1) 
Drug-Intervention
You cannot watch someone killing himself without doing anything. If someone has a knife and wants to kill himself. You will do anything to stop him. Drugs is the same thing. It is just a longer process .
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Anderson110
The Digital Learning Group
There are a number of tech groups around campus who collaborate on projects within and outside of the University. The Digital Learning Group (DLG) is one of them. We have two programmers, a Flash programmer, an instructional designer who is also a Flash designer, and a webmaster. Though we’re housed within the School of Public Health, we can contract with anyone who wants to work with us.
Visit the DLG website for more information.
Closing and Future Directions
Download Ann Hill Duin’s “Future Directions” Powerpoint from the closing session of the Networks & Neighborhoods in Cyberspace Symposium.
These are my personal thoughts and reflections on the closing session. I did my best to accurately report on the thoughts of Ann and the other participants. Please feel free to comment or post your own blog as well. 
Ann Hill Duin did a great job of summarizing the panels from earlier. Her big question - Where do we go from here? We need to make things that are “disruptive” if we want to move forward and create new things. For example, the University of Minnesota recently altered their requirements for tenure to include incentives of interdisciplinary research. This is a big change, as professors will be required to reach beyond their normal spheres of influence…and potentially have a greater influence.
The way people interact and share information is changing. That is, many of the major name brands are losing market influence to more collaborative online environments:
- Blogger.com now has 100M (up from 10M in 2005); beats CNN.com
- MySpace.com beats MTV.com
- Wikipedia.com beats Brittania.com
- Skype adds 220,000 subscribers per day
Vision for the future. Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0.
Ann’s presentation opened up to more of an interactive discussion than a presentation, so the following paragraphs are a mix of Ann’s thoughts and those of the audience.
There are distinct differences between the traditional model of choosing research partners vs. the “shared leadership” model. When choosing our networks and partnerships, they should be based on the quality of interactions rather than on titles and positions. Members should be interdependent and help each other to learn and grow intellectually, moreso than simply providing a portion of the needed data. That is, good leaders “provide multiple means to enhance the process.”
Outcomes Do Matter, and a Unified Framework is the First Step
I strongly disagree with Aaron Doering. In the second section of Panel II: Implications of Cyberspace, he made what seemed to me to be an exceptionally strong stance on the need to measures outcomes from the implementation of new technologies for learning, stating that no student would ever face the decision between a media-empty and media-rich class, so measuring outcome differences between online and face-to-face courses is unneeded.
This is simply untrue. For example, in my home department, Psychology, we offer a course which can be taken either online or in person. It is an identical course. The only difference between the two sets of sections is that the lecture and discussion component is given entirely online for the online course. The lectures are the same - the online course receives a webcam-captured version of the face-to-face class.
So imagine this: if there was a consistent difference between online and face-to-face class outcomes (say, for the sake of example, students in online courses received consistently better grades with the same instructors and materials), students would be faced with the choice of taking a course that produces lower or higher grades (on average), which would be a very real and important decision for them. Our high-minded ideals of “but you learn the same amount either way” would amount to little for their decision and for their GPA, which does have important implications for future outcomes for them (graduate school, work after college, etc).
A gentleman also raised another important point in this session - “is there any conclusive evidence that online is better than face-to-face?” - which received a similar answer from, I believe, PZ Meyers. He claimed it didn’t matter to him, since an in-person component was present in his class anyway. This is also unrealistic when putting this in the larger perspective of education as a whole. Some classes DO have online components alone. This is an interesting and valid question - just because you could have a face-to-face component in addition to an online component doesn’t mean you will.
I don’t know about findings in education, but my home field of industrial psychology actually does shed some light here (industrial psychology is a relatively small field, but focuses on the application of psychological principles to the business world - such as training on the job). A meta-analysis on online vs. face-to-face training interventions by Sitzmann et al (2007) provided aggregated evidence across 96 studies that showed that, on average, online studies are no worse or better than face-to-face training. However - and this is an important however - when more training techniques were used in the online training, students did do better.
This leaves several unanswered questions. Is it simply because there are more training opportunities in the studies with better outcomes, or is is because the nature of those training opportunities is qualitatively better than traditional (usually lecture-based) training?
