Pageflakes, the BBC and free lunches.

The BBC Internet Blog have for some time been making use of Pageflakes as a tracking tool, using it as a one stop site where they pull together comment and conversation about the BBC. It's quite a good and interesting read. Some of it's a bit parochial, but it is their page. They have made it public, so they must want to share.

It is not only BBC insiders that use the facility, this author is among several who read the flake.
On A Hill has in the past experienced little surges in readership stats when the blog has featured in their Google blog reactions feed.

The BBC are a little upset, concerned, and worried because they have noticed that their PageFlakes page has changed.
New flakes and horror of horrors adverts have appeared.

I went to have a look and have to confess that it took me a while to discover the sponsored flake.
Those of us who spend long periods of time on the Internet do not see adverts. I certainly block them out. They are a nuisance, particularly the flashy ones that vie for attention, but I don't consciously read them.
It may be that they work on me subliminally but I just don't see them. But the fact remains, the BBC sponsored / promoted Pageflakes page is carrying adverts and as we all know the BBC don't do adverts (unless they're advertising their own output).

The BBC are now wondering what's to be done with their Pageflakes page.

I went to look at my Pageflakes, produced as part of a small project I was involved with earlier in the year showcasing Web 2.0 technologies. I also discovered a sponsored flake.

In my case it doesn't matter, my pageflakes were for a small audience (who no longer read the page).
But if my flakes were to be used in the name of the University of Glamorgan, it probably would matter that adverts were appearing on a page linked with our work.
What if I were pulling together environmental feeds and there in the middle of the page appeared an advert for Jaguar cars?

There is no such thing as a free lunch, a free blog, or a free hosted Web 2.0 application.

Recreating the BBC Pageflakes page for private use would not be that difficult for those of us interested in it's content. The feeds could be pulled together on an iGoogle page, in Netvibes, in symbaloo, in SuprGlu, in an ordinary feed reader; the list is endless.

But that's not the point.

If I as a relatively private individual chose to produce a page of feeds related to my interests, say University News Feeds to share with my colleagues I am quite at liberty to use a "free" service such as Pageflakes.
In return I give Pageflakes access to my colleagues, who to Pageflakes are a ready made audience interested in particular topics. But if I then publicise that page to a far wider audience all sorts of problems arise. I wouldn't be at all surprised if such a venture would break some of the University regulations.

The problem faced by the BBC now, is that what was a possibly private internal page of links has been publicised. Perhaps it should have been kept private. Web 2.0 apps are quickly transforming our world but there's always a cost that we don't always see when we come across cutting edge applications. 

I guess the BBC Internet Blog shouldn't have an official Pageflakes page.

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On Obama and Inclusivity.

Driven by my friend Datblogu's interest in this video, I've spent a little more time on Obama's website.

There can be no doubt that Obama works hard to be inclusive.
He has prepared and made available text, video and sound messages aimed at the many different communities and ethnic groups to be found in the United States.

I'm going to list in alphabetical order the people he aims to connect with here :-

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders
African Americans
Americans Abroad
Americans with Disabilities
Arab Americans
European and Mediterranean Americans
Environmentalists
First Americans
Generation Obama
Jewish Americans
Kids
Labor
Latinos
LGBT
People of Faith
Republicans
Rural Americans
Seniors
Small Business
Sportsmen
Students
Veterans and Military Families
Women.

It all seems a bit clinical to me, or am I being too cynical?

My eye was drawn to the Sportsmen, curious as to where the sportswomen were?
I am so dull!
Sport in the USA is not quite the same as sport here.

Obama speaks to the sportsmen.

“I am very mindful of the fact that sportsmen in America may have gone hunting with their fathers, their grandfathers, their mothers, their grandmothers, and that this is part of a tradition and a way of life that has to be preserved. And there's nothing that I will do as president of the United States that will in any way encroach on the ability of sportsmen to continue that tradition.”

No mention of animal rights then :)

On Education Applications, Ipods, Iphones and Stanford.

As was widely predicted the introduction of third party  applications (via  Apple's ITunes store) has enhanced the appeal of the iPod and iPhone. No longer is the iPhone a strictly walled garden. In the same way that gadgets can be placed on the iGoogle desktops, or widgets can be placed on the Mac dashboard, applications can now be placed on both the iPod touch and iPhone.

