Mabel, Your Cows Are Out! Social Networking Revisited

What is Social Networking?

Let the king explain:




Mabel! the voice was breathy as if she had been running.

Your cows are out and they’re headed for my corn garden in the north field. Harvey has the truck and I can’t get over there. I’m gonna sic Buster on them to send them your way.

Oh sorry Pearl, those beggars must have knocked the west fence down again. It’s that new bull, he just walks through everything! Wait, I hear Bob’s tractor, he’s just come in from the field for gas. I’ll send him right over. Bye Jean, I call you back later.

Bye Mabel, give me one ring if you need help. Say Pearl did you get those Saskatoon’s picked behind the schoolhouse?

Not yet Jean. I sent the kids up there with a pail, but they said there were too many wasps in that nest behind the outdoor toilet.

Okay Pearl. Maybe I’ll get over there after I pick my peas for supper. You know, Mabel wouldn’t have so much trouble with that bull if Bob would get his fences fixed properly. If you ask me, I think he has too many irons in the fire, don’t’ ya think ?

Well Jean, I can’t help but think that poor Mabel’s just run ragged trying to keep up the house and the yard and that big garden. Bob is just no help at all! Oh gotta go it sounds like someone wants the line.. let me know when you want to get together to can those peaches…

It was in the early 1950’s. That cultural icon, the wooden phone box with the silver and black mouthpiece and the right- handed ringer, was mounted on the south wall just as you came into our farmhouse kitchen. The two fist-sized silver bells would ring a happy ring if you flicked them with your finger tip but you had to drag out the kitchen step stool to reach up that high. One long and one short was our ring, but we could hear two others, the Nielsen’s and the Simmons’ but any ring at all would uncoil us kids into action. First, one hand went over the receiver in case we breathed too heavily, then carefully and slowly we lifted up the earpiece and cocked it at a 45 degree angle so both my sister and I could rubber neck on our neighbour’s call. Their ring was two longs.

While rubber necking was expected, it was bad form to be caught. But if the cows were out or a hailstorm was coming it was expected that you would alert your fellow rural party-liners down the road. One long continuous ring meant emergency, such as a grass fire or accident, but the best use of the phone ever in my childhood opinion was New Year’s Eve.

Before long TV, would have us glued to Auld Lang Syne, but in these pre-Guy Lombardo nights, we would set the timer on the stove clock and when it went off at exactly midnight, we would grab the reviver, and crank on that ringer round and round and round with the merry continuous riiinngg alerting everyone on the party line that they were all being wished a very Happy New Year!

And just two weeks ago when I attended the 100th anniversary of our old community one room schoolhouse, I saw the remnants , my old neighbours, now old and gray folks, those who were my very first social networking group.




Women and Rural Folk : The Problem of “Unruly Users”

Mercer, 2006, traces the evolution of the role of the telephone as a “negotiated “ use between the developers and the users. In the early 1900’s the developers of the emerging technology envisioned the telephone as being a business tool. Users of the telephone however, pre-empted the prescribed use and adapted the technology instead to social networking. Women and rural users in particular did not follow “industry guidelines” and were responsible for creating a cultural shift. They had discovered that the party line was ideal for “visiting”. The Bell Telephone Company got so perturbed by this “frivolous” use of their technology, that they created legal, (but unenforceable)guidelines for use in an attempt to dictate manners and control eavesdropping and gossip. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? But wait, it gets even better…

In 1909 a Seattle telephone manager in an attempt to control this frivolous telephone usage, “monitored” calls and discovered that:

20 % were used for business orders
20% were for the users own businesses
15% were for social invitations
30% were for idle gossip!

This high incidence of gossip, the developer determined, was inappropriate and could be “fixed” with proper education. Engineers were also given the task of creating new technologies to reduce eavesdropping and even fines were set in place.
Nevertheless, “unruly women and rural users” did indeed change the intended use of the party line telephone. They had quickly realized its potential as a way of reducing social isolation and creating informal community networks. Within these networks, the rules of rubbernecking were negotiated.

Finally, telephone developers and promoters twigged to the reality that the users of this new technology had determined its role in society and accepted the fact of idle gossip and multiple listeners and after the 1920’s they began to promote it as a social enhancement tool. Those unruly women and rural listeners had indeed shaped the social use of technology.

