The future of education: reboot required

A Vision of Students Today, posted with vodpod

Our Future will be a Real Life RPG

The internet of things (IOT) meets Facebook….thought-provoking and depressing in equal measures

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The reading experience

I was in Tofino last weekend with some friends (surfing, but that’s another story). There were four of us, lounging around by the fire, reading. Two of us had Kindles, the other two were reading print books.

Reading from an eBook reader has, for me, proved to be a very pleasurable and seamless experience – the device really does disappear in the same way that a physical book disappears – I am immersed in the words. It is quite different than reading from a laptop – I’m always aware of the machine when I’m doing that.

However,  it did occur to me that there was something very different about the experience of reading in company. First of all, the rustle of the turning page is replaced by the subtle click. But what I really noticed was that I could see what two of my companions were reading, but not the other; and they could not see what I was reading. (Insert predictable porn joke here.) This loss of social information is quite interesting – we have grown accustomed to the cover of the book conveying data about the reader. With eBook readers, all this is gone.

Book Publisher Tries Reversing the Fate of Industry with Viral Video

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Viral video – Do you want to date my avatar

Nice example of a viral marketing video from The Guild. (And it made me and my avatar laugh, of course).
There are some very strange Google ads associated with this though….are gamers particularly prone to allergies?

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How to market a book on social media

How to market a book on social media using YouTube:

Copy a brilliant viral video idea from a couple of years ago (thankyou Michael Weiss for Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us); borrow very heavily from a second video – Did You Know 3.0 (including the soundtrack ….without attribution or acknowledgement?); come up with a hideous neologism; cross fingers and hope.

Grade: unduly derivative in content and style;  slightly hysterical in tone. Didn’t think we would notice?

Nobody googles Adwords

Well, we don’t do we? We don’t google for Adwords. When we search we look in the organic search results; the “sponsored links” are there to be ignored. We don’t enter search terms into Google (or any other search engine) in the faint hope that we might be served a relevant ad. We don’t treat Google like the Yellow Pages….we don’t want an ad, we want trusted content. When we want the equivalent of the Yellow Pages (you know, the print directory), we go….where? Canada411, Craigslist, Google Local. I don’t know where we go, but we don’t search for Adwords.

Facebook and the privacy contradiction (or how to really sell your grandmother)

I don’t use Facebook. I have an account of course, but I don’t use it. The closed nature of FB drives me nuts. I know, I know…its primary purpose from the point of view of the individual user is to provide a social networking, many-to-many tool to facilitate sociability and discourse (hah!) between people who know one another in the real world (FB’s TOS makes it clear that “fake” accounts are not permitted). That is why it is closed….that stuff is “private”. The expectation of the mythical average user is that somehow, this “free” tool will keep their private stuff..private.

FB’s purpose is the opposite. FB needs you to sell your grandmother (whose demographic is increasingly clogging up the site these days). Hence the ban on anonymity. Your data is not nearly so valuable to marketers if they don’t know who “you” are. I suppose it must lack authenticity or something.

FB’s privacy policy has and continues to be, a source of controversy (Beacon lives). But it was this article in Ars Technica that really started me thinking about this again. Here we have several screenfulls of detailed instructions on how to manage privacy on Facebook, or rather (from my cynical point of view) how to work around FB’s increasingly overt use of the data that they hold (and which they have made sure that they have license to use in perpetuity, yea even after death). My extremely unscientific show-of-hands type enquiries of my students tell me that the majority never read privacy statements, let alone go to the trouble of figuring out how to change FB’s increasingly baroque and byzantine (am I mixing metaphors?) privacy settings.

Which brings me back to the central contradiction…FB needs to be a closed site – because your data is its prime asset…it isn’t going to open that up is it? Fred Vogelstein calls it the Great Wall of Facebook. But it also needs to be as open as it possibly can to those who will pay – because it has to sell that data..and where behavioural targeting is concerned…the more private the data is, the more value it has.

