Monthly Archives: September 2008

flickr and Creative Commons

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While going through my Google Reader items, I ran across a comment from Sarah McGowan on one of my photos on flickr. She used it in the article “Dignity: Women in Mumbai Avoid Harrassment on the ‘Ladies Special’ Commuter Train“. I was baffled and joyous to see my picture there.

It was a very nice gesture of Sarah to let me know about the photo’s use and not just attribute it in the article as would have been enough. She also sent a flickr message earlier asking if she could use the photo. Unfortunately, I only saw that one when I logged in a few minutes ago. Note to self: I have to find a way to get these messages delivered to my computer because then I will not oversee them.

I had received a couple of comments on flickr earlier, but this one made me think about the power of this photo sharing site and Creative Commons licenses.

Thousands of people use flickr to upload their photos. You can find all sorts of pictures there. Many even reach the quality of awesome photography. However, finding the right pictures can be quite cumbersome. If pictures are tagged, it is easier to find them, but of course only when you hit the right tags.

Once you’ve come up with results that seem promising, it still takes time to look at them all and moving from one results’ page to the other. That’s where cooliris comes in handy. That is a browser extension not just for Firefox with which you can look at pictures as if they were hanging on a wall. You can zoom in and out. In the latest version you also see the photo’s description. When you click on an image to be taken to its page on flickr, Google, Photobucket or other photo sharing sites, but don’t want to stay there and return to your wall of pictures, you have the opportunity to do so. I craved for this feature since the first days of PicLens, the former name of this extension, and it has finally arrived. :-)

But what does that have to do with Creative Commons? Creative Commons (CC) is a licensing system that allows you to keep your copyright, but gives other people the right to use your work under the conditions you put forward. It’s a way away from “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved”. With the vast amount of creative work online and the ease of re-using this work, the CC licenses are great to legitimize the use of works without getting into legal trouble.

The internet makes it easy to copy and paste and not think much about intellectual property because: who will see what you took among the billions of pages or when you make a printout without asking for permission? When I adhere to the CC conditions of a work, I live without guilt. Providing my stuff under CC as well is my way of giving back to the community and providing others with opportunities to use my work. I don’t just want to take and benefit, but share and give if I am able to do so.

Now, when you combine flickr and CC, you get a great amount of pictures that you have available for searching, finding and then using for projects without having to either pay for them, shooting the pictures yourself (which is not always possible) or going without a visual input.

It’s the end of week 1 as I see it

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The first week of the MOOC CCK08 (these abbreviations are already ingrained in my brain) is almost over. I still have a lot of work to do, but have to interrupt it after this post to prepare some stuff for work. Unfortunately, I cannot devote my entire waking hours to the course which I think would be extremely helpful at times to really follow up on interesting discussions and trying to contribute to them instead of just opening them in my tabs in Firefox. I don’t feel comfortable to jump into a very theoretical discourse if I still need to straighten out the basics in my head. Hopefully with time it will get better, my inner optimist encourages me. Of course, I don’t and can’t follow all discussions, but at least the ones that I am interested in should be possible. :-)

The “Mookies” (Stephen Downes coined that name for people who participate in a MOOC) have been producing a lot of writing, video, concept maps and other visualizations in this past week. The visualizations certainly help me to get a better idea of the connections among us all and to sort out the many participants.

Tom Whyte and Trevor Meister try to come up with visual representations of our networks. Tom has started on the Twitter connections and Trevor put forward his ambitious and awesome ideas in his blog entry “Visual Network Interactions in CCK08“. As of now, Tom had already nine Twitter networks connected and there will hopefully be added many more. There are common connections already within these nine networks, and the network map starts to become complex. Pretty soon, we will need to invest in screens as big as walls and have them multi-touch enabled to navigate through this visualization. :-)

I order to see where I have been active and to reflect on my sparse activity during the week, I collected all Moodle and blog posts as well as tweets connected to the the course and put them in the infamous Wordle. Of course, I already knew where my emphasis was in the discussions, but maybe I had missed something which could have come up in the visualization.

