If you haven’t heard yet, this week is International Education Week. At least once a day I get an email telling me about some event on campus in recognition of International Education. AND with each email I’m reminded how far behind I am in my Issue Entrepreneurship Project!

I’ve been doing some research and there are tons of active programs promoting international education in one way or another. I started a separate page that I plan to use as a scratch pad of sorts for organizing my IE project, and on this page I’m summarizing and annotating my findings about these various programs.

There is one thing in particular I’m looking for in my research: existing networks of exchange student alums. One idea I mentioned in my previous IE project post is that an online network of exchange student alums would be beneficial in promoting a sense of global citizenship among teens and college-aged students, and could be a valuable resource for those who may be considering student exchange. While there are some limited alumni networks, such as the IES Alumni Message Board, I have not found any exchange alum networks that link beyond a single program or University.

I think a network of student exchange alums that spans across different Universities and programs would be beneficial. The network could have an online presence serving not only those alums in the network, but also those students searching for information regarding the exchange experience. Such a network could do 2 things:

1. It would gather together a broader group of like-minded individuals. As Dina Habib Powell, the Assistant Secretary of state for Education and Cultural Affairs has said, “People who participate in exchanges almost always say the same thing, ‘It forever changed my life.‘”* Such groups always have greater power (power in numbers) in promoting a cause. Members could learn from each other what works and what doesn’t when it comes to promoting a sense of global citizenship.

2. It would create a valuable resource for students considering exchange. Members of the network could be available as “exchange mentors” to answer questions about their experience, or even make blogs about their experience available to those who are interested. Students previously uneasy about spending a semester abroad may feel more at ease with information at hand about other students experiences.

These would both lend themselves to the goal of this project, which is to instill a sense of global citizenship in teens and college-aged students, and ultimately, to increase global/international awareness in the typical US citizen.

Using Social Software

Social software is key in this endeavor because such a network will necessarily be dispersed around the globe. A virtual presence online is required to unite the group.

I imagine this network having a central online presence, as a sort of starting point for students who either (1) have been on exchange- the alums, (2) students currently on exchange- the bloggers, or (3) students considering exchange- the info-seekers. Both alums and bloggers could be considered mentors.

Whether a wiki or a shared blog or a CMS is best for this central presence, I haven’t yet decided. The key elements to consider are:

1. Communication — Members need to be able to get in touch with one or many other members. If International Education Week is coming up and one member wants to encourage all others to go out and speak at a high school, then that communication channel should be available. Likewise, if an info-seeker wants to speak to alum-X because he sees that she spent a semester in Portugal, then that communication channel should be available as well.

2. Searchability — If an info-seeker wants to find alums who have spent a semester in Argentina, then she should be able to. If a mentor wants to find all other mentors in NYC so he can organize a colloquium, then he should be able to.

3. Blog linking / tagging — current students on exchange should be able to link their blogs to the central presence so info-seekers can browse in addition to search. Imagine a map where an info-seeker clicks on Argentina to browse the blogs of students currently on exchange in Argentina. Blogs could also be filtered according to tags and fed directly into the main presence via RSS.

(these are starters, I’m thinking about more — please let me know if you have comments)

I don’t plan to build this thing all myself. In true entrepreneurship fashion, I think the first step is garnering enough support that I have help, even at the initial stages. I hope that by garnering initial support or “planting the seed” this effort will grow.

Planting the Seed

My next step is to put together a better description of this project, it’s goals, and it’s methodology into a dedicated page where I can direct people I’m trying to recruit into the cause.

Then, I’ll send an email to several Programs (such as the ISE) and Universities (directed to their International Education / Exchange offices) to try to recruit initial support. Support in (1) building an initial presence online, and (2) building further support.

It sounds a little daunting, and I’m hoping I’m not fishing in an empty pond. But it’s something I feel strongly about, so I doubt I’m alone.

More to come….

Barbasi’s book Linked has been called revolutionary in the way it treats networks, but when considering Web 2.0 does it not go far enough?

The NYT article ‘Folksonomy’ Carries Classifieds Beyond SWF and ‘For Sale’ led me to the 43things site I mentioned in my last entry. This article describes 3 specific sites in an attempt to illustrate how “networking sites” are no longer about simple networks of friends:

Networking sites on the Web started as online personal ads, and most are still built around the desire to meet people. But there is a new, rapidly growing generation of networking sites built around purposes, not people.
These sites connect people by their interests and goals. Three such sites are del.icio.us, which lets users bookmark Web sites and share the bookmarks with others; 43things.com, which loosely connects users with shared goals like learning to play the guitar; and PledgeBank.com, a London-based nonprofit site that brings users together to participate in civic actions, like starting a political group or giving blood.