The parallels are astonishing aren’t they?

I was about to start this next section with the title: Social Networking: Why is it so popular? but I actually have answered that in my intro story. So the question now should be:

Social Networking; What Does it Look Like 50 Years later?
“Say Mabel, what’s new?”

The newest tools for collaborative work are small, flexible, free, and require
no installation. This is the 21st Century version of just grabbing the ringer handle cranking up your neighbours. Your networked friends simply open their web browsers and they are able to edit group documents, hold online meetings, swap information and data, and collaborate in any number of ways without ever leaving their desks.
Open programming interfaces allow users to author tools that they need and easily tailor them to their requirements, then share them with others (Horizon Report, 2008).

Social networking is the grouping of individuals into smaller neighbourhoods just like our rural telephone party line. Back at the farm, we would social network in real time/real space, at the local one –room schoolhouse where we had pie socials and card parties. While this type of social networking does still happen at school or university within say, the Knitting Club, for example, networking online is where the action is. You can seek and find like-minded individuals looking for anything from a good B&B, to the uses for melatonin to wakeboarding to how to integrate ICT outcomes into CALM. Personal relationships have blossomed on social networking sites, as have professional groups seeking to share data, teaching strategies, or to simply build a contact base.

Websites are used to build social sites, which then become online communities.
Once you have been given access to the site by setting up a user profile and logging in, you can begin to, well for starters, to socialize!

"Traditional" social networking websites and usually have open memberships but once you are inside, you can begin to create your own network of friends and eliminate members that do not share common interests or goals.


“Mabel, get off the danged phone, Bob needs the line to call the auction mart!”

While the “Friend Request” is where we all get hooked on Facebook, there are wider applications for social networking than socializing. For this information I had to go to The Horizon Report, 2008:

Online collaborative workspaces serve as a hub where students can easily work, share resources, capture ideas, and even socialize. In contrast to productivity applications, which enable users to perform a specific task or create a particular product, collaborative workspaces are “places” where groups of people gather resources or information related to their personal or professional lives.

The most popular of these tools are highly flexible and can be adapted to almost any project. At the same time, these spaces conveniently lend themselves to almost seamless integration of content from other online resources, often quite transparently. Examples include do it- yourself social networks like Ning ; sharable personalized start pages that are “ pagecast”—shared, in other words—from services like Netvibes or Pageflakes ; and social networks like Facebook .
Horizon Report 2008

The following story is from Life on a Party Line

"In St. Nicholas there was a woman who was a very fine cook and her name was Eileen (Poirier) Gaudet and she worked hard for many years at the Queen Hotel in Summerside, PEI. Over time her nickname became Eileen 'Journal-Pioneer' because she had the news before it went into the paper.

But as an older woman Eileen was back at home in St. Nicholas and time was long on her hands. She took to picking up the telephone when it wasn't her 'ring' and she would silently enjoy the news she heard on the old party line. Two women in the community decided they would hatch a plot to catch her in the act.

One woman called the other on the phone and asked for a recipe for molasses cookies. "First you get a good sized bowl," she said, "Then you get a half a cup of lard and two cups of molasses." Eileen 'Journal-Pioneer' couldn't help herself and blurted into the phone, "It's only one cup of molasses!" And the dear old soul was caught red handed."

Eileen was actually appropriately named a “Pioneer” . She was just ahead of her time because if she had been part of a social networking site, she would have been seen as a valuable contributor to the collective intelligence process rather than a rubbernecking busy-body!

The defining trait of the social networking technologies is that they make it easy for people to share interests and ideas, work on joint projects, and easily monitor collective progress- even baking molasses cookies if that is what is the topic at hand! All of these are needs common to student work, research, collaborative teaching, writing and authoring, development of grant proposals, and more. Using them, groups can collaborate on projects online, anywhere there is Internet access; interim results of research can be shared among a team, supporting illustrations and tables created, and all changes and iterations tracked, documented, and archived.