Applications are neatly filed in the iTunes store under a range of nineteen categories.
The filing system is not that helpful but it is enhanced by the customary "New", "What's Hot" and "Staff Favourites" sections. Eager browsers may also find themselves attracted by the "Top Paid Apps" and "Top Free Apps". Reviews of the applications are provided to help in app choice but as ever  "Caveat emptor" should be the eager shoppers motto.

The list of Education Apps makes for interesting reading. At present it consists of fourteen pages, each carrying twenty one apps! Some of these are free, some are lite (demo versions with limited features) and some cost. The cheapest are 59p, the most expensive I have noticed to date are £23.99.

As I browsed through the store two Ed Apps caught my eye.

 A company called Modality Inc provide "Zollinger's Atlas of Surgical Operation, Gastrointestinal: Upper", which is described as;

"The classic guide to general surgery procedures ... now available for the iPhone and iPod touch ...... Using the intuitive iPhone interface, you can navigate through detailed images with the flick of a finger, pinch to zoom, and tap to read easy to follow instructions for each procedure" !

I am so tempted to purchase one of Modality's products just to see what it looks like.

Here is a company working to embrace the use of mobile technology in teaching and learning. "Modality, we make small screens smarter, The Titles you Trust on the Screens you Love" have a developing range of titles  for medical students and professionals. Also they seem to be preparing to release Cliffs Notes which I remember from my days of studying literature. Impressive stuff. Think how many teenagers / young people / students have ipods/ iphones. If the applications are as good as they appear to be, think of the market!

The second application that caught my eye, was a free one. I came across the 8.4MB of code that is "iStanford" an application that slipped into the store on October 4th.

The application description says;

"iStanford is Stanford University in the palm of your hand.
Search the Stanford directory, search campus map, find and bookmark courses, and get scores, schedules, and news for all Stanford varsity athletics teams. All from your Iphone or iPod touch"

It continues.......

"Coming soon
Register for classes, View your course and grade history (this and previous terms), View your University balance, past statements and transaction history, Login to view private Stanford information"

This I have downloaded, and explored and it is an impressive application. Having explored the Stanford app I searched the web and discovered the following (in no particular order)

• Stanford University IT Services sell the Apple iPhone.
• The iStanford app was produced by TerriblyCleverDesign a student owned development company at Stanford.
• This fall / Autumn in the UK Stanford University are running a taught course / module entitled iPhone Application Programming.
• All of this seems to have been made possible by the iPhone Developer University Program (USA only)
  

I was led to the iTunes App store by my new iPhone, but I'd missed the point. When I first saw the iStanford app my initial question was how many students at Stanford own an iPhone?

It was the wrong question.

The questions we need to ask are

• What applications are we building in the UK for our students?
• What applications are our students building for themselves?
• How quickly could we in the UK introduce a course like the iPhone Programming Course at Stanford?

What's to be done?

On Hi Tech Cheats.

As we slide towards the beginning of a new academic year an interesting article by Moira Sharkey, can be seen in today's Western Mail.

It reports that 1,600 students have been caught cheating at Welsh Universities over the last three years. Most were guilty of plagiarism, some guilty of cheating in exams.

According to the article, over the last three years among Welsh Universities the University of Glamorgan has disciplined the most students. A statistic rightly defended by the University as they take "cheating seriously and work hard to catch the culprits"

As is ever the case, the statistics are incomplete as Welsh Universities have different methodologies and systems for publishing annual records but they do show that Welsh Universities are engaging with and beating plagiarists.

Many students enter University unaware of how academic work is assessed in Higher Education and are often ill prepared for the vast gulf that exists between sixth form and undergraduate life.

Ben Gray (of NUS Wales) comments on this in the article

“NUS Wales recognises that there are huge differences in the way that
higher education is conducted and assessed compared with secondary
education and as such these are issues that student unions across Wales
are assisting institutions in helping students understand the system.”

