Accidental Pedagogy

For Bastille Day

Using social network tools in conferences - backchannels

danah boyd just tweeted a link to a blog post in which she rants in a thoughtful (and funny) way about changing patterns of interacting at conferences. The psot is well worth a read. 

Her rant was sparked by essentially being told off for using online tools during a talk. her argument is that these tools help her understand better - by being able to look things up, ask questions to Twitter and even translate. And yes sometimes they contribute to not paying attention. But so do doodling, and some times even asking questions.

She sees a cultural divide between those of us who use tools this way and those who dont. She seems to be pointing to these differences being an age thing but I really dont think they are.

the use of things like Twitter at conferences does seem to engender a weird sort of response in people. A couple of months ago a colleague posted a link to a really bad piece of research about the use of Twitter at conferences. the research was bad but the interesting thing was the quite vehement response of his friends. Most seemed incredibly put out at the concept of tweeting at conferences, describing it as being "rude" and as "changing the dynamic." I was dumbfounded. A few of us tried to push back in comments about the value of conference twittering but to no avail.

There is something in this.

What big blueberries you have!

From Alan Wolf, more of his photos here

Optical and audio illusions

Can you have an audio illusion - somehow when I say illusion I associate that with seeing things. But the dictionary says that it means an erroneous mental representation.

And there have been a lot of them doing the rounds of the web lately.

In terms of optical illusions there was this great illusion showing the break of a curveball.

And now via Presurfer is an amazing audio illusion. Listen to it and then hit replay and listen to it again.

AMAZING Audio Illusion - Funny bloopers are a click away

It will sound like the scale continues to rise, but it doesnt't. Weird.

Interesting Links

1. Sixty Symbols

Via Kottke, the folks at the University of Nottingham who brought us the Periodic table of Videos now bring us a collection of small videos explaining the 60 major symbols used in physics and astronomy. It's a really neat way of presenting things. I wonder how well they get used. In some other sorts of similar projects I have heard accounts of people not really getting into re-use of the pithy little talking head appraoch. But the way these are presented and collected may mean that these work better.

2. Weblog as Personal Thinking Space
A slideshare of a talk Lilia Efimova gave on weblogs as personal thinking space. There has been a lot of talk about blogs being egocentric and in the sense that it is usually something of a one way conversation, that may be true. But in this talk Lilia captures another way that blogs also work, a way that I find very useful. 

3. Streams not blogs
One of those arguing that we need dialogue not monolog or blogs is Jay Cross of informal learning fame. He gives a typically thoughtful explanation of the shift that he feels happening away from blogs and towards Twitter and aggregatoirs like Posterous and FriendFeed. Some interesting pushback in the comments from Alan Levine and others. 

4. Bad charts. Example no. 875
What we have here is a failure to communicate. A beautiful explanation from Junk Charts of why a spectacularly awful set of charts from the London Times is in fact so awful.  

5. Great Shop Names
A little photo essay from Guy Kawasaki on stores in Edinburgh with great names, including Thistle Do Nicely and Well Hung. 

Blame it on the Banjo and Violin - The Audrey's

Listening to music as I get down to work - really the only way that I can get it donw. This song just came on, by the Audrey's out of Australia. I heard and saw them live for the first time lying on a bed in a hotel room in Austin, TX. They were doing a gig in the private showcase (or fringe festival) at the North American Folk festival. There were maybe 4-5 other people in the room. They blew me away and it's no surprise they've achieved great things in Australia.

Procratinating with Post-Its

A great stop motion video, and a subject to which I can strongly relate.

I wrote this song, today, and yet they pay me no royalties. I think I'll sue

Getting over an attack of grumpiness.

A miscellany of good stuff

I thought I would post a bunch of quick links here instead of burdening my friends with them. Plus this way I know I can find them later.

1. A neat interactive graph from the New York Times on economic cycles

2. A critique of structurelessness, especially with regard to unconferences that seem to be all the rage these days. I will write more about this later. And it is time to start working on another list of really annoying phrases in academic technology.

3.  An account of the big brouhaha at the journal Political Theory.  As a recovering political scientist I am naturally a bit interested (plus as a grad student I knew and took the odd course with Mary Dietz). But as a general case it shows the dangers of corporate control of academic journals. A bit troubling.

