Notice the social networking aspects included here? Groups and friends and comments are possible here. You can also have layers of privacy and security - notice the "public" editing of some of the wikis, like Wikipedia.

An example of the display view for one of the timelines from xTimeline.

Dipity is another multimedia wiki timeline tool, with a more engaging display.

This one made me wonder if it is possible to create the timelines from an RSS feed. Oh, and Dipity allows you to embed a timeline in other web media, so you could literally have wikis within wikis!

I just thought this was a wonderfully creative use of both timeline and wiki technology for sharing more social networking types of information - family schedules and recipes.

Slideshow is made with SlideFlickr.

Links for most of the wikis shown are at:
http://del.icio.us/rosefirerising/wikis+es08

Optional, but Recommended:
Create a small selection of questions that are difficult to answer. The criteria for questions are that the questions should not be easily discoverable on the Internet with a search, but are easily answered if you know the right person. The best questions would fall in the category of "I know what I need to know, but I don't know where to look for it (or I can't ask)." Examples:
- When is the administrative assistant's birthday?
- How can I integrate the del.icio.us player into a Typepad blog?
- What are some examples of really good surveys?
- How do you wire tail lights on a Bronco?
- Where is the best place on the body to get a tattoo?
- What was the name of that font we used in our newsletter ten years ago?
- How do you sync data from the iPhone app to a desktop app?
- School is closed. What time is the PTA meeting?

Estimated Time

10 minutes

Introduce the Exercise

As everyone comes into the room, hand them a slip of paper with the instructions: "Please write down a question, not necessarily a reference question, that you consider a 'stumper' or hard to answer." Put all the questions in a box.

Let's Do It

1. We need 2 volunteers from the audience.

2. Thank you for volunteering. Would you please pick two slips of paper from the box. If you know the answer, please put the slip back in the box and choose a different slip.

3. Pick whichever slip you think is the hardest question. Go out into the audience and choose 3 people you will ask the question. Whisper the question to each one of them privately, and have them whisper back to you if they know the answer. Make a note of the answers. If you finish the first question before we call timeout, continue with the second question. When we call TIMEOUT return to the stage.

4. Leader waits a maximum of 5 minutes and calls TIMEOUT.

5. Hang on to the questions you already have. Please choose a new question from the box. Again, this needs to be a question for which you don't know the answer.

6. Would you please read the first question you 'researched' and the answers you received. How confident are you that you now have the right answer? How much time did it take you to get the right answer (or how long do you think it would take to get the right answer using this approach)?

7. Would you please read to the audience the last question you picked?

8. Anyone in the audience who thinks you know the answer please stand up.

Take Home Message(s)

What we hope this will show is the power of "crowdsourcing" for unusual reference questions. It is sometimes more efficient to ask a question simultaneously of a group than to seek out people one-by-one who might know the answer.

Connect the Tech

This is an illustration of what happens when people ask questions on a microblogging forum such as Twitter. Other microblogging forums are Jaiku and Pownce. This is also similar to using the "Questions" application in Facebook. In all these examples, the question goes out to your chosen community, and the answers come from that community, but not necessarily from the individuals you might have thought most likely.

Caveats or Drawbacks to this Exercise

If someone put a really inappropriate or embarassing question in the box, that might be annoying. This wouldn't work with a really small group.

I think of this as 2.0 convergence. This convergence also shows up through the integration of social tech tools in each other. Embedding Flickr pics or Slideshare presentations in blogs would be one example.

One of the examples of convergence that I find most interesting is the large number of blogs and wikis that have grown up around Second Life activities. The blogs are easy to find, so I will let you discover those on your own. The wikis tend to fulfill rich information needs around using Second Life for specialized tasks.

Here are a few examples.

The Second Life wiki for any resident to edit: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Main_Page

SimTeach - the Second Life Education Wiki: http://www.simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Second_Life_Education_Wiki

Second Life in Education: http://sleducation.wikispaces.com/

History of Second Life Wikia: http://secondlife.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

Second Life Science Center: http://sl-science-center.wikispaces.com/

Useful Chem Wikspaces: http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com/

One of the new additions to this collection is the SLHealthy wiki, which gathers information about health and health care locations, groups, and events in Second Life. SLHealthy was presented this weekend at the SLang Health event in the SLang Library.