This is the focus of a study that I am conducting right now - and improvement and expansion on the Sitzmann meta-analysis, taking into account the actual composition of the training interventions. Do they use blogs? Do they use wikis? Is there a video component? I am sorting through several hundred studies and aggregate the results in order to understand more targetted questions, e.g. “Does online training that uses wikis produce a bigger online-vs.-face-to-face difference than online training that doesn’t?”
The major problem that I face with this is that most studies treat cyberspace-driven training interventions as “something we did,” and not as a collection of dependent features. For example, descriptions might be like “WebCT was used.” Well, what parts of WebCT were used? Did you do real-time assessments? Video presentation? Lecture materials as PDFs?
This is one of the MAJOR challenges that any multidisciplinary examination of these ideas must face. How do we define any of these inteventions? MySpace will come and go. Facebook will come and go. Google will (probably) come and go. But what makes these technologies similar or different? What is ACTUALLY changing when someone migrates from one social networking service to another for their training or education needs?
This is why we need to develop a unified taxonomy and framework to work within in order to even BEGIN to talk about these issues. We cannot talk about “the benefits of MySpace” because MySpace isn’t what’s powerful - it’s the tools that MySpace provides. This also escapes the trap of technological obsolescence - if we study the components and not the products themselves, then our research will not obsolete until the components fall out of favor - not just until Google’s stock dries up. This also keeps the research fresh, and the grant dollars coming in - as new technologies develop, they must be placed in the taxonomy and monitored as they develop. Creating this taxonomy and framework is what I would like to do, and it truly is a multidisciplinary question. We cannot address this in just one field without limiting ourselves artificially by the technologies available to and commonly used in that field.
So I suppose, in the end, this will sound like an AA introduction: My name is Richard Landers, and I need some collaborators!
(rlanders.filedrawer.org)
Neighborhoods Online - What’s the best way? What doesn’t work?
I am interested in research about the best ways to build sustained online relationships among those who live near one another.
I am highly skeptical that technological determinism (the cornerstone of web 2.0) will build much more than “virtual ghost towns” at the local level. Sites like Facebook are only “public spaces” if you accept the Mall of America as a democratic public space - what we really have are publicized private spaces and not public life reflected online.
I am interested in research that will take on this tool-oriented cyber-optimism and find out what really works online (and offline) to make local places work online.
Below is a post to our online community of practice for those building Issues Forums about the real world efforts required to create deeply engaged geographically-based communities online that last for years.
Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org
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Panel II: Implications of Cyberspace
These are my personal thoughts and reflections on this panel. Please feel free to comment or post your own summary!
Panel includes:
Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch
Aaron Doering
Sumanth Gopinath
Joan Hughes
Jeremy Iggers
PZ Meyers
Loren Terveen
Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch: She teaches 1 of about 70 required freshman English composition courses. UTHINK blog - What is the best use of the UTHINK blog for classes? Some instructors are resistant to moving away from the face-to-face writing workshop, which is a very pedagogically-tested commodity. But the blog allows people to connect (and write) in new ways. There are successful examples of moving the writing group online.
Does putting required writings online cause students to become more engaged in the writing process (i.e. they want to look good when their friends visit their blog).
Can be used to address digital plagiarism.
Aaron Doering: Go North! Polar Husky “Adventure Learning” project. Millions of students and thousands of teachers around the globe participate in this daily, live adventure learning experience. Go North! immerses students in an issue - this year it is “Mineral Exploration” under the main theme of “Climate Change”. Students are now becoming the experts in that they are gathering local data and submitting it to the website as well as blogging for other students to learn from.
How do we teach inservice teachers how to teach? Doering is trying to figure out how to use the Go North! project to help prospective teachers learn about the teaching experience (and gain experience teaching).
Jeremy Iggers: Intersection of virtual and physical space was a violent collision. Newspapers and news outlets are shifting resources away from public watchdog activities, which has led to a degradation of society. But this didn’t start with the Internet; rather television was the start of the decline of civic activity and the Internet increased this decline. The destructive forces that we see also show promise. For example, “The balance of power has changed.” Ordinary citizens can now participate in journalism/reporting more readily as blogs, etc. become more pervasive. Professional journalists need to change to accommodate this new reality.
Iggers is one of the founders of Twin Cities Daily Planet. The Daily Planet is seeking to encourage more civic involvement and responsible citizen journalism.
PZ Meyers: Owns the opinionated and Squid-driven blog, Pharyngula. He had his students contribute directly to his blog (under a pseudonym) and didn’t evaluate them on the actual writing. One of his students posted a blog that outraged many of PZ’s readers.
