Swift Kick Central

Orientation Before Orientation: The New Work of First Year Social Network Development

We exist in overlapping, intertwined social networks: family, friends, neighbors, church groups, hobby acquaintances, christmas card friends, etc. etc. It's an old human thing, we've always been that way.

We get emotional well being from the close family and friends. We get growth from topic groups. We need well being first, then growth, it's Maslow's hierarchy.

When a college adopts a new, incoming student, the student's networks are paramount. The student goes through the official stages:

Contact -> Admissions -> Orientation -> Classs (First Year Experience) -> Advising

Through this college entrance process, students will be negotiating a dramatic shift in their networks. The process can be tricky. When I did it, I felt dislocated and uprooted. It's often different now.

Schools, through various methods, have always tried to help. Student ambassadors, shared interest residence halls, learning communities, multi-day orientation, and ice breakers are all examples of social capital creation efforts. There are many more.

The goal is simple - get the student in and help them find their niche. Connectedness, Tinto always says, leads to retention. It also leads to student success.

The feelings are the same; the tools have changed.

Facebook was built as a tool to help us manage our overlapping networks. It makes the whole process substantially easier, delivering similar social and emotional oomph with far less work. A simple status update from the cell phone instead of 150 stamps to lick at Christmas. (Remember those days?)

Facebook, et al., as social networking tools, allow us to carry more people in our networks. While most people, prior to Facebook and internet tools, topped out at roughly 150 people across their networks, now many college students, with Facebook, carry 300 or so with little effort. It's not unusual to see two or three times that number.

This dramatic expansion of our social network carrying capacity is a huge deal. To review, comfort comes from close friends and stronger ties, while learning comes from bridging capital, the weak ties.

Both strong ties and weak ties work differently now, because of the shift in tools.

Students just do it. It's up to the schools, and the rest of us, to figure out what it means and find the new opportunities to help.

Let's start with the changes to close friends, or bonding capital.

It's not what it used to be.

When I went to college across the country, I had to find new close friends. Back in my day, I could call my old friends (though they had to actually be home, cell phones weren't yet ubiquitous), or write letters (email caught on later in my freshmen year), but these occasional contact points always felt inadequate. To be emotionally sound, I clearly needed to move on from my old friends. I needed a new core group to build my confidence on. The lack of close friends was painful. It took me a while to realize this, and I did not do the transition well. If it wasn't for my family, I could have easily been one of those 30% that drop out in their first year.

With Facebook, and the current first year student, the game is different. Their close friends are simply kept in Facebook. There is still a desire for face to face friends, certainly, but the connection to the old networks can be maintained with video, status, pictures, and wall posts. The old network can be maintained without any additional effort. If "social" goes through Facebook, it costs nothing to have extra people watching. It's not face to face, but it's substantially easier to maintain connection and caring with the cell phone and the tools of Facebook than the tools I had in 1994. (Just look at the number of parents who want to "friend" their own kids to stay in touch. They wouldn't complain so loudly about being rejected if they didn't have a sense of the richness.)

It's rich enough to "feel" - to maintain a sense of identity in a group and to maintain the social foundation of a group of good friends.

There is diversity of course. Some students never had good friend networks in high school. They never had a social foundation to maintain. Some students are so confident that they are nearly self-contained. These are both extreme ends of the spectrum. The tools shift the middle of the bell curve.

Just look what a tool change did to parents. Helicopter parenting became feasible with cell phones. Prior to that tool, helicoptering, for the majority, was simply too much effort. It was almost impossible before answering machines.

The tool changes the need.

For most student it's no longer step one to find close friends. That will still happen, given enough face time, we can't help ourselves, but for most students it's not the "make friends with anyone" need that I had when I got to college.

When current students switch to a new place, they don't have to start over at the bottom of Maslow's.

Instead, college students are picky.

They want to find people like them.

They want easy conversation because they both love "x". And why should they settle for less? They are used to the web, where they find the video they want with a few clicks. They're used to search.

Emotionally, because their friends and family are still "with" them, they don't feel the pain that would justify lots of awkward face time to fix. They feel good enough and because of this, many more students are ready to group up. They've been trained to expect this will be an easy thing, because it is easy online.