Slide presentation with script available at the SLHealthy wiki:

http://slhealthy.wetpaint.com/page/SLHealthy+Presentation+at+SLang%2C+February+9%2C+2008

| View | Upload your own

Purchase a lot of different kinds and colors of ribbons. Minimum of 30 pieces of ribbon, preferably in a minimum of 7 different styles/colors/lengths. Minimum recommended length for a single piece of ribbon is 1.5 yards. Optional: It makes the ribbons a little easier to grip if you tie a small knot at both ends of the strips of ribbon.

NOTE 1: Yarn may be substituted, but is not as durable or visible.
NOTE 2: Many fabric stores will sell bags of ribbon remnants at a relatively low cost. Ask if they have this, or ask when they might next have this.
NOTE 3: If you do use ribbon, you probably want to ask people to give them back, since this can get a little expensive.

Estimated Time

10-15 minutes.

Let's Do It

1. We need a volunteer from the audience, someone who knows a bunch of people here. This person will now be referred to as Mr/Ms. X.

2. Thank you for joining us! Here are five pieces of ribbon. (NOTE: These five pieces may be in different lengths but should all be the same color.) Hold on tight to one end of each piece of ribbon. Now, ask five people you know to come on up here. Give each one of them the other end of one of your pieces of ribbon.

3. You next five people are now known as Mr/Ms A, B, C, D, and E. You all get 4 pieces of matching ribbon, but each of you has a different color. Hold on tight to one end, and look for people you know to hold the other ends. Here are the rules. You may NOT give the end of one of your ribbons to Mr/Ms X. You MAY give an end to one of the other people Mr/Ms X knows (Mr/Ms A, B, C, D, and E). You may also call up someone else from the audience.

4. We have a few more random pieces of ribbon left. Those of you called up by either Mr/Ms A, B, C, D, and E may take a piece or two of ribbon to connect to anyone you know who is already up here. This assumes you are not already holding one of their ribbons.

5. Now let's look at the connections. Everyone up here has at least 1 ribbon in their hand, and Mr/Ms X has 5. Does anyone else have 5? If you do, lift your hands up. 4? 3?

Take Home Message(s)

This is an illustration of what is an itty bitty teeny tiny social network. The idea is to make overt and visible those invisible connections between one person and another, and those people and others. Each person has their own social network, but the social networks of one person and other people often overlap. This is what leads to the concept now known as "6 degrees of separation."

Connect the Tech

Here we illustrated a face-to-face social network. A fundamental concept in the online social networking environments is that the same kinds of connections still hold true, even online, even in virtual environments. (Discuss examples or illustrations of online social networking tools/resources.)

Caveats or Drawbacks to this Exercise

May not work with a very small group who all know each other well. Works best when the space has two levels or an incline, so that the pattern of ribbon connections can be made visible.

May not work with a very large audience, simply because of lack of visibility.

OPTIONAL: If you can get above the group of ribbons, consider taking a photo of the connections and projecting it on a screen for the rest of the audience to see. This is especially helpful with a very large audience.

None

Estimated Time

10-20 minutes

Introduce the Exercise

Once standing, please stay standing. If you don't recognize the name of the technology or the examples, assume you are not using it. Terms will be defined later.

Let's Do It

PART 1:

1. Is anyone here using Second Life? If so, please stand up!

2. Does anyone here share presentations or educational content via Slideshare or Classroom 2.0 or similar sites?

3. Does anyone here contribute content to a social news site, such as NowPublic?

4. Is anyone here in Ning? If so, please stand up!

5. Is anyone here in another social networking site (Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, or other)? If so, please stand up!

6. Is anyone here using microblogging (Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr)? If so, please stand up!

7. Does anyone here share images via a photosharing site (Flickr, Zoomr, SmugPhoto)?

8. Does anyone here share, collect or comment on content via a social media site (YouTube, iTunes, Last.fm, Justin.tv) or by podcasting?