In class situations, teachers can evaluate student work as it progresses, leaving detailed comments right in the documents if desired in almost real time. Students can work with other students in distant locations. It is easy to participate since the software to support virtual collaboration is low cost or free, and available via a web browser.

Students can access the same materials from any computer, whether it is theirs or one in a computer lab. For my OPPT girls they would use their cell phones. Support needs are greatly reduced as nothing needs to be installed or upgraded which is good because our techs at school consider us the Gulag. A virtual collaborative workspace for a course or study group can be assembled quickly using tools, or widgets, that can pull information from a variety of sources, including Flickr, Twitter, MySpace or Facebook, news and weather feeds, Del.icio.us, blog feeds and more.

An example that can be viewed is The Flat Classroom Project
which uses a Ning workspace that is shared by students in the U.S. and in Qatar. Students use the site to share information about each other, collect resources and information, showcase multimedia clips and other class projects, provide access to course materials, and participate in forums used to support group discussions and interactions (Horizon Report, 2008)


“Say Mabel, is that one ring or one Ning?”

Ning, which is Chinese for “peace”, allows users to create their own social networks and join and participate in other networks. Users of Nings have access to a site that is functionality similar to that of better-known social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace. Various features allow users to read news or learn about related events, join groups, read and comment on blog entries, view photos and videos, and other activities as set up by the network creator. RSS feeds let users subscribe to updates from specific parts of the social network.
I found the following information on Educause, one of my favorite sites for education/tech news.

Why should we care?
While Facebook and MySpace the most popular sites on the web, users are constantly pushing the limits of available tools to make connections and find new solutions. With Ning, users have the freedom to channel this creative energy into designing and building a social network that looks and behaves exactly as its creator believes it should. Network creators with technical ability to do so, can create entirely new tools and features to respond to the changing needs and demands of the network members. So it is the ultimate user-constructed website that keeps changing its shape.

What are the downsides?
Some times too much of something is just too much of something. The flexibility of the evolving Ning means it is always in a state of change, according to the whims of the users. Also, users can join multiple social networks, which can create those onerous daily “chores” of keeping track of hundreds of friends across many networks. Also, as Ning hosts all content on its platform, this can be seen as a compromise for some organization’s privacy.

What are the implications for teaching and learning?
For today’s students, who spend countless hours on Facebook and MySpace, teacher participation on those networks is often seen as an intrusion. Ning provides an ave¬nue for educators to take advantage of social networks in a neutral setting, offering functionality and experiences that are familiar and comfortable to students.

Teachers can create a Ning for a specific topic in which students can build a collective content base and a personalized learning community. This community in turn could connect with researchers around the world who are exploring the same topic. Social Nings can also connect new students to a school and help them feel welcomed to a smaller group on a large campus. Students who travel during the school year as is often the case in outreach, can stay connected to their teacher and studies, without feeling behind or disconnected. Users can even morph the Ning to accommodate their subsequent needs as grads or alumni as they leave school and spread out into the world.

I found this Ning from the Alberta School Libraries Council (ASLC)’s blog . This invitation explains the purpose of the Ning and how to become a member.

Thursday, August 21, 2008 Join the ASLC Ning! The ASLC has set up a Ning to aid in communication and collaboration between members. A Ning is an online social network site that can be created by individuals or groups. We will use this Ning to share websites, update ASLC members about upcoming events, and discuss common issues, concerns, and ideas. To join the Ning, please send a message to degroot at ualberta dot ca and an electronic invitation will be sent to you. In the fall, we will use the Ning to engage in an online discussion of Will Richardson's book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts. We hope this discussion will be beneficial and interesting to all ASLC members. Posted by Joanne de Groot at 8:19 PM Labels: ASLC, Ning, social networking


From the “peace” of Ning, let’s now journey to the “IN YOUR FACE!” of Facebook. I will examine Facebook as my first choice of social networking sites because it is hands down the most popular site used by my students, and because it is the one I use as well.

My Journey on Facebook or Where I Get to Choose Who is On My Party Line!

“Mabel, pick up!”

