Category Archives: internet

To list or not to list

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Recently, Twitter launched its list feature which allows users to create lists of people one follows so that they are grouped and their updates can be viewed without the noise of others one follows. Some client applications have already done the same thing. Now the game changer is that lists are officially supported by Twitter. I guess, many hope that these lists can then be used in the clients as well.

Many people have already written about Twitter lists and how they are not quite sure how they will be used (Steve Wheeler), or how they think lists will change the social economy (Dave Troy), or where the dangers lie within public lists (Mark Trapp).

I know that categorizations help me. Heck, I do it every day by tagging resources in Diigo to be able to hopefully find them again when I need them, though the search is most often done in Delicious as I prefer their bookmark panel. Putting things in categories is neat and I know where something belongs. I don’t have a problem with it when I call it tagging because I can give the resources any number of tags / keywords.

Lists and groups, however, seem to have a different connotation. They are stronger categorizations and identifiers that can have lots of impact as Mark Trapp’s and Dave Troy’s blog posts indicate. I have not heard complaints about tagging resources with the “wrong” tag or a defamatory tag (maybe I haven’t looked close enough?). It always happens that people disagree on categorizations and be it only because they come from different backgrounds and contexts in which they encounter a thing or a person. Of course, it is not nice to be publicly be labeled “douchebag” list, but except for blocking this person on Twitter I couldn’t really do anything else.

Would the Twitter lists be as discussed if the lists were called tags? Is the list feature so hotly discussed because it categorizes people and not their blogs / websites / articles / videos etc.? Are the lists thus more personal?

I had set up groups when I checked out Mixero and ran into the problems of not being able to classify people in just one group. However, to avoid seeing tweets twice (the whole point of creating groups for me was to reduce the noise), I did put everybody in just one group which was hard. As these groups are entirely private, it did not matter and I couldn’t hurt anybody’s feelings publicly. Currently, I am still debating whether I should replicate these groups in Twitter itself or whether to find a different classification system and which groups I want to make public and which ones to keep private. I will keep an eye on the Twitter lists and see if I can get comfortable with them.

My groups in Mixero

My groups in Mixero

Streaming a stream

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Alec Couros and Dean Shareski dueled today at #tatc09. Each of them presented their favorite web tools in the Cool Tools Duel which was broadcast live on Ustream. The audience – in the room as well as online could even vote for their favorite presenter. Both Alec and Dean presented great tools and the audience loved their duel.

Alec presented Ustream and thus he was streaming a stream and everybody could watch the stream in the stream streamed in the stream. ;-)

Streaming a Stream

Streaming a Stream

It was tough to decide whom to give my vote. In the end, Alec got it,but the irony is that I used two tools that Dean talked about to take the above picture. ;-) I took the screenshot with Skitch, a tool that I truely love to have on my Mac, and added the frame and the text with Picnik.

Thanx for sharing this presentation.

Feeling lonely in a webinar

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I just finished listening to a webinar on new features of the survey tool Qualtrics, whichwe use in our BA study program. As neither Elluminate nor Adobe Connect was used, I had hoped to get a good glimpse of what is possible with GoToWebinar / GoToMeeting. However, I cannot give a good overview as only a few features were unlocked for this webinar. Thus, I can write about the possibilities to restrict a meeting to a high degree which does not provide a fair image to what is possible with GoToWebinar. I guess, I will have to wait for another meeting using this service to see how the “regular” features work out. What I can say is that I did not encounter connection speed problems as sometimes with Adobe Connect and that the screen sharing was very smooth.

Anyway, this webinar showed to me clearly how I got used to the communication features generally available in online presentations, webinars, online meetings or whatever you may call them that I have attended in the context of educational technology.

Usually, a list of participants is displayed. I like to scroll through it so see if anybody I know is there as well. That is like in a face-to-face meeting when you check the room to look for familiar faces. In this meeting today I did not see a participants’ list. The organizers said that they had been asked to keep that information confidential. I was very amazed because in Elluminate and also Adobe Connect, you can choose any screen name and nobody will be the wiser who is behind that. Furthermore, I got the impression that those who asked for this confidentiality either did not want others to know that they were there,  what kind of questions they asked or they were not ready to communicate except with the presenter / support team. I guess, I will never find out because I do not know how many people participated and who they were.

Confidentiality and security over communication

Confidentiality and security over communication

In general, the chat / backchannel is important because people discuss the presentation, post questions and comments, share links and other resources etc. However, it can be highly distracting for me if the backchannel is very active. Then I have trouble concentrating on the presentation and I have to decide which to follow more closely: the presentation or the chat. Despite my own weakness in that area, others are great in handling the chat, the presentation and providing additional information. I am always amazed at presenters who can read chat questions and answer them while they are presenting. The chat enriches online seminars immensely because it draws in the participants and gives the presenter / moderator feedback on what people think about, what is important to them.