While NUS Wales should be commended for assisting students understand the University way of thinking, work needs to be done to ensure that schools understand what Higher Education expects and that Universities are perhaps a little more aware of their student's shortcomings.

Many sixth formers (digital natives?) are ill prepared for the rigour of academic essay writing and the associated referencing processes, as they have passed through a school system where the cut and paste mentality of project and course work has been encouraged and endorsed by the actions of their parents, teachers and peers. This is not totally the fault of the schools or the teachers. It is a way of thinking that has been encouraged by the system. Now that course work is being downgraded schools need to do much more to prepare students for University life and Universities need to do more to integrate undergraduates in academic life.

If Higher Education is seen to be actively confronting and disciplining those guilty of cheating, not only will the numbers of those cheating be reduced but public confidence in the quality of Higher Eduction qualifications will be restored.

The figures should be published openly and shared with the current and prospective student
communities, so that it can be seen that Universities deal with cheats. It is quite strange to me that the figures have come to lightas the result of an enquiry from Chris Franks AM.

Perhaps they should be published annually by the WAG, published in University prospectuses
or on University Web sites. They should most certainly be shared with new students during Fresher's weeks.

Of course catching the cheats is one thing, deciding what to do with them is another.

A first year undergraduate caught plagiarising is quite likely to have plagiarised unwittingly or unknowingly. A third year undergraduate or a Master's degree student caught plagiarising is guilty of completely different kind of cheating.

Can you remember hearing of anyone being "sent down" ?

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On the Hair at the End of the Tail

It's been a month since I last posted so it's time to return to the blog with a review of last year.

According to Google Analytics between January 1st 2007 and January 1st 2008, On a Hill received 2,637 visits from 2,207 absolute unique visitors, who between them made 3,957 page views.

My guess is that in the scheme of things that's pretty pathetic, but the statistic makes me smile.
Whether any of my visitors learned anything from On a Hill remains a mystery.
I hope they did.
I on the other hand have gained and learnt much from maintaining this simple blog.

During the last year I made 93 posts and visitors made 24 comments.

The ten most visited pages in order of popularity are listed below.

1. In search of gradatim ferociter
2. Gradatim ferociter
3. On deleting Facebook
4. On Facebook, students and porn
5. On UCAS, plagiarism and pyjamas
6. Gradtim ferociter, the search goes on
7. Problems with Facebook
8. On Facebook Fridays
9. Notes on Facebook
10. On email addiction and statistics

As is ever the case the subject about which I and the world know least remains the most popular. It might be time for me to make another post about Blue Origin and it's enigmatic motto!

45% of my visitors used Firefox, 45% Internet Explorer, and 6% Safari, with the remaining few percent using Opera, Netscape, Camino, Blazer and the curiously named HTC-8100.

72% of my visitors used Windows as an operating system, 24% used Mac, 2% Linux, the rest used AIX, PalmOS, Playstation Portable, SunOS and iPhone.

Visitors came from 96 separate sources with 70% coming via Google, and much smaller percentages of visitors arriving directly from blogger, sitemeter, technorati, computing research at glamorgan, phdweblogs and similar sites.

Geographically America provided the most visitors, followed closely by Europe. Asia, Oceania and Africa followed a long way behind. The figures show that very few visitors came here from South America (I guess that's a language thing) and very very few from Africa which remains the dark continent on my map of visits. The stats show one visit from Aghanistan! Perhaps I should add one of those map widgets to the blog.

It's worth noting that the visitors from the smaller traffic sources (ie everyone except Google) stayed longer and visited more pages per visit.

I guess they really wanted to be here and didn't arrive by accident.

How did you get here?

What Comes Round

Mmmmm.

It appears that some other commentators are beginning to question the usefulness of facebook.

Kevin Anderson pulls together some of the Web conversations about facebook on the Guardian PDA.

Does Facebook live up to the media hype?
I don't think it does, in fact I never really believed that it did.
It's certainly never going going to become a viable alternative to a VLE.

Despite many people's claims about the future of operating systems based on social networking, we would do well to remember this sentence

"Facebook is on the internet, it is not the internet"

On Spam, Google, Curt Bonk and Flying Fish

It's been said that I spend too much time on the Net, so to save time I've been trying out Google Alerts.

