Class Clouds

I'm creating word clouds of our discussion this semester. Let's see what this kind of aggregation will tell us. Here are all our blog words from August:



Now, here's September:



Now, for October:



And then, November:



Finally, here's all of them together:



Go here for larger images of August, September, October, November, and All.

So what do you think? Does this tell you anything about our semester together? Does it neatly summarize our discussion? Does it capture what you learned?

Tools for Aggregating Wisdom

In this class we have used just a few of the thousands of Web 2.0 tools that are available on the Net—most for free—to help us connect, collaborate, and create with our crowds. The video below shows a wonderful use Spreadsheet, one of the gDocs that we used this semester as a Form to do our quizzes and class evaluation. Most people think of spreadsheets as a business or science tool for calculating numbers, but consider what these four people did with it:



Now consider that this video was sent to me by Joshua Williams, one of my former IDST students. In a sense, Mr. Williams is still connecting to this class, collaborating with us, helping to create more meaning. He is part of my personal learning network, and I appreciate that.

Now here is the Sunday School lesson: I must cultivate that PLN. I must find ways to add value back for Joshua Williams, and all those others, so that my network, my crowd, will stay alive. If I feed it just a bit, then it will feed me much more. Your network works the same way.

In this class we have focused on using the Net for building and feeding our networks, but as some of you have pointed out, the Net is not the only way to build a network. I thought that point was obvious, but it is worth making anyway. Most of us still build and feed our networks the old-fashioned way: face-to-face. Well, it's Thanksgiving, an ideal chance for you to return home, to your family crowd, and feed the network. Here's my Sunday School question for you: what value are you bringing to your network, to your crowd, to your family? And don't be silly enough to think that your mere presence is sufficient, though it is the necessary beginning. What value are you adding beyond just showing up? Though I'm reminded here of Woody Allen's famous quip: 80 percent of success is showing up.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving. Enjoy your family.

Aggregating the Wisdom of Classes

Privacy & Collective Behavior

Our author, James Surowiecki, gave a TED lecture in Feb, 2005, about the good and bad sides of collective behavior on the Net, and he reaffirms what he suggests in our book: that collective behavior can tend towards amazing intelligence or towards incredible stupidity. Watch Surowiecki's lecture:



One of the keys to making collective behavior intelligent rather than stupid is independent, private knowledge and a willingness to stick to what you know. A crowd with diverse points of view can be intelligent, even though many of those diverse points of view may be erroneous. However, a crowd without diverse points of view can get stuck in a circular mill, like ants, that march around and around, each ant following the one in front of it, until the whole colony dies.

If there is a core lesson from this book, then this is it, I think: for a crowd to be wise, it must be composed of independent minded people who stick by their beliefs and are not afraid to express their beliefs. Are you such a person? What groups do you belong to that encourage you to think for yourself? What groups do you belong to that discourage you from thinking for yourself?

PLNs & Privacy

You may have noticed that the posts about privacy have generated the most discussion in the class, and I'm not quite ready to let it go.

In a recent post to the Educational Leadership blog, Will Richardson worries that his children will not be Googled well. He is not expressing concern that his children will be too exposed on Google; rather, he is concerned that they will not be easy to find on Google. He says that he is worried "that when a certain someone (read: admissions officer, employer, potential mate) enters "Tess Richardson" into the search line of the browser, what comes up will be less than impressive. That a quick surf through the top five hits will fail to astound with examples of her creativity, collaborative skills, and change-the-world work. Or, even worse, that no links about her will come up at all. I mean, what might "Your search did not match any documents" imply?"

This is a reversal for most parents who are very protective of their children and want them off the Net. True, Will Richardson is a digital pioneer, but still, what's going on here? What is Will trying to say?

He's saying, I think, that his daughter's ability to succeed and make her way in the future will depend in great part on how well she builds her identity on the Net and cultivates the network of links and associations that make that identity strong, robust, and valuable—that make her connected, interwoven into the networks (social, educational, personal, professional, etc.) that form our lives. He's worried that she won't be transparent enough to her network.

So what is transparency on the Net? For me, transparency is a willingness to be discoverable and knowable, a willingness to be approached by others and to communicate genuinely with others, to engage others. Will Richardson says that transparency "fosters connections and … a willingness to share our work and, to some extent, our personal lives. Sharing is the fundamental building block for building connections and networks; it may take the form of ruminations on life in a blog, photos of the latest family picnic on Flickr, or discussion notes students post to a classroom wiki for others to read and contribute to." Whatever the content or service we offer, transparency is our willingness to put ourselves out there and to share with others.

Transparency works very much like good social skills in other settings, a party, for instance. We've all seen people who are too sullen, too shy, too belligerent, or too damaged at a party to encourage others to connect with them. And remember, as we've already said in this class, your success in a network depends in large part upon the number of people willing to connect to you. This means that you must first be available, transparent, searchable and findable. Once found, you must have something to offer your PLN. You can't just be a taker.

So, we've worked to form a personal learning network in this class, and my question for you is this: what value have you brought to this class, this PLN? This is not likely a question you've had to confront in many of your other classes. In most classes, you are treated, and you likely view yourself, as a consumer. You show up, and the professor pours in the information. You don't bring much back to the class. This strikes me as a great waste of your time, but even worse, it undermines your ability to create your network.

Some questions:

1. Help define value added for this class: what value can students add to a class?
   
2. What value have you brought to this class?
3. What value have other students brought to this class?
4. What have we done in this class that encouraged you to add value?
5. What else could we have done to encourage you to be more transparent to the class?