Wordle of my participation in Week 1 in CCK08

Wordle of my participation in Week 1 in CCK08

Common English words as well as numbers have been removed by the program which leaves the most often used words in the visualization. As you can see, “course”, “can” (isn’t that also a common English word?), “use”, and “moodle” dominate the word cloud. I never imagined being drawn into a discussion on Moodle as much as a I was, but that is what happened and where I posted mainly. In hindsight, this forum, albeit I am not an expert on Moodle and there are participants in the course who are much more familiar with the software, was a safe place for me because I knew the topic, had read about advantages and disadvantages of virtual learning environment, had tried a few myself, have worked with them for several years now and was confident that I could contribute something. Although it was a safe spot, that does not mean that it was not challenging, just not challenging in the same way as if I had tried to wrap my mind around a less familiar topic.

My resolution for the coming weeks is to spread out more thematically to the discussions closer to connectivism trying to geet a better understanding of the theory. I am not sure yet, if the coming epistomological week will actually be the perfect week to start with ;-) , but I will try my best and stick with the discussions even though I may be a more silent observer.

For this week’s Wordle, I have tried several versions as the words are redrawn every time you select a different font. Finally, I chose the one above as it gives me hope for my New Year’s course resolution. “Connections” sticks out a bit from the rest of the words and I take that as a sign for the next weeks: Look out for new connections and foster the ones that have started growing and that I want to keep. Connect week 1 with the coming ones.

The gathering of the data I used to feed to Wordle showed me that I will need a different strategy if I want to continue doing that for the next weeks. It’s been only one week and I had to remember where I had posted. It was rather easy for Moodle because you can access all forum posts of one person in the profile. However, for the blog entries it would have been more difficult had I posted more. In the first instance I even forgot Twitter. So I went back there, got my tweets out with Tweetake, the service Tom uses for his experiment, and fed it to Wordle as well. Next time, I guess, I should also include Facebook. The only thing I can think of right now is to paste anything immediately after posting into a document to keep track of. That’s the disadvantage of the distributed discussions, but I would not change that for the sake of ease to gather data. That would be like adapting your teaching to the technology that is available and being unhappy about it.

To end this post on an optimistic note, I am looking forward to the continued discussions, (visual) experiments, live online sessions (I hope I can make the Elluminate session on Wednesday) besides starting the new semester and everything that comes with that.

Elluminate me

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A crowd of approx. 82 participants of the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course, commonly known as CCK08, just met in a synchronous online session in Elluminate. It was quite an experience for me as that was my first live session in Elluminate. Previously, I was only able to watch recorded sessions of webinars.

Participating in this hour long discussion was challenging as I had to listen to the various speakers and watch the rapidly flowing chat. This time, the whiteboard could still be mostly looked at peripherally. Had the session been at the previously set time (2 a.m. in the morning for me), I would not have been able to follow for most of the time, I guess, as I am not a night owl. ;-)

I think I would have coped a little bit better even now if the chat window had been bigger. This little window was way too small for me to see the comments properly. I’m not talking about the size of the font, but rather the comments themselves. At times they just sped past and were gone beyond the scrollbar. Maybe I can increase the window size. I haven’t figured that one out yet. However, I still have 11 more weeks to go to either find a way to enlarge the text chat area or to get used to reading the comments in the small window without losing track of the speaker. :-)

This shows that I am not so good at multi-tasking. George Siemens, who moderated the session by himself for a few minutes before Stephen Downes joined, and was already there before the session, did a wonderful job of talking and reading the comments at the same time and getting back to them.

Screenshot of an (empty) Elluminate session. The text chat box is way too small for my liking as a lot of stuff happens in there.

Screenshot of an (empty) Elluminate session. The text chat box is way too small for my liking as a lot of stuff happens in there.

