While conversation may indeed be king, meaningful conversation requires that we check to see whether the king is wearing any clothes.

In my research on using social or participatory media applications to support substantive educator knowledge development, it is clear conversation or professional talk is a powerful element or factor that can lead to deeper knowledge and understanding of one's practice (Hargreaves, A., 1994).

In my initial examination of participant posts and comments within an online professional learning community designed to support knowledge building among geographically separated participants, I have noticed that conversations fall into two general categories with some occasional subtle overlappings. In general conversations in the online learning community fall into two types: thin and thick.

Thin conversations are those that provide little in terms of reflection, feedback,  expansion and or examination of the initial ideas presented. Thin conversations suggest the emperor is threadbare and thus offers no redeeming substance or value (i.e., the conversation is powerless).

Thick conversations offer not only the thoughts and ideas of the participant but they build and expand upon thoughts shared from the initial post. Thick conversations also provide a sense of deeper reflection and emotional cues that offer insight into the participant's sense of self. Thick conversations are not necessarily verbose; they can be short, triggering statements that lend themselves to deeper reflection and deeper contemplation. Thick conversations are the robes and raiment that make conversation king.

In my initial analysis, where these two categories overlap is where conversation may be thin, but attached resources and artifacts associated with the thin conversation are thick and rich. There are multiple examples within my study that show participants offering little in terms of content-rich, back-and-forth dialogue and conversation, yet attach multiple rich resources or artifacts to their post that serve all participants in the community exceedingly well. The conversation is thin, but the knowledge and value associated with the post appears to outweigh the apparent veneer.

Perhaps, this requires a clearer definition of what conversation in a social media supported environment affords participants. Clearly, meaningful dialogue and written exchange can be valuable to knowledge development. Yet conversation can also trigger references to artifacts outside the immediate conversation that can also provide additional meaning and value. Given that the platform being used to serve and support conversation in this instance also allows the exchange of physical artifacts, conversations can be thin in initial substance and thick with associated attached resources.

Hmmmm....

Your thoughts and feedback are clearly warranted!

Reference:
Hargreaves, A. (1994). Changing teachers, changing times: Teachers' work and culture in the post-modern age. New York: Teachers College Press.

My colleague, Erik Black, and I had a great summer teaching an Introduction to Educational Technology course to undergraduate students ranging in disciplines from telecommunication studies, journalism, sports management, public relations, and education. The course was designed to be an overview of the interplay between society, education, and technology. Lessons were divided into thematic units that covered topics such as online identity and impression management, Internet safety, learning theories and learning styles, visual and information literacy, participatory media, social networking, games, and virtual schooling. Activities included developing a web presence (learning Dreamweaver), photoshop basics, using del.icio.us and a host of student-selected social software applications.

The uni requires that I give an exam, so I thought I would share it with you all to see what you think. Erik and I are thinking of requiring one of these questions to be addressed by all participants, then having participants select two of their own choice to tackle. I have a rubric that I use to assess student's work here. If you're interested, let me know your thoughts. As always, I am amenable to suggestions.

EME2040 SumC Potential Exam Questions

1) Online identity management: are you managing your digital footprint?

Enter your name into three search engines (e.g., Google, Yahoo, Dogpile, Cuil).

    * What shows up?

    * Are you suprised?

    * What actions can you take to ensure that you do not leave to chance your online reputation and personal brand?

2) One current concept in contemporary education is 21st century skills.

Utilizing the your web-based search and information analysis capabilities, develop a personal working definition of 21st century skills, then describe your progress towards the attainment of these skills. What have you done in the last few years to add to your 21st century skill-set and what do envision doing in the future to continue to develop these skills?

3) Social Media and You

Utilizing the Internet, select and describe a freely available online application that would be useful for individuals in your 'field of choice'. Describe how you envision utilizing the application in a professional setting? Why is this application specifically relevant to your field of interest? What do current users of the application have to say about it's strengths and weaknesses?

