There's been lots of UK media coverage over the weekend of a Microsoft research study that used traffic on Microsoft's Instant Messenger (IM) to investigate global communication (See articles in the Guardian, Telegraph, and BBC.)

The study captured anonymised data from June 2006 - specifically properties of 30 billion IM conversations (not messages, conversations!) among 240 million people. Of interest to the media is the global investigation of 'six degrees of separation' - the idea that everyone is just six steps away from anyone else. In fact, the researchers found that the average separation among IM users was 6.6, or seven in terms of whole people!

The original study was published in June 2007 - which perhaps says something about the degrees of separation of journalists from up to date research.

Even though those with (reported) ages in the 15-35 age group are strongly overrepresented, there are other findings that are interesting in terms age and gender.
For example, a series of hot and cold graphs plotted against age, show that younger users have more conversations made of up more quickly generated messages, but they are shorter than older users who tend to send more messages per conversation. In terms of gender, the researchers note that "cross-gender conversations are both more frequent and of longer duration than conversations with the same gender".

Leskovec, J., & Horvitz, E. (2007). Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network.

Labels: digitalnatives, networks, researchmethods, sms

Although details aren't yet available on the eLearning Alliance site, the next annual conference sounds to be a must attend event! Entitled Jock Tamson's Bairns (a reference to a Scot's saying meaning "underneath we're all the same"). The conference aims to question whether Web 2.0 marks a transformation in approaches to learning. Will this present further challenges in providing access across organisations, considering that learners could come from across four generations?

Headline speakers include Clive Shepherd chair of the eLearning Network and author of The Blended Learning Cookbook and Stephen Downes renowned eLearning expert. This slideshow is one of Stephen's more recent on the development of online community since the mid 90's, and includes lots(!) of examples of Web 2.0 tools in use for education and learning.

Labels: conference, digitalnatives, elearning, futures, scotland, web2.0

PublicTechnology.net report on the Samaritans' plan to roll out a text service to improve their reach to the most vulnerable young people.

A pilot of the scheme was carried out during which over 10,000 texts a month were received, "with 63% of contact from people aged 10-24-years-old". They believe once rolled out nationally there could be a "rise of up to 1,000 texts a day by 2010 - that's one text every two minutes, every hour of the day".

Increasingly public and voluntary sector organisations are looking towards new technologies to identify, engage and maintain contact with harder-to-reach groups. Inspire Research Ltd recently completed a project with the Renfrewshire Workforce Plus Partnership (a collaboration between public and voluntary sector organisations who are working around the workforce agenda) to review current communication methods. This study also looked at organisations' and client's perceptions of communicating via new technologies, and investigated possible future approaches. For more information, please contact us.

The Samaritans are looking for a strategic corporate partner to help deliver this project.

Labels: digitalnatives, engagement, hardtoreach, sms, text, web2.0

I've just come across two interesting news items - one about the use of Web2.0 in the Health sector and another about using online games to encourage children to respond to a consultation about play spaces.

Although the full text is not available without paying a hefty sum, the Executive Summary of the E-health 2.0 report is available. The report offers an overview of twenty "leading e-health 2.0 providers", and discusses a number of themes that emerge from this overview, including: Transparency in the health system; Rebalancing the doctor-patient relationship; Consumer empowerment; Empowerment through connectivity; and Mobilisation of data. According to Public Technology.net "The profiles provide a snapshot of innovation across healthcare: from organisations providing online communities for patients with specific conditions, tools for chronic disease management, sites that enable patients to rate the quality of care they receive, together with tools to enable clinicians to better search for and share research data."

The second story I saw came from the Department for Children, Schools and Families. The Playspace consultation tool is a neat online tool which is aimed at 8-13 year olds to try and get them involved with a national consultation on the development of play spaces. In a Sims type game it allows kids to create their ideal playspace, and they earn credits to buy cool things (like skate ramps, swings, etc) for their playspace by answering child-friendly questions based around the consultation.