My surname around the world, well, at least part of it…

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Occasionally, I have wondered where people live who have the same name or who might even be related to my family. My mom’s side of the family does have a pretty complete family tree going back a few centuries. From this side we know that there are relatives living in the USA whom we also know. But the information on the other side of my family is rather spotty.

Today, @Digitalstudio sent a link to the website “World Names Profiler“. This was a great opportunity to check out where I may find people who share the same surname.

So, here is the result:

People with my surname can be found in some parts of the world

People with my surname can be found in some parts of the world

The name pops up most in Canada with a frequency per million (FPM) of 36.9. That is followed by Luxembourg with 8.5, the U.S.A. with 7.03, and Germany comes in 4th with 3.56. The number seems to be right for Luxembourg, as we are just shy of half a million people in this country and I only found two fellow “Hoeppner”‘s in the online telephone book. Of course, some, like me, may not be listed. However, if we divide 8.5 by 2 minus a little bit because we are not quite half a million, that gets you close to the 3. There may even be more as these people may be married

Checking the FAQ gave me a better picture of how many names the database actually includes:

How many names do you have information for?
We hold data for approximately 300 million people in 26 countries of the world, representing a total population of 1 billion people in those countries. In our database there are 8 million unique surnames and 5 million unique forenames.
What countries do you have data for?
We have data for 26 countries in Europe, America, Asia and Oceania.

OK. But already the top four countries for my name have more than 300 million inhabitants. According to the CIA World Factbook, they have close to 421 million people. So even though 300 million may look like a big number, it is not in closer examination also taking in account that there are an estimated 6.721 billion people on earth.

Even though these numbers do not really represent “the world” because 26 is a far cry from the 192 recognized by the United Nations, it is still interesting to see where I might bump into another person with my last name – related or not. Canada seems to be the hot spot, especially Manitoba. When looking at the top cities, I’d have to go to Gurnee in Illinois or second to Encinitas in California. That’s not really in Canada, but somewhere warm is also nice. :-)

What is the role of the quality of connections?

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Over the weekend I read “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy” by Clive Thompson in the online edition of the New York Times Magazine. The article deals with the value we gain or think to gain from social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter as well as explores whether we have become more social beings now that we have many more “friends” online than in the real world. Dunbar’s number is brought up which basically states that an average person can handle up to approx. 150 stable social relationships.

As I interviewed some of the most aggressively social people online — people who follow hundreds or even thousands of others — it became clear that the picture was a little more complex than this question would suggest. Many maintained that their circle of true intimates, their very close friends and family, had not become bigger. Constant online contact had made those ties immeasurably richer, but it hadn’t actually increased the number of them; deep relationships are still predicated on face time, and there are only so many hours in the day for that.
But where their sociality had truly exploded was in their “weak ties” — loose acquaintances, people they knew less well. It might be someone they met at a conference, or someone from high school who recently “friended” them on Facebook, or somebody from last year’s holiday party. In their pre-Internet lives, these sorts of acquaintances would have quickly faded from their attention. (Clive Thompson)

Although many of our acquaintances fall into the category of “weak ties”, they are nevertheless part of our network in some capacity because otherwise we would not follow them or friend them. Or if we became a weak tie in somebody else’s network without wanting to, we could block them or ignore their friend request.

As these weak ties are part of our network, I wonder how network theory and connectivism deal with them. As I am not yet very familiar with it, I do not know if George or somebody else has already addressed that issue.

I would assume that these weak connections may receive a different treatment than well-established connections that are rich(er) in meaning depending. Or does that only depend on the kind od structure that underlies the network, i.e. hierarchical networks display weak ties whereas non-hierarchical networks don’t? Does their importance increase the more weak ties of a similar kind are established? Will they become a different kind of tie when they become more important to me, e.g. because my weak ties can help me solve a problem much better and faster than my long-time friends could?

Certainly, I’ve gained a great deal from my weak ties. Not so much that many actual problems were resolved, but more in terms of learning about resources that I may have never or only at a later stage come across, of confirmations that stuff I posted was useful for others, and that we were on the same track.