In today’s meeting there was no chat. I had a window for questions and answers (see screenshot above), but I only saw my questions and the answers I received. When I realized that I would not see the questions or comments of the other participants, I reached a very low point and was rather disappointed because I was not allowed to communicate with the others in the webinar. Sure, I could write comments and send questions, but I felt that I needed to write questions and not engage in small talk because my chat messages were only read by the support staff monitoring the chat and they surely only wanted to receive content questions. I felt very isolated like being in a box (“prison” would be too strong a word as I chose to be there on my own) with a screen on which I could follow the presentation, which was insightful by the way and nicely done, and only a small window to the outside through which a guard who was positioned in front of it kept watch of what I said and gave answers without allowing me to pass on and receive messages to / from other inmates in their individual soundproof boxes.

It was a rather lonely affair. I really missed the chat because when I read it, I get to know what other people are working on, how they relate to the content of the presentation, what kind of questions they ask etc. Ideas and solutions to problems are shared and it is not always necessary that the moderators answer all questions because often there are knowledgeable people in the chat who provide useful solutions.

As my experience with online seminars and presentations is mainly limited to the educational technology field, I do not know if the type of online presentation I participated in today is very common in other areas and I only had my webinar culture shock. The shock waves still ripple through me and it has nothing to do with the tool we used, which is most likely great when communication features are open to the participants, or the initial content of the presentation. Just the mode of delivery was not to my liking.

Waiting for the (Google) Wave

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Since last Thursday I have picked up snippets of buzz around Google Wave and finished watching the demo video today (had kept it for my workout to have that pass more quickly ;-) ). I am just speechless and can’t wait for it to be publically available.

Wave is a new communication tool that is email, instant messenger, microblog, blog, collaborative writing tool, and some more all in one. It redefines the way online communication is done because you do not have to think about whether you want to write an email, send a Twitter message or start a chat. You just do it all in Wave.

The Wave team from Australia demonstrated so many features and extensions of Wave that your head spins (not in a particular order):

  • email
  • instant messenger
  • embed waves into a blog
  • wiki
  • drag and drop photos and links
  • embed videos
  • spellchecker
  • instant translator (I think that one got the biggest applause)
  • add people to an ongoing conversation
  • connect waves
  • inline commenting
  • collaborative gaming
  • linking other services, e.g. Twitter, bug tracker, and be able to either update from within Wave or these other services
  • federation: communication between different Wave installations
  • playback of the development of a Wave conversation

I think the only things that are missing are audio and video chat. I could imagine audio comments to show up like text comments or have an audio conversation be recorded while working on a document.

Now, how can some of these features be used for learning and for research? The one point that jumps to mind instantly is the possibility of collaborative writing (including using visual media). You see instantly what the others type and do not have to wait until changes are committed. That is similar to EtherPad. You can add comments to a document which can be hidden or displayed which is easier to detect them and to deal with them than in Google Docs where you write them inline with the text. Parts of a current wave can be opened as a new wave to branch conversations.

When you want to research the flow of communication, for example how people interact when writing collaboratively on a document, all you have to do is hit “playback” and the wave unfolds in front of your eyes. I already liked the “playback” feature when I discovered it in the concept mapping software CmapTools. Even though I have not used it yet beyond testing purposes, it has a ton of potential if you are involved in that kind of research because you do not need an additional program to record what has been done, but you can have all actions recorded automatically.

Another great thing about Wave is that it can run on any server and does not have to sit on a Google server. The GUI is also changeable. This is great news because Google is often accused of listening in on conversations, using it all to their own benefit. When the Wave runs on a server different from the Google one, there is no information exchange. However, Wave communications can take place across different servers so that Wave users do not necessarily have to create accounts on all Waves. They then form a federation. According to the developers, only the content that is meant for the Wave users across the systems will be sent to the federation Waves. If a private comment is made between two users of one Wave, the other server does not see that comment at all. That makes Wave attractive to companies, institutions etc. that want to use it, but do not want to put their communication and documents out there on a Google server for confidentiality reasons.

The demo made it all look so simple, but the Wave team spent two years on getting this far and they have pooled resources from other Google programming teams. Google opened the code and invited programmers to get busy on extensions and gadgets for Google Wave to make it more powerful even before the official launch. Let’s see when the Wave will hit our keyboards.

Update: Mashable has a great resource page which they call “Google Wave: A Complete Guide”. There you get all the information that is currently available.