I suppose what struck me most about these is the way in which technology is changing the relationship between organisations and their 'clients'. Whether that's through finding interesting and fun ways to engage children and therefore enable them to contribute to developments in their world, or encouraging greater interaction, support and freedom of choice through the use of social networking in the health sector.

It's encouraging engagement, interaction, involvement and ownership of these issues and with increasing familiarity and access to technology it seems likely to become more prevalent in every part of our lives.

Labels: consultation, digitalnatives, education, engagement, freedom, games, health, IT, online gaming, open, socialnetworking, web2.0

As the parent of a child who's been keen on computer games from the age of three(!), I welcome the Scottish Government's plans for teaching schoolchildren how to design and develop their own electronic games. Apparently, pupils will use software to create their own games, and be taught how to use computer software to create animations and feature films. While this is at least partly intended to support Scotland's games industry, which employs more than 500 and generates £20million annually, Maureen Watt, Minister for Schools and Skills, also notes "Technologies have become part of every day modern life, whether in computer programming, engineering or craft and design - and we need to encourage children to be confident and competent when using them".

From what I can see, confidence in using technology is already par for the course among primary 1s, certainly in terms of xbox, playstation, nintendo ds various... And if you need convincing about the potential educational value of games, have a look at how it is being done on gamelearning for the 'playstation generation'; read what John Rice has to stay about the educational uses of the ds; or for something more practical (and my favourite) why not see if you can beat the clock on Lunar Jim's patchwork game (Level 3), or for something a bit easier how about Spooky Spoon Sudoku?

Labels: digitalnatives, education, games, learnerexpectations, schools, scotland

Yesterday I attended an interesting presentation by Ewan McIntosh (his edublogs site is worth checking out) run as part of the Urban Learning Space seminar series (a podcast of it will be available soon).

What I found refreshing was his discussion of how emerging technologies (social software in particular) is really just another development in a long line of 'in-things' (from sliced bread in 192x!) whose use seemed daunting, unusual or even inappropriate initially.

What I took from his talk was that maybe educators tend to take the use of emerging technolgies too seriously, treating them as an all-or-nothing. Overplanning the use of technolgy, putting so much emphasis on the need for them to be successful (or the need for it to not fail) means that the flexibility, spontaneity and innovative use of technologies is often stifled in the learning environment. And yet our learners are displaying exactly these traits in their personal use of the technologies - from using their blogs to publish creative writing, to producing videos for youtube sharing their comments on current affairs, and using some impressive technical features to showcase their talents. Maybe it is time we learned from them and see it as a creative medium rather than looking for the way to assess it and 'prove' the value of the excersie... maybe the value is it can engage the interest of learners!

Labels: digitalnatives, education, educators, elearning, freedom, internet, IT, learnerexpectations, online, web2.0

The Guardian reports that MySpace and Skype have joined forces to allow MySpace users to chat to each other for free within the social networking space using Skype VoIP technology.

The development has been hailed as 'The start of a convergence of social networking and communications applications' by Tim O'Reilly. It will afford users with another alternative communication channel, making the social networking environment an increasingly rich communicative tool.

Labels: digitalnatives, internet, IT, networks, online, web2.0

The Health Protection Agency have announced a new strudy investigating the effects of wireless networks on our health. Although they say that they "have good scientific reasons to expect the results to be re-assuring", the empahsis of the study seems to be looking at patterns of use, and quantifying actual levels of exposure.

Read more at PublicTechnology.net .

Labels: digitalnatives, education, health, internet, IT, networks

This recently published article reports on research which says that university applicants expect unrestricted access to internet. While this is unsuprising as most university applicants will already use the internet in their everyday life, it does raise questions for institutions who want to maintain a degree of control over their networks, and how to reach an acceptable compromise between learner expectations of freedom of use and safety/security of the network.

Labels: digitalnatives, freedom, HE, internet, IT, learnerexpectations, networks, security