4) Weekend at Bernie's

Using current examples from Internet, which should include links and references where appropriate, present a thoughtful structured argument for why you feel that the University of Florida is or is not the #1 party school in the nation.

5) Social Software Application Design

Facebook allows individuals and corporations to develop custom applications for Facebook users (eg: scrabulous, superpoke, funwall). If you were to design an application for Facebook, what would you design? Why is this application needed? Who would use this application?

6) Blogging as Journalism

Utilizing your Internet search skills, provide a brief synthesis of what bloggers are saying, pro and con, about the genetic modification of plants and/or animals to increase food supply in the United States and/or abroad. Provide a listing of the blogs that you visit and also verify the credentials of the bloggers who are posting. Identify a blogger who you feel is particularly well informed and has the credentials to make commentary on the topic (explain these credentials). Identify a blogger who you feel is not particularly well informed and does not have the credentials to make commentary on the topic (explain the lack of credentials).

7) Employment Screening

Employers have increasingly begun to use Web sites like MySpace.com and Facebook.com to screen applicants and current employees. Should employers be allowed to do this? Provide a thoughtful, detailed explanation of your thinking below. Be sure to articulate possible social, moral, legal, and ethical consequences of such actions.

8) What does it mean to be literate in the digital age?

Read the following article (NYT Literacy article) and reflect on the different arguments for and against reading books and reading online. Is there a clear correlation between the decline in reading test scores for teenagers and the increasing use of the Internet? Show evidence from the article in your response.

9) Social Media and Marketing

You work for a chain of gym and fitness centers that are ready to expand nationally.  Your boss has asked you to identify three strategies for using the Internet in the new advertising campaign. Your job is to select three ways you would incorporate the Internet into the campaign and then write a memo to your boss ranking them in priority from the most to least appropriate match for the campaign.  You need to clearly explain why you selected each particular strategy and what you think it brings to a national marketing campaign.

10) Serious Gaming

Neuromatrix is a new educational video game that's designed to teach people neuroscience. It's marketed to ages 9-15. The developer, Morphonix, writes that they "are developing a series of video games which make abstract concepts of brain science fun and comprehensible to children and teens. Many software games spur kids to use their brains, but this is the first series of video games which also teaches children the science of their brains." From the game description:

You play a secret agent infiltrating a top-secret neuroscience research facility. Your mission: to track down and root out the Nanobots that have invaded the brains of the scientists there. If you fail, the Nanobots and the secret entity that spawned them will take over the Earth, reprogramming the human brain into docile submission.

Write a letter to your school principal explaining why you want to incorporate this game into your curriculum. What would be the costs, benefits, risks, and potential consequences associated with using the game?

On the other hand, if you do not want to see such a video game used in your school, provide a rational argument against its adoption and inclusion.

11) Fielder's Choice

Throughout the summer you've been introduced to many different topics, the majority of which have only been covered in a cursory manner. Select a topic, concept or idea that was discussed in class or in the online materials that you are not familiar with and find interesting. Utilizing the Internet and your web-based search and information analysis capabilities, develop a personalized learning plan for gaining a better understanding of this topic. Provide links and references that will demonstrate that you have given critical consideration to the concept and have used the social affordances of the Internet.

What happens when punk rockers get old?

Well, they change, right? And they start country bands, take side gigs as movie and t.v. actors, and become law-abiding, taxpaying citizens. Oh, and they do spotlight interviews for the Sundance Channel.

Uh-huh.

Well, if you don't already know of him, meet John Doe.

John fronted a band in the early 80s called "X." Their sound was rich, snarling, ready for a fight. The first time I heard X was on MTV when I was 15. I had learned to play the guitar well enough to put together a handful of bar chords. And while I tried to emulate Jimmy Page and Angus Young, X stepped on stage and rearranged what rock music was in my mind. They weren't punk in the sense that they threatened "Anarchy in the USA," but their music, lyrics, and stance were clearly a reaction to the music heard on Top 40 radio. While punk music packed a lot angst, it was music aimed straight at the kids. It said, "Hey you! You don't have to listen to that shit on the radio. Rock the f_ck out! We did it. So can you." Bands like X, the Minutemen, the Dead Kennedys, the Clash, started as art school boys and girls getting together and finding a means to express themselves through a web of music and recordings, creating a platform to spread their message world wide.