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Some handy uses of Google Alerts include: * monitoring a developing news story * keeping current on a competitor or industry * getting the latest on a celebrity or event * keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams

I have a few alerts running, one of which is for the "University of Glamorgan".
To be honest the responses I get for this query are fairly mundane and repetitive but on October 12th. I was intrigued to notice a message which included the following text.

UK E-Learning Reflections: UK leads the way or does it?
Monday the 15th was spent in Wales with a presentation to teachers of the future of ICT and schools at the University of Glamorgan ......

What caught my eye in this instance, is that I was there, I heard the presentation and after the event read the speaker's blog and therefore recognised the posting. (It's true I spend oo much time on the Net)

The speaker was Curt Bonk from Indianna University, the talk took place on January 15th at the University of Glamorgan, Treforest and he blogged about it on January 20th.. The talk was memorable; the speaker threw me a stuffed fish, and the blog made for interesting reading.
Why then, should it appear in a Google alert ten months after the event?

Following the provided link I found myself reading Curt's blog entry again, but this time on an anonymous blog, made of pieces cut and pasted from the net; 23 random articles, copied without reference their original source.
Examination of the page reveals that each article has been tampered with and links to commercial sites added.

It's spam!

The problem here is that I nearly fell for it.
The spam came courtesy of Google.
Google Alerts sent me the link.

Reader beware!

PS. (added 17.10.07)
My most recent Google alert message arrived yesterday informing me that this post existed!

If I were to adjust the settings on my alerts it would be interesting to explore how long it takes for an alert to be sent.
I'm just curious.

On David Cameron, Facebook and life

Earlier this week David Cameron (bless) spoke to the party faithful at Blackpool. In a well received speech he mentioned the Internet saying

"We live in an extraordinary world of change and freedom. The Internet is transforming people's lives. The website MySpace has got 130m members. If it was a country, it would be the tenth biggest country in the world. Facebook, the social networking site, 30m members.

People are using it to talk with each other and meet people. I had a look the other day. There is a network on Facebook called 'David Cameron is a hottie'. It's got 74 members. And I looked a little further and there is another network called 'Am I the only person who doesn't like David Cameron?' and it's got 379 members - I am sure there is nobody here today. But the point is a serious one."

He's so right, "the Internet is transforming people's lives" yet Cameron, his speech writers, his advisers and his party so obviously don't understand it. He describes MySpace as a website and Facebook as a social network as if they were in someway different. He has explored Facebook, or someone has shown him around, yet he made no mention finding things of interest in MySpace. Remember danah writing about American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace?

He tells us that there is a network called "David Cameron is a hottie" and another called "Am I the only person who doesn't like David Cameron?" (facebook membership required), In telling his Conference (and us) of these networks he aims to impress but fails, revealing in fact that neither he nor his advisers understand how Facebook works. The networks he describes are not networks they are groups of little importance. I find it hard to understand how belonging to a group of like minded people who think that David Cameron is a hottie might "transform my life".

Networks lie at the heart of Facebook's structure, originally based on colleges networks have expanded and are now consist of geographical regions, colleges, workplaces and High Schools. Within these networks members join groups (such as those described by Cameron) often directly related to their personal interests.

A brief glance at these groups shows that conversation here is limited. Indeed to the members it is the belonging to the group that matters. I suspect that many Facebook users place or choose groups for their profile in the same way as train spotters might sport lapel badges or a WAG might leave books scattered on a coffee table.

Observers of Mr. Cameron on the Web or at his Conference might be persuaded of his digital credentials. I am not so sure. In Prensky's terms Cameron's words tell us that he is more of a digital immigrant than a digital native.

He is of course not alone, in every workplace, every classroom, every lecture theatre, every Faculty we constantly encounter those who would have us believe that their understanding of our digitally connected world is much more advanced than our own. Their voices are often strident, loud, and convincing but we need to take care that we are not led astray. Remember the story of the Emperor's New Clothes?