I don’t think I agree with the claim that networking sites on the web started as personal ads– I always saw Friendster as a new way to connect with old friends, not necessarily a way to meet new people. But I do agree that these network-building sites are evolving beyond simple person-to-person networks. In the same article they describe del.icio.us:

Networking was not the main focus of the site’s design … but evolved out of shared activity. Each bookmark is “tagged,” or filed under a term of the user’s choice; through tags, users work together to categorize the Web, and it is in that context that a network forms. Users meet on del.icio.us in their natural Web environment: the act of finding information they care about.

We all tag in similar ways: I’m sure I wouldn’t be the only one to tag our class blog with “social software” or “web 2.0″. If we tag in similar ways, and common tags are linked, then the act of tagging becomes a shared activity. It creates a layer of connectedness for those users doing the tagging.

Flickr is similar in the way you can tag photos, and through common tags people become linked. Flickr also has the traditional friends and contacts list, connecting you to other users in the same way Friendster does. So in effect Flickr has built-in 2 layers of possible connectedness.

And what about other sites like 43things (connecting common goals) or CiteULike (common academic papers) or even blogs and trackbacks? Each of these, along with Friendster, Flickr, and delicious, are comprised of their own networks, with their own highly connected hubs and other lesser connected nodes.

We can visualize and analyze each of them individually in the way Barbasi describes in Linked, but they overlap. They are overlapping and as a result networks are linked to networks, in a multi-dimensional mesh that has the effect of shortening the distances between nodes.

Are multiple linked networks something that deserve further attention, beyond the inquiry in Linked? Or once connected to each other should these networks be thought of simply as a larger, single network?

Someone once told me that the definition for “good” art is… art you wish you had made yourself.

Does the same hold true for websites? I just came across a website I wish I had made myself– 43things is simple in idea but huge in the impact it can have on peoples’ lives. You write out your goals and can see if others share those same goals. Users encourage each other, and hear about how others succeeded in achieving those goals. From the about page:

We all have stories about what we care about. Writing down your progress on a goal can help someone else learn about something you both want to do. When you see a goal you’ve achieved, click on the “I’ve done this” button and share a story about how you did it.

I don’t remember the last time I’ve said “awwww” in succession so many times. First when I saw the goal dont fall under pier pressure! [sic], and again many awwwws later when I saw the #4 most completed goal: fall in love.

Of course, fall in love was between #3, buy an iPod and #5, get a tattoo, so don’t think the world is all warm fuzzies.

I’ve been racking my brain for a while trying to come up with a social cause to stand behind for my Issue Entrepreneurship Project. Many possibilities pop into my head, but I keep dismissing causes as either (1) being already over-represented, (2) being irrelevant or trivial in the grand scheme of things, or (3) requiring more cause-specific passion than I could ever provide.

Of course, if you think some cause is irrelevant, you are going to have a hard time mustering up passion for it. So reasons two and three above are really one in the same. However, if a cause is already over-represented, there still may be some hope. I ask myself, could I add a new slant and add value to the cause? Sometimes we are quick to think “oh I’m sure that’s already been done” without doing any research. If everybody were to think that way, nothing new would ever happen.

So what is a cause I could stand behind and hopefully add value to?

I think international / cultural education is becoming more and more important as the world grows more connected, and should be a top priority for teens and college age students as they establish and build their identity and their role in a globally interdependent world. US politics seems to be increasingly separating us from the rest of the world in a time when the world is growing smaller and the lines separating nation from nation are becoming greyer. If young Americans are to become good world citizens, then they need a good understanding of other cultures. The nationalism that is currently being fed by American politics is a step in the wrong direction.

When I was an undergrad, I spent 6 months abroad as an exchange student in England. It was an experience that changed my life. I stayed in the international dorms and met people from all over the world. It was during that time that I realized how diverse and important other cultures of the world were– I became a global citizen.

Sometimes I look back at the results of our own US elections and I wonder why people vote the way they do. I think back to my exchange student experience and I wonder how different American politics would be if everyone thought about politics on a global scale, and not just on a national scale. As a democracy, would we vote differently if we saw ourselves as world citizens and not just national citizens?

We may not realize it living in the diversity of New York City, but a large part of America couldn’t care less about the rest of the world. I grew up in a rural Florida where many people had never left the country, and had no interest to. I think if their interest had been piqued, and they had first hand experience of other cultures, things would be different.

The question then is, how can social software be used to make a meaningful contribution toward this cause? There are several initiatives out there to encourage international education for many of the same reasons I’ve tried to relay above. But I’m hoping that social software can be employed in a way to garner support among more people, among communities of people. Maybe networks can be set up by exchange student “alums” to raise interest among high school and early college students? Or in true issue entrepreneurship fashion, maybe enough support can be garnered among like-minded people that we can make this a bigger issue, bring it into the limelight as they say, even build monetary support to put toward exchange “scholarships” so less privileged students can experience other cultures?

