Lesley Anderson

Meeting 3

After Ken’s message back to the whole group - prompted by Liz’s email to him, I’m guessing - all seems well for RedPod again. As teachers, we are used to setting up collaborative activities and it makes sense to us to approach this task in that vain. We had a great discussion tonight about just what collaborative activities are and how they are set up and organised. 

Now that everyone is on the same page and happy with the direction we are taking we can move forward with the main part of the task - the research and investigation. I am working on the use of Skype for Professional Development and I have started looking at lots of different websites already.

I’m hoping to have something ready to post to the blog ASAP.

Meeting 2

I have been hanging on to my reflections on the Pod meetings - don’t know why. 
Thought it was time to publish them.

After this group meeting all the members were left feelin quite confused and unsure of exactly what we were going to do.  At the end of  the last meeting we thought we had it covered but further discussion opened up a whole can of worms. We are now unsure whether our original plans will actually cover all aspects of the task and the subsequent assessment.

We made a decision, that Liz would email Ken again and get a little bit more information and clarification - just to make sure.  This is a bit of a nuisance as we all really want to get started with the task.  We are working well together, though and the discussions are great.

I’m sure we’ll be on our way soon.

Meeting 1

As the date for our pod assignment was getting closer and we seemed to have little success facilitating meetings RedPod decided to meet on Friday 2/10/09 at about 8.30 pm using Skype as a meeting network.  We decided to use Skype as we had been chatting on it and found it a successful way to talk to each other. That time was chosen because one of our members - Liz Evans lives in Darwin N.T. and we needed to take into account the time difference.

The decision to meet was made by three of the pod members - myself, Liz and Melenna as we chatted on Skype the night before. We all felt we needed to make a start on our assessment and my thoughts were to try and get it up and running before my school holidays finished.

The pod has 2 other members - Ben, who was unavailable to attend and Shin for whom we had no contact details as this member didn’t appear to be using the forum and had not attended any previous attempts to meet.  We did post a message to the subject forum, just in case either of the other members were available.

During our meeting we did make some decisions about how we would address the assessment.
We decided to create a new blog purely for RedPod and use it to write our ideas and recommendations for the final assessment. This blog would become our group’s collaborative space and we would have all our research and information in one place.
We also decided to post reflections on the assessment, and logs of the meetings to our personal blogs.

We made these decisions knowing that other members of the pod needed to be informed and contacted - Liz volunteered to do this and I volunteered to create our new blog using WordPress.
http://redpod.wordpress.com

Our group also decided to take a social network each to begin researching in order to make a start on our assessment and meet again on Wednesday 7/10/09 at about 8.00pm for first discussions.
I created our blog and customised it a little to be suitable for the pod and I also created some categories to get us started.

Here we go…………

Social networks case study

Who is following who? Exmaine the blogs in your POD and
work out the map of Followers/Following relationship.

This Social Networking diagram shows the group of followers of the blogs belonging to RedPod.  It is colour coded according to the Pods all followers belong to.

Assign each person a letter in the same order as they appear in the dialogue as a, b, c .. etc.
For your chosen extract, draw the social network diagram and build the same matrix of 0 and 1’s as per figure 1. Descibe any patterns of people’s interactions that you discover.
If you were to repeat this analysis on another set of blogs from another POD,
would you find the same patterns?
Why or why not? [HINT - changes in context and process may be just some variables to consider]
Support you opinion with any of the reference provided or with others you find.    

The RedPod meeting that this dialogue was extracted from and from which the data was extracted was certainly full on.  In fact most of the meetings our Pod has held have been the same.  I did notice, as I looked over the dialogue that we talk about a lot of other things besides the task at hand but there seems to have been great discussion about what we have been doing, how we are doing it and what we have achieved.  This discussion was highly motivated too All members contributing at some stage, to the discussion, is reflected in the table above.  We all talked to each other at some stage of the conversation.  The diagram is fairly mundane as is the table.

One thing, these items don’t show is ‘how much’ each member of the group contributes to dialogue and conversation.  Perhaps a diagram with weighted edges as suggested by Hallinan[i] in the second of her lectures - “Networks” would better do that?    Weighting or colour coding edges could certainly aid in showing which members of the group were most actively engaged during discussion and interaction.