This sense of youthful idealism, this sense of me and my mates against the world, against the system, against the improper use of power and authority, could be channeled through amplifiers, through the gift of music. What fun! I subsequently started and/or joined a number of musical outfits all in the name of Do-It-Myself. Similarly, it was this same ethos, this same sensibility, that led me to teaching, of changing the world one or two kids at a time.

I also bring this story up as it relates to changing the face of education through participatory media. The changes many of us want to see, have to come from the kids. They start small as garage bands playing locally. Like musical hits, some changes take immediate traction and spread far and wide quickly, ushering in wider audiences and broader acceptance. Thus, the key to educational change, I believe, is one band of kids at a time. They don't need me or you or any educational technologist to tell them what to do. They will simply do it.

The same goes for you, you old puke.

I am interested in finding collaborators for a project involving getting a clear picture of the number of teachers who blog across the globe.

In my current research on using social software to support teacher professional development, I found myself asking, I wonder how many classroom educators (a) started a weblog and (b) continue to blog?

Turning to several academic databases as well as Google I found no evidence of any such data. I then turned to Technorati and searched under the following terms: teacher, teachers, teaching, and education.

I received the following results:

teacher -
491,199 posts tagged teacher
5,940 blogs about teacher

teachers -
8,122 posts tagged teachers
2,378 blogs about teachers

teaching -
17,664 posts tagged teaching
5,899 blogs about teaching

education -
117,595 posts tagged education
23,723 blogs about education

[Search conducted on Technorati June 26, 2008 at 8.05 AM EST.]

While this data is intriguing, it does not answer my initial questions. I then went in search for some benchmarks, something to compare these numbers to in Technorati. Unfortunately, I could find no way to adjust my search to a specific time period within Technorati. (Is there a step I am missing?)

Further searching led me to an article from the Houston Chronicle dated January, 29, 2007. The reporter noted that "[t]he number of blogs about "teaching" or "teachers" tracked by Technorati.com" had increased 10 percent in less than six months to "nearly 950."" Unfortunately, it is not clear from the article what 950 represents. Does it mean there are a combined number of blogs about teachers and teaching? Is that an average? Or are both terms showing 950 instances?

Given this limited data set, we can see that since the end of January 2007 to the end of June 2008, the number of blogs about teachers and teaching has grown 2.5 to a little over 6 times larger in 18 months. (How long will this trend continue? What's driving it? Questions for another day....)

So what other data would be useful for thinking about teachers who blog?

According to the Upcoming Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2007, there are 6.8 million teachers employed in the United States. The bulk of them (2.6 million) teach at the elementary and middle school level. The remainder include those teaching at the postsecondary, secondary and preschool and kindergarten levels.

Let's say for the sake of argument, of the 5,940 blogs about teachers, half of those are authored by teachers in the U.S. That would mean that there are around 3,000 teacher bloggers in the U.S. or approximately 1 blogger for every 2,000 teachers.

Does this sound right? Is there better data out there to make more informed estimates about teachers who blog?

Any thoughts or ideas on how to make this information more salient or reliable? Interested in collaborating? Let me know what you think.

Reference:
Upcoming Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2007) retrieved 26 June 2008 from http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/fac

Graph -- All theories proven with one graph

Below is my response to this post/presentation by Stowe Boyd. Looking back, I feel my criticism is a bit pointed, but I guess I'm beginning to feel frustrated by conversations that layout the importance of new media for our collective future without providing any concrete steps that can lead us there.

Please understand, I think Stowe truly has his fingers on the pulse of Western culture. He is a keen observer of society and the associated intricacies and subtleties that impact they way we live and breath. I guess I just want expect pioneering thought leaders to do more. Let's stop talking about affordances, and instead show them. We've had plenty of time to assess the situation, the time is now for action.