Loren Terveen: Amazon collects all sorts of data that helps people to navigate their enormous online store. Target collects similar data to improve their store. Terveen noticed that this idea started in the real world (notes on recipes, etc.). The more someone knows about you, the better service they can give you. What is the balance that needs to be struck between privacy and usability. Cell phones can now collect data about where you are at what time of day. They can then use that data to sell you goods or help you to find directions to somewhere. How much privacy are we willing to trade for convenience?
COMMENTS:
Terveen: The software to do some of the more useful position-awareness things with cellphones isn’t universally-installed, which makes it difficult to test and find.
Doering: To what common denominator do you want to develop for? Should we develop in Flash? Hopefully when the students see what they COULD have, they’ll get it taken care of. We want to provide the BEST online learning experience possible, and sometimes you have to use less accessible stuff (Flash) to do it.
Audience Member: How does computer technology effect the way that the brain develops? Would we have different brains if the cavemen grew up on computers? Will technology negatively affect the way humans will grow from here on out?
Myers: Yes, we would have very different brains, but there’s no way to tell if they would be better brains or worse brains.
Gopinath: We don’t always consider the idea that technologies can have negative consequences on brain/human development and in other areas.
Audience Member: How do we create an international code of Internet ethics while avoiding the 1984 phenomenom (i.e. authoritarianism)?
Terveen: There are good and bad things that come with more online regulation.
Myers: What is the alternative? These collisions that happen between online and physical are good and bad, but “change is good.”
Audience Member: How do we make everyone aware of the advantages and dangers of using new technology?
Hughes: Technology can be used to do things we always did or it can amplify things we have done in the past. But how do we push universities to change the they think about technology to impliment NEW uses of technology? Example: Some school have policies that forbid email and mySpace rather than figuring out ways to utilize these technologies to enhance learning.
Kastman Breuch: Internet is changing the way we do things. Faculty have to do a better job of exploring new technologies and integrating it into our curriculum.
Gopinath: There is a “creative destruction” in capitalism. There are currently battles of distance learning taking place as a result of both a desire to increase access and turn a profit. So “content delivery” could become the new university model (or not). There is an urge to hold onto the old ways of doing things (not necessarily a bad thing).
Iggers: There is an unprecedented ability for these social networking tools to bring people together. You see it on political campaigns and in Wikipedia.
Audience Member: How do we assess the benefits of using new technologies in the K-12 classroom?
Terveen: If the goal is to “replace” things, then the result will be bad. You have to think, “What can we DO with the new technology.” Wikipedia - “It’s crazy that it works.” One reason Wikipedia works is that the software features make sense for that technology. They built a piece of software that created a resource; they didn’t try to remake the encyclopedia.
Doering: The research indicates that there “is no significant difference” between online learning and face-to-face learning, which is a good thing, because it means that we can deliver education in a more flexible manner (and to more people).
Audience Member: What is the best way to set up an online community for a local neighborhood?
Iggers: Check out Twin Cities Daily Planet. We are currently working on this initiative.
Aesthetics and multimedia presentation tool
I am one half of a two person development team that has created a multimedia organization and presentation tool. We are looking for:
- a researcher
- an instructor
- a faculty member
- a presenter or
- someone who regularly works with multimedia presentations
to join our network and help us advance the development of our prototype tool.
What is this about?
Many software- and online-based multimedia display and organization tools, such as PowerPoint and Flickr, handle one form of media well - images, video, audio, or text - but not all forms of current media. Furthermore, these “multimedia” tools do not facilitate the sharing and collaborative use of all available forms of media.
ManGO is a seamless media organization and sharing platform being developed by Laurie McGinley and Fritz Vandover that will enable users to upload assets, create elegant multimedia presentations, and share and discover media that other ManGO users elect to share.
We think we can create a better way to present multimedia coursework and we welcome your comments, ideas and participation.
Place and Online Participation - Researching “real” neighborhoods online - E-Democracy.Org provides partnership opportunity
At the last minute I found myself unable to attend in person, so thank you for the online option.
E-Democracy.Org is very interested in working with groups of academic researchers looking to create actionable knowledge. By that, I mean knowledge that helps those seeking to improve democracy and strengthen local communities do better work and be more effective.