Mom if you don’t get set up on Facebook you just won’t ever hear from us again! The not so veiled –threat was delivered with the offer to set it up even as I loudly protested that I just didn’t need more homework at the end of a long day of schoolwork. My daughters were both leaving the country, the eldest to be a nanny in Italy (response to an explosive bf breakup), and the youngest was off to Bible School in New Zealand. They had already set me up on Skype but knowing how I would have trouble figuring out different time zones for different daughters, (Gee mom, it’s on the widget right there!), they thought FB would be a good back up plan. Plus we could post pictures and I could meet their new friends and we would all be happily connected across the seas.

As my happy journey on FB began, sure enough I started fiddling..hmm what does give a gift do? Oh MasterCard is needed after that first free one? What is poking..sounds kind of dirty. Why would I want to talk like a pirate? Oh I get it…. I can get rid of KG’s annoying daily updates by doing this? Look at all these pictures! Cool. Really, it’s after midnight already?

Soon my earlier intuition proved true and I had to go into a type of FB rehab of checking only three times a week for 10 minutes a time. It indeed had become more homework and somewhat addictive..should I update my profile picture? Did that link convey the right message? What doesn’t anyone talk to my wall? Can my daughter tell if I am stalking her wall? AMG! Was I just a modern rubbernecker?

What are the rules for moms posting on kids’ walls? Is it considered uncool for their friends to see Mom comments on their walls? Should I use the send a message instead of a posting? But maybe I want their friends to see that there is an “accountability” mom? I somehow missed the negotiations for the rules!

To be honest though, the thing the girls remarked on the most wasn’t the cute little youtube videos I thought they would be thrilled to see, or that link I thought they might want to read.

No, it was the care packages I faithfully sent every week filled with jujubes and running room socks and dollar store Canada key rings for their friends, and Coffee Crisps that seem to be available only in Canada...pity. When their friends started commenting that their moms NEVER sent mail, I had unwittingly created my own personal social network of care packages for the neglected children of other clearly negligent parents. This ranged from those rich Italian kids that were being nannied, to “my lovely Aussie roommate here in New Zealand whose birthday is coming up and I know she would love a package from you mom, just in case…”

And, BTW, the post office lady got to be my bff , even without a “friends request” and asked weekly how the girls were doing and if they liked the sour soothers I had sent the week before. Alternatively, “My Facebook Team” busted me for posting a video that I had added a song from my iTunes that “broke copyright”. Yeah right. You’re NOT on my team and I paid my $.99 for that song!

So now, two years later, I have come to a peaceful agreement with Facebook and use it with a grain of salt. I features that work for me are:

• Finding lost people
• Staying connected with friends in other countries
• Sharing videos, books, travel places
• Forces me to attend to my photos quickly after a trip, otherwise they would just sit in the library
• Staying connected with the girls as they continue to travel
• A sometimes-brief journaling site as a response to an event
• SJ the gleaner: Re-postings of other people’s great blog links

Facebook’s greatest gift to me as a learner/teacher has been in forcing me to learn other tools that I would not have bothered to learn, because of the “audience factor”. After all, anyone can shove a few pics on an album..but to compose a slide show with painstakingly chosen music and Ken Burns effect to achieve just that right tone. Now that ups the ante!

Yes, the spectre of the audience does provide both an incentive and a barrier.
In the back of my mind, I am always thinking,,hmm what if this gets taken out of context? When my OPPT girls asked me to friends them I had to say no, remembering the article in the ATA News advising teachers not to. Having said that, I did a search and saw that one of my students did start an OPPT Facebook page and I did join that one. Search for OPPT and you will see what she has started.

The lesson from my Facebook use is that I expect my student share the same uses and some of the same worries as I do. I would do well to remember this as we grow our OPPT Facebook page next term and as I contemplate the possibilities for this site being a good place to start a student newsletter for our group.

Other worries that I have encountered include the changing format and look of Facebook- remember I go strictly by the manual and don’t easily change to new formats. And I find that I am more and more selective about friend’s requests and say decline more than accept. I still tend to think of the term friends literally, although my research for this blog has told me that is so last decade thinking!

Having said that, you can also go to my site and send a friends request. I won’t decline, promise. Search for Shirley Jorgensen.

But I am a dilettante and an inhabit the demographic that is least likely to fully embrace social networking. SO I thought I would do a little action research and interview the “correct” demographic; the very demographic that has never been without Facebook.

