Will Richardson

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What Creates Interaction in Facebook (and Elsewhere)

July 14, 2011 By Will Richardson

While this is meant for Facebook pages, I think these ideas probably hold true for wherever we blog and post:

The main highlights from the study, published on the Facebook for Journalists page, suggest journalists with Facebook pages should take note of the following facts:

Starting the conversation: Posts that include a question or call to action from the journalist received the highest amount of feedback;

Personal analysis is effective: Posts that included the journalist’s analysis and personal reflections had 20 per cent more referral clicks than that of an average post;

Images work: Photos received 50 per cent more likes than non-photo posts, and journalists who shared links that included a thumbnail image in the link preview received 65 per cent more likes and 50 per cent more comments than posts that did not include images.

What do you think?

(Now if I could just find an image…;0))

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: audience, education, facebook, literacy, writing

Censorship in Public Spaces

June 22, 2011 By Will Richardson

This echoes one of my concerns in moving over to Tumblr, but it also suggests a huge new complexity when it comes to how we can maintain control over our ideas and online spaces. Thinking a lot about that.

As the British blogger notes in his post on the incident, Facebook is “increasingly the space within which people receive their information, including civic information.” We are living more and more of our public lives and getting more of our information through networks such as Facebook, and while that can be a very powerful thing — as we’ve seen with events such as the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt — it also means that more of our information is being filtered by a corporate entity, with its own desires and rules, not all of which are obvious. The implications of that are profound.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: education, facebook, shifts, technology

The "Added Value of Networking"

March 4, 2009 By Will Richardson

From the “Building the Compelling Case Department” comes this piece in the Harvard Graduate School of Education magazine Ed. titled “Thanks for the Add. Now Help Me with my Homework.” This is another one of those pieces you’ll want to print out, xerox, and put in your administrators’ mailboxes. (Yes, my cynicism gene is in full gear.) They will like it because a) it’s from Harvard (ooooohhh) b) it’s based on research (more ooooohhhs) and c) it’s from Harvard.

Seriously, there has been a run of these of late, articles by traditionally reputable institutions that advocate (gulp) the use of social networks by teachers. And lord knows we need them. I sat in on a recent presentation by a union representative who told teachers not to e-mail students individually. (Group e-mails were ok, however.) And, as I recounted earlier, I’ve been in a couple of conversations of late with teachers whose state associations are basically telling them not to even create a Facebook profile for fear of litigation. We could spend hours discussing the challenges here; I’d rather focus on the slight breeze beginning to blow at our backs, especially in this article. Here are some of the compelling points to highlight.

First, kids are already using these spaces to learn, though there are huge opportunities for us to teach them how to to do it well:

Greenhow has found a virtual creative writing boom among students spending long hours writing stories and poetry to paste on their blogs for feedback from friends, or creating videos on social issues to bring awareness to a cause. Far from media stories about cyber bullying, meanwhile, she found that most students use the medium to reach out to their peers for emotional support and as a way to develop self-esteem. One student created a video of his intramural soccer team to entice his friends to come to his games. Another created an online radio show to express his opinions, then used Facebook to promote a URL where friends could stream it live, and then used one of Facebook’s add-in applications to create a fan site for the show.

They are learning skills that will serve them well in the future:

The kind of skills students are developing on social networking sites, says Greenhow, are the very same 21st century skills that educators have identified as important for the next generation of knowledge workers — empathy, appreciation for diversity of viewpoints, and an ability to multitask and collaborate with peers on complex projects. In fact, despite cautionary tales of employers trolling social networking sites to find inappropriate Halloween pictures or drug slang laced in discussion forums, many employers are increasingly using these sites as a way to find talent. A survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers cited this spring in The New York Times found that more than half of employers now use SNSs to network with job candidates. The website CareerBuilder.com even added an application to allow employers to search Facebook for candidates. “Savvy users say the sites can be effective tools for promoting one’s job skills and all-around business networking,” says the Times.

No one, however, is teaching them how to use these tools well:

What was more surprising to her, however, is how few teachers were using the Internet at all — and even fewer were aware of, much less using, social networking sites, despite their heavy usage by students. “It is the kids who are leading the way on this,” she says. “They are forming networks with people they meet every day as well as people they have barely met. If we can’t understand what kids are doing and integrate these tools into a classroom, what kind of message are we sending them? I think we’ll see an even bigger disconnect than already exists.”

As such, the kids are asea:

Even so, with the exceptions like Theresa Sommers, few students were actually using these sites for the purpose they were ostensibly created for — namely, networking with strangers in their intended college or career field. “The networking aspects weren’t even on their radars,” says Greenhow, who argues for a role in educators and guidance counselors in nudging students to take advantage of these opportunities. “Kids are conceiving of reaching out to others outside of school, they are getting there. What teachers can bring from their mindset is the added value of networking.”

The solution? We have to suck it up and get our brains around this for ourselves:

If that is going to be possible, however, first teachers must learn from the students’ mindsets — that is, rolling up their sleeves and creating Facebook profile themselves.

Look, I know it’s starting to sound like a broken blog-ord around here, but this really is the only way to put it: The world is changing because of social web technologies. Our kids are using them. No one is teaching them how to use them to their full learning potential, and ultimately, as teachers and learners, that’s our responsibility. To do that, we need to be able to learn in these contexts for ourselves.