They try Facebook, but as I've said before, each question pushes down the one in front of it. It's the wrong interface. Facebook is not designed for finding new people, it's designed for managing the people you know.

So they'll try all kinds of things all over the web: Twitter, Zinch, Unigo, and one hundred others, but few of these will have enough adoption to make the search useful.

Colleges have an incredible opportunity to fill this need in their orientation process. It will help retention and it will accelerate positive social capital development.

Here's the rub. Most schools don't know who the students are. They don't know enough about the students to make the "people like you" introduction. What the school does know, from admissions essays and other input, is buried, often in separate departmental systems, locked up in FERPA realities or misplaced fears.

San Antonio's Involvement Dashboard

San Antonio College was the first school to launch Red Rover in '09 with the new involvement dashboard.

Oh my is it fun.

Talk about doing more with less in times of tight budgets:

Two hours after they ran their orientation, Tyler Archer was able to go into the involvement dashboard and see what actually happened.

We've talked about this for ever. The "Data Don't Drive" paper from the Lumina Foundation bemoans research and data gathering that is never used and advocates for "data-based decision-making." They simply want more data that actually empowers members of the academic community to be agents of change.

Tyler gets a live "involvement dashboard." Her data is Real Time. (No 18 month delays on compiling the self reported engagement metrics here!) And she, as the practitioner, can act on that immediately. That's powerful. That's just the way it should be.

Here's how it works:

Tyler goes to her Red Rover involvement dashboard and sees a simple pie chart.

The chart tells her: Who joined how many campus groups?

She can then click on any segment. She can focus on students that haven't joined any groups yet, or she can focus on the smaller percentage of hyper engaged students.

Let's say she starts with not yet involved students, looking to get them connected to at least one group.

1) She clicks on "View all Who Joined 0 Groups"

2) She can click the gray arrow on each name, revealing the student's keywords, their year, major, residence hall (if applicable) and a link to their social network or any other links (a blog, etc.)

This gets to some exciting new areas. What we're seeing is a correlation between the number of words students put into their profile (the depth to which they describe themselves) and their involvement on campus. This is a new area of exploration, but we think the measure of digital identity development in the educational context will become a key metric.

What is exciting about the Folksonomy at the heart of Red Rover is that even when a new student puts in only a little bit of information, it's still wonderfully useful.

Let's say Tyler is going through her list, clicking around, looking to connect students to groups, clubs, or orgs.

She comes to David here:

[By the way: David has been told that all of his info on Red Rover is public, so he's made the conscious choice to put this info in the open. No FERPA issues and no problems with using the collective language / activity for research. By linking his Facebook, he's simply confirming his identity and giving people options for getting a hold of him, his info is still behind Facebook's privacy filters.]

David has not joined any groups and he only put in three words, which is approximately 1/4 of the average number of words we are seeing.

3) Tyler clicks on "basketball" and can see two hugely important bits of information:

a) there are 58 other people in her small spring orientation that like basketball.

b) there are currently no groups/clubs/orgs that have anything do with basketball.

What she does with the info is up to her as the practitioner.

4) In two clicks she can email or Facebook message David and let him know that there are 58 other basketball players in his year - does he want to be the one of the leaders of a new club?

5) Or she can click on the number in that window and get a list of all the new students (or existing students) who like basketball. She can message them all with a time to meet on the courts.

She could easily look for established leaders of one group, who may be older, who also have "basketball" as a keyword, and may want to take on another group.

In less than 5 minutes she can meet David's needs. She can make him (and 58 other brand new students) feel like the school listens, cares and is there to help. How much does this group cost the school? Nothing. It's just a few clicks.

Now, critically, the students have all of this information and ability too. They are empowered to be leaders. They are empowered to connect on their own and take care of themselves.

Tyler isn't required for it to work, but she'll play with it and help where she can. Because she's not in student life to do the paperwork. She's in it because she loves helping students. This new dashboard just makes it incredibly fast and easy.

6) She can go back to that pie chart and watch it move.

7) If anyone above her asks "Just what does student life / activities do anyway?" she can tell David's story. Or better, she can send them David's blog.