9. Is anyone here using social bookmarking (del.icio.us, Digg, Connotea, 2collab, CiteULike, StumbleUpon, etc.)? If so, please stand up!

10. Has anyone here ever edited or added content to a wiki? If so, please stand up!

11. Does anyone here blog, even occasionally? If so, please stand up!

12. Does anyone here use a social shopping site, such as Amazon? OK, everyone standing now?

PART 2:

1. How many of you use 3 or more of these tools? Please remain standing, everyone else sit down.
2. How many of you use 6 or more of these tools? Remain standing.
3. How many of you use 9 or more of these tools? Remain standing.
[4. If there is still a crowd of folk standing, start listing individual tools until most of them drop out.]
3. When you get down to one or two folk still standing, start Part 3.

PART 3:
1. OK, everyone sitting down, take a good look at the folk standing. How many of you know them or recognize them? Please stand up.
2. Folks still sitting, do you recognize ANYONE who is standing? If so, please stand up.
3. Repeat as necessary until a significant portion of the audience is standing.

Take Home Message(s)

1. Social technologies are ubiquitous.
2. Social technologies connect people (duh!).

Connect the Tech

Most people get involved with social technologies because they already know someone else who is using whatever it is. Which people in this room were using which technologies? Does knowing that certain folk are using certain technologies make them (either the person or the technology) more intriguing to you?

Caveats or Drawbacks to this Exercise

None

None

Estimated Time

5-10 minutes

Introduce the Exercise

Once you are standing, please remain standing until instructed otherwise.

Let's Do It

1. Look at the people on both sides of you. Do you recognize either of them? If so, please stand up!
2. Folks still sitting down, look at the folks around you in any direction. Do you recognize either of them? If so, please stand up!
3. Folks sitting down, look up and down the row in which you are sitting. Recognize anyone? If so, stand up!
4. Folks seated, now look around the quadrant of the room in which you are sitting. Recognize anyone? If so, stand up!
5. Take a good look around now, at all those standing people. Anyone look familiar? If so, stand up!
6. People standing up - is there anyone sitting down near you? If so, you now have 1-2 minutes to ask questions to find out if you know anyone in common. As soon as find someone in common, be sure to stand up! On your mark, go!

Take Home Message(s)

It's a small world, and even in a big room in a strange city, chances are you probably know someone.

Connect the Tech

Most people get involved with social technologies because they already know someone else who is using whatever it is. They spread by osmosis (or a virus? airborne?). Look at how many people in this room know someone else in this room, and imagine the potential for an idea to spread throughout this community.

Caveats or Drawbacks to this Exercise

This would only work in a largish group of folk that know each other moderately well. A small group that works together every day would not work, nor would a new group of people where they've mostly never met anyone else there.

A little over a week ago, I went to a local real-world social networking group - A2B3. A2B3 is a motley collection of geeks, tech wizards, corporate startups, educators, students, hobbyists, politicians, activists, and various other identities who gather once a week for lunch and to discuss interesting ideas. I tossed this idea out to them for starters, with a couple examples, and collected a fascinating collection of cool ideas. I hope to expand on some of these over the next few weeks and months as we develop our ideas for our presentation. In addition, hopefully, this might become a useful collection of teaching concepts for other folk.

What I give below is the scenario I provided to the group, and the notes I took of what they said. Not all of my notes make sense to me now, but those that do will turn into separate blog entries of how we envision they'll work. This is just a sampler to whet your appetites and fire up your imagination. Feel free to add more in comments!

SCENARIO:
You have a room full of people, around 100-200. You want this group to do a few exercises that would illustrate in real world terms the types of connections and interactions that social tech applications facilitate. How would you do this?