Mabel, pick up, it’s Kaleigh!

I have asked this beautiful university student, Kaleigh , the person who has used Facebook the longest of anyone I know, to provide a first-person narrative of the joys and the limits of social networking.

I will let her speak for herself.

KAELIGH VIDEO


Kaleigh makes the case that she was a reluctant convert and she finally caved as a “social obligation” But her comments of how she uses FB I believe exemplifies the zeitgeist of the native user. She says that she uses the technology to fit her own construction of what it should do for her. This ability of users to adapt and define a tool is a common thread that we have seen throughout our explorations for the Web 2.0 tools, particularly in mashups and other collaborative tools. This incidentally also separated the digital natives from the digital immigrants. I still need to follow the manual while the Kaleighs of the world adapt and construct or discard at will. They create their rules for using the tools or even for creating the tools. That is another dividing line for her and my generation of users.

We would do well as educators to remember this in our interactions with our own students. Expect them to adapt the use of the tool or even the tool itself. Do not be afraid of this if we don’t understand it. Let them go and explore but obligate them to bring some of us along as well. Or at least leave a map behind.


Keeping in mind some of the pitfalls of social networking as described by our guest star, you can begin to search for networking communities to join such as MySpace, FriendWise, FriendFinder, Yahoo! 360, Orkut, and Classmates. Or you can even start your own social networking site.

Actually it is fun to see a backlash against Facebook and social networking sites in general. This is coming from the very demographic that built and supported it. It seems people are getting bored with it all. Interesting. Here is one of my favorite backlashes that also cleverly summarizes the capabilities and apps for Facebook:



“Mabel, is there something wrong with your line? Has a pole been knocked down again?”

Ringing Up Kathy: Researching the Issues and Further Implications

Kathryn Montgomery, in her book, Generation Digital (2007) explains how social networks are shaping children and youth. She examines the politics of the expanding role networks play in an integrated digital culture. Montgomery sees the immersion effect of online social networks as being important for youths’ identity formation, connecting to peers, creating their voices and for engaging in the larger society.

I believe we teachers should explore with our students to use social networking as a means to engage the internet as a political voice. This may empower them to feel like they could be counted, to make a difference. Witness how young voters were mobilized in the US presidential campaigns, “or our own Edmonton debate on what to do with the City Centre Airport? The mobilization of young voters through social networking turned the tide on the latter issue. In my own OPPT setting, I could help the girls begin a campaign for example, with a local issue that touches their lives, such as the need for low cost housing in Leduc. The powerless could participate in such a debate through social networking and have a better chance of their voices being heard in the somewhat democratizing effect of the internet.

However, for all its potential, Montgomery sounds a warning bell about the marketing of information that is harvested from social networking sites and the loss of privacy in the lives of users.
In a radio commentary she sates:

“Social networks are just one part of what advertisers see as an expanding "digital marketing ecosystem." Today's teens are also being targeted on their cell phones, through instant messaging and in videogames. Marketers are making it fun and easy for kids to create online commercials for brands, which are then distributed widely on the Internet. Companies are crafting one-to-one messages, designed to work at a subconscious level by tapping into an individual's innermost needs, desires and anxieties.”

This opens up yet another responsibility for teachers to assume. Our students likely are not even aware of the methods and extent to which they are being profiled. My OPPT girls for example, need to be aware of how their developmental needs as teenagers, their roles as young moms, and their social needs for a homogenous peer group have been tagged with digital markers to make marketing connections to these needs.

In addition to social networking users being vulnerable to marketers, students are violating the Youth Criminal Justice Act in Canada or “friends” who have posted pictures of accused young offenders after a crime has been committed.

Matthew Johnson in his Blog posting (2009) notes:

With sites like Facebook growing at a rate of 250,000 new users a day, though, it has become clear that controlling information – even in cases like the YCJA, where it is done for arguably the best of intentions – has become much more difficult than it once was. The courts are still deciding just how much privacy can be expected on social networking sites; a Toronto judge recently ruled that even posts whose distribution is limited to Friends only must be disclosed if they are relevant to the case. (This ruling actually came from a civil trial, in which postings on the plaintiff’s Facebook page were introduced to counter his claims of having been seriously injured in an accident, but the precedent would apply to criminal cases as well.)