Am I being off base here? Have I finally flipped? Am I just having a "bad day?" Perhaps. In the end, I feel that showing is often more important than telling -- especially for someone like myself who has heard this same story for many years.

I applaud your efforts and thank you for sharing your presentation.

I found the points presented to be on the mark, but you are focusing on new media affordances, on theoretical possibilities of a hyperconnected reality, and not as much on how to actualize said affordances. Perhaps that will be in the book, but so much of this has been said in so many different ways -- when are the social media heavy-hitters like yourself going to focus on practical applications, on social action, instead of talking about the need or possibility thereof?

I apologize if I appear to be overly pedantic. I guess I'm just tired of seeing the same ideas, the same promises, being replayed over and over for the past 10-15 years about the future and social software.

Your analysis is sharp and your observations are critical. I guess I'm also used to seeing citations for such statements as "We have learned that trust and reputation is personal, non-transferable." Who says this? What research are your referring to?

I teach educators and students how to decode new media, how to validate and evaluate information they find on the Web. I also teach people to understand that such skills are not individual, but cultural. So I think in many ways we are on the same page. I guess that's why I want to see not just a summary of where we are and where we need to go; but instead I want to see such an analysis with an accompanying road map for how to get there. What steps should we be taking to move ourselves in the prescribed direction? Should we be so prescriptive? Should we be constructing this new reality from the ground up? Or do we need help from the centroids, the hierarchies that are in place?

I offer this feedback as someone who recognizes your power and influence in new media markets. Since I am only reading your notes, I am sure there was much more presented in your talk that addresses some of my concerns.

Please know that as an edgling, I am one with you and all of the other edglings trying to make an impact on the centroids (that's why I am dedicated to working with the centroids' children and their children's teachers). But we need more maps, more sharing of what is working in addition to our understanding of what is possible.

Keep rocking...

Chris

 

I have been listening in to several conversations of late that have been pondering our collective fate in light of new social media affordances. It's not just politics or education or celebrity news that's driving this train. It seems the potential to organize, act, and solve problems has never been greater given new social media applications. And given the relative trajectory of social media adoption across the globe, things appear to be potentially getting brighter.

Since we have the ability to organize in a ridiculously easy fashion (Paquet, 2002), the next step involves developing new forms of group leadership. Managing people, activity, and information is no small feat; thus, while new social tools are re-vising the way we do our work, new organizational models are required that, for the most part, have yet to be invented. I look forward to reading the research that examines how to best manage and leverage new media applications for social action in profit and non-profit arenas. However, with the pace of new application development and deployment being what it is, it seems difficult in many cases to stay on top of rigorously assessing these new media applications, hence functional research is often years off.

A different solution might be turning social media research over to the users themselves. This is precisely how the notion of action research evolved. Imagine having school children studying the effects/affects, and impacts of social media in mathematics, biology, economics, in literature, as well as the communities within which they participate. Imagine K-12 school children using social media to study social media and the world they live in. Of course, teaching children how to set up, validate, and evaluate experiments with rigor and aplomb requires teachers to be capable of doing such, as well. So the reality there points back to the caliber and quality of educational professionals and what we are doing as a country to ensure that we are providing our youth the best education possible (and not simply what they can afford). As such, it is my belief that school curricula need to be re-written to allow learners and educators to become researchers of, as well as producers of knowledge and information, and not just consumers thereof.

So, if this is something you believe in, you might ask yourself: What am I going to do to alter this reality?

What are your expectations? How are you going to make these changes happen? Who do you need to better educate? What's is your timeline? What resources will you need?

Somewhere in the distance, I can hear John Henry's hammer ring.... Just don't swing yourself too hard and I look forward to reading your results.

