Jonesieblog

I’ve been playing with the data from Scotedublogs (I can provide this data in its raw detail, if anyone wants it!). Clearly we do not have every edublog in Scotland in the system, but I thought this visualization was interesting:

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A quick heads up that Google have launched The Google Highly Open Participation Contest  – a global contest for high school students.  I’ll definitely be passing this on to our Computing department.

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Having tuned in to the enormous buzz about the concept of an open, global, social graph, I’ve been pondering what the implications are for education and young people.

The reality is that some time pretty soon young people are going to be arriving in high school with well established online identities which support “single sign on” (SSO) across a wide range of web sites and services, and with portable graphs of their social connections. They already have the social graphs and identities – they just need the graphs to be liberated from the closed social networks within which they reside and for the identities to be unified to allow SSO.

Will we then provide them with a new, school-based online identity and expect them to be grateful? This will never work unless their school identity plays nicely with their real identity, by which I mean that they will be able to designate their school identity as belonging to their real identity, and will therefore be able to access their social graph from within the school identity.

Handing a young person an identity (username/password) which cannot connect to their existing identity or identities, and cannot therefore access their existing social graph will be exactly as useless to them in the future as it would be to hand them a computer with no Internet access today.

This delegation of identities is relatively easy with OpenID – I am http://robertjones.myopenid.com but I am also http://www.jonesieboy.co.uk/blog – with the latter url simply referring on to the root identity url.

It also strikes me that the doom-merchants are going to go absolutely ballistic! Imagine suggesting that young people might be putting their graphs of social connections online for all and sundry to view? The horror! Never mind the fact that almost all child abuse is perpetrated by family members or adult friends of the family [see Child maltreatment in the United Kingdom: executive summary (PDF, 67KB ], and never mind the fact that they are all doing so already in Bebo, MySpace and elsewhere. This wailing and gnashing of teeth will be a good sign that something genuinely as revolutionary as the Web is occuring.

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I realised today that many of the blogs in my news reader are dormant/dead.  Some were tentative ventures that didn’t develop, but some were really interesting for a while.  For me, the lesson is that if you are not actively seeking out new blogs to read, you are slowly losing touch with the blogosphere.

Anyway, here are some blogs I miss:

• Creating Passionate Users – of course;
• Miscellaneous Learning – Nova Stevenson;
• GeekyTeach - recent signs of life actually from Peter;
• Paul Goodall;
• It’s late and I’m tired – the reality of being a probationer;
• Graham Dickie;

Can anyone recommend any new blogs that I should definitely be subscribing to?

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Scott Wilson has a superb diagram on his blog showing how institutional software and user-controlled spaces should interact in an efficient learning environment.

He also has a slide show about OpenID and education, in which he says:

Far from threatening institutional viability and control, distributed, user-owned technology offers an escape route from escalating costs, liabilities, and bureaucracy that come from a supply-driven model. Rather than spinning us out of control, they offer a way to get back under control.

Oh yes!

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