while I presume you assumed I had read it. You thought we were having a conversation, but I did not “hear” you respond to me. Thankfully, I have heard you now.
I totally agree that ownership of one’s texts and ability to edit them indefinitely is critical to authorship, which I also mentioned in my post on blogging. Maybe I will continue my response in a post on my own blog, for that reason, and also so that my readers will also have access to this conversation…
August 4th, 2008 at 2:14 am
P.S. Your post let me know that while I had posted a bunch of information about myself on the “About” page of my blog, I had neglected to fill out my Edublogs user profile. (Now I have at least added my name to that, but I still feel daunted by all the profiles for all the tools that I have been sampling. ) This is another example of communication breakdown - I thought I had identified myself to potential readers of my blog, but you did not find what you wanted where you were looking. So many tools, so much variable functionality! I think we are on our way to building a better mousetrap…
August 5th, 2008 at 12:37 am
Yes, Marielle, I found your name when I returned to your blog, and looked more closely, but not until after had I found it in another online environment.
What dismayed me about posting a response on your Reciprocity post was that my name and email address were required before your blog made explicit any policy regarding collection, recording, or use of personal information collected from commentators. I’m sure my blogs do no better.
A nice thing about Edublog posts about other posts on other Edublogs is that backlinks may appear as comments on the original post. However, this function, I imagine, must be enabled in blog settings. Yours didn’t seem to be fetching.
As you have suggested, elsewhere, comments on posts may not figure prominently in readers collections in social netorking systems because comments may not propogate as initial posts do.
That posts, subsequent comments, and RSS reflections thereof, might have equal status, in terms of subsequent syndication would be cool, especially if a Harvard student would steal the idea and run with it.
Cheers, Paul
August 5th, 2008 at 3:43 am
Hi, Paul. Looks like we have encountered some of the mysterious nuances of cyberspace. I do have pingbacks fully enabled on my blog, and they appear to be functioning, as my own reference to a previous post showed up in a comment on the new post. And I don’t think I had to submit my e-mail to post to this blog, as I was recognized as an Edublog member. Not sure what’s going on, but maybe we’ll figure it out…In any case, I share your concern about privacy issues, and I think we have a long way to go before we’re on top of them as a society.
August 5th, 2008 at 8:47 am
Yeah, the closer you look, the more puzzling the nebulous connections appear. Indeed your own reference to So Many Nodes (Authorship 2.0; July 3, 2008) from Blogging to Learn (July 30, 2008) is showing up, though my link to it from the post on which we’re commenting here does not. We’ll see if links I put in this comment after I save it show up later.
I suppose I was asked for names and email addresses when I first visited your Nodes post because I had not been logged in to Edublogs, or because I had not posted a comment already that you had approved. There are so many possible permutations that it’s hard to predict what will happen when learners start mucking about in their own dashboards. Perhaps that’s why lots of teachers set up course, class, and group blogs for “many-to-many communication” (Authorship 2.0, The Unsung Hero…, June 18, 2008) over which they can maintain control.
August 5th, 2008 at 10:26 am
PS: You may have to approve trackbacks (the first time from individual sources), too, depending upon your blog settings, in order for them to appear with teasers (contextual extracts) among comments. You should have three incoming links from the comment above - more than the default Edublog trigger for manual comment approval on individual blogs (Wordpress: Settings, Discussion, Comment Moderation), plus another from a wiki I’m building, along with the link from the original post to which this comment is appended (So little reciprocity?, 2008.07.24).
August 12th, 2008 at 4:01 am
Yeah. Not happening. Not sure why. I’m aware of all the approval conditions, have been to the settings panel many times, and nothing is awaiting my moderation. Who knows…?
Would be interested to see the wiki…
August 14th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Offhand, I’m not sure which wiki I was working on when I posted August 5 (comment 111, above), but from context I’d guess it’s the one featured in this blog’s sidebar and mentioned in previous posts as a counter-part to this blog…. Yup, after adding affinity spaces to the Glossary on that wiki, and supporting the definition with links that you’d drawn to my attention, I offered thanks for your pointing out another link that I added to the RSS Notes page (both pages accessible via the LTD Project Wiki sidebar).
For practical, if not definitive purposes, I’ve gleaned that Edublogs’ automated back-links (if activated) pick up direct links from other Edublogs posts, but not necessarily from comments on other posts, or posts on other blogs, nor from other sources such as wikis. By this I mean to suggest that real-world reciprocity, outside of closed systems such as CMSs or SNSs, may depend on folks taking the time to code in links before or after posting (if possible), rather than or in addition to making verbal references to relevant posts and other online sources, and on them cross-posting notices of new developments to interested parties or related sites. Yet in retrospect, I recall only limited pro-active connection forging among contributors to CMSs and SNSs, too, laziness or imprecisiion which likewise assigns from one to many the onerous and repetitive task of rediscovering and clearing paths hidden in or overgrown with foliage.