Below are the notes for a 15 minute presentation about my research in social software and teacher professional development. Please let me know if you have any questions or areas you would like clarified. -c-

Student Alliance of Graduates in Education Presentation

06 June 2008

Christopher D. Sessums
Adjunct Faculty/PhD candidate in Curriculum & Instruction with an emphasis in Educational Technology
School of Teaching and Learning/Educational Technology
email: csessums@coe.ufl.edu

Using social software to support teacher professional development

Keywords: social software, school-based professional development, inquiry, action research, professional learning communities, online learning communities, professional networks, teacher professional development, educational technology, weblogs, Read/Write Web, networking

1. The Problem: Given the promise of action research to transform educators’ practices and improve schools, coupled with advances in thinking about professional learning communities, it is reasonable to wonder about the role of a facilitated, computer-mediated learning environment and how participation in such a focused community fosters educators’ critical understandings of their practice.

2. Study Objectives: Design a case study to better understand how an online learning community supports a network of practitioners coaching action research. The three main questions that guide this research examine the ways in which an online learning community, as an organizational structure, facilitates participants ability to (1) deepen their understanding of the action research process; (2) deepen their understanding of coaching action research; and (3) deepen their understanding of their own evolving stance toward their professional practice.

3. Perspectives: A phenomenological approach is used in this study focusing on the meaning participants make of their own experiences as revealed by their speaking, writing, and behaviors.

4. Modes of Inquiry: An exploratory case study approach is used to examine participant activity associated with the online learning community over a nine month period. A modified social network analysis protocol will be used to analyze the relationships between participants, and narrative analysis will be used to examine site postings and participant interviews.

5. Data Sources: (1) Facilitator generated prompts and participant responses, (2) participant initiated discussion, (3) technical data associated with facilitator and participant activity in the online learning community site, (4) participant interviews, and (5) field notes.

6. The Workshop: The CSI PDC workshop consisted of three face-to-face meetings (September, November, January) before the final Showcase in May 2008 with the majority of communication and interaction occuring online through the CSI blog site. Participants were provided a text and instructional protocols for coaching action research. During the face-to-face meetings participants were shown how to employ textual materials and protocols as a means of coaching other teachers through the teacher inquiry/action research process. In the online learning community, the facilitator created an organizational structure to provide spaces for both her and the coaches to share coaching experiences, strategies, critical reflections, and receive updates and announcements associated with organizing the Showcase. The facilitator posted regularly to the site modeling an inquiry stance prompting other participants to reply or post in kind. As such it was our hopes that through such prompting, the coaches would be able to develop a sense of community and share experiences, tools, ideas, lessons, rubrics, protocols, recruiting letters, and other specific documentation in supporting both the coaching of and the teacher inquiry process.

7. Participants: This study focuses on the experiences of 11 educators, one facilitator/workshop coordinator, and one technical support person. Educators' experience ranged from 3 to 19 years in the classroom full-time, 180 days a year. All participants had at least one year's experience conducting formal action research/teacher inquiry projects. Not all participants considered themselves technically savvy, but they all could use email and access World Wide Web pages either at home or at work via an Internet connection.

8. Results/Conclusions: My goal was to examine the ways in which an online learning community, as an organizational structure, facilitates participants ability to (1) deepen their understanding of the action research process; (2) deepen their understanding of coaching action research; and (3) deepen their understanding of their own evolving stance toward their professional practice.

While analysis of the interviews, site postings and interactions, and technical site data is still ongoing, preliminary findings include:

• recognition that time, effort, and attention are clear costs of participation
• the desire for emotional commitment by participants
• evidence of legitimate peripheral participation and a community of practice ontology which aided newcomers in entering and acquiring the sociocultural practices of the community
• the recognition of a participant epistemological stance and its impact on levels of participation
• participants valued the ability to post questions and receive responses from peers and facilitator
• participants spent more time observing each other online than actually interacting online i.e., writing back and forth, posting, commenting.
• all participants report that the site allowed them to deepen heir understanding of the AR process, coaching AR, and their own evolving stance by allowing them to observe their peers and make comparisons of their own responses and activity to that of their peers.

9. Educational import of the study: This study provides an exploration of ways school-based professionals can participate, enhance, and expand their professional learning, work toward school improvement goals, and tap in to extended professional networks afforded by social software adoption and use.