There was another speech much reported at Blackpool this week, 'the quiet man spoke'. Firmly embedded in the real world, he reminded the conference that

“You cannot love your country if you do not care for its beating heart, the people who live in this country"

Whatever our personal enthusiasm for the wonders of the Internet or Web 2.0 might be, those of us who are or were teachers, need to remember that all our work must be grounded in the real world, with real students in real groups and communities.

On Facebook, students and porn.

While its no big deal, I noticed something interesting on my facebook home page. I was looking at the news feed showing popular posted items in the University network.

Top of the list is a link to a popular soft porn image gallery.

What can we deduce from this I wonder?

Think of the offence such a clearly visible link could cause to some.
We all know that the Internet has some pretty murky corners; after all it reflects the real world. Some members of the network think the link worthy of posting.
But in our classrooms, our lecture theatres, and computer labs we can't allow ourselves to be party to illuminating those corners for our students.

The University PLE wouldn't carry such a link.

Should Facebook be the platform through which students will access class discussion groups? I'm not sure.

On Google Docs, Commoncraft and dotSUB

Although I do very little collaborative work I can see the value of Google Docs.
There can be no doubt that those involved in group activities would find the ability to share and work on documents on line useful.

Lecturers might want to bring Google Docs to the attention of their students, and possibly explore the application themselves to facilitate the preparation of papers for departmental, university and wider audiences.

The commoncraft team have produced an excellent video, describing clearly and simply how Google Docs works.
Watch it.

Regular readers would not be surprised to read that I would be careful about the sort of documents that I might place in Google's care. It might not be the place for highly sensitive, controversial or valuable documents. On the other hand documents placed in Google's care might be more secure than those left on lost and stolen laptops or on the hard drives of second hand computers.


As a result of reading the commoncroft blog I have been introduced to dotSUB, a Web 2.0 application that provides an easy way for videos to be translated into a wide range of languages by the use of subtitles.

Its very clever, simple to use and should be noted by those who work in bilingual and multilingual countries.

On deleting facebook

As my cynicism about facebook grows I have been so pleased to come across this post from Brian Heys writing about "How to delete your facebook account".
(update 18.01.08 I'm not certain this link works anymore)

Good advice, but remember should you decide to close your facebook, it is deactivated; which I guess means that all your data, your profile, etc. etc. will be preserved for when you realise the folly of your ways and want your friends back.
It will also be preserved for facebook to access as they see fit.

I'm not certain if deactivating an account is the same as removing user content?
Reading the terms of use we discover that....

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

Returning to the book to reactivate a dormant account should be easy.
I might try deactivating my account and returning to see what happens.

I wonder do Facebook include dormant accounts in their user numbers?
Remember the doubts about Second Life statistics?

Update. 14.02.08.
Facebook introduce choice between deactivation and deletion

On the TUC, Academics and Facebook.

Back in August Facebook changed.

As everyone knows, in its original form Facebook was a social networking website for American students. Members were linked via networks based around universities. As it spread globally membership was restricted to those with an .edu, .ac.uk type email address. Later networks were developed for High Schools and some businesses. Late in 2006 membership was opened to anyone with an email address.

In its original form The Facebook carried an application called Courses, this brought together students following the same course and made it possible for students to identify and contact their peers (invaluable for students popular courses). Keen observers of Facebook will have noticed that this application has disappeared, has been withdrawn, is no more.

A mention of its withdrawal can be found in the Facebook blog.

"The initial version of the Courses application was created by Facebook to give you as much functionality as possible. As of today, we're turning off our version of Courses and have decided to turn this over to the developer community and let you – our users – decide which Courses application works best for you. In many ways, our developer community is the best suited to create the applications that help people connect, track, and collaborate with their teachers, professors, and classmates. Many of our developers are in school and have used some kind of collaboration software. Their experiences make them the ideal creators of useful education applications."

I'm not convinced by this argument. Really what Facebook are saying here is we've grown and changed, many members don't come from college networks, so the Course application is no longer part of our core mission.

It's somewhat ironic that as HE academics take an interest in Facebook, Facebook begins to distance itself from it's roots.

Back in August the TUC issued advice for employers and their staff.
Should we be discussing these issues with students?

Our American colleagues have much more experience of Facebook as a learning tool. These slightly dated notes from Unit Structures may be of use.
Should we be discussing these issues with academics?

