I ended up attending the 2009 SITE conference in Charleston almost on a whim.  I didn’t propose a presentation, but my good friend Andrea did:  “Online Social Networking Used to Enhance Face-to-Face and Online Pre-Service Teachers Education”.  The abstract states,

“In this presentation we will share our experiences with teaching a technology course for pre-service teachers using online social networks to enhance the course.  We will begin by presenting three case studies in which two social  networks were used in three different instances of the course.  Finally, we will present our findings and our conclusions about social networks, how they can be used most effectively, and the advantages and disadvantages of the features in each.”

Andrea’s section of IP&T 286 was the first instance. A section taught be the course coordinator, Dr. Charles Graham, provided the second instance.  Andrea asked if I would mind writing up a brief description of my experience using Ning in my online section of IP&T 286 last semester.  Since I didn’t mind, I provided the third instance and was granted third author status.

I learned that the presentation had been accepted months ago, but did not decide to attend until a few weeks prior to the conference and didn’t actually make travel plans until last week.  I’m glad I decided to come, and not just because Charleston is a beautiful city with weather ten degrees warmer than what I left behind.

I arrived at the conference on Wednesday.  The first session that I attended was a presentation by Linda Brupbacher and Dawn Wilson of Houston Baptist University.  The presentation described efforts in technology integration in a pre-service teacher program.  Brupbacher and Wilson emphasized their attempts at a spiral curriculum aimed at developing future teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge.  For me, the idea that I was most eager to try was that of placing the technology course at the beginning of the course sequence for education majors.   Brupbacher and Wilson pointed out that this gave pre-service teachers skills that allowed them to use technology to aid in their own learning, which in turn gave them ideas for using technology to aid their future students’ learning.  I like Brupbacher and Wilson’s approach, but I would go even further.  I believe that all college freshman should take a required technology course that helps them learn how to use technological tools to support their learning.

Since the presentation that I was a part of was a “brief paper” and was presenting at the end of the hour, I managed to catch a presentation by Denise Schmidt, Evrim Baran, Ann Thompson, Matthew Koehler, Mishra Punya, and Tae shin.  The presentation was entitled, “Examining Preservice Teachers’ Development of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge in an Introductory Instructional Technology Course.”  This presentation described the results of a study that attempted to measure pre-service teachers’ growth in TPACK over a course of a semester (the study will continue to measure these teachers’ growth throughout their time in the education program).  Their results showed growth in all seven TPACK components.  I was interested in this presentation because I have been working with Dr. Graham and a few other graduate students to create an assessment of TPACK for use with pre-service teachers at BYU.  I saw some similarities between their instrument and ours.  However, we’ve encountered some difficulties in clearly defining the boundaries between constructs.  The concept of TPACK has some intuitive appeal for me, but I have concerns about the distinctions between the component parts of  the TPACK framework (I have similar concerns with TPACK’s parent concept, PCK– I’ll discuss these in a later post).

Wednesday afternoon, I attended back to back sessions by Judi Harris, Mark Hofer (and a host of collaborators).  The session title was “Operationalizing TPACK for Educators: The Activity Types Approach to Technology Integration” and it was delivered in two parts.  Activity types are an attempt to categorize the activities that teachers think about when planning lessons.  I first read Harris and Hofer’s article about activity types in 2006 and had immediately sat down and tried to create my own comprehensive list of activity types  (which I still have by the way).  My approach was different than Harris and Hofer’s.  They and their collaborators looked at the types of activities used in each content area.  I attempted to look across content areas in an attempt to separate general pedagogies from content or topic specific pedagogies.  It seems to me that for PCK or TPACK to be a useful construct, it should be possible to classify general pedagogical activities as pedagogical knowledge (PK) and content or topic-specific activities as pedagoical content knowledge (PCK).  I asked Mark Hofer about the lack of general activity structure in the taxonomy.  He argued that they felt that the difference between reading text in, for example, a social studies classroom, was different enough from the activity of reading text in a mathematics classroom to constitute separate, content-specific activity types.  I am not yet convinced.  Still, I find the concept of activity types to be a very practical concept for assiting teachers’ planning, independent of the TPACK framework.