10. Intended audience: Education professionals, educational technologists, teacher educators, professional learning communities, educational leadership and administration.

I have not taken the time to reflect on blogging in quite a while. Writing for the Web has been on my mind lately, as has the act of writing with purpose and the latent networks and communities contained in each Web page.

Here's a video that sets the stage nicely--a set of fresh eyes, ears, and minds, sharing their reflections on blogging and their "business:"

Recently, Chris Brogan triggered a desire to rethink my blogging stance by posing an innocent enough question:

"How does your blog relate to your business?"

As a young educator-surveyor, I started my weblog as showcase for my writing--as a way to refine class assignments into something that could be shared with a general readership. Along the way, I have received invitations to present and publish my work based on the traffic I drew to my blog. I saw it as a value to cultivate my skills as a public intellectual, finding ways to translate my ideas into a more citizenly discourse that speaks across disciplinary boundaries and communicates with a diverse audience.

Ultimately, I see it as my business to blog. It permits me to circulate my research findings and those of others more broadly and to respond to contemporary issues in a thoughtful and timely manner.

So what are you blogging for? Why is it your business to blog? (Pssst... pass it on.)

Acknowledgments::

With much help from Henry Jenkins, Chris Brogan, Nigel Robertson, and Drew. 

Occasionally, the associations of a particular word become more powerful than its meaning. For me and many others studying social media, the word community is just such an example. In general, the word community is a sociological term; it is used in reference to the study and classification of human socities. The term dates back to the 14th century from the Old French communité, from the Latin communitatem/communitas meaning "fellowship" and a "community of relations or feelings," which is also directly connected to the term communis, meaning "common, public, general, shared by all or many" (see common).

It's a large, umbrella-like term that can range in scale from groups of people to groups of nations. It can refer to a society at large, a common character (as in a community of interest), and as a social activity (see community of practice). Groups sizes and participation within communities ranges from small to large, with many large communities being sustained by the efforts of a small groups residing within in them. Again, this simple illustration points to the complexity inherent in the term.

What threads together the wide range of definitions of community is the notion of likeness, a shared commonality, a tie that binds people or groups of people together.

In her article Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community in the Julie/Julia Project, Anita Blanchard cites a definition of virtual community that seeks to differentiate a virtual community from a virtual settlements from a sense of community (Blanchard, 2004). Several of Blanchard's sources for the definition of a virtual community try to affix them with the same characteristics as concrete ones, ignoring the affordances of social software (which, to be fair, was still in early stages of development when they were probably conducting their research in the mid-to-late 1990s).

With the ridiculously easy group forming capabilities ushered in by the Read/Write Web, the use of the term community has spread even wider and farther. The term is used so broadly that it sometimes feels like it can apply to practically any group or grouping of people. But that's not quite right either. For example, Shirky (2008) notes, "an audience isn't just a big community; it can be more anonymous, with many fewer ties among users. A community isn't just a small audience either; it has a social density that audiences lack" (p.85). On the Web, however, the elasticity of our handy term is once again put to test.

Now here's where things get a bit dicy. Shirky (2008) points out that Read/Write tools provide a platform that makes every webpage a "latent community" (p 102). He elaborates:

"Each page collects the attention of people interested in its contents, and those people might well be interested in conversing with one another, too. In almost all cases the community will remain latent, either because the potential ties are too weak (any two users of Google are not likely to have much else in common) or because the people looking at the page are separated by too wide a gulf  of time, and so on" (p. 102).

This is quite a peculiar, yet equally intriguing notion of community. Each webpage serves as a virtual space that can potentially unite people by serving a common interest. In essence, the Read/Write Web provides a new space for people to settle, commune, share, and cooperate.

What this suggests is that more people now have the ability to communicate and tie into to one another than ever before. We are witnessing the restructuring of organizational structures and the management of information on a scale never before heard of. As Shirky (2008) again points out,"any radical change in our ability to communicate with one another changes society" (p. 106). But here's the part that Shirky adds that also allows us to see things differently:

"Communication tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring" (p. 105).

