Why we should stop using Twitter and switch over to Laconica

The biggest implementation of Laconica

A lot of my colleagues at Stoas Learning including myself are having a lot of fun using the microblogging service Twitter. It has changed the social interaction between some of the team members and we have gotten to know each other better through a very simple service delivering 140 character messages at a time.

I like the service a lot but have been worried about one thing: the fact that all this information is only on Twitter’s server. This point is extra poignant whenever Twitter is down (which happens quite often).

Imagine a world in which people with a Hotmail email address could only email somebody if they also had a Hotmail address. There would be no way for somebody who is registered at Gmail to email somebody at Yahoo. Luckily this is not the case: email is collection of open protocols which can be implemented by anybody. Unfortunately we cannot say the same about instant messaging. I personally have a MSN account, a Skype account and a Yahoo account and there is no way for me to talk to a Skype user with my MSN account.

So what about microblogging? Will we go towards a future which is similar to instant messaging with multiple microblogging services which are not connected to each other? Will Twitter be so dominant that there will be no alternative (creating a monopoly with all its disadvantages)? Or will we move towards a future where microblogging is like email: you can choose the provider you want and connect to people using other providers?

I prefer the last option and feel that I should be principled about it. That is why I will stop using Twitter, temporarily abandoning the people I follow and the people that follow me and switch over to Identi.ca, currently the largest Laconica installation. Here is how Identi.ca explains in what way it is different from services like Twitter:

Identi.ca is an Open Network Service. Our main goal is to provide a fair and transparent service that preserves users’ autonomy. In particular, all the software used for Identi.ca is Free Software, and all the data is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, making it Open Data.

The software also implements the OpenMicroBlogging protocol, meaning that you can have friends on other microblogging services that can receive your notices.

The goal here is autonomy — you deserve the right to manage your own on-line presence. If you don’t like how Identi.ca works, you can take your data and the source code and set up your own server (or move your account to another one).

I will spend the next couple of weeks trying to convince everybody around me to make the switch and maybe even get Stoas to start its own Laconica server.

If you are interested in hearing more about Identi.ca and Laconica I can recommend episode 37 of Floss Weekly where Evan Prodromou, the creator of both is interviewed and explains how Laconica works and what the plans for the future are.

6.6 Degrees of separation on average

Stanley Milgram was a very innovative social experimenter. I will keep his experiments on authority for another blog post and instead will focus on his Small world experiment, which I have always found fascinating.

In 1969 he tried to figure out whether the world was becoming a “small world” network by sending out packages to random people in the US and asking them to try and get the package in as little steps as possible to a contact in Boston. His research showed that people in the US seemed to be connected through three friendship links on average.

Some students later invented the “six degrees of kevin bacon” game (connecting each film actor to Bacon in 6 film cast lists or fewer) which popularised the term “six degrees of separation”.

Milgram’s research methodology had some problems and later attempts to redo the experiment using e-mail were never very successful (I personally tried to do a version of the experiment with my highschool students which failed miserably).

According to the Guardian Microsoft has now finally proved the theory using raw data from their messaging logs. The average degrees of separation globally (by people that use MSN at least) seems to be 6.6:

Researchers at Microsoft studied records of 30 billion electronic conversations among 180 million people in various countries, according to the Washington Post. This was ‘the first time a planetary-scale social network has been available,’ they observed. The database covered all the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging network in June 2006, equivalent to roughly half the world’s instant-messaging traffic at that time.

This is an example of a new way of doing research. The amount of data that is being collected by some technology companies is so massive that you don’t need a theory anymore, you can just look at the patterns instead (see Wired’s The End of Theory).

What could this mean for learning? Imagine the amount of things we could find out about how people learn if we would have an equivalent of MSN or Facebook in the learning space! What would all Moodle logs combined tell us about how learning technology is used?

Which organisation will be the first to leverage our small world and use it for learning?