The type of dialogue is not reflected - agreement or disagreement, questioning or explanatory, or reveal relationships between group members. Tone certainly is not evident and that is difficult to gauge from text alone - unless it is obvious that someone is unhappy with what is going on in a discussion and expresses it adequately.

The way I have displayed my social networking diagram is not indicative of the direction of conversation either.  It basically makes the statement that at some stage during the conversation person A spoke to person B. Having the table in front of you helps a little - in this case we know that person B did speak to person A but we don’t know where in the conversation this occurred.

There are certainly factors that I believed influenced this and other of our Pod discussions.
The timing of our meeting - we had not yet started with our pod work and had had a few hiccups with how we would approach the work and workload in order to fulfil the requirements of the task set for us.
With a general feeling of urgency and need to complete work within a time frame it is much easier to get discussion happening and keep it on track.
Time zone differences - we had to make the most of the time when we were all able to get together to discuss things as one of our members is one and a half hours behind us. Not that it has caused any real problems, but I do think it makes us frugal with the time we have together.
The nature of the work - knowing that this is assessment material also helps to keep us efficient with our meeting times and stay relevant to the goal we are trying to achieve.
Size of the group - only four members discussing things over distance, makes the discussion much more productive and makes all the data look neat and tidy - there’s really not that much to handle.

If these restraints and pressures from outside the group were not there, if we had unlimited amounts of time to work together and get our task finished, if we had to communicate across a huge group of people over distance and were not all working toward a common goal,  things might well be different.  Kirshbaum[ii] talks about complex systems as being self organising - they adjust naturally to increase their efficiency and effectiveness, in response to so many stimuli from the environment around them as well as being affected by the nonlinear change that happens within them. It is amazing that all of it occurs without us even realising it.   

 [i] Hallinan, J 2005, Introduction to Complex Systems, <http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~comp4001/>, accessed 21 October 2006.

 [ii] Kirshbaum, D, 2002, Introduction to Complex Systems, <http://www.calresco.org/intro.htm>, accessed 21 October 2006.

I decided to actually take a look at a larger dialogue to compare with my original data. 
This table and the second Social Networking Diagram have been generated from dialogue from the group’s Etherpad discussion on the 5/8/09 and, even though there is only double the number of members in this discussion excerpt the picture is quite different - in both the table and the diagram. I remember feeling at the time, how disjointed the meeting felt as members of the group came in and left randomly.  The table also shows dominance by a couple of the group members and the dialogue actually reflects this - with their names coming up more often in the conversation.  It also shows polarising to a certain degree - this was quite early in our semester of work and people were still finding their way, getting to know others and understand how things would work.

Research and evaluation in Government 2.0

1. Summarise the use of

• 1. Wiki drafts of papers for public discussion and
• 2. Twitter in Government.

Wikis appear to be a favoured way of creating some documents where public discussion is to be included. On the Public Sphere2  site. http://wiki.katelundy.com.au/PublicSphere2 an outline is given of the steps that were undertaken to create a collaborative document on - Government 2.0: Policy and Practice - which would ultimately be given to the Gov2.0 taskforce when it was completed.  Use of a wiki was central to this process, enabling people from throughout the Australian general public to have their say about the topic by adding to the wiki file.  This has also been the process for Public Sphere3 and other Government bodies are embracing the idea of public forum set up in this way with a view to decision making being collaborative with and transparent to the general public.

Twitter also seems to be gathering momentum for use in such forums. Both the Public Sphere reports mentioned above and passed on the Gov2.0 taskforce included documentation of twitter feeds in which members of the government and public added comments and information to the discussion taking place. On all the Gov2.0 sites are icons for twitter encouraging people to follow the government on it. Read the rest of this entry »

Is social networking a business model?

What are the arguments for and against social networking being classified as a business model?

There is certainly a lot of talk on the web about business models and whether social networking sites could be classified as having one. Firstly, tracking down a definition of a business model that I could understand - as a non-business person was challenging. I finally got some satisfaction with this definition. A business model is -
“A description of the operations of a business including the components of the business, the functions of the business, and the revenues and expenses that the business generates. ” http://www.investorwords.com/629/business_model.html

It seems that a business model is generally about how a business will generate revenue to sustain itself and satisfy anyone who has financial interests in it - monetization. Some models and the problems they may face with regard to social networking follow in the table below. Read the rest of this entry »