In summary, E-Democracy.Org:
1. Hosts “online town halls” and “neighborhood forums” in ten communities across three countries. Our “Issues Forums” (current forums) are led by a volunteer Forum Manager and supported by a local Steering Committee - we combine the service club model on a century ago with advancing “anywhere, any time” technology of today. The St. Paul chapter extends their mission off-line with digital inclusion outreach as well.
2. With grant support we are launching an initiative in rural Minnesota starting with five regional citizen media outreach events. We will end up with three new Issues Forum in rural communities.
3. With another grant we are in the early stages of launching online neighborhood efforts in high immigrant/communities of color/low income areas of Minneapolis (Cedar Riverside) and St. Paul (Frogtown).
4. We have additional neighborhood forums starting - Seward (open) and Standish-Ericsson recently signed 120 people using good old paper forms.
There are dynamic research and evaluation questions related to all of these projects. What ideas do you have?
In addition to the projects above, some additional opportunities include:
1. Comparison of the deliberativeness, etc. of our model with other types of similarly geographic bounded political exchange online.
2. Collaboration leading to technology enhancements for open source GroupServer platform (combines e-mail, web forms, blog feeds, social networking/Web 2.0) we use to test new ideas. We are about to receive another grant which will allow us to dramatically improve our usability/look and feel for our forums site (which is highly utilitarian, loved by existing users, but needs to “look” more “Web 2.0″ to attract new users and volunteers willing to start new forums.)
3. Qualitative interviews of elected officials, journalists, citizens that gets to heart of the real impact of local online political participation. At the local level, our most active forums put a community years ahead of those just starting to develop a local blogosphere.
4. Comparative analysis on the generation of social capital online in local places using different technologies and models - no one has attempted to answer the “what works best assuming limited resources” question.
If you are interested in connecting or learning more, drop us a line:
team@e-democracy.org
Also, I run the Democracies Online site (and have spoken on this topic across 27 countries) which include an international online community for e-democracy researchers. Join us.
Sincerely,
Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org
Panel I: Defining Networks and Neighborhoods Today
This post is simply my observations of the panel and is by no means intended to be the definitive word on the subjects discussed. So please post your own blog or comment on this one if you’d like!
The panel includes:
Laura Gurak, Moderator
Lee Anderson
Christine Greenhow
Alok Gupta
Steve Kelley
Joanna O’Connell
Nora Paul
O’Connell: We should think in terms of global teams without language as a barrier.
Paul: Changes in the technology is changing the form of storytelling.
Anderson: Creating a building or project requires a lot of people working together. For example, even though Frank Gehry is the “star architect” of many buildings, he has all sorts of architects, designers, construction crews, engineers, etc. working to bring a project to completion. There are other stakeholders as well (visitors, government, etc.). Is this multi-disciplinary?
Global teams of designers, architects, etc. are now working “round-the-clock” in different areas of the world and offering their expertise electronically. This worldwide base of knowledge allows for rapid prototyping and quick turn-arounds on all sorts of projects.
My thoughts: What are the implications of all this? How does all this influence the way we communicate? Is it good? Bad?
Greenhow: Today we have the ability to craft a viewpoint and disseminate it to a mass audience. This means that teenagers and folks in traditional positions of less power, now have more power. This shift in power has transformed political campaigns, etc.
How are youths using social networking sites? Over 55% of teenagers use online social networking websites. Popular media has portrayed this as a negative thing (kids posting photos of them drinking). But in her conversations with teens, Greenhow has discovered that they view it as a positive thing - that is to deepen and maintain existing social connections. They are more social and have a more positive sense of identity and community. This has (possibly?) helped to keep many kids in school - when students feel like they are part of a community, they are more likely to show up, hang around, and participate actively.
Teens are learning creativity, problem solving, and are becoming more open to different viewpoints.
SHOUT OUT is a project that Greenhow is working on that is more than just social. She is trying to learn if she can help students to learn how to network and share common interests and, ultimately, to stay in school at higher rates. Can we utilize online social networks to teach leadership skills?
Gupta: Online Markets Design and Consumer Behavior
Online marketing has been influenced heavily by online social networking (think Amazon.com & UPS.com - your ability to follow a package as it moves around the globe). Information goods can now be sold and downloaded (now you can instantly download journal articles).
