Is Google Facebook Making Us Stupid?
By RR | May 22, 2010
We all know that Facebook is everywhere. And most of us know that the company has been challenged on its privacy policies and it use of personal information. But sometimes I have a slightly broader concern with the popularity of the social networking giant: I think it may be dumbing down the web–and the web user.
Here is what I mean: we are entering the downhill slope of the 2.0 revolution–the changes in the structure and functionality of the web exemplified by YouTube, Wikipedia, and yes, Facebook. The 2.0 idea–namely, that users create and organize content through huge, interwoven social networks–is being seriously challenged by the unchecked growth of Facebook. Facebook wants to be the web, in the same way that Google is virtually synonymous with being online. Facebook, in other words, wants people to say, “Where’s that restaurant again? I’ll Facebook it. ” Or perhaps more ridiculously, “I’m Facebooking my article right now.” (see my recent post on the new Microsoft/Facebook partnership).
The trouble with this is that Facebook is crowding out other innovative 2.0 companies as it gobbles up more and more user experiences. Why keep a blog any more? All of your friends and family members (in other words, the people who actually read your blog) are on Facebook already. Just post a note there. Why upload your photos to Flickr, the photo sharing site whose features far exceed those offered by Facebook, when your photos have a much better chance of being seen at Facebook?
Part of the idea of web 2.0 was that users can create a highly customizable web experience with absolutely no coding experience. This experience went something like this: go to WordPress, start a blog, add a blogroll, embed your video from YouTube, publish your podcast, syndicate your feed, and alert your friends and family. Now, the idea of web 2.0 is this: Facebook.
The dominance of Facebook–and the limited user experience that results–is somewhat akin to the Apple experience. A life-long Windows user, I’ve switched to a Macbook Pro. I really like the computer, don’t get me wrong. In fact, I still can’t figure out why the Windows clones cannot be a sleek or as well-designed as the Mac. But I have noticed that the online conversations about Macs are less about innovation (how to hack the code to make it do what you want) and more about advocacy (“Who needs to be able to cut a file? Not Mac users! Everything is better in a Mac!”) . Windows, for all of its failures, has given rise to really smart, really useful software and modifications. Windows Media Player not working for you? Try one of the dozens of free alternatives available on the web. Don’t like the version of iMovie that came bundled with your Macbook Pro? Good luck.
So, it may be that Facebook needs the equivalent of the blue screen of death. Enough users have to get fed up with its privacy violations and its interface to begin hacking its code and offering better alternatives. I personally would like to see four or five major social networks, all contending for customers. Maybe we start by quitting Facebook in favor of new startups like Diaspora. Who’s with me?
Categories: Cloud Computing, Web 2.0 | Tags: Facebook | 4 Comments »
Best Explanation Yet of Web 3.0, the Semantic Web
By RR | May 10, 2010
My class spent about an hour today thinking and talking about Web 2.0. What struck me about our conversation was how much the class already knew about Web 2.0–and how mainstream most Web 2.0 applications have become. The social media, in other words, have become almost transparent. We use them so much, we don’t really even realize they are there.
What’s still on the horizon, of course, is the idea of Web 3.0, the so-called semantic (knowledge) web. The main idea of this new and largely theoretical version of the web is that computers will learn our language, so that will be able to communicate with them as well as we communicate with human beings. This video created by Kate Ray, a Journalism/Psychology major at NYU, does a great job of explaining the idea:
Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.
Categories: News, Web 3.0 | Tags: semantic web, Web 3.0 | 2 Comments »
Networking Saved Educational Nings
By RR | May 5, 2010
This may be premature, but it seems like the folks at Ning are listening to us. They just announced that Ning would continue to allow educators to use their ad-free service for no charge. What’s cool about this, besides the obvious fact that a bunch of my sites won’t need a new host, is the way in which we got the attention of Ning. An online petition. A net meetup. Raising awareness through blogs, wikis, and more. We networked to save the network. Here’s the article from the NY Times. I’m including it in its entirety.
Ning Planning to Remain Free for Teachers
By JOSHUA BRUSTEIN
May 4, 2010Ning, a company that allows users to build their own social networks, says it has signed a letter of intent with a major educational publisher to keep its service free for educators, several weeks after causing an outcry among nonprofit groups by announcing that it would end its popular free service. Ning did not give any more information about the deal, which it disclosed as it outlined its plans to begin charging subscription fees to all of its users.
Ning claims over 46 million users, spread over 300,000 social networks focused on topics from music to politics to religion. It has become popular among nonprofit groups, and tens of thousands of organizations established networks ranging in scale from teachers who set up networks for their students to sprawling efforts like T. Boone Pickens’s PickensPlan, for people interested in alternative energy, which claims over 200,000 users. Setting up the network is free, but extra features are available for a fee.