4. And via Stephen Downes Desire2Learn just sued Blackboard for a Declaratory Judgment Action. Go read the blog.

Late Update

5. The dangers of extrapolating

The bad technology research two-step

Bad research about technology use really get's my goat. But in the case of many technologies used in higher education or by young people (e.g. Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter) we get what I think of as the bad technology research two step. First you get poorly thought out or executed research and then it is poorly reported or sensationalized in the press.

We've seen this two step performed many times. Not long ago we had Facebook and poor grades (see here and a later, slightly more sober account here) and whether or not to Tweet at academic conferences (see here). All somewhat shaky preliminary research seized on by a press that seems either unwilling or unable to read it critically, but very willing to sensationalize the results.

My latest gripe is about some research done on the personalities of people who contribute to Wikipedia. I first came across this in a blog post by Nicholas Carr titled "The Sour Wikipedian." According to Carr,

Forget altruism. Misanthropy and egotism are the fuel of online social production. That's the conclusion suggested by a new study of the character traits of the contributors to Wikipedia. A team of Israeli research psychologists gave personality tests to 69 Wikipedians and 70 non-Wikipedians. They discovered that, as New Scientist puts it, Wikipedians are generally "grumpy," "disagreeable," and "closed to new ideas."

Hmm. It's worth taking a look at the original article (and I'd bet you dollars to doughnuts that most of the people who wrote about the report didn't even though it's quite short and there aren't a lot of complicated statistics or anything).  I am assuming that when the report talks about Wikipedia members they mean contributors rather than users but they never really say.

So the first step of the two-step. Weak research.  There is a lot to pick at in the article but I will start with the method and specifically the sample. Under the section titled Method we have a total of 165 words - and that's including titles. Most of that is about the questionnaire's the researchers used. What we are told is the following

"One hundred and thirty-nine subjects participated in the
study (86 men and 54 women), of which 69 were active
Wikipedia members (85.5% men compared with 14.5%
women). Average age of participants was 26 years (SD 7.6),
the average age of the Wikipedia users was 25 years (SD 2.9),
and the average age of non-Wikipedia users was 27 years
(SD 10.2). The data were collected via online questionnaires."

139 people in the sample, total? Of which 69 were Wikipedia contributors? As of today Wikipedia tells me that they've had 282,886 contributors. So we're looking at a very very small sample. I would be interested to know how they calculated that that was an ok sample size to go with. At the moment I am not very confident. Some more questions,

• What kinds of Wikipedia contributors were these. There is a big variation in levels of contribution between users. Were they heavy contributors, or only occasional contributors. What sorts of things did they contribute to?
• Where was the study done? i am assuming Israel, but we are never really told but surely that would make a fairly big difference. Do the questionnaires they use work cross-culturally? Can we really extrapolate from Israeli contributors to other nations, and vice versa.
• How many questionnaires did they send out? what was there return rate? How did they find the users?

I could go on but will spare you. There are a bunch of other questions one might ask  for example about the questionnaires.

But in many ways I don't want to dwell on the research. Most research (especially of this type) has its flaws and it's best to think of it as a contribution to a conversation. Through this conversation we make progress in our knowledge.  And besides, the the second stage of the bad research two-step is more insidious. As you read the article you wonder where Carr and others got their information. The major finding of the article is that contributors to Wikipedia locate their "real me" on the Internet ie they feel more comfortable expressing themselves online.

They did find that members scored lower on agreeableness and openness and their hypothesis that Wikipedia members would score lower on measures of extroversion was partially confirmed. They then suggest that "it may be that the prosocial behavior apparent in Wikipedia is primarily connected to egocentric motives, such as personal expression, raising self-confidence and group identification." (italics mine)

But from these rather measured and modest findings we get from commenters like Carr and the New Scientist that if you contribute to Wikipedia you must be misanthropic and egotistical and grumpy and closed to new ideas. That sounds a lot like me, especially when I am thinking about the bad technology research two-step, and I don't even contribute to Wikipedia.

People who report on the findings of research on technology do need to develop a basic critical ability and research literacy. Among other things they need to identify and report on the limits of the research and not make sweeping statements that distort the actual findings.