A termed coined by Jyri Engeström meaning the ability to have your finger on the pulse of your friends, family, and colleagues. Jyri is a founder of Jaiku a similar service to Twitter, Groovr and Dogdeball, which are ‘micro-blogging’ systems enabling the distribution of short-messages between peers. The result is essentially a stream of life-activity between a network of people. Kathy Sierra on her blog Creating Passionate Users puts this type of service in perspective.
Continuing from Jaiku:
We believe that online social behavior as a whole is moving towards groups who are in a state of constant connectedness. This means shorter, more frequent, more personal updates that assume the recipients already know a lot about the sender and context of the message. The amount of communication increases but it contains less noise because we know more about the context of our peers.
Naturally, at Praxis we always look for the learning angle. We are big believers in learning as a social process and are taking the first steps of integrating basic social networking functions with our Connect section in the new generation of our products.
We would be very interested in hearing ideas on how Twitter-like services might be used to enhance the learning process.
Source: 606 Tech
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Ken Carroll Says:
April 10th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
I agree with Kathy Sierra that this level of connectivity should be used judiciously. Done properly it could be an enormous boost to learning - during fixed sessions where learners are working on the same task, for example. To be connected like that throughout the day, however, with a wide variety of friends or casual acquaintances looks to me very much like a huge distraction that is not conductive to focused learning (or focused anything else).
Is focused learning the only type of learning? I guess we’ll find out. Either way this development resonates very much with the idea of connectivism. It has the aura of the Big Brain in real time - almost thinking collectively and out loud. I think it also resonates with Hank’s ‘network sense’.
Ken Carroll
Michael Butler Says:
April 11th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
My feeling is that in terms of learning there is no need for such intimate and continual connections served up by these kinds of services. In fact, Kathy Sierra also explains the problems associated with always on, instant connectivity quite well.
What is needed in learning are cooperative, constructive, and supportive contacts with other learners. Do these contacts need to be “always on?” Do these learners need to even have personal affection for each other? Do they need to become friends? Do they need to be involved in each others lives?
I don’t think so. One can make a case for consensus and sharing built around a task without assuming that a relationship needs to be built outside of this task based environment.(In fact, if things are working well why risk things by trying to deepen the relationship outside of the context?)
If you can create an environment for cooperation and sharing and give people tasks to work on within a shared framework I see no need to go much further with your tools unless you can do so unobtrusively.
Lantian Says:
April 16th, 2007 at 11:46 pm
DEVICES - I disagree. I think the barrier or gatekeeper here are our devices. Form factors such as the telephone do not make this kind of communication very useful, imagine it beeping constantly with every message.
For brief times during the U.S. internet boom, there was enough funny money for people to put out some crazy devices and networks, and for me to try them. I remember for a period of about a year where I had a ultralight laptop with a battery that lasted the whole day that had 24-7 unlimited wireless internet throughout the Western U.S.
This in essence allowed me to keep in constant contact with my co-workers through email and instant messaging. We were very very productive. The economics of the wireless service weren’t however able to sustain the service.
I also remember in a time prior to that a small Motorola text-pager like device that had a small very useable thumb keyboard. We would stream in stock info, AP news, messages, email, very much like a Blackberry. We had a small team of about 15 people and we made life so much easier for each other because we could share information and communicate at all times. It was great!
The key is being able to regulate your status and negotiating with others expectations about reachability. For example, I would welcome a phone equipped with GPS that showed my friends where I was, as long as I could switch that status on and off at my discretion.
Now to tie this back to learning, how might these kinds of devices help the learning? I think in general the barrier to another language is input, one has to find enough moments in the first-language day to insert the target language.
If a device like this existed on a global scale, one could tap into a constant stream of conversations and input throughout the day. The key however is the ability to filter and status at one’s own discretion.
It’s great to see some new language partners chatting back and forth, but it’s not good if some stranger can constantly ping me or spam me. I don’t see how it could harm the learning if say a class of students all had portable devices where after class there could be in essence a mobile bulletin board of questions, answers and discussion.
If the device allowed seamless instant conferencing, one-to-one communications, and ample data storage, filtering and sorting, why not? Imagine seeing a conversation between two people, being able to highlight the word, pop up a definition and sending it over into your wordbank. That’s learning IN context.
Imagine the device acting like this. A new day starts. A podcast is published and automatically pulled per your previous selection. After some time, others begin to post questions and discussion after having listened to it. These comments appear on the device in a running thread, say some folder. You’re browsing thru the text and see some answer about a word people are discussing. You highlight it and up pops the definition, click to save to Wordbank.
You then insert your earbud and scroll over to the live conversation section, there you basically are in a room where people are actually talking with a teacher. All this audio is actually also being recorded live Tivo like, you’re able to click and set time markers for parts you’d later like to listen to again. A couple other clicks and you can designate a section. You know the part where Jenny says something memorable and you just want to listen to it again and again and again.
Clicking over a few places you then see some messages left for you by some language partners. You speak and respond to some of them.
Since you’re speaking, you figure why not record yourself speaking that day’s podcast dialogue. After recording it, it’s left in an area associated with that podcast, other’s have done the same thing. The fun part is that you can listen and rate other people’s ‘performances’. Ouch. Your recording from yesterday really was hit hard with low ratings. It’s okay, just fun and some speaking practice. Someone however left some nice comments and tips on areas they noticed where your pronunciation was off.
And so on. I just think it’d be wonderful and would make acquisition so fast that we’d forget the days when it was hard.
I haven’t tried the mobile function that they set up over at the Forum, but I think if I was able to RSS the Cpod comments into my phone, it would tremendously free up my day. And especially if I could text back. Maybe the iPhone will allow us to try.