IDEAS:

1. Who's your neighbor? (Who do you know.)
2. What's a social network? (Ribbon game)
3. FB Beacon shoutout model (a.k.a. Twitterpation)
4. Reputation networks (verify identity)
5. Playing phone (twitter relay, twitter storm)
6. What is a seminal moment?
7. How would I tag myself? (Self-sorting exercise)
8. Sort in Space (Geographic sorting)
9. Gift introductions
10. Issues of trust
11. LinkedIn Intros
12. 43 things
13. Collaboration
14. Flickr tags (photo sorting)
15. Magazine routing (items of interest)
16. Saving articles to share, ie. digg
17. Ranking and shoutouts
18. Key person who becomes link of influence (gatekeeping)
19. Use all channels available / Common ground / Conversation
20. Proximity (connection to real life)
21. Graffiti is Facebook (used to be tagging)
22. Turf relationships
23. "PlacesDowntown" (a.k.a. Twitter)
24. Pair an open source expert with novice and get them to come up with a new open source project
25. Monkeys Mixer (marriages, divorce, pair up your friends via email)
26. Critical Mass (i.e. fax machines)
27. The Ladies that Lunch (collaborative decisionmaking - refining suggestions of lunch venues)
28. What is a Flickr Topic Pool? (sorting by image prefs)
29. Gallery Night (What is an PhotoBlog?)
30. Rumors
31. Objects of Fascination
32. Organizational Nucleus
33. 57 miles (sticker + serendipitous encounters)
34. Ann Arbor Birthdays
35. Sort by: (geography); then secondary sort by (interest / skillbase / hobbies / pets / cuisine / gender / generation / ... )
36. Game Show Host (come ooonnnnn down!)

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The University of Michigan opened Wolverine Island for use by the UM Community this term (Fall 2007). Since then, Wolverine has continued to rapidly evolve and change, with more interesting and dynamic spaces. The first course to be taught at Wolverine was an elective for the M1 students (more on that later). The first community social event, a brown bag to discuss future needs and plans for the UM SL community, happened this past Friday. I thought it would be remiss of me to not report back on how the event went, generally, and the actual work productivity interaction features of the meeting.

ABOUT LOCATION:
We'd been asked to have a series of events for people new to Second Life where they could come to a campus location and practice their skills with more expert people available to help. With that in mind, this was a combined real world / virtual world event. The real world location was the new Crossroads computer classroom at the School of Public Health.

Regarding the location in Second Life, here are some images of both Wolverine Island and the people (avatars) who came to the Brown Bag.

FOLKS WHO CAME:
Around 20 people attended the session*. 7 came to the real world location, and almost all of those were our team of designated helpers. So where were people coming from?
- 7 = Public Health classroom
- 2 = working from home
- 2 = Med School
- 2 = own office
- 1 = Dearborn campus
- the rest = unspecified
* 17 verified, but I didn't catch all of the names, so there were more.

Not everyone identified their departments, but those that did included people from the libraries, Medical School, Department of Kinesiology, School of Information, LS&A, and Dearborn Campus.

At one point, we were talking about the potential of SL for distance education, but from this I could see some real utility for just regular meetings! Think of all those meetings you go to all around campus and the travel time you plan, and then imagine going to a meeting by popping onto your computer, with your office around you and your desk and files and cup of coffee ready to hand. Even with this meeting, at the end, about half the people leaving on time said they had real world meeting they needed to get to. This made for a bit of contrast.

MEETING PRODUCTIVITY:
Just to show that meetings in Second Life can be productive, let me share a bit of what happened. The topic of the meeting was brainstorming for what we would like to do for future brainstorming sessions. Here is an abbreviated and selected list of topics suggested in the 45 minutes of active discussion.

General:
- invited speakers
- experimental techniques or tools
- checklists or best practices for types of events

Issues:
- rules or guidelines for effective use of voice
- learning curve vs. learning cliff: does SL keep changing too much to be effective in education?
- do we need a real world pre-orientation before students enter SL?
- providing or getting tech support for SL for UM activities
- Doing field research in SL, getting started, logistics, etc
- finding funding for SL projects

Education:
- best practices in SL education
- tours to educational places + discussion/conversation
- SL for distance learning
- Herding Cats 101 (how to coordinate a class moving around SL)
- developing mentoring system for new teachers in SL
- what types of SL instruction and class activities best work with new students?
- how to best orient new students to SL
- teaching in SL, lessons learned
- managing student accounts with money
- conducting constructivist learning activities in SL
- market penetration of SL in our student populations