All of this is just me thinking aloud. I still have a lot to think about. If you have any input, please let me know. I need it!

I haven’t tried it yet, but a new service lets you call a free 1-800 number for business and residential listings, anywhere in the country. I know I’ll be using this from my cell phone, where 411 would cost me a buck. I’m so cheap, I’d rather wander around lost for an hour than part ways with my hard earned dollar. So 1-800-FREE-411 will hold me over until I master googling from my phone.

Several of the CCTE tagged del.icio.us links over the past few weeks led me to articles about social book-marking. (It didn’t take me long to realize the irony in using del.icio.us to learn about social bookmarking!) EDUCAUSE’s 7 Things You Should Know About… article lists social bookmarking as #7 on their list, and they give a good overview of what it is, how it works, who’s doing it, and what the current drawbacks and limitations are.

Of course, social bookmarking is just a subset of the larger phenomenon tagging. Tagging isn’t new, but it seems to have just recently crossed it’s tipping point. Just like del.icio.us users tag their bookmarks, Flickr users tag their photos, Gmail users tag their email, and bloggers tag their posts using the the rel-tag standard. All these people “tag” so they can either find info for themselves in the future, or make it easier for others to find this info.

When I was reading articles on tagging, I got a sense that people are aligning it with a social or collaborative way of organizing information. In these same articles the word folksonomy keeps popping up, and positioning itself across the room from taxonomy. If taxonomy is the traditional way of classifying information into hierarchical, tree-like structures, then folksonomy is classification by the common folks in non-hierarchical communities using tags or keywords individually.

Tagging does allow collaborative organization when talking about things like social bookmarking, but it has a benefit even in organizing personal, non-collaborative data (such as email). I can label an email in my Gmail account with any number of tags, and can find that email later by searching for any one of those tags. By contrast, in older email systems I’d have to pick a folder — one and only one folder — to put an email in. If I wanted to place an email in two different folders I’d have to make a duplicate of that email. The folder system or hierarchical classification is inefficient, and often results in duplication of information.

As Rashmi Sinha says in her blog post on the Cognitive Analysis of Tagging, trying to force something into a specific category has extra cognitive cost that tagging does not.

This inefficiency of the traditional, hierarchical way or organizing information makes me wonder if human language is inefficient for the same reasons. I was talking to friend today who had to present her ideas in a meeting. She was only half-joking when she remarked how it would be so much easier if she could just transfer her thoughts into someone else’s head. The ideas are easy, it’s the translating them into coherent language that’s difficult.

In other words, it’s the forcing-our-thoughts-into-language that is so difficult. Maybe that’s because doing so has the same high cognitive cost as forcing information into a specific category.

I think tagging could mark a change in the way we organize our information, and by extension, the way we organize our knowledge. Knowledge (and communication of knowledge, i.e language) has been inefficient because we’ve stuck to linear, hierarchical methods. If folksonomy overtakes taxonomy, and tagging reigns over hierarchies, could it change the way we communicate?

I’ve been at TC for over 5 years now, and one thing that’s kept me happy is the consistency of the chocolate chip cookies in the cafeteria. Glistening with buttery goodness, they’d make them a couple times a week, I think to draw people in with the aroma. Matthew and I would peel them from the cooling racks, sometimes burning our fingers, sometimes leaving a trail of drool on the floor.

It didn’t matter if the lunch food was sub-par, as long as I had a cookie to wash it down with.

NOW, they’re trying to pass off some store bought crap as the real deal. And to add insult to injury, they upped the price from 3 for a dollar, to 2 for a buck-fifty!

I guess I’ll have to quit.

My first computer was a Coleco Adam some time around age 10. My two brothers an I had already mastered every game made for our Atari 2600, so a computer that played ColecoVision games was a welcome addition. This monster used your TV as a monitor, came with a printer the size of a small oven, and had no hard drive– it read data off regular audio tapes. After the novelty of the games wore off my brothers never touched the thing, and my mom used it only for printing out her weekly grocery lists. I took it over as my very own and taught myself the basics of BASIC. I remember spending all night typing in binary code from the back of my Mad Magazine so I could see an all green and black rendition Alfred E Neuman.

Fast forward a few years and I’m in high school, spending all night trying to get our 386 to connect its noisy 2400 baud modem to the local University’s library. I didn’t really care about looking up books, I just wanted to see if this modem thing worked the way the library pamphlet promised. I grew up in a rural area on the outskirts of Tampa, remote enough that “going into town” was a big deal. So when our computer screen was showing me the contents of a computer a 30 minute drive away, I got excited. I would “Press N for the next page of results” and it worked. I hit the N key, my computer digested it and sent it over the phone line to the computer at the University, and that computer found the next 10 results and sent them back to my computer over the phone line. All this happened in about a second, and even though it was just text on a screen, I was amazed. It was my first experience with action-at-a-distance.

