Gaming & Learning

8) Ratings system
Now, this may sound a little bit over the edge for some folks, but if someone is a known “spammer,” I don’t want to have to figure it out. If a person has never had a bad “report” of spam is important to me. So, I guess a “satisfaction rating” or something of the sort would be nice like they have on ebay. A non-pest rating? ;-)

While the “rating” of people’s habits might be over the edge, we should at least be able to do it with apps. Right now, the app writers have all of the power. If an app is unethical or has a problem (like Beacon), when I’m asked to install it, it should give me some “customer reviews” and star ratings like Amazon does. (Apps have fans, but not when you’re looking at the add screen.) Then, the best apps rise up and the not so great can be cast off like an old shoe.

Author: Vicki Davis, TechLearning, 7th December 2007

[More to come soon.]

Full article available here.

7) Personalization

If you can’t customize your background and a little bit about your own page, then it is frustrating. Graphics may be taxing on the server (and hard on the eyes sometimes), however it would be nice to customize Facebook an itsy bitsy bit without having the garish look of many myspace pages. (I think Ning does a pretty good job of this. If you look at our global collaborative Flat Classroom Ning, you’ll see most students do customize their pages.)

My students came up with this one today when I talked to them about this post. That was their #1 complaint w/ facebook. And although they like myspace, it is easy to get “tacky” quickly they say.

And should I be able to customize the look of my page depending upon their connection type?

Author: Vicki Davis, TechLearning, 7th December 2007

[More to come soon.]

Full article available here.

6) Level of access
I get frustrated with this one. Someone wants me to add them and I have to decide if they get to see the limited profile or the full information. And suppose I get closer, I don’t usually remember to “promote” them.

If (social) networks implemented connection types as proposed in item 1 above, then I’d like to say, “OK this person is a blog reader” and then automatically set the settings for what they see with me. This sounds like the same as #1 but its not.

Right now on facebook, you say two things 1) How you know a person and 2) What level of access do they have to your account, limited or full. For me, I’d like Question #1 to determine #2 and I want it to be the same for everyone so I can be consistent. I don’t want mistakes. My family’s safety depends on it.

Author: Vicki Davis, TechLearning, 7th December 2007

[More to come soon.]

Full article available here.

5) Multi Purpose Contact and Activity Management

Many students say, I don’t know if I can use facebook at school b/c I’ll be distracted by my social life. So, perhaps I could log in and say,

“OK, right now I’m working. And when I’m working, I only want to see this sort of activity. Activity for my job, my network of professionals, and my intimate family.”

and then on the weekend

“OK, right now, I’m not working, I”m going to rock the house. I want to link up with my family and friends and forget that 9-5 work stuff!”

But, if its super urgent, perhaps certain types of people could “nudge” me.It is the mix of work and social that causes many of the problems that we have. I want to plan family vacations and encourage family members, however, if my sister his having a hard time and I leave her a message that “I hope things go better with that jerk of a boss” and she’s using her facebook for mostly work, then I’ve just made a mess for dear old sis!

I know that this will be hard, but goodness knows, it is what I and all of my students want to do! They want to talk with me about summer assignments but NOT about their Friday night plans.

It is about social networks.

Author: Vicki Davis, TechLearning, 7th December 2007

[More to come soon.]

Full article available here.

4) Better Group Search

After getting on facebook, I had some friends ask if there was an edublogger group and I looked and couldn’t find one, so I created one. We now have over a hundred members. Oh, but oops, there was one listed under philosophy with the same name!!!! — it is because I typed “edublogger” and the name of the group was something like “edubloggers.” When I started to create a group with the same name, I wish it would have told me.

OH, and there is global edubloggers too. The search app should have caught it!

Nothing New Under the Sun
There is a growing frustration among us Web 2.0 educators with duplication of efforts. Why can’t we work together? Why did we do all this and realize that others were already doing it?