While the vast majority of Ning’s users relied on the free service, the company says 75 percent of its traffic and 80 percent of its revenue come from paying customers. The company announced on April 15 that it would shift to an exclusively subscription-based model, saying the needs of its free and paid clients were so different that it had to choose one of the groups to be its focus.
The company’s initial announcement prompted a round of spirited discussion among nonprofit groups about the perils of relying on free Web-based services. While these services can be invaluable to groups on shoestring budgets, they can also disappear with little warning when companies change business strategies or fall onto difficult financial times.
This is not the first time that nonprofits feel they have been burned. Last November, Causes, a fund-raising application, stopped working with MySpace, deleting users’ content and communications. Ideablob, a service that created a platform for people to discuss business ideas and awarded cash prizes to the most popular ones, shut down later in the month when its parent company filed for bankruptcy. In both cases, the changes were abrupt, and nonprofit groups felt blindsided. This seemed to be happening again last month, when Ning’s decision was made public before the company told its clients.
“We have to ask, ‘what is the cost of free?’ ” wrote Beth Kanter, the author of a blog about how nonprofits can use social media, in an e-mail message.
In the hours and days after Ning’s announcement, the company’s message boards were filled, and it was deluged with hundreds of e-mail messages from teachers and nonprofit groups. It was also presented with an online petition signed by over 1,100 people asking it to waive its fees for educational and nonprofit groups.
Ning says it is taking a step in that direction with its effort to provide free service for teachers and their students. The company also says its premium subscriptions will cost less than they do now. It will offer three tiers of service, ranging in price from $2.95 a month (or $20 a year) to $49.95 a month. Ning will no longer look to gain revenue by placing advertisements on its networks. Jason Rosenthal, the company’s C.E.O., said he expected the increased income from subscription fees to offset the loss in advertising revenue.
The company is announcing its changes on its blog on Tuesday.
The decision to exempt teachers from subscription fees was made after discussions with teachers about the barriers to getting even small amounts of money approved by school systems.
“For public educators, the process for buying anything tends to be so arduous, and we’re going to make it easier to use Ning,” Mr. Rosenthal said.
Manny Hernandez, the author of the book Ning for Dummies who also runs a nonprofit focused on diabetes that maintains two social networks on Ning, was involved in discussions between nonprofit groups and the company as it worked out its new pricing structure. He said he was happy with the outcome, saying that even the paid subscriptions were modest enough to be affordable for small groups.
But he also saw a cautionary tale.
“The big lesson for nonprofits and education technologists alike would be to keep in mind that if you want absolute control over the way a certain platform or solution works, the only way that can be accomplished is by housing it yourself,” he said. “Unfortunately that comes at an additional cost, and that cost has to be taken by someone.”
Categories: News, Web 2.0 | Tags: Ning | 1 Comment »
Smackdown: What You Know Vs. Who You Know
By RR | April 22, 2010
In case you missed it, yesterday marked the beginning of a historic partnership between Microsoft and Facebook. Microsoft launched a new service called Docs.com (still in beta) that aims to compete with Google Docs as an online productivity suite. The site looks very sleek–much sleeker than Google Docs–but this is not the big deal.
The big deal is that Facebook and Microsoft are linking their services together. Here’s how it works: your Facebook login will get you into Docs.com, and all of the documents you create on Docs.com will be shared with your FB friends (depending, of course, on your privacy settings). The idea is to make collaborative work with others simpler by drawing on your existing FB connections.
Not a bad idea, really, though I doubt that a cloud version of MS Office will EVER replace the software version. Better to add more sophisticated networking capabilities to the software version if you ask me. But here’s the larger significance: FB and Microsoft are betting on the future of the web. Facebook wants to become the very fabric of the web, the way that Google is now. Think about it: whenever you need to find something on the web, you Google it. Facebook wants to be your first stop on the web–the place you go to find things.
This marks a kind of shift in thinking about information online. Google banks on the idea that information is important in and of itself. Their mission statement, after all, is to organize all of the world’s information. Hence Google Book Search, the project to make millions of volumes available to the public.
Facebook believes that it’s not what you know (or can find): it’s who you know. The most effective way of finding information, from this point of view, is to see what your friends are posting about–not just status lines about their cats, of course, but important news stories, blogs, and, according to this new deal, documents. This idea does have some merit. I remember learning about the death of Michael Jackson and the earthquake in Haiti through FB and not a news organization. Somewhere, one of your friends is online, sharing videos, posting links, and updating his status line.