A few years later I’m in undergraduate school studying to be a Civil Engineer. I’d used email for a few years by then, and even navigated files I’d saved on the University’s servers. But everything I’d done up to that point was via text commands: I’d used fetch and finger and gopher and get and put. But one day there was a computing open house, with a hands-on demo of Mosaic 1.0. Suddenly I didn’t need to know commands to get things done. I could just point my mouse at an underlined word, click, and I’d be taken somewhere. Again, the geek in me was amazed. I knew from this point that computing and “the net” would no longer be confined to engineering labs and bedrooms of geeks.

I finished up school and worked 2 years as an engineer. I hated it pretty much the whole time. I decided to move away from engineering and from Tampa, and made the big move to the big city. I got a job at Teachers College in the IT help desk, based on experience from tech support jobs that paid my way through undergraduate school. After 7 months I moved out of the help desk (thank god) to a position in the LAN team, as a network administrator. I’ve been in the LAN team for over 4 years now, farming servers and making sure web pages pop up when you want them to. Occasionally I work on non-network technology projects for the college like the eBoard.

Since working here, I’ve taken advantage of employee benefits and graduated with an MA in Instructional Technology and Media in May 2003. I keep taking classes, but I’m either too scared or too lazy to commit to the Doctoral program. Either way, I’m really in this for the education and not the certificate.

I’m taking a course this semester called Social Software Affordances, taught by Ulises who I met in the Technology and Society course this past Spring.

We’ll be studying the current impact and future possibilities of social software — blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, social bookmarking, etc. From the syllabus:

‘Social software’ has become a convenient label to group a new generation of socio-technical systems (mostly web based) that facilitate human expression, communication, and collaboration. Examples of social software include content management systems such as blogs, knowledge and collaboration management systems such as wikis, relationship management systems such as Friendster and Orkut, distributed classification systems such as del.icio.us and furl, and the use of RSS feeds to distribute information to specific audiences.

Social software represents the promise of truly networked human communities extending across the online and offline dimensions of reality. But beyond the hype, a critical approach to social software is necessary in order to explore its impact and possibilities.

I’m pretty excited about it. For the past year or so I’ve been putting some time and effort into building up my online presence, because I want to take advantage of the new social opportunities it affords me. I think it can enrich my life by enriching my interactions with others, and open new social avenues that weren’t possible before “going online”.

Of course, this class isn’t “Blogging 101″. It’s more about the bigger picture: trying to figure out how these new technologies can change the social fabric and the way we interact. But like “Blogging 101″, we’ll be communicating and posting assignments mainly through blogs and wikis.

I had the option of creating a new blog specific to the class, but since my personal blog hasn’t been seeing much action (to the tune of 2 posts a month!) I figure it has the room to spare. So expect to see lot’s of social software related posts here in the next 3 months.

Also, I’ve enabled categories to facilitate weeding out all the nonsense posts about other peoples’ cats or the onion garden growing in my fridge. Not that you’d *want* to weed out such great content, but you could.

With the rainy days coming up, I bought some caulk to seal up the door that leaks when the outside drain backs up. Mission accomplished, door sealed. I think I’ll stay dry.

Applying the caulk reminded me of a skit on SNL, filled with sexual innuendos. One of them was something about “filling the crack with caulk”. When I should have been doing one of twenty other things, I started searching for a copy of this skit, so I could re-live the raunchy laughs. Instead, I found the even funnier NPR Schweaty Balls skit. Ah SNL, I remember the days when you used to always be this funny. Now it’s a rarity. What happened?

I was talking to Melanie to see if she remembered the caulk skit. She didn’t, and it took her 6 hours to get the joke (no, seriously). She said the only reason she even knew the word caulk was from playing The Oregon Trail back in grade school.

Then I had a revelation. I’d seen the You Have Died of Dysentery shirts all over the place recently– at least 3 in the past week. I knew the reference from reading books for my TC classes, but I’d never played the game or even heard of it in my own grade school days. I thought it was an obscure reference.

Melanie’s matter-of-fact-ness about the game made me realize it’s not really that obscure. It’s just obscure to me. The reason? Well, we didn’t have computers in my schools. All the way up to 12th grade the only time I saw a computer in school was in the “rotation class” in junior high — that 1 hour class where 1/4 of the year we studied computers, 1/4 of the year was home economics, 1/4 of the year was wood and metal working (aka shop), and 1/4 of the year we tried to memorize where all the keys were on a state-of-the-art IBM Selectric typewriter.

Of course, burning chocolate chip cookies was much more fun than reading about ENIAC, so I never felt shortchanged.