The Value of a College Degree in the Networked World

Working in San Francisco with the Red Rover programming team, so this will be quick.

Schools used to base their value on ownership of the books and the information. Now many are sharing what they know for free. As a group, schools are beginning to value sharing over hoarding.

The old frame was that schools transferred the value (knowledge) to students. This value was given currency: a degree.

Here's the key quote from Umair:

Yesterday, we build advantage on owning assets. Tomorrow, we will build advantage by sharing assets.

Selling students a degree does not fulfill the responsibility of schools. It's not enough. To prepare college students for success in the world in which they will live, schools must teach the students to share. Schools much teach students how to be public; public in the world of digital.

It's not enough to own the knowledge / degree. The value creation occurs when the knowledge is shared. We live in a time where this sharing is infinitely scalable.

And this is the focus of most digital sharing "education" I come across on campuses:

Sharing and public could be vague and this conversation can go many directions. Feel free to comment and take it there. There's lots to be said about educational ethics, citizenship, and societal change. At the moment, I'm very focused on the practical. In my little corner of the conversation, I can be very specific:

This means: don't give them e-portfolio's in a .pdf file. (It's not searchable and searchable = sharing. They cannot connect or be found with .pdfs.)

Do let them aggregate their involvement and interactions in tools they control. Teach them delicious.com, use Disqus for you campus community, use google groups and show them how to use google reader to keep track of their content.

This means: don't just teach them to be scared of drinking pictures or stalking on Facebook. Fear is not a strategy.

Do teach them to manage and grow their positive digital identity. Google is the new resume.

This means: don't restrict your students (especially your student leaders!) to closed, password protected, organizational systems.

Do teach them to blog. Encourage them to connect their public blogs at conferences and create a personal learning network of their peers.

Here's the whole post to give you some context and spark thinking:

Edge Patterns: From Owning to Sharing: "

Hertz imitates Zipcar and makes cars shareable - nice move. This is a killer example of a radical edge pattern: from ownership to sharing. Yesterday, we build advantage on owning assets. Tomorrow, we will build advantage by sharing assets.

Hertz's move is, of course, potentially disruptive in a recessionary environment, because microchunking cars offers significant efficiency gains across the value chain. But the really interesting part is this.

We talked not so long ago about bringing new DNA to Detroit. One of the questions we discussed was: how could we bring open-source principles, like sharing, to a moribund auto industry? This is a nice start.

The larget economic point is this. The pressure for sharing in a hyperconnected world is too strong to resist. It's not a fringe effect, relegated to geeks and hippies: it is one of the foundations, as we've been noting, of next-generation value creation.

And its doubly vital in a world where the fabric of value creation is breaking apart.

"

(Via Umair Haque.)

Podcast on Technology and the Future of Higher Education

In a podcast with Paul Miller of Project Xiphos, Kevin talked about technology and the future of higher education. The podcast runs 38 minutes, but if your time is short, here are some key quotes from Kevin I pulled while listening.

- Education needs technology to stay relevant

- Apathy is oil in the ground waiting to be tapped

- We are giving up control to participate

- If we don't give up control we loose the communication channel.

- Sequestering students in our private walled garden that we paid a lot of money for is really doing them a disservice.

- The role of the institution is....teaching students how to be public.

- Established big players don't typically make the jump to the next shift. They don't participate in the disruption of their own business model.

- One of the primary things Blackboard sells is privacy and security.

- The Ebay peer-to-peer assessment model is far more exciting than the professorial model.

- We can care about [the students] more than the lawyers who care about duty of care.

First Year Disorientation: Retention and Community in Higher Education, Part 1

I grew up in Minnesota and went to college at the University of Oregon. In high school I had an incredible group of friends. I was never the cool guy per se, but I felt appreciated, influential, and comfortable.

My first year at Oregon was a social mess. I was lonely and often depressed.

In hindsight, it's clear that my sense of personal worth was embedded in my social network. The network I left behind. I went off to college and left my confidence at home.

My roots were deep in Minnesota - 18 years with pretty much the same group. The creation of my group growing up was unconscious and slow; it was identity development in a crock pot. (For those not from the midwest, that's slow marination in low heat.)

