Should podcasting and Second Life be priorities for schools?

When I come across interesting-sounding videos that are too long to sit and watch, I usually play them in a corner of my screen while I do something else. I can usually glean the main ideas without losing an hour of my day.

I was playing just such a video of a big deal 2011 TCEA Conference Featured Presenter, when I stumbled on a realization about how far education technology culture is from real world technology culture. I tested the thought in Google Trends, and what I saw blew me away. (Google Trends lets you compare the number of Google searches for up to five different phrases, and shows the data in nifty charts.)

First, check out this Google Trends chart for the terms [podcast] and [second life]:

Google Trends: second life, podcast

No big surprises. Second Life exploded at the beginning of 2007, and most people quickly lost interest. Podcasting grew organically until Apple officially added it as a feature in iTunes in June 2005 (says wikipedia), and leveled off by the end of that year.

I still hear about podcasts all the time in education technology as a really cool new thing that schools and teachers can really go for. And, in the TCEA video I watched that spawned this whole post, a featured presenter sounded really gung-ho about Second Life. That's at one of the biggest education technology conferences...ever, with thousands of attendees. So keep in mind, these two tools are still being pitched in the world of education technology.

Now, look at what happens when we add [myspace] and [twitter]:

Google Trends: second life, podcast, myspace, twitter

Holy smokes. You can't even see the lines for Second Life and Podcast. They're basically inconsequential in comparison! 

(And, if I can digress for a moment, you probably have a good understanding of how big Twitter is right now, right? To put things in perspective, look at this chart and realize that, at it's peak, MySpace was searched for over twice as often as Twitter is now. You can really start to realize why MySpace was such a big deal, and why it freaked out so many adults and educators. It took over a big part of online student culture before anyone knew what had happened.)

(Digression #2: "Podcast" is also a no-show in the Wikipedia article for iPod, which is sad, but indicative of the real world impact of podcasts.)

Now, take a look at all of the above...compared with searches for [facebook]:

Google Trends: second life, podcast, myspace, twitter, facebook

Blam.

MySpace is gone. Twitter is hanging in down there. Podcasts and Second Life didn't even show up to the game.

Now, look. I'm not saying podcasts don't have their place. I'm not saying that a skilled teacher couldn't get some mileage out of Second Life. But the big picture is that schools need to think pretty hard about turning their backs on Facebook. When you ignore something as big as Facebook, or advocate strongly for something as inconsequential as Second Life or podcasts, you're mapping out a very challenging road for yourself.

Google+ is the next generation of social networking, thanks to +Circles

It was a magical moment when I saw the Google+ announcement. Immediately, it was obvious that Google+ is on a different scale of magnitude than Buzz, Wave, or Connect. Those were small potatoes, side projects that missed the big picture.

This is Chrome big. Maybe bigger. This might be Gmail big.

Why?

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Social networking has been stagnant for several years. Since the advent of Twitter, there have been no new major players to speak of. Facebook is relying heavily on network effects -- people join Facebook and stay active because that's where everyone is, not because the features are fresh and useful.

The elephant in the room with social networking is that Twitter, Facebook, and pretty much everything else are built wrong for how we actually interact with each other. As everyone joined Facebook, we've ended up with "friends" representing many aspects of our lives: schools, neighborhoods, jobs, hobbies, family members. And, even though we act a little bit differently with each of these people in real life, on Facebook, we have to present the same face to everyone we know. People don't cringe because they don't want anyone to see a picture of them with an empty bottle of wine; they cringe because Facebook shows that picture to everyone.

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Google+ has several potential killer apps, like nifty video chat and Instant Upload to a private album. The most important bit, though, is +Circles. Call it the killer glue that will hold everything together. The idea of +Circles is that the entire social network is built, ground-up, to let you manage your "friend" connections in groups that make sense. So, you can tell all your close friends about your night on the town and talk with your family about the reunion without cross-pollinating. This is exactly what we do in real life, and it's the part of Google+ that gives it the most potential.

Google+ is "post-Facebook". It's the next evolution of social networking.

Are the "Like" button's benefits worth the privacy concerns?

I've been hesitant to put the Facebook "Like" button on our school district website, because it could violate your privacy:

• Anytime your web browser tries to download a file from a server, it sends some information about itself
• Anytime you visit a page with a "Like" button, your web browser tries to download a file from Facebook's server.
• Therefore, Facebook knows every time you visit a page with a Like button on it.