On Facebook, public search listings and friends

On entering Facebook yesterday I noticed that I was being invited to check out my public search listing.

I didn't know I had one!

It seems that Facebook is changing.



My Public Search Listing will be available not only from the welcome page but soon through search engines like Google (sic)

My public search listing means that "friends" who aren't yet on Facebook will be able to search for me from Facebook's front page. In a week or two these listings will be available in Google et al. Once again our understanding of the word friend is stretched. It now seems to include anyone, friend or foe, who might be connected to the Internet.

Anyone who discovers me who is not already a member of Facebook will have to join if they want to contact me...which will still leave me in control of any contact but also makes me link bait for Facebook, and Facebook little more than a telephone directory.

Which means that I might want to be ex directory.

Which reminds me of this observation by Tom Coates.

The BBC report this story here.


I'm really not sure I understand Facebook.

On the end of Summer!

As the summer draws to a close it is time for me to return to The Hill.



Time to return to academic reading, writing and my research.
Time to reflect and write.

During the summer much has happened, World Blog Day happened and it passed me by.



On August 31st participating bloggers linked to five new blogs, "different from their own culture, point of view and attitude," so that "on this day, blog readers will find themselves leaping around and discovering new, unknown Blogs, celebrating the discovery of new people and new bloggers."

Imagine my surprise to return to my blog to discover that my blog had been linked.

Mr.Harrington blogging teacher at Ddraig Goch blog, was good enough to give me a mention. His mention brought me extra traffic (not much, but some) and a comment!

Comments happen rarely On the Hill. Visitors often leave nothing but footprints (and a time stamp at my stat counter). They lurk! I cannot complain as I do the same. Perhaps during the next academic year I should make an effort to stop lurking.

I have mixed feelings about comments, but I am glad that Jennifer and Mr. Harrington left comments, for not only did they lead me to Ddraig Goch and ThinkTime , they have led me to reflect upon the importance of comments (which may feature in next term's blogging project.)

As Mr. Harrington, knows in a primary school ideally every piece of work undertaken by pupils is commented upon by the teacher. Good work is shared and celebrated. Our first year undergraduates are not unlike primary pupils, they need instant positive feedback. If we require them to blog for us, we need to participate, to comment to involve ourselves in their work. Furthermore we need to encourage them to read one another's work and comment.

Difficult.

As a result of reading ThinkTime today I have been introduced to TagCrowd. This is such a clever application. It creates tag clouds from text typed, pasted or uploaded into the tool at their web site. The resulting cloud provides a visual analysis of the text based on word frequencies. I've tried it out with the text of this post.

academic analysis around based blog bloggers celebrated cloud comments creates ddraig discover discovery encourage extra glad goch happened harrington hill importance instant linked lurk mention mr ourselves participate people primary provides pupils reading reflect result return stamp stat summer teacher text thinktime tool traffic undergraduates upon view work writing year

created at TagCrowd.com

What have I been writing about?

On statistics (again!)

Lee Le Fever at Common Craft Blog (the people that brought us the outstanding RSS in Plain English and Wikis in Plain English videos) points at some interesting statistics produced by Harris Interactive for Wet Paint an American wiki company.

"16% of the US online population is familiar with what a wiki is.
Even if you just look at the online trendsetters (18-34 year olds), only 27% of those online users are familiar with wikis.
Blogs, which have universal awareness among nearly anyone reading this post, are only familiar to 35% of online users. And familiarity with social networks as a category still ranks below that of online forums at 28% and 35% respectfully.
For context, consider that 76% of the same population know of search engines and 97% of toilet paper."

These figures are confusing.

Given the hype and publicity around wikipedia, how is it that the wiki recognition figure is so low?
How can it be that only 76% of the same population know of search engines?
What context does that provide?

My informal observations of students and academics confirm what Lee suggests.

"We're making assumptions about what people understand about our online world. There is more misunderstanding than understanding and more confusion than solution."

Where are the digital natives?
Not in my college!

On Blogging

Here's an insightful quotation from the Wired Blogs.