Image via Wikipedia

About a year ago, I started teaching a course on Instructional Technology in Teaching and dived head first into the world of Web 2.0. Somewhere a long the way, I found a blog post that mentioned the term “personal learning network” and was intrigued because it described the process that I was using to learn about instructional technologies. I felt that if my students could learn to develop their own personal learning networks, they would become less reliant on me as their instructor and better prepared for a life time of learning. However, I’m not sure how to teach people to develop personal learning networks. Much, perhaps even most, of my knowledge about how I’ve developed my own personal learning network is tacit rather than explicit and I have grave doubts about the validity of generalizations based on a sample that includes only myself.

One of the difficulties in teaching about learning networks is trying to decide what a learning network is. I’ve seen definitions that describe a learning network as a group of people who help guide your learning (Tobin 1998). I’ve also seen broader definitions that include any resource that you that you can refer to when you need to learn something (Smith). Those who’ve read my previous post on “The nature of networked information” can probably guess that prefer the broader definition.

If one accepts a broader definition of learning networks, as I would like to, then documents or other artifacts can serve as nodes in the network. I don’t know enough about analysis to say for sure, but I suspect that the including inanimate objects adds a level of complexity to the analysis of the network.

I don’t have figures to back me up, but I suspect that many, if not most, web-based (and some traditional) learning interactions are mediated through some sort of document or other resource (e.g. blogs, wikis, podcasts, books, video, etc.), rather than direct communication between two individuals. How should such ties be represented in a network analysis? According to Granovetter (1973) ties between individuals are by definition “positive and symmetric”. Do two individuals who know each other only through comments on common blog have enough of a connection with each other to be described as having a weak tie, or would the tie be better described as negligible? What terminology describes unidirectional relationships such as those between an author and silent audience member? What should I be reading to find answers?

From McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook (2001), I learned a little about the role of organizational foci in shaping social networks. Most of our non-kin ties form as a result of our association with institutions such as school, work, and voluntary organizations. This week, I’ve been reading The Social Life of Information by Brown and Duguid. The chapter that I read last night introduced the concept of networks of practice (related to, but distinct from Lave & Wenger’s concept of communities of practice). I believe the idea of networks of practice can provide some insight into the ways in which institutional forces influence our learning networks.

Image via CrunchBase

Yesterday, I spent a fair amount of the afternoon augmenting my Facebook profile.  This is not something I do very often, because frankly, I feel that Facebook’s best use is for killing time and I tend to agree with Thoreau that killing time wounds eternity.  Still, it was my homework to browse through the long list of Facebook applications and install one and play with it.  I got carried away.  I added eight or nine applications and then spent additional time rearranging my applications.  What did I add?

• Language Exchange
• Blog Networks
• SlideShare
• Visual Bookshelf
• My Cookbook
• Latest PHD Comics
• Where I’ve Been
• Pandora
• Send Flowers
• Send Roses

What did I discover (or rediscover) that I already had (not including defaults)?

• Birthday Cards
• Free Gifts
• Supercool School
• Linking Universe
• GigPark
• We’re Related
• Business Cards
• My LinkedIn Profile
• Portfolio Joe

My experience with Facebook actually begins with me declining the first invitation to join that I ever recieved from a friend.  I told her that I would prefer to stick to be being her friend in real life rather than becoming her virtual friend.   When a second friend invited me to join Facebook, I decided that I might as well join in order to see the pictures that two of my friends were displaying on Facebook.  It turned out that more than two of my friends were already Facebook members.

I like that Facebook helps me to keep tabs on important events in the lives of distant friends.  It’s like getting the yearly Christmas card in installments instead of all at once.  I also enjoy the applications that allow me to send and receive virtual gifts (and now virtual flowers), as long as they are free to both parties. Facebook helps me remember my friend’s birthdays and lets me easily send them a token to let them know that they are in my thoughts.  I actually think that Facebook helps me to be a better friend.