Gang Leader for a Day

A couple of years ago I read Stephen Levitt’s fascinating book Freakonomics. One of the most interesting themes covered was the economics of a drug selling gang in Chicago. Levitt had access to a couple of years of ledger books detailing the income and expenses for one particular chapter of the Black Knights gang. The person who gave him these ledger book was Sudhir Venkatesh who spent a couple of years doing research in the Robert Taylor Homes.

Venkatesh has now written a book about his time in the “projects”: Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets. This book is very interesting on many different levels. In the beginning of the book he accidentally gets into contact with a gang leader, J.T., who is strangely willing to have Venkatesh tag along and lets him in on the secrets of gang life. He visits the neighbourhood over a period of years, gradually expanding the number of people who trust him and are willing to share their story with him.

Throughout the book he struggles with his research methodology. He is convinced that doing traditional quantitative research using objective surveys does not lead to any deep insights into why it is so hard for many people to get out of poverty and how it is that people do manage to struggle along. On the other hand his participatory research is also troublesome. What is he to do when he witnesses the gang planning or doing illegal activities? How does he earn people’s trust? He notices that by observing all kind of hustlers and trying to get to know as much about them as possible, he himself is also slowly turning into a hustler: a hustler for information.

I was surprised to find out how much of the drug trade is run as a normal business. Most of J.T.’s problems and dilemma’s are managerial. His actions and behaviour on the street are all in the interest of selling more drugs and keeping their customers happy.

There are a couple of parallels between the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago and the “Bijlmer” area (Amsterdam South-East) where I have been working as a teacher for several years. The sense of community where people know each other and look out for each other is very recognisable. They also share the failure of the urban renewal programs in the 60’s and 70’s. From the book:

From the outset urban renewal held the seeds of its own failure. White political leaders blocked the construction of housing for blacks in the more desirable white neighborhoods. And even though blighted low-rise buildings in the ghetto were replaced with highrises like the Robert Taylor Homes, the quality of the housing stock wasn’t much better. Things might have been different if housing authorities around the country were given the necessary funds to keep up maintenance on these new buildings. But the buildings that had once been the hope of urban renewal were already, a short forty years later, ready for demolition again.

This is exactly what happened in the Bijlmer. Looking back, it is hard to understand how the nearly ideological architectural ideas behind the highrises that were built with expansive empty spaces between them weren’t seen as the complete failures that they turned out to be. I’ll revisit this theme in a post in the future.

Whiplash the cowboy monkey

Right now I am in Dallas for a two day training. I am teaching a dozen learning designers how to use some of the more advanced Moodle features.

I have learnt a lot in the couple of days that I have been here. For example that is possible to have a skating ring inside a shopping mall when it is 40 degrees Celsius outside and that you do not only have drive-ins for food but also for general groceries, pharmacies, ATM’s and even for donations (drop off those old clothes without getting out of the car!).

I also went to see the Mesquite Championship Rodeo. I had never been to a rodeo before and I thought it was a great event. They did bull riding, broke back horse riding, roping (with headers and heelers) and barrel riding. It is probably one of the only sports where women earn more money than men. This is because they do the barrel riding, which is truly one of the most exciting horse events I have ever seen. They have to race their horse around three barrels in a clover pattern and they do this at an incredibly high speed.

The highlight of the evening was Whiplash the cowboy monkey. This is a 21 year old Capuchin Monkey who has been “riding” on border collies herding sheep for over 18 years. Check him out:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYNoQZ5djUA]

To me the real star of the show was the dog. I am always impressed when I see dogs herding sheep. Training animals is a real art and I always wonder whether those same techniques could somehow transfer over to training human beings. Would my course for the learning designers been (even) more succesful if I had given them an oreo cookie after each properly executed assignment? Some people do believe that this is the case: At Masie’s Learning 2008 there will be a keynote from Amy Sutherland in which she will explain how she trained her husband using her experience training exotic animals.

Which learning philosophy do you think that Whiplash’s trainer used? I am pretty sure it wasn’t a social constructivist one!