It is a frustration. So, if a platform facilitates groups, we need to be able to make sure we’re not duplicating things. A more robust search and notification system needs to be in place before we create a group that is already there. We go from elated pride in creating something new to frustration that we wasted our time and that of our friends.

Author: Vicki Davis, TechLearning, 7th December 2007

[More to come soon.]

Full article available here.

“What if you could broadcast learning at will via the Internet to a world of learners? How would that change your conception of learning? What if you could interact with people, not only face to face in your workshop, but also halfway around the world? What if your workshop participants could participate in a conversation with those virtual participants, all of them discussing the broadcast learning going on? Pretty exciting, no?

I still remember my first exposure to broadcast learning technologies now available via the Internet. The power of pro-sumers, individuals who create as well as consume…but instead we might call them “prolearners,” as Vicki Davis suggests — learners who not only are docile consumers of knowledge, but also active creators of it.

FlashMeeting screenshot with Paul Harrington in the foreground.

My adventure began quite simply one day at work. On October 11, 2007, I had the opportunity to “sit-in” on Vicki Davis’ UStream session on Wikis. The session was announced via Twitter, an instant messaging tool that allows you to follow what hundreds of others — in my case, educators — are doing. Someone shared the link and I was off to see this new broadcast learning technology. It was a lot of fun listening in on that workshop. I got a real sense of being there, even though the only person I could see was Vicki. Sometimes she was on screen, sometimes she wasn’t. I also had fun tracking the backchannel conversation going on; the backchannel was a conversation about Vicki’s presentation available via Twitter.”

Copyright © 2008 Education WorldAuthor: Miguel Guhlin, Education World®, 14th March 2008

Full article available here.

3) Language filter / Ratings System

I just don’t want to see certain words. I don’t want to be asked to join a group with the F word in it. (And I don’t mean the word “fun” there.) So, if a person or group chooses to list smut or (god forbid) change their group name on me so that it shows in my profile, I won’t have to unsubscribe on it, my settings will do it for me. If someone tries to post a “bad word” on my wall, it will say, “Oops, this page is rated G” and not allow it.

Some of the problems that people have is that things get posted on their page and it could be a lie but its there. And they don’t check their “walls” and notice to delete it. Guilt by association.

Or in the case of my students, they say that they don’t want to make enemies of their friend when they delete it. It shouldn’t be a complete moral discussion when someone posts something that is not acceptable to another. We have different levels of tolerance for those things. We should be able to rate our pages. (Now, wouldn’t this help with filtration 2.0?)

And why couldn’t we set these ratings by connection type? My professional life is rated G, college buddies PG-13, and maybe my discussions with my handsome husband might be rated X? (just kidding, but you get my point.)

Author: Vicki Davis, TechLearning, 7th December 2007

[More to come soon.]

Full article available here.

2) Adding appropriate apps

I enjoy networking on facebook and communicating, however, I don’t want to be bitten by a vampire nor do I have time to play scrabulous. And to be asked to install these apps on an ongoing basis is a little bothersome. In the rush of everyone and their brother to build apps, sometimes, I just don’t have the time to be bitten and super poked!

So, how do we delineate apps that are gaming apps and say… don’t allow invitations to gaming apps to be delivered to me? Can’t the apps have categories and I express my interest in categories of apps to handle some of that for me as sort of a prefilter?

Kill App Spam
Or, we have a way to filter e-mail spam that if someone has sent it to more than a certain number of people, don’t deliver it to me. Can’t we say, “If someone has sent the app to more than 5 people, I DON’T WANT IT!!!”

It’s App spam. Keep the spam in the can! But newcomers can’t help it when they don’t know better! (I mean, how can you tell a newcomer has e-mail, they start sending hundreds of forwards that they probably never read! It is the same with newbies in facebook.)

Author: Vicki Davis, TechLearning, 7th December 2007

[More to come soon.]

Full article available here.

I’ve been enjoying facebook and learning about social networking since Thanksgiving. I think that there are some things that need to happen in facebook and other social networks before we can head over there en masse and use it as the nexus of our life’s network.