The truth of this new etymology occured to me this week as I continued my research on my new book. Here’s the story. I need the transcript from a BBC radio program originally aired on March 6, 1991. The BBC electronic archives do not date that far back–essentially, to the pre-Internet days. I was searching online in vain (looking for the what, I suppose) when I thought of something better–contacting the scholars whose works reference the original transcript. I emailed one, and in short order, I had another lead, this time to a collection at Northwestern. I emailed the keeper of that archive, and, while I would like to say she sent me the transcript post haste, I am actually still waiting to hear from her.
I am not entirely convinced that knowledge is inherently social, at least in terms of the web. But incidents like the above go a long way toward validating the importance of who you know.
Categories: Cloud Computing, News | Tags: Facebook, Microsoft | 2 Comments »
Say it Ain’t So, Ning! No More Free Plans!
By RR | April 18, 2010
Ning just announced that it is phasing out its free service in May. This cut is apparently part of an effort to retool the company. Ning is also laying off a whopping 41 percent of its employees. Ning posted the announcement in its forum:
So, we are going to change our strategy to devote 100% of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity. We will phase out our free service. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning. We will judge ourselves by our ability to enable and power Premium Ning Networks at huge scale. And all of our product development capability will be devoted to making paying Network Creators extremely happy.
That hurts. The educational community has embraced the free service–so much so that there is a petition that you should sign if you want to keep using Ning in your classrooms. I am skeptical that the petition will work, but it doesn’t hurt to try.
You can also take a look at the Google Doc co-authored by a number of Ning Network Creators. It outlines some possible alternatives to Ning. I’ll definitely be posting any alternatives I find here, since I have used Ning for multiple classes, conferences, and organizations, including the MCTE Ning. I wonder what the English Companion Ning is going to do?
Read more about it in the Wall Street Journal.
Categories: Web 2.0 | Tags: Boo!, Ning | 1 Comment »
Smackdown: Cloud Computing Vs. Apps
By RR | April 11, 2010
I see two real trends in web-based technology emerging. The first is cloud computing, which is the movement of all computing to the web. What this means, in economic and practical terms, is a trend away from software packages such as Microsoft Office and toward web-based applications such as Google Docs. For now, these cloud applications are a little clunky–not quite as refined and sophisticated as their licensed counterparts.
The other trend is moving in the opposite direction: apps for everything. A few days ago, I visited Best Buy to play around with the new iPad. This was my version of a birthday present. Instead of the actual iPad, I get a trip to Best Buy to window shop. The demo iPads had all kinds of sexy apps already plugged in, including a Facebook app, a Google Maps GPS app, and a really cool iBooks app that makes me want to rethink my position on hand-held readers. Many of the apps were free from the Apple store.
The idea here, though, is interesting. Just when we thought we were getting away from software–at least software in the conventional sense–smart phones and the iPad are creating an entirely new market for smaller, cheaper, and more portable applications. As sleek as these apps are–and as clunky as many cloud-based interfaces are–I can’t help but think that true cloud computing has probably seen its day.
Categories: Cloud Computing, News | Tags: apps, ipad | 1 Comment »
Use Viddler and Ning to Embed Private Video in a Private Network
By RR | April 1, 2010
I have been interested in web video for the past five years or so–and those years have seen a huge number of changes, as popular formats have come and gone (remember Real Player?), as YouTube exploded, and as the web as a whole got much, much faster. I have been searching for the ideal way to host student videos from my 331 seminar. Because these videos show secondary students in local schools, they must remain private, accessible only to students in the seminar. They are also quite large (around 500 MB) and can be up to 45 minutes long.
That leaves very few choices for streaming hosts, unless I am willing to pay big dollars. Turns out, I am not. So, I use Viddler, one of the few free services that puts no limit on video length and allows 500 MB per upload. As I’ve blogged here before, Viddler also lets you share video with a limited group–in this case, the students in my 331 seminar.
The problem was, I like to use Ning for the seminar, and I couldn’t get the private Viddler videos to embed and play in the Ning. So, students had to keep checking both Viddler and the course Ning. I like things centralized, so this was a vexing problem. So, here’s the work around (from the Viddler forum), in case you want your students to stream large but private videos from your course Ning. Once you have created a private buddy list in Viddler, you should do the following for each video:
Embedding a private video
1. Enable the secret URL (be sure to save).
2. Copy the normal HTML embed code. (instructions)
3. Copy the secret code at the end of the secret URL.
4. In the HTML append /0/secretcode to the player’s source URL.Example player URL: http://www.viddler.com/player/6e3bf4a7/0/34304303/
Be sure to edit the URL for both the movie PARAM and the EMBED.
This worked really well for me, though the process is a little time-consuming.