In other words, it's not the invention of the tool that holds value; it's the tool's ubiquitousness that contains the value which ultimately leads to profound social changes.

Similarly, the tools that support virtual communities probably won't be very interesting until they become invisible, everyday components in our lives. For some, this is already the case and as such we are beginning to see new and powerful means to share, commune, and identify with one another. For example, I have found a simple tool like Twitter has allowed to both collapse and expand my professional and personal networks whether I am at work, on a plane, at my desk, or on the beach. Such a powerful little application that limits my choices but by doing so allows me a tremendous amount of freedom to connect, share, and cooperate within its boundaries.

So while I pretended to desire a limited use of the term community, in reality, I like the fact that the term resists fixity. To paraphrase Victor Hugo, when a language becomes fixed, the human intellect also becomes fixed. While there are degrees of fixedness in language which allows us to function in a state of seeming normalcy, the dividing line between elasticity and fixity in a language is never usually easy to determine. Likewise, the need to limit our current definition of virtual community could potentially limit its potential range of meaning and applicability.

For the most part, it is fair to say communities exist in some form or another across societies, and that they all share such similarities as membership, boundaries, norms, forms of exchange, and often shared emotional connections (Blanchard, 2004). With the introduction of social media, the term community now equals a mix of social and technological factors that should continue to evolve and adapt over time.

References:

Blanchard, A. (2004). Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community in the Julie/Julia Project. In L.J. Gurak, S. Antonijevic, L. Johnson, C. Ratliff, & J. Reyman (Eds.), Into the blogosphere: Rhetoric, community, and culture of weblogs. Retrieved 28 April 2008 from http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogs_as_virtual.html.

Shirky, C. (2008). Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. New York: Penguin Press.

After a very confusing vote on a local school bond, I’ve stepped down from my old project Blue Hampshire, to start a local information site, called Citizen Keene.

There were an number of other reasons for stepping down — as a newly promoted Director at a public college, I wanted to move away from being a prominent figure in partisan politics. Additionally, the workload of running Blue Hampshire was significant, and did not fit into my new job.

But those are more reasons for stepping down from Blue Hampshire.

The reason I started Citizen Keene is I felt the flow of local information was broken. Talking to people after the school bond failure, I found time and time again that the people who hadn’t voted, or had voted in a way that they later regretted once they learned the facts — these people were often good friends with people who had the facts.

But for whatever reason this information just was not transmitted.

And it was significant information. Almost no one understood what the rejection of the bond meant. The rejection of the bond didn’t save money — because a stay against enforcing certain code violations at the current middle school was predicated on the new school being built.

The upshot? The town will now spend $7 million dollars on band-aid fixes in the next two years, the school auditorium and industrial arts wing will close for at least three years, and current 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders will likely spend their middle school years in portable trailer.

The turnout was 16%. The bond failed by 24 votes. Now that the vote is over, there’s no end of people that didn’t vote or voted it down who believe they weren’t provided the information they needed to make the decision. No one would have voted this way had they had the facts.

It’s easy to look at that and say, well, you should have just done your homework.

But I’ve never seen that response solve anything. On the whole the amount of time that people are willing to put toward these things is constant. If you can get that information to them more efficiently you can change things. But you’re not going to shame them into spending more time to become informed. It just doesn’t work that way.

So Citizen Keene isn’t about technology, or Facebook coolness, or IPOs. It’s about the fact my 3rd grade daughter is likely to spend her middle school years in a trailer while they fix fire code issues in a school the town had been trying to move out of since 1968. And that’s going to happen because information flow is broken, and I want to fix that.

In coming days, I hope to explain why I chose the technoogy I did to build the site, and what the relation of this experiment is to academic technology and online communications. So please stay tuned, even is this doesn’t seem like it ties into the traditional subjects of this blog. It all ties in I promise, and will be useful to everybody from professors to college web editors.

But it does start with my daughter’s future, and it has a deep meaning to me. That’s step one.