If I put a "Like" button on one of our webpages, Facebook will know that you have visited the page, even if you don't click the button. Whether you're logged in to Facebook or not, the only way to block it is to make some atypical changes to your computer/web browser's default settings.


Is that enough of a reason to not use the "Like" button?

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Protecting user privacy used to be an ideological hill that I would die on, but privacy has changed a lot in the past few years.

This kind of data-mining capability is now ubiquitous. Most social media "share" buttons (including Google's fancy new "+1") work the same way. All sites using Google Analytics count their hits by telling your computer to ping Google on every webpage. Pretty much all online advertisements you see have the same capability. The ubiquity has advantages -- you can hide in a sea of consumers, watchdog groups exist and keep things from getting out of hand -- but nothing's ever OK just because everyone else is doing it.

We are now much more comfortable with sharing. 600 million Facebook users. 156 million public blogs. 190 million Tweets each day. Ten years ago, we valued online privacy mainly because we didn't know what would happen if we didn't. In 2011, we've shared huge chunks of our lives and have a much better idea of where the lines are drawn...and they're drawn much more loosely than we thought.

"Like"-ing one of our news stories spreads the word that our schools are doing good things. That's the piece I can't ignore. It's too easy for people outside of education to assume that schools have gone downhill since they left, when the reality is that education is constantly changing for the better. Our community needs to be reminded just how many success stories happen here every day. If we can use "Like" buttons to keep the true stories of our teachers' success in front of false rumors about inefficiency, that's a powerful point that can't be overlooked.

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I think it might be worth it now, but I don't feel right making that call myself. I want to know if the "Like" button is what our users want. I'm going to start explaining the situation and asking them, and see what their verdict is. If they know the privacy risks and still think it's OK, then there's not much reason to keep leaving those benefits on the table.

Usability failures created the digital native/immigrant divide

I've been working on an idea for a while now, that today's "digital immigrants" are really just badly-burned early adopters from the 80's.

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"Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants" is a 2001 article by Marc Prensky that tried to explain part of the awkward relationship between schools and computers. The main idea is that the K-12 students of the time (born 1984~1996) had always known a world with tons of personal technology. They had computers at home, learned to use them at a young age, and got increasingly comfortable with using them as they grew older. Those are the natives.

The immigrants, then are everyone else. Anyone who grew up without being surrounded by computers sees them as a new thing to be learned. The fast-moving cultural shifts probably passed them by, unless they're pretty techie.

There was a fair amount of discussion about the idea online in the mid-to-late-zeros, as teacher blogs exploded in popularity. Most of the talk was pointing out the exceptions: it's not impossible to find students who can't cut/paste and teachers who write PHP from scratch. As a whole, I'd say bloggers know not to treat it as a hard rule, but begrudgingly admit that native/immigrant is a rather appealing concept that we can't help but keep bringing up.

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My spin, then, is that native/immigrant gives a bad rap to people who actually deserve to be recognized as the early adopters. "Digital immigrants" born before 1980 were there when PCs were being rolled out to schools and businesses in droves. They were gradually introduced to computers, they had training, and they were assigned tasks, which they accomplished. They did it before anyone else, before it was cool, and they deserve recognition for that.

The problem is that early computers were sometimes horrible to use; a small error could easily cause a catastrophic, unrecoverable failure. It was harder to make backups, because there weren't hard drives, and you couldn't upload to the cloud/network drive or email yourself a copy. So, when you saved over your only copy of your report, or kicked the powerstrip under your desk, your work was gone. If you dropped or broke a piece of equipment, the replacement cost was high. Even as things advanced, it was still possible for one simple mistake to infect your computer with a virus that would cause any kind of problems it wanted.

Young digital natives, on the other hand, benefit from years of usability and technology improvements: space is plentiful, backing up files is easy and cheap. Parts are cheap and standardized. Firewalls, email virus scanners, and countless built-in protections in web browsers do a lot to mitigate viruses and worms. Google Docs saves your work every few seconds -- you'll never lose a report when the lightning takes out your power. (If you're connected via cell network, you might even be able to keep working.)

First impressions are everything. Many digital immigrants never got comfortable with computers because they couldn't see past the risks associated with them. They kept their distance, but that kept them from appreciating that computers have become much safer and easier to use.

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Now, when I'm helping a textbook "digital immigrant" setup a website, I always focus on building the idea that it's safe. They won't delete everything in a way that we can't undo it; they won't ruin someone else's website. I set them loose to experiment and check back with them later. So far, it feels like it's helping people take a big step past the mental barrier that's kept them from becoming a "native".