Categories: Multimedia | Tags: Ning, viddler, Video | 1 Comment »
Designer Tool: Wordle
By RR | March 14, 2010
Design matters. Even for English teachers. And we have nearly endless opportunities: we create handouts, develop slide presentations, build blogs, set up wikis, and much, much more. All of this will little formal training in design. Most of us scraped by in high school with an art class or two, hardly enough training for the aesthetic requirements of our daily work. So, it’s not a surprise to see poor design in our field: handouts with a welter of clip art, fonts, and colors; web sites with busy backgrounds and animated gifs galore; and even professional journals that look like they were printed in Soviet-era Russia.
I am not a design expert by any means, but I manage with a handful of good tools. One of my favorites is the Color Scheme Designer 3 , which helps me make intelligent color choices for web and print design. Trust me: without Color Scheme Designer, my web sites would be as mismatched as my outfits. I also use a range of old and new software for graphic design: Photoshop for images, Fireworks for vector-based graphics, and most importantly, Snagit to grab screenshots of interesting designs I see on the web. I admit that I am still quite software driven in this regard. Cloud tools such as Aviary Suite are still catching up. I do use two other sites–Rounded Cornr and Roundpic–to help me with web design. And I look around for free downloads–especially for Word templates.
All of these help me create sites such as the Flannery O’Connor Readathon (coming up!) and the new MCTE social network. For a recent design job, I made use of a tool that has been around for a long time: Wordle. I’m not sure why I didn’t know about Wordle, but better late than never. Wordle creates word clouds based on your input or a web site. It then allows you to edit the look and feel of the word cloud. So, here’s a snaphot of a Wordle-based graphic. It’s also a not-so-subtle advertisement for my upcoming spring class. Take a look.
Categories: Cloud Computing, Web 2.0 | Tags: Wordle | No Comments »
Michigan Loses Race, but will Grand Rapids Win Google?
By RR | March 7, 2010
Last Thursday, the state winners of the new Federal education reform plan–Race to the Top–were officially announced. Not surprisingly, Michigan did not make the cut. The list of winning states that qualified for the next round includes Colorado, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Tennessee. What this means for Michigan, which will apply again this summer, is a little unclear. The recent batch of legislation passed by Michigan to comply to Race to the Top standards (implementing alternative certification, teacher merit pay, and more) seems to be wasted effort, though Michigan teachers and schools will definitely feel the consequences.
More promising for Michigan (Grand Rapids) is its bid to win Google Fiber, the ultra high speed pipeline project that is currently soliciting pilot locations. Winning would bring real change to West Michigan–including educational change. At the university level, a Gig-per-second data transfer rate (roughly 100 times faster than standard cable or DSL) could mean the almost instant exchange of high-resolution x-rays, for instance, which would make the GVSU and MSU medical schools pretty attractive places to be. Google Fiber would also draw entrepreneurs interested in capitalizing on the high speed connection: imagine a Grand Rapids-based digital movie archive with 10-second download times, for instance.
It would be interesting to see what kind of educational possibilities Google Fiber would create. I wonder, for instance, if distance education would be improved. I can imagine all Grand Rapids schools retrofitted with Google Fiber, creating jobs and allowing for real-time data exchange between all teachers, students, and schools. Or, Google could develop more sophisticated cloud apps such as Google Docs (imagine a Google Docs that looks more like Microsoft Office 2007). There are dozens of other possibilities, so keep your fingers crossed.
Strangely enough for a left-leaning guy, I’m hoping a good corporation like Google could foster educational change, and I’m rooting against Obama and more top-down federally mandated “reform.”
Categories: Cloud Computing, News | Tags: Google Fiber | 1 Comment »
Experts Say Web Will Help Reading, Writing
By RR | February 27, 2010
The Pew Internet in American Life project has released another report, this one focused on some common perceptions–or misperceptions–about the web. The report asked experts in the field about the future of the web. It should be noted that the experts were major players in the tech industry–so, their responses are optimistic, as expected. Tech CEOs would be pretty dumb, after all, to say the web was dumbing down civilization.
In any case, I found one item on the report to be pretty interesting: a majority of those surveyed believe that the web will improve reading and writing skills. I made a similar argument in my dissertation, suggesting the ways in which the web could enhance deep literary reading. And my book essentially makes the same claim: that the kind of skills/habits we value as literature teachers could be supported and enriched by the web. My co-author and I talk specifically about four main habits: entering the story world, close reading, responding personally to texts, and establishing contextual information. I like that this report supports our ideas. I also like that it counters the prevailing cultural discourse about kids and technology–that their lives are impoverished, not enriched, but digital technology. Here’s the key finding from the report:
Categories: News | Tags: Pew Internet | No Comments »