So are those Facebook users who posted the identities of the accused breaking the law? To date no charges have been laid, and after a year it seems unlikely that they will be. At the moment we seem to be in an odd situation where respected, responsible news outlets such as the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star have to abide by the law, but Internet postings do not. As seems more and more often to be the case, technology is at least one step ahead of the law. Given that many of our Outreach students are well acquainted with the YCJA, it would be prudent to discuss the implication of posting that picture off your camera that you took while the police did a sweep of the parking lot after the break in!

While the law so far has not caught up to the capability of the modern equivalent of the Wanted Poster of the Wild West, this is an issue that our students need to wary of.

Whose job is it anyways?
The issue for educators teaching such issues of privacy and the legal implications of Facebook becomes: whose “subject is it? Social Studies? Forensic Science? Language Arts? Legal Studies? Psychology? CALM?

Since I teach all these subjects to my OPPT girls, it will be relatively easy to embed the discussions in any or all of these courses. The scaffolding works well as I have the equivalent of a “home room”. But it may take careful coordination and collaboration within a specialized, and compartmentalized school where curriculum and standardized exams define the use of precious and limited class time.

I did found some questions that capitalize on the teachable moment of Facebook being used as criminal evidence: Here are some examples from here.

Here is what a class discussion could look like:

Why does the YCJA protect the identities of young offenders? • How might it serve the interests of: o Young accused o Young victims o Family of victims or accused o Society at large • Do you agree with these reasons? • Why might people have chosen to reveal the identities of the victim and the accused on Facebook? Do you agree with those possible reasons? • What powers should government have to control the publication of information online? • Should those powers be greater within the justice system? Why or why not? • Given that Facebook is an American company, should material it carries be subject to Canadian law? Why or why not? • Should people be charged for posting information about young offenders or young victims on sites like Facebook? Why or why not?

Perhaps if educators could be aware of even using news items as starting points for conversations, the students would be thinking and questioning their own social networking use.

Despite educators’ concerns with using social networking tools and sites it will continue to be a major influence on teaching and learning. According to the Horizon Report, 2008, the next phase for connecting people through the network will be the emergence of social operating systems—tools that not only recognize our social connections, but will expose information in entirely new ways that will make these networks richer and more fluid.

Finally, we educators also need to be aware of the widening gap between students’ ever expanding facility with social technologies such as Facebook, coupled with their rising expectations about opportunities for their uses, and educators abilities to integrate these technologies in the teaching processes.

“Serving to expand this gap is the withering pace of emerging technology, and even old technology hands often tire at the thought of learning yet another new way of working. At the same time, student expectations are important, and successful learning-focused organizations have long known they ignore these expectations at their peril.” (Horizon Report, 2008)

This last statement as a familiar ring doesn’t it? Remember how at the introduction to this blog we saw how users, not the developers, determined the best adaptation of the new technology, the party line telephone? It was those "unruly women and rural users" who ultimately embraced the potential of the telephone for social networking. We saw that same type of adaptation in Kaleigh's determination of how she makes Facebook work for her.

Perhaps we as educators share that same dilemma as the 1920’s telephone developers, and we too now must play catch up and rework our own thinking and marketing that embraces the possibilities for educational adaptations of social networking.




And on that note, the last word must go to my mom, an accomplished rubbernecker, and one of the last teachers at that schoolhouse one mile up the road, where she used to send us to pick saskatoons, “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”

You know, she’s so right on many levels.

But shh, just a minute, I think it's Jean on the line...
“Mabel, I have to hang up now. I’m going up to the schoolhouse to pick those saskatoons”

Eplilogue

Earlier someone posted a WIKI prayer..
Well here is my social networking reply: this is the social network that never crashes



References:

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2007/11/01/montgomery_commentary/

http://www.educause.edu/ELI/2008HorizonReport/162471

Mercer, D. (2006). The telephone: The life story of a technology. CA: Greenwood Press

Montgomery, Kathryn. (2007). Generational Digital: Politics, commerce and childhood in the age of the internet. MA: MIT Press