On online auction sites, there are all sorts of strategies that people employ. Some people log in early and place one bid. Others might participate throughout, place a dummy bid at the beginning, or swoop in at the very end and try to win the auction. So how is this affecting design of websites?
What incentives exist to influence people to contribute online? When a site offered an award for sharing information online, people stopped sharing information with each other.
Kelley: Some folks are really tech-savvy and others are have never owned a computer. So city officials need to pay attention to the varying skill levels and needs of citizens. So, you see cities setting up public works and emergency phone numbers as well as websites.
Politics. Barack Obama is constructing a mass movement using web 2.0 tools (online fundraising, networking, etc.). His YouTube “Yes We Can” video has 3 million views. Ron Paul is also building his campaign using online tools, which make him the “idiosyncratic” Republican candidate.
Online labs at schools have raised questions about whether online learning really works as well as face-to-face, traditional teaching. The jury is still out on whether or not virtual tools are effective.
We need multi-disciplinarity. “Mash-ups” - tools that combine technologies on the web.
O’Connell: Older people say they “don’t have the time” to learn them. Younger people know how to use the tools. How can we help colleagues connect with each other when they are speaking a different language? How do we use technology to help these two age groups connect?
Most faculty are not trained teachers. Print culture changed ideas of nationality, etc. What will literacy technologies shape the way we view the world. How will new technologies inform old tools (books, talking, conversation, etc.). The viral circulation of Obama’s “Yes We Can” video has connected Obama supporters in an interesting way. What happens when people meet each other in person for the first time, online for the first time, and in person after meeting someone online?
How has technology been used to change/form political movements both in the past and present? How does past use of technology inform the current use of technology (blogs, mySpace, etc.)?
Paul: Digital Storytelling Effects Lab (DiSEL)
“How are new forms of connectivity reshaping relationships?”
There are lifecycles of talking about and collaborating on ideas (meet, talk, research, celebrate, etc.). How does online social networking influence these cycles?
Challenges:
- There’s still only 24 hours in a day.
- Generational differences (…yet another program to master).
- How does one go about learning Moodle when there isn’t a big interest in it (attention deficiency) or enough time in the day?
- “If you build it, they won’t necessarily come.” You can build great tools that nobody uses. Social networking can help get users!
- Many technologies and technology topics are fun and “irresistable”
“Can technologies facilitate collaboration? Blogging, Facebooking, Wiki-ing, Moodle, Dabble, Google Docs, etc.
COMMENTS
Gupta: Sometimes the tools that are created don’t have mass appeal.
Anderson: You have to determine what the function is before you build tools. What do we want to do, and how can we use technology to solve that problem?
Kelley: We need/will develop a common vernacular to discuss online stuff. The lack of consistency in discussions of online tools make it difficult for many people to connect on things that might be very interesting or useful.
Commenter: Organizations don’t always see the value of collaboration tools. Self-interest is needed sometimes to make organizations invest in certain technology.
O’Connell: In her experience, undergrad students are more willing to share online than grad students and, for some reason, have more motivation to do so. Grad students lacked the motivation.
Gurak: New technologies are often built in some sense of isolation. As technologies move forward in the development process, they change.
Anderson: Who benefits by using Google? (Google shareholders, advertisers, users, etc.) How does the profit motive influence the tools that Google makes?
Commenter (to Anderson): How is architecture evolving to accommodate and control the new forms of online collaboration?
Anderson: The profession of architecture has an established culture that controls the ways that people communicate online. But perhaps the new forms of communication are disturbing those controls. The main question seems to be: Which way will the controls sway - will the large corporation own the controls or will they be more democratized?
Commenter: How can we motivate researchers to conduct multi-disciplinary or inter-disciplinary research?
Gupta: There are support systems at the University that are working to provide incentives for networks to grow. There needs to be more done.
Commenter: Usability needs to be discussed more when we are talking about online social networking (blind, deaf, different languages, lack of tech knowledge and understanding).
Commenter: How do we create sustainability in online networking communities? (We’ve seen the rise and fall of Friendster.com)
Greenhow: Students would like to go to a safe place around a topic of interest. How do we integrate the different “pods” of interest?
Gurak: There comes a point when you are better off going with the mainstream product rather than developing tools in-house.
O’Connell: There is no searchable online database for faculty expertise! Faculty members invest a LOT of time figuring out what other people do. The existing tools are proprietary. We need a good, unified tool at the University.