It took me a few years to find my friends at Oregon, re-grow some roots, and reestablish my sense of belonging.

Those few years were not very "educational" in the sense of engagement with my classes or academic ideas. Being lonely colored everything in gray. Belonging comes before confidence or problem solving and learning on Maslow's Hierarchy and this is reflected in my transcript. Big lecture halls just made me feel more alone - "water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink."

With my privilege, I had it better than many. My family was strong and supportive (if far away). I had models of college success nearby. It was still a very hard time.

Those years were formative in that I knew staying provincial would be limiting and I had to learn to root my confidence internally. I went through it the slow painful way, the only way I knew how.

We're building a much better way.

A way that's fun instead of painful. We're building a clear path to identity formation in community. We're building a stronger Maslow's foundation so that students can stay focused on esteem, leadership, and actualization.

Community Creates Retention

This is how the academics talk about it:

Thus, the lower performance and persistence rates of first-generation students are more likely attribut-able to the fact that they are less likely to engage in the academic and social experiences associated with success in college (Pike & Kuh, 2005) such as studying in groups, interacting with faculty and other students, participating in extracurricular activities, and using support services (Billson & Terry, 1982; Lohfink & Paulsen, 2005; Nunez & Cuccaro-Alamin, 1998; Pascarella et al, 2003, 2004; Richard-son & Skinner, 1992; Terenzini et al, 1996).

From "First Generation College Students" by Jennifer Engle, Adolfo Bermeo, and Colleen O’Brien

How do the students talk about it?

Carlito Umali is giving a commencement speech on Sunday. He is profiled in an article in today's Seattle Post Intelligencer. Carlito is notable because he is a first generation college student, who succeeded against the odds (more than half of first generation college students who enroll in a four year college will not graduate).

What does he think is the most important aspect of his success?

"Community, I believe, is really the foundation of all education no matter what you're studying," the English major said. "In one way or another, you're trying to find community."

From my own experience, I couldn't agree more. What I really appreciate about Carlito is that he is giving back:

Carlito Umali will work for SU's First Generation Project next year, recruiting first-generation students from local high schools. He said he'll try to show students that they're welcome at colleges -- that academia is a diverse community they can find a place in [. . .]

Carlito made it work and now he's going to help others find their place.

If only we had enough Carlito to go around.

Coming In Part 2:

Belonging, Hierarchy, and Engagement

The Long Tail of Cool

Breaking Into the Dance Circle

More Assumptions and Beliefs for Red Rover

Awhile back I posted a preliminary list of assumptions for Red Rover. As we are in the process of gathering up our ideas for discussions tomorrow at our first advisory meeting, adding to that list seems appropriate.

The goal with this is to state our ideas plainly. Or failing that, put out some rough drafts of thoughts to get to plain later. All of these ideas get baked into the software and strategy. With a list, our advisors and stakeholders can be clear on what they agree with and what they don't. We can then focus the discussion and learn.

On Facebook and social integration with academic integration.

Fred Stutzman has a draft paper where he questions the wisdom of using Facebook for class management due to challenges of "moving instruction into student spaces of sociality." In short, students get weird when professors hang out in their bedrooms. So let's not.

I'm really looking forward to talking this out with Fred tomorrow, but here's my take:

Education is social. It is peer social.

Younger students want to socially integrate first. What matters is the feeling. They lead with the "where are my peers who I can hang with / feel comfortable with?" question.

As we get older, we start to prioritize common interests. Knitting comes first, friends come later. I want to find the entrepreneurs in NY. I assume I will like a few, but I lead with the topic. Being uncomfortable is worth the networking benefit.

Our prioritization of "social" shifts as we get older. Once our emotional needs are met (or dismissed), we socialize for other reasons and reduce the prioritization of comfort. We call it growth.

NASPA, ACPA, APCA, and NACA are all banging on about "Learning Reconsidered" where one of the arguments is that the school must help facilitate the interaction between the Social, Academic, and Institutional context. When this happens it creates holistic, transformative learning, the ultimate goal. They give "service learning" as an example of an activity that blends all three contexts.

More challenging, and incredibly rewarding, is the integration of the social into your standard classroom. Learning Communities are one approach.