"Blogging is not about making friends, it’s about expressing yourself truthfully and in the process providing some hitherto unforeseen insight into an important issue or topic of the day. If you make friends, that's a bonus. Real blogging is about shedding the politics and letting it all hang out. Sometimes that honesty yields less than enjoyable results, but other times the honesty of certain blog posts can inspire us all into action or thinking about important issues in a different light."

(via Scripting News)

On Danah, Facebook and Wales.

Danah at apophenia has written an excellent blog essay, (a rough work in progress paper) which she has called "Viewing American Class Divisions through Facebook and MySpace."

Its an excellent read, far better than many of the press articles describing its contents.

Regular readers of Danah's blog are I think aware of the way she works. She finds her own observations "disconcerting". It is interesting to note how many of those who commented on her thoughts, choose to criticise her rather than her observations which suggest that

"Hegemonic American teens (i.e. middle/upper class, college bound teens from upwards mobile or well off families) are all on or switching to Facebook. Marginalized teens, teens from poorer or less educated backgrounds, subculturally-identified teens, and other non-hegemonic teens continue to be drawn to MySpace. A class division has emerged and it is playing out in the aesthetics, the kinds of advertising, and the policy decisions being made."

I need time to think about her observations as I'm not certain how her theories might translate to the UK, or to Wales. I'm not convinced that the urge to Facebook or MySpace is as central to UK student life as it is in America, but it is growing. In the last week I've noticed several relatively prominent Welsh bloggers writing about the use of Facebook by politicians (locally and nationally) and by journalists seeking copy.

Here are a set of notes made by a blogger who heard Danah speak at Harvard.
The blog provides a good example of how a blog can be used to present notes taken at a lecture, seminar or tutorial.

Out of curiosity I've explored Facebook this morning and looked at the regional and college statistics for Wales. These figures are correct as of today.

The WALES network has 65,952 members.

In hierarchical order the college networks (in Wales) have the following numbers of members.

Cardiff, 15,104
Swansea, 6,447
Aber, 5,995
Bangor, 4,145
Uni Glam, 2,243
UW Institute Cardiff, 1,653
UW Newport, 716
Swansea IHE, 481
Lampeter, 469
Trinity, 333
RW College of Music and Drama, 332
NEWI, 356

A total of 38,274 facebook memberships.
(How many students are there in Wales?)
(How old are these networks?)

To make sense of these figures, some statistical work will be required to show the number of facebook memberships as a percentage of the student population of each of the colleges, as we are not really comparing like with like here. (I suspect that Cardiff on Facebook includes the College of Medicine.)

I wonder if I can find similar figures for Bebo or MySpace?

On Cat Blogging, Self and Authority

Stephen Downes' observations on "Cat Blogging" are important and have made me return and think more of our recent experiment in undergraduate blogging.

While our students were keeping blogs I have no doubt that some of the most thoughtful reflective observations on personal learning came from those students who were able to "reveal something of themselves". It was through their writing about self that their understanding of personal learning emerged.
The students who told us little or nothing about themselves tended to be those whose blog entries simply reported what had been done.
Conversely there were those who wrote much about themselves but little about their learning.

What did Socrates say?

In the blogosphere and in print media we come across many who write with authority but tell us little about themselves. We often need to ask the question "who says?"
Read this little article from last Sunday's Independent.
"Birds and bees are hit by phone waves"

What questions do you want to ask? Here are mine.

• What reports?
• Who claims?
• Who is Debi Jones? an authority on bees, birds, mobile phones, electrosmog?

Now read this little article (via Kottke) on "The Dangers of Bread"

Scared?

Counting Academics

Dysg points to statistics about Higher Education in Wales.
Readers of this blog might be interested to note that:-

"In 2005/06 there were 17,705 staff at Welsh publicly funded HEIs, 525 more than in 2004/05.

Cardiff University employed most staff (5,685), more than double the next largest - the University of Glamorgan (2,065), University of Wales Aberystwyth (2,015), University of Wales Bangor (1,830) and University of Wales Swansea (1,640).

Less than a half - 8,150 staff - were recorded as academic professionals."

Interesting, for every academic post there is at least one non academic.
I wonder would it be worth making such a comparison for FE, secondary or primary education.