(Photo “Creating Networks” by carf.)

Filed Under: On My Mind, Social Stuff, The Shifts Tagged With: facebook, learning, shifts, social_networks

Facebook as Tipping Point?

February 14, 2009 By Will Richardson

More and more I’m starting to think that Facebook may just be the engine that drives school change around technology. The numbers right now are pretty compelling. Six hundred thousand new users PER DAY, and fully three-quarters of the 175 million users are over 25. In fact, the fastest growing segment is women over 55. Whoda thunk that?

I read that as a whole lot of parents and teachers are dipping their toes in the pool and at least beginning to come to terms with social networks. Whether they can see the potentials for learning is another discussion. But I can’t help but think this conversation for reform which includes teaching kids how to learn in networked publics and online communities will be given a boost by their participation.

You?

Filed Under: Social Stuff Tagged With: facebook, shifts

It's the Parents' Fault. Not.

October 26, 2008 By Will Richardson

Recently, during a Q & A after a presentation, I had an interesting exchange with a high school principal that went something like this:

Principal: So I just want to give you my take on this.

Me: Sure

Principal: You bring up those examples of kids on MySpace and make the point that no one is really teaching them how to use those sites well.

Me: Yep

Principal: Well, I’ll tell you when they learn about that stuff. When I drag them into my office and read them the riot act about what they’ve been posting to their Facebook pages and they tell me that they never thought other people would look at their pages. They seem genuinely astonished that I could find them.

Me: And whose fault is that?

Principal: Well, I’d like to blame their parents. (Laughter.)

Me: Well, I think it’s your fault. (More laughter.) I mean, maybe not you in particular. But whose job is it to educate kids to use those sites well and appropriately? I doubt that most of their parents really have enough of an understanding of what their doing to prepare them.

Principal: So how do we do that?

I get into some variation of this discussion on a pretty regular basis, but I’m always amazed at how willing school leaders are to admit this reality and how little they are doing to deal with it. There is a solution to this, one that we all know, but one that for some reason few seem willing to implement other than in the guise of a “parent awareness night” or some type of scary Internet predator presentation by a state policeman. For the life of me, I can’t understand what is so hard about opening up the first and second and third grade curriculum and find ways to integrate these skills and literacies in a systemic way. If you want kids to be educated about these tools and environments, then maybe we should, um, educate them.

If we start talking about this stuff in first grade (in age appropriate ways), AND we involved parents in the process by being transparent about our intentions and our outcomes, I’m pretty sure that we could minimize the number of kids who get pulled into the principal’s office when they behave badly on their Facebook pages.

Filed Under: On My Mind Tagged With: education, facebook, safety, school

"Ambient Awareness"

September 8, 2008 By Will Richardson

Interesting article in the NY Times magazine section yesterday on the effects of Facebook and Twitter et. al. in terms of social awareness, friendship, and host of other aspects of how our lives are being affected by these technologies. A lot of it made me think, “yeah, that’s me,” especially parts like:

Many avid Twitter users — the ones who fire off witty posts hourly and wind up with thousands of intrigued followers — explicitly milk this dynamic for all it’s worth, using their large online followings as a way to quickly answer almost any question. Laura Fitton, a social-media consultant…recently discovered to her horror that her accountant had made an error in filing last year’s taxes. She went to Twitter, wrote a tiny note explaining her problem, and within 10 minutes her online audience had provided leads to lawyers and better accountants. Fritton joked to me that she no longer buys anything worth more than $50 without quickly checking it with her Twitter network.

It’s not all pretty, obviously, (some interesting thoughts of what this means for kids which I hope to write about more later) but what intrigues me so much about what the article brings up and about all this stuff in general is simply that it’s different, and that we’re in the midst of learning what it means right now, all together. At the end of the day, that is still the pull of social learning with social online tools for me, the fact that that brain work is transparent. Sure, I like knowing where folks are or getting some snippets of their personal lives; that adds to the picture, no doubt. But what I really like is being able to tap into the thinking of hundreds of really smart, active, engaged people who are willing to share their work and their learning with me on a scale that was not possible even five years ago. (Maybe not even two years ago.) How I manage and navigate all of that to the maximum benefit is always a struggle, but it’s a struggle that I enjoy greatly.

Filed Under: On My Mind, Social Stuff, The Shifts Tagged With: facebook, shifts, social, twitter

Teaching Googleableness (Con't)

April 29, 2008 By Will Richardson

From the “And These Teachers Got Hired How? Department” comes this downright scary quote in a Washington Post article on teachers with Facebook/MySpace sites:

In some cases, teachers apparently didn’t mind that their Web sites were raunchy and public — at least until a reporter called. Alina Espinosa, a teacher at Clopper Mill Elementary School in Montgomery, had written on her Facebook page in the “About Me” section: “I only have two feelings: hunger and lust. Also, I slept with a hooker. Be jealous. I like to go onto Jdate [an online dating service for Jewish people] and get straight guys to agree to sleep with me.”

Asked about the page, Espinosa said: “I never thought about parents and kids [seeing it] before. That’s all I’m going to say.”

Um…that kind of says it all, I think.

So who’s to blame? The schools that hired them? Their preservice programs? Their parents? Society? Technology? Or…

Filed Under: On My Mind Tagged With: education, facebook, shifts, teachers

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