Google privacy opt out announced on The Onion

Enough said….although it’s FaceBook that I’m afraid of

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Identity and anonymity online

There is a vigourous debate going on at the moment on Dusan Writer’s blog and elsewhere, related to ThinkBalm’s policy on the use of real life name versus anonymous avatar name in their professional community on LinkedIn; quoted as follows:

“One of the ThinkBalm Innovation Community’s core values is transparency and openness and one way we accomplish this is by members using their real names on their profiles (which means in their posts here in this group), at community events, and on community work products (like issues of the ThinkBalm Immersive Internet Storytelling Series and community machinima projects).

Many immersive environments allow people to use names other than their real ones. This is perfectly appropriate when the technology is being used for entertainment. But it is problematic, for our purposes anyway, in the work context.”

This discussion is the third element in a confluence of issues relating to online identity that I’ve been thinking hard about recently, mainly as it relates to my own personal practice.

The position encapsulated by ThinkBalm above suggests (at the extreme) that identity is fixed and monolithic. We have only one, and if you want to act with us in a professional capacity, then we need the label (ie. legal “real life” name) that goes with that identity. (I agreed to these terms when I joined the LinkedIn group, thinking only that it was interesting that they felt the need to be so explicit about it.)

Dusan Writer / Doug Thompson suggests a position that is somewhat more intriguing. That avatar identity (tied to avatar name) is, or rather can be, something different when that name is not tied to any real life name and identity. That the fact of anonymity allows a person to be more creative, innovative, and free from the normative roles that bind us in our everyday “real” lives. (I struggle with what to call real life, but never mind.)

The third stance is that of those who (again at the extreme end) regard themselves at digital people, with an identity that exists purely online. My objection to this is that it also suggests a model of identity that is monolithic (or maybe what both are suggesting is that we have multiple, discrete identities?), but that is just an aside.  Among this admittedly loose category are people like Scope Cleaver, the virtual world architect, who refuse to supply their real life names (credentials?) to the point at which they lose work contracts.

I maintain that it is impossible to be in virtual worlds (more so than just being online and using a proxy name, because of avatarization) and to not have to think about these issues. My own personal practice is quite varied and contradictory.

I have a username (versoe) that I use all over the web, and that is linked to my real name (for example on my delicious account). I have no problem with this, it relates directly to my professional activities. I don’t however use this name anywhere that I wish to be anonymous, and I quite quickly deleted my first Second Life avatar (from mid-2006) that bore this first name.

The avatar I created next (January 2007) was and is anonymous (in other words I supply no information that would allow anyone to identify me in real life, apart from a little very selective seepage). I don’t intend to change that practice. Why? Because it allows me to act unconstrained by expectations….other than the expectations of the people I have become close to in Second Life. Reputation and community = expectations..these don’t go away, in fact I think they are even more powerful in virtual worlds, because that is all we have there. Anonymity is not an opportunity to act without integrity, rather the opposite. Anyway, I digress.

My “work” avatar, mystery Arida was born in Second Life in September 2007. At first I didn’t use the account very much, and didn’t really make any friends when I was online with that identity. That changed as I became active in Second Life in a professional capacity, and began to talk about my virtual world activities at work (showing a (very amateur) machinima I made about the educational uses of Second Life, giving workshops etc). For all of these, I am mystery Arida. My real life identity is tied to this avatar name in a completely open and transparent fashion. I am in Second Life with people that I know and interact with in real life, as well as with those I know only through Second Life, but whose real life identity I also know. (This doesn’t mean that I provide my real life identity to anyone and everyone I meet in Second Life of course.) When I was at the New Media Consortium conference in June this year, my avatar name was on my conference badge, right under my real name…which did feel a little strange I must admit.

I think the point is that I have separated my personal and professional lives in Second Life, in a way that I have always done in my first life.  I sometimes wish that I could merge the two, but really, why would I? Funny, I never think that about my real life…here in the real world we just call it protecting our privacy, don’t we?

There is a lot more to say on this topic, but this will do for now.