Online folks call a social / learning group Personal Learning Networks and the web folks' tools offer incredible flexibility, speed, and reach. This makes the conference far more social ("we've been twitterin' for 6 months!").

Fred's right in that professors do not belong in a student's bedroom. "Uncomfortable" is not the type of emotional engagement we are looking for.

I believe, as Fred noted, this is less of an issue when students are more professional (higher levels, greater maturity) with a more goal/topic prioritization.

Further, this "I want to maintain my party space in public" (and 500 FB friends is public, ask Ms. New Jersey) idea is an immature and limiting desire. It certainly won't help with job networking. So it is a school's responsibility to gently move the student along the transformative learning and maturation process. At some point this means helping them learn to effectively expand, for the sake of their engagement and networking, their binary ideas of work and social.

Students can use tools or privacy settings to create their small rooms for close friends. This is how Fred uses Twitter - it's a choice, bonding over bridging capital to reduce cognitive "is this appropriate?" strain.

We do this as adults. If students don't learn how to think and use tools like adults in college, when will they learn?

Beyond teaching context negotiation (and we can debate when is a good time) I believe that working with educational data in Facebook has two important benefits:

1) Convenience. People do more of what is easy. The lack of another login matters. One click from where I am already matters. FB groups are easier to navigate than Blackboard.

2) Peer socializing. Not the same as socializing with a professor. Peer connectedness leads to higher engagement. Educational environmental design matters. Your typical large room classroom is set with all seats facing the front. Facebook is inherently social graphy. This is a good thing.

This does not necessarily mean only using FB groups. It could mean using a page and porting the feeds into the page. I'm not sure what the correct technical implementation is for blending contexts, but I do believe it is way too early for institutions to abandon Facebook.

On Groups:

College is a series of groups with different sizes, structures and goals. (Student Body, Class, Major, Residence Hall, Class, Student Group, friend cliques.)

Colleges spend most of their money managing these groups. (Think paperwork and leadership, both big $) The old model used to be: Bigger Groups = Bigger Expense. Grouping finding, organizing, and communication tools are dramatically reducing the cost of grouping.

Smart students are creating their own learning networks outside of the school. Network reach has a high economic utility. Students should be taught how to network at the local and global scale.

Seeing who is like you in any new group helps put people at ease. ("Whew, someone is weird just like me!") Ease increases engagement and involvement. This is why Red Rover is including group member matching.

There is no one right tool set for all types of groups. Instead, Red Rover focuses on finding and joining groups (like a school specific Meetup) and then aggregates feeds from whatever compilation of free group tools the members / leaders of the group decide to use. (I.e. Red Rover is fine with a group using a blog, a wiki, friend feed, twitter, etc. as long as the tool generates a feed.)

RSS, XML, and API's will be used to plug tools into Red Rover groups.

Changing Education Practices:

Free tools (Web 2.0) are innovating in the aggregate much faster than established LMS providers such as Blackboard. Innovative professors (my standard top of the head list: M. Wesch, Fred Stutzman, BJ Fogg) are mixing and matching these FREE tools to create rich classroom experiences. As these leaders explore best practices, other faculty will follow. New faculty, who used these types of tools throughout their graduate experience, will use free tools without thinking twice.

Institutional Information Management Systems:

Various departments in the institution tend to have their own software solutions (i.e. career center, alumni relations, activities, advising, learning management, enrollment, etc.) most of these pieces do not talk to each other.

Most schools are incapable of telling a student everything the school knows about them. Academic transcripts are the norm. Activities transcripts are still fairly cutting edge. What about career? What about mentors? What about preferences?

Large tech vendors are starting to say "one college" and Banner and College Management Software will both sell the school a module for everything that supposedly works together. I do not have experience with either of these vendors, but I don't think the top-down bigger more complicated solution is the most interesting solution.

Far more interesting, I believe, is pushing the data management to the end user. In the exact same way that Google is changing the handling of medical records, and for pretty much the same effect: efficiency and improved experience.

This data used to be "expensive" (in the broad economic sense of money and time) to manage. So the school would take on this expense and buy expensive software to make the process more efficient.