I’ve attended seminars on using Facebook for business networking, but I haven’t done that very much.  I’ve added a few applications like Portfolio Joe, My LinkedIn Profile, and Business Cards to showcase some of my professional interests, just in case, but it isn’t my primary purpose for having a Facebook account.  Yesterday, I added BlogNetworks, SlideShare, and Visual Bookshelf in order to display a few more professional (and personal) interests. After all, a lot of my Facebook friends are ed-tech geeks like me.

SupercoolSchool, Language Exchange, and My Cookbook are applications that interest me because of their potential, but I haven’t actually used any of them.  I like knowing they exist and that I could try them . . . someday . . . when I get around to it.

The latest PHD comics is true time waster application (but, hey I’m allowed one, right?) and I’m a little ashamed that Where I’ve Been and Pandora might be examples of Facebook narcissm (of course everyone wants to know exactly where I’ve been and what I’ve been listening to), but I believe that at least some of my friends and family do visit my Facebook page because they are interested in me and my interests.

So, now that I’ve detailed which Facebook applications I use (or think I might use some day), the most interesting conclusion that I can draw from this isn’t all that interesting.  In the most important way, it appears that I am fairly typical facebook user.  I use Facebook to maintain an existing social network, not to make new friends (Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe (2007) in boyd & Ellison (2007)).

My Facebook contacts

TouchGraph is an interesting data visualization tool that I like to play with every now and then; I find it a fascinating way to surf through the results of a Google Search.  After completing course readings on the social graph, I thought of Touchgraph’s ability to visually map Facebook contacts and decided to see what my social graph looked like (at least the part of it that’s on Facebook).

It’s interesting to me that TouchGraph chose blue for the group of friends that includes my siblings, my cousins, and my childhood friends and associates.  True blue, perhaps?  It’s equally interesting to me that my cousins are included in this group since my cousins grew up 2,000 miles away from me and have never met my childhood friends.  But since both my childhood friends and my cousins are linked to my siblings as well as to me, TouchGraph groups them together.  My husband is one of the biggest circles in my TouchGraph network.  TouchGraph is “smart” enough to recognize that he’s important.  TouchGraph assigned my husband and my in-laws the color of yellow, a nice complement to the blue of my family.  The friends that I have met through my husband are orange.  My husband’s former coworkers are purple.  My professors, coworkers and classmates in the world of instructional design are red, while most of my professors, and classmates from my days in the world of public policy are are blue-green.  The classmates who were also roommates are green along with all of our neighbors from that time period.

How many people would I say are “misclassified”?  Well, there are some individuals who are the “wrong color”, but since they’re isolated from the group of that color, I figure TouchGraph was trying to make them into a new group.  Based on that assumption, only eight are in the “wrong group”.

Now, TouchGraph can’t begin to graph my entire social graph because my entire social graph is not represented by Facebook.  None of my family members over the age of 50 are on Facebook; only one member of my husband’s family who is over 50 is on Facebook.  Outside of the current graduate students and university employees, who make up the majority of my current social circle, only a few of my face-to-face friends who are over 30 are on Facebook.  As a result, Facebook does a poor job of representing my social circle from my days as an undergraduate or a high school student.

Currently, I only have two Facebook “friends” who aren’t also real-world contacts.  They aren’t even the virtual friends that I’ve had the most significant interaction with.  I’m honestly not even sure if they should be represented in my social graph, let alone how best to represent them.

I’ve toyed with the idea of creating a matrix of the relationship data of all of my contacts and then using the trial membership of TouchGraph to see what it looks like, but I don’t think I have the time to do it (at least not without a good reason for it).  However, I’m enough of a nerd that I just might do it.  After all, with all the time that I’m not spending creating a visual representation of my social graph, I might actually make more friends.  If I keep putting it off, the job is just going to get bigger.