Skills:
- voice configuration
- safe places for newbies
- best places for education
- who and how to ask for help
- finding professional attire
- getting dressed, making outfits, making clothes 101
- building tutorials
- scripting tutorials
- how to stream audio/video for events
- things to do with textures
- building tours or HUDs
- tips for combined RL/SL events
- capturing class sessions for asynchronous viewing
- machinima
- using mouseview and taking pics in SL
- things to do with your Profile
- lag and how to prevent it
- finding/using animations
- creating custom animations
- navigation in SL, tips and tricks
- inventory management skills

FUTURE:
The group discussed a variety of ideas for future events, so stay tuned. For the short-term, please feel free to join us at more brown bags in Second Life. They are Fridays, noon Michigan time or 9-10 SLT (Second Life Time) at the campfire on Wolverine Island (unless otherwise specified).

December 14, noon
TOPIC: prioritizing future brown bag topics, what is most important to the UM Second Life community

December 21, noon
TOPIC: A tour of Wolverine Island

FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Contact Patricia Anderson, pfa at umich dot edu, or IM Perplexity Peccable in Second Life.

Meanwhile, the buzz this week has been the new YouTube video, "Here Comes Another Bubble." Before we go right to the video, I'd like to put it in context.

Earlier in this blog I highlighted another popular video about Web 2.0, a.k.a. social technologies, "Web 2.0 -- The Machine is Using Us."

The focus in the first video is on the range of social technologies, what / why social technologies, and really a nifty introduction to the idea of social tech as a kind of ubiquitous crowdsourcing environment. Pretty nifty! This is what I really focus on myself in social tech -- the ideas that are most important are (a) people FIRST; (b) everyone has something to contribute; (c) the power of the many; (d) the personal and collective utility of friendship and collaboration. Perhaps the ultimate democratic environment thus far, with political and viral meme implications that are beyond the scope of this blog.

Back to the topic. The "Here Comes Another Bubble" video focuses on a narrower view of social tech, primarily the economic implications. Let's take a look at it.

Realistically, all grown ups who have had to work for a while have figured out that either you go off and live a lifestyle based on hunter / gatherer / subsistence farming, live homeless, or you have to figure out a way to make a living. It is entirely possible to have a great idea to benefit the welfare of mankind and have it never see the light of day because of sociopolitical or economic factors. So whatever the idea is, other people have to find value in it.

What people like changes. Hey, what did you expect? As individuals and communities, we learn, get bored, move along, become fascinated with something new, and generally keep spiraling (hopefully) upward. The short message of the video is that if you are looking for a way to make money, you might expect that the whole social technologies business is probably leveling off. This will impact on the trends of development.

There are so many incredible tools and widgets and gadgets that no one person can keep track of the whole picture. Once it gets hard to find the cool tool you want, it is kind of like household clutter. Anyone here ever bought a second copy of something you already had because you couldn't find the first one? (/me raises hand) At that point, we've crested.

The most successful web 2.0 entities are those that have aggregated a suite of tools - one stop shops. The geek will go out hunting for the best tool for the task. Johnny B. Good man-on-the-street will use the first tool they find that accomplishes the task fairly easily. People like the authors of this blog try to bridge that gap. I expect the next step to be more consolidation and refinement, rather than a lot of totally new concepts.

Lucky for me, I'm not in it for the money. As an educator, though, I do want to be aware of the trends and what is coming next. Humanity is so social I don't see the social part of technology getting less. I can see it becoming such an assumed default that we don't talk about it much. No more so than, we explain relationship dynamics to two-year-olds. Of course people like technologies that facilitate connections with other people. Duh.

Now here's a new concept, at least for me. Let's say you have been working to make your site as accessible as possible, for the obvious reasons -- #1) the more folks that can use the site, the more folks *will* use the site; #2) need to meet legal, government and enterprise specifications; and #3) being "good folk". You've done all kinds of CSS and behind the scenes coding to make sure that people with special needs can choose to use their own setting instead of yours.

Then you get a complaint from someone and it turns out the complaint is not because they can't use their settings, but because they DON'T KNOW HOW. Oh. So whose problem is it, whose responsibility is it, etcetera, etcetera.