If web tools, Facebook, wiki's, blogs, delicious, friendfeed, twitter, etc. become standard use for organizing and managing groups on campus, and they all can feed into a student's record system, then the management of this data becomes nearly free. For a great example of passive information management, see mint.com. Josh Koppleman calls this trend the implicit web. Your data works for you without your effort.

If the students control the data, they can do whatever they want with it. This gets us around the lawyers that so weigh down the institution with terms like "duty of care" and FERPA. It amounts to Universities saying to students: "We know you will use your own tools and be online. We want to help you be successful, and not limit you. Therefore it's best for you to have your data, because if we have it, your options and networking are limited. As a college, we are severely encumbered (and expensive!) when we try to work with your information. It's best in your hands."

Higher Education Software Vendors:

Most tech vendors see the institution as their customer. This is wrong. The student is their customer. Ask students how they feel about WebCT. [Full disclosure: our marketing is 90% focused on faculty interests, we are working to correct this.]

Because of the institution focus, most vendors focus on control, increasing the "expense" (broad economic definition) of student use. Now that students have many options for grouping and information, they will increasingly choose the easier option. Leaving both the software vendor, and the school, out.

Software vendors should take more responsibility for use of their product. If the students hate it, or just don't use it, that should not just be the school's problem.

What's the Responsibility of the Digital Consumer

Most of the conversations I've read about the importance of digital identities (here and here) put the responsibility on the producers of the information to be more aware of what they are posting online. Like teaching students about their digital identity so next time the student will pause to think about what they post online and how it will be with them forever. I think this is important and should be taught in schools as I've stated before, but it's only one side of the issue.

What about the responsibility of the digital consumer?

Because I'm linked with a lot of students online, often times I find myself stumbling into a context of their world not intended for me by viewing pictures or reading blog posts about a person's social life. It's information that I didn't really need to know about the person, nor I assume they intended for me to know. The mixing of contexts is an issue with online social sites and Facebook is trying to solve this contextual confusion by offering the option to segment your friends into groups and define what part of your profile each group can see. I give them points for trying, but it's not perfect as often times people put you into a "see everything" or "see nothing" group.

The current response I've heard is to blame the producers (students) for posting the pictures and stories in the first place. I agree that if students listened to this advice and didn't post any potentially damaging pictures it would solve the issue, but I think this is unrealistic and students will never fully listen as they haven't with countless other attempts to curtail dangerous behavior against social norms. I also think it's a cop out for the consumers to pass the responsibility off to the producers.

I think consumers need to be taught the ability to pre-filter producer information based many different criteria. Pre-filtering allows us to take the information and put it into a context that makes sense. It doesn't mean we should blindly accept all negative behavior, but I do think the consumer should be responsible enough to pause for a moment and reflect before judging.

In a world with increasing amounts of personal information being shared, I think the importance of the responsibility of the digital consumer and digital producer will be equal. It's time to not just educate the students, but to educate ourselves as well.

Now my question for you - as you surf the web and fall into contexts not intended for you, how do you handle it?
Technorati Tags: digital consumer, digital producer, digital identity, krieglstein, swift kick, swiftkick

Why Students and Faculty Sometimes Miss Eachother

The current crop of adults grew up in a world of physical identity where behavior was modulated according where someone was. The audience was clear. One could swear in front of friends - Not at school.

The current generation of students grew up in a world largely influenced by digital identity where the reality, consciously noted or not, was that context was in the eye of the searcher.

If you google my name, you will get my myspace blogs, written for friends, press releases written for corporate audiences, and if you search deep, you will find some early college poetry that got posted with an early online college magazine. Google does not care what my originating context was. It's up to you, the searcher, to cut me some slack for my 11 year old poetry.

Students reasonably expect some flexibility around appropriate behavior and context. The overlap and muddiness of "appropriate in context" is simply a fact of the tools they grew up with. They are more public and forgiving because of it.

If your paradigm is based on a lifetime of physical identity, with its clear boundaries and expectations, this muddiness is extremely difficult to understand.

No one is wrong. It's just different ways of looking at it, based on different experiences.

It's easy to say that the old folks or the young folks "just don't get it" - it's just not very accurate.