(Author’s Note: From this point on, I’ll write (social) network to denote the network of the future because I believe it is about networks for everything not just social.)

Until they fix these things, we will continue to see news articles as people make a melting pot of their work and social lives that was never intended to be and is not what people really want.

1) Multiple connection types

Finding me

On social networks, you’re either unfindable, hidden except for your face, or you’re naked!

What I mean is this:

There are basically 3 flavors of access icecream on facebook:
1) No access (unfindable)
2) Limited Access (just your face)
3) Full Access (you’re naked, well, not literally if you’re smart.)

Additionally, I can remove my picture and name listing from the main facebook search, but then I cannot be found.

I’m either lost or WAY TOO FOUND!

Friend of a Friend, or is it?
Now for me, I’m facebooking professionally but I’m also finding family and friends so here is the inherent problem in this.

I have 100 or so readers of my blog as facebook friends, but I also have my cousins in there. I might really want you to read all of my information, but do I want you to know who my cousins are?

Or my husband?

Or next year, my children?

And I might want to talk to them about some private family stuff, but should that show up for you to read?

You get a window to my family, a window I might not want you to have.

Daughter of a Blogger not Friend of a Friend

For then, you can say,

“Hey, Vicki’s first cousin, Vicki told me to add you.”

And then they add without asking and “Bam!,” there is a link there I might not want. My cousin assumes “any friend of yours is a friend of mine.” However, you’re not my close friend, you’re a reader of my blog. And there is a difference! So, it is not really, friend meet friend. It is blog reader meet cousin. Or blog reader meet child of blog writer. And I have a problem with that!!!

So, for me, I might want something that looks like this:

• Professional Network
• Social Network
• Community Network (my hometown)
• Classroom Network
• Family Network

And yours may look totally different. I don’t know why there can’t be a method to set several different connection types. Then, you can add friends to one group, or another, or all of them. I mean what if Leo Laporte or Robert Scoble actually wanted to use facebook to connect with their friends. They can’t! (I mean, can’t famous people really use this stuff to make their lives better?)

I’m not my student’s friend

We’re going to have to use a private group on facebook for me to communicate w/ my students. They don’t want to add me as a “friend” and honestly, I really don’t want to add them as a “friend” either. I’m not their friend, I’m their teacher. There is a professionalism I have when dealing with them and I’m not their friend nor do I want that implication. Plus, there would be something about my daughter’s math teacher being on her myspace friends list.

(Don’t get me wrong, I love them. I enjoy being with them, but I am still an authority figure in their lives and not involved in their social lives.)

However, I do want to communicate with them on facebook (particularly for summer assignments.) And I cannot.

Until social networks realize that we cannot divide our lives up into three or four levels of connection, they will be limited and continue to have criticism from educational groups. (Which is often well intended but misguided.)

One (social) network doesn’t fix all. There are problems when we mix things, however facebook and myspace are simply too popular to say that “Oh, I’ll use facebook for social and then ning for professional.” What if someone is only available on facebook and doesn’t do the “ning thing.”

And what happens when Granny joins myspace and she wants to date!? We need networks!

Note: Now, the Open Social standard is supposed to help us move our profile and settings from place to place, but their remains the fact that if one person we want to connect with professionally is only on Facebook and not Linked in, that we’ll have to connect on facebook even if we use that for family. So, I don’t know that Open Social will solve this problem.

Author: Vicki Davis, TechLearning, 7th December 2007

[More to come soon.]

Full article available here.

Author: Adam Metz, T.H.E. Journal, 20th February 2008

“… for educators who are champions of new technologies, getting any kind of social media program going in schools is a serious challenge. A significant portion of districts ban even the tamest forms of social media. So just to get started, you’ll need to find ways to broach the subject without scaring off stakeholders. That means focusing on the form of social media right for your school; tying a social media program into learning objectives; and finding the right ways to break the ice with administrators, IT/technology directors, and other teachers.”

See article: http://www.thejournal.com/articles/22060