A couple of months ago I started experimenting with the use of Twitter and other social media in my wired college classrooms. Meanwhile, out in California, Howard Rheingold was exploring the question of wired attention spans with his UC Berkeley social media class. Rheingold turned these explorations into a series of compelling vlog posts called “Training Attention.”
All of this got me thinking about the nature of engagement in a wired world. It struck me that we’re in need of some form of scaffolding for particpatory and social media use. Specifically, the creation of some sort of attention scaffolding that transports the user beyond a state of random gratification and sensory overload.
These thoughts led to an inspiring conversation with fellow educator and webby Rabble.ca columnist Wayne Macphail. Macphail turned this dialogue into a Rabble column he called “May I halve your attention please?”
Continue reading ‘Attention rabble-rousing with Wayne Macphail’
Has anybody else had a tough time explaining the value and purpose of Twitter to your non-Twittering friends, clients or colleagues?
After writing several lengthy emails, I threw all my best examples and links into a single message. My “Twitter explained” boilerplate is the result.
Continue reading ‘Client hacks: Twitter explained [boilerplate]‘
Despite the popularity and widespread adoption of social tools, there’s little agreement when it comes to matters of our individual terms of use. Without a collective social contract for social media, many of us are left wondering: How do I define my own social policy? Until now, corporate social media developers are defining those policies for us. Some of us feel it’s time we defined social media according to our our own terms.
In 2007, Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington created A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web. Their bill was intended to “spur conversation and debate” around the need for users to be more proactive about the ownership and use of their personal social media content. For example, the right to:
“Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats.”
I was inspired to extend this idea to speak to the more elusive question of social granularity. For example, to define my own policies around connecting, professionalism and signal to noise. The need to define these things along more personal terms was the basis for developing my own policy for social networking and media.
The following is a template based on my own personal Social Media Policy (SMP) for you to hack and remix. As ever, the content, tone and format is entirely up to you.
Continue reading ‘[steal] My Social Media Policy’
About a month ago I created a short Twitter survey. The idea for this survey emerged out of discussions about using Twitter in learning environment and the varied responses I received from students and educators. This inspired me to capture and share these responses in hopes that we might, collectively, demystify this weird new moment of microcontent. I distributed the survey via my blog and Twitter network and solicited responses for two weeks.
Download it here: Twitter Survey [PDF]
Of all of the questions I asked, I was most interested in knowing HOW we can use Twitter for productive ends. Read on (below)
Continue reading ‘My Twitter survey: results’
I created the following scorecard for small publications and organisations in order to help them assess the absence or presence of social media on their site. Here are the questions. You can dowload the scorecard to calculate the results social_media_scorecard [PDF]
1. How social is your site?
Rate your site features following social media (2 points each)
__ RSS/feeds/syndication
__ Blogs
__ Bookmarks (delicious, digg, etc)
__ Tags
__ User comments
2. If you build it, users will find it …
Rate your site’s social media usability and find-ability (2 points each).
__ Social media features are prominently located (close to the top of the article)
__ Social media features have recognisable icons (delicious, technorati, RSS symbol)
__ Your site features a “how to” or “help” section that explains social media features
__ Your site blogs allow (and encourage) user comments, permalinking and tagging
__ There is little to no registration involved for participation
Continue reading ‘Social media scorecard: How social is your site?’
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