If you make your site accessible for reason #2 you probably really don't care as long as you've met the job requirements, but if you do accessibility for either reasons #1 or #3, then you really do want people to be able to get at what they want from your site, and you are willing to help them a bit to make sure that happens.

Someone over at Accessify (a truly wonderful blog about tech and web accessibility) came up with a clever idea -- don't just make the site accessible, but include training for the core skills, such as how to make font size (text) bigger or smaller.

Accessify: Teach a Man to Fish, or, How to Resize Text: http://accessify.com/news/2007/09/teach-a-man-to-fish-or-how-to-resize-text/

One of the truly innovative parts of this post is the suggestion that you can not only include training, not only create a how-to screen capture video (and put it in YouTube for maximum access), but you can embed this in your accessibility statement for the site. Now, there's a thought to consider. What is your most common access question for your site?

This EDUCAUSE publication should be available to all of us at UM, since it is a member organization. I haven't looked at it yet, but in general I've been pleased with the quality and usefulness of their publications.

Lots of folks around campus have been having very interesting conversations about what is happening in Second Life (SL) and what could happen. Along these lines and to aid in these discussions both locally and more widely, the School of Dentistry and Health Sciences Libraries partnered on creating a video of science education and research in SL.

What I would like to point out to readers of this blog is how easy it was for us to do this, compared with making a video normally. For this project, we had three people. The video editor was the only person with any experience having made videos before, and he did not have an account in Second Life. The other two had accounts in SL, but no experience making videos and no knowledge of how to record video from the Second Life application. We decided to make the video at 1pm on Tuesday of this week, and gave a copy to the dean at 3pm on Thursday. In that span of time, our team of 3 learned how to make video in SL (machinima, also known as machine cinema), took lots of video clips, organized them coherently, made an outline of talking points, recorded the voiceover, smoothed transitions, edited pieces into a whole, made several versions to reduce time and help make it more engaging.

Now, if we could do this, as rank newbies, and having only been in Second Life for a couple months each, just imagine what you could do! There is a statistic I've heard (but can't verify) that on the Web about 10% of the people using it also create new content, while in Second Life that ratio is more like 60%. I don't know where that nubmer came from, but the ease of creating new content in this video says something to me about how powerful engagement with Second Life can be.

Without further ado, take a look at what we did, and see what you think. Not bad for newbies, eh?

YouTube: Science Learning Opportunities in Second Life: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfsSGBraUhc

For example, recently we've had some brown bag sessions on opportunities for science and scientists in Second Life, the multi-user virtual environment that has recently received much prominence in the popular press. Here are the slides for that presentation, as part of our blog entry.

Note the functionality. Readers of the blog can click through the entire slide presentation without needing to click through to another site and then return, at least as long as Java and Shockwave are activated and they are using a compatible browser. The Slideshare convertor supports displaying the images and text on the slides, but not animations or launches to other programs. They also have the option of clicking through if they wish to, and browsing the added functionality available in the Slideshare community. There is a filesize limit, so you might want to break really large files into two sections.

Now, what if all you wanted to do was show people pictures? Post your images to Flickr (not other people's), and organize a set containing as few or many pictures as you want on the topic. So, now we have a slideset of images showing science and scientists in Second Life:

SL - Sciences & Scientists: http://flickr.com/photos/rosefirerising/sets/72157600274466018/

At this point, you've always been able to click on the slideshow link and share that with people.

http://flickr.com/photos/rosefirerising/sets/72157600274466018/show/

But there was no easy way to take that slideshow and embed it in another web page, the way we can with Slideshare. Sure, you could download the images and make a presentation and upload that. lots of folks did exactly that. There is now a simpler no-frills, no-fuss tools called SlideFlickr that allows you to embed a slideshow of your Flickr images in your blog or web page. All you need to do is enter the user name, group name, or URL for the slideset, and voila! You have a slideshow on the page, complete with copyable code for you to use. Now, here is our Flickr Slide set of images on science in Second Life.

Pretty easy, eh? Try it out and see what you think. Oh, and if you're in Facebook, you can add SlideFlickr to your Facebook page as well.