The LTD Project Blog

In 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.

As I sat in the cabin darkness, feasting on its deliciousness, and staring dubiously at the Cmap representation I’d included in the previous post, Another Edublog… (2008.05.20); it dawned on me: “Eh, mate! You’re going on six blogs (and um-teen other online identities)!” Yet I’ve long been in a virtual sense, if I may tweak a line from a favorite children’s story by Lynly Dodd, “all [pabey] and [pboney] like Blitzer Maloney” [add page ref. about here].

Having tired of grappling with technological demons, real or imagined, yet not of deliberation and reflection in writing; I’ve opened the locker door, and tossed moldy vestiges of identity out to air on the deck. Here is a heap that has come to light:

An earthling: “An educator and a learner, a parent and a child, a colleague and a friend” (in elgg, c. 2006); “I teach computer skills, cultur…[-al appreciation], listening, speaking, reading and writing, and promote both [language] learners’ and teachers’ development” (in Blogger, c. 2007), as an author, a blogger, and a collaborator, aka: pab, pabeaufait….

([my] Your Profile, 2008.05.29)

Tags: blogging, identities, online, stories

In an interesting elgg weblog, Christopher D. Sessums points out a “provocative” animated presentation about the Facebook:

Food for thought:

All that I am really doing is putting together on single spot for my students to be able to access it quickly and efficiently so that they can expand their knowledge about certain topics we cover in class.

The following are snippets from email that I’m representing here as a cautious approach to construction of online identity:

When I first browsed the b4b database about a week ago, there were entries in it whose “names” were a jumble of letters and numbers, followed by no more information whatsoever.

So I decided to approach the database ever so cautiously. It wasn’t until yesterday that I discovered all of the entries included at least a nickname and some other information.

… I recommend the same course of action to students and teachers with whom I work, basically: “Provide no more information than is necessary until you know what’s really going on in any online environment.”

… Though I may be failing miserably, I do want to be able to keep the extents and locations of online identities to an affair that I can manage on the whole, rather than one needing updating in all of the particular instances.

It has taken a couple days for me to get around to reopening the b4b evo Session Participants’ database to take another look at what’s there in response to a moderator’s question asking which information I consider personal (personal correspondence, Jan 17, 2007, at 04:55, JST).

As part of this point by point reflection on b4b evo backchannel messages, I’d like to suggest that, among other items of info. collected in the database, full names, gender, Yahoo ID and Skype names are personal (no Hotmail MSN for me, thanks, but that would be, too).

If there is order to these reflective pieces, it probably entails ease of collecting thoughts, exploring group moderator proposed work-arounds, and responding to requests for explanation or assistance.

The original post in this reflective series raised an issue of “ambivalent trust” (Jan. 18, 2007, 14:54 JST). Here I’d like to explore a couple of recent interactions that rekindled thought-fires regarding trust.

The first of those interactions was run of the mill. That is, when applying for group membership, I supplied the Yahoo! (R) Groups’ interface with a concise rationale for asking to join the b4b group.

In return, I got an automated, “Please give us more information, or wait,” sort of message. Though the application form had allowed only a few more characters (200-250 character limit?), I didn’t want to wait and succumb to a foreseeable avalanche of introductory messages. As I noted later:

…I had hoped that gaining admittance to the group prior to the weekend launch would enable me to avoid a huge backlog of posts, come Monday morning….

I’d never wish that kind of reading load on EFL learners unless I wanted to extinguish their enthusiasm, or to train them to ignore the majority of posts from their peers.

So I wrote back right away to demonstrate humanity, to show that I wasn’t some sort of spamming robot, and to find out whether more info. really was necessary to do so. In short, it wasn’t.

However, the possibility of surrepititious humans gaining access to the group retraced synapses when I opened the group database. I figured that anyone who could pass the human screens would have access to all the information earlier arrivals had posted there. That was well before I’d even browsed the hundreds of introductory posts that had already arrived to see who’s whom.

When I had last checked the group participants’ database (Tue., Jan 16, 2007, 9:58 am JST), there was still an ID in the database for whom automated searches of all messages retrieved no messages. With 160+ participants now on list, I can say neither that I know everyone, nor that I’ve even scrolled, paged, and scrolled through all of the database records to double-check who’s there.

In reviewing that database today, however, I have discovered “Actions” (Edit/Delete) controls which I consider a plus because they enable participants to update their records without dependence upon group moderators. If any personal info. that participants’ list changes (or gets abused), they apparently will be able to manage it to some extent, as long as group owners permit access.

The short story ends here; I did go back and add a limited amount of info. to the database. Participants photos will probably be the next point I take up.

Thanks to a pointer from a colleague who shall remain anonymous, in a message entitled “anonymity, privacy, blogging” (personal correspondence, January 12, 2006), I discovered a Borderland post On Anonymous Student Blogging, but not immediately.

There had been a fault in the link that I followed, so I skipped across to another post, Blogs and Genre, in which Doug refers to blogospheres (re-)defined by John Evans (Are There Three Blogospheres (Revisited)?). Between the two of them (among other commentators), blog genre definitions emerge that hinge as much upon audience definitions as upon content, if not more so.

It’s going to take a while to explore all the ramifications of that serendipitous sidetrack. Hopefully further explorations along those lines will reveal gems to share or ideas to implement perhaps sooner rather than later in a workshop on Blogging for Beginners. In the mean time, this post may well serve as a stepping stone for anyone hopping by.