These graphics were inspired by a conversation with Scott Silverman about his dissertation, THE EFFECTS OF OSN COMMUNITIES ON COLLEGE STUDENTS' EXPERIENCES. HOW CAN STUDENT AFFAIRS PROFESSIONALS BEST RESPOND TO THIS EMERGENT PHENOMENON - and it's well worth a read if you are at all interested in Student Affairs. You can find it here.

Thoughts on Thoughts on Thoughts

Our ideas come from a collection of conversations, books, articles, blogs, and videos among many other sources. We are active participants in what is coined the Read/Write Web in which someone takes a little content to produce a little content. We are both consumers and produces at the same time.

It's very gratifying to receive an email weeks after a training in which I can tell the person was mulling over our content and now has produced some content of their own in the email. Last week I received this type of email from Larry Androes of Bossier Parish Community College.

Thank you Larry for your thoughts on our thoughts so I can have more thoughts. Larry makes many great points so with his permission, here is his email in full:

Hi Tom!

I attended the talk you gave at Bossier Parish Community College about two weeks ago. I was one of the two students who stayed to talk with you (I would have thought everyone would be wildly exited by these ideas). I was the guy with grey hair and a cane, and I talked with you about the exponential curve of all this information.

I definitely want to be included in the information you are getting through the del.icio.us site. Hopefully, my email is enough for this connection.

But I also wanted to take a moment to express how important I think what you are doing is. On one level, it is certainly about advising students to be careful about their online identity and using it to pursue future goals.

…Yet on another level, you are part of a wave nudging young people toward a paradigm shift in how they conceive personal identity, moving from physical to digital. This cultural shift might be the biggest change since one of our ancestors picked up a rock and used it to crack a nut.

So, at a deeper level, you are teaching kids to change their inner software – outmoded beliefs about who they are (physical, local, separated) – toward a new dimension of global digital identity that is supported by our expanding technology.

I am reminded of two current streams of thought. One is by Peter Russell, who talks about different revolutions in our history – agricultural, technological, information, and consciousness. Each is exponential, but they differ in the rate that information/knowledge doubles. If I remember correctly, the information revolution doubles every six years and began in the early 1900’s, and the consciousness revolution doubles every three years and began in the 60’s. So we are now seeing huge changes in who we are and how we know the world.

I also think about the Spiral Dynamics ideas, in which portions of humanity are opening to new memes, or ways of interacting with the world. The turquoise and coral spirals are about global consciousness and new neurological capabilities.

I thought of a couple of ideas – there are probably already five dozen web sites I don’t know about yet (that’s the way it is with exponential curves):

1. For our physical identity we generally use a mirror; we look at a mirror for feedback about who we are physically. We need the equivalent of a mirror online for our digital identity –something like a ‘digitalme.com’ – where we could click and see a view of our current digital presence (a Google list just doesn’t do a striking reflection). I am thinking of a page that would look something like kartOO.com.
2. Parents need to start at the beginning with the idea of digital identity. We need something like a ‘firstdigitalfootprint.com’. “Hey! Flipoo was born yesterday. Google him – check out his website and profile.”
3. I’d also like to see a page one could pull up – oneself as a circle in the center, with online contacts as circles connected to that one (kind of like a mind map). And if you clicked on a connected person’s circle, you could see all of their connections – and so on outward. It would be a fun way to explore how many degrees of separation existed between you and any other person on the internet (What is the shortest path between you and the Dalai Lama?).
   

Thanks for stimulating some new ideas!
Larry Androes

APML and Education

A pretty little video:

DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

At the moment this is a highly fringe technology conversation - solving a problem of only the most involved and finicky mobile networkers.

The idea of data-portability is great - though the current challenge is two fold: you can't get your data out, and if you did, you can't plug it in.

The hope is that all this will change.

We will be adopting OpenID, APML and open social with the 1.1 release of Red Rover coming out in May. We will be doing our part to encourage portability, playing nice, context control, and plug and playing for education.

Plus APML is a pretty cool concept and direction. It's still a chicken and egg problem, if we build the profile for students, they need some place to plug it in, but we have to start somewhere.

I'm very excited to apply attention profiling to education and the relationship / relevancy challenge.