Twitter Links as Blog Comments – conversation or junk?

I was enjoying taking a few minutes to read Jon Husband and Harold Jarche’s terrific set of reflections on social learning, A framework for social learning in the enterprise: Enterprise 2.0 Blog: News, Coverage, and Commentary when I noticed something. 79 comments! Wow, there must be a great conversation going on. So I scrolled down.

What did I find? Tweets, autoposted as comments. The first seven were real responses. The rest were people tweeting out the url. Now, I believe I found the post via a tweet. So it was a good filter.

My question is, does this auto integration of tweets ruin the blog conversation? Yes, it shows how popular a post is, but wouldn’t it be better to have some sort of indicator of tweets and retweets rather than waste the space of a tweet which is essentially a URL?

This feels like a technology stewardship issue. Just because we CAN do something, should we? What are the anticipated outcomes? What surprises us once we implement something and when should we change it?

What do you think?

(Edited March 12 to more accurately reflect authorship of post in question. While Jon was listed as the “author” on the blog, much of the work was Harold’s. There was an interesting twitter back and forth with Harold on how someone else took and reposted the whole piece without due credit, and I said something like “it is still important to pay attention. Yet clearly, I did not pay enough attention. Good learning for me.)

Monday Video: Urgent Evoke & Games 4 Change

Urgent Evoke – A crash course in changing the world is a project of the amazing Jane McGonigal and the World Bank Institute. A game to engage young people in understanding and helping solve complex problems in Africa. I’m intrigued. It kicks off March 3rd. Check out the introductory video. Show it to a teen in your life and find out what happens!

EVOKE trailer (a new online game) from Alchemy on Vimeo.

Thanks to Twitter Friends for Librarian Network Links

haikugirlYesterday I put a query out to my Twitter network to identify active, vibrant networks of librarians. Thanks to the following fab friends, I was able to pull together a list which I’ve copied below.

Thanks to @MoreCoffeePls, @eekim, @Carl_wkg,  @ekreeger, @band, @alinwagnerlahmy, @goamick, @clairebrooks, @heatherdavis, @flexnib, @haikugirloz,

Networks that “Librarian 2.0” types might plug into

If you have any more, please leave them in the comments! THANKS!

References on Lurking

I was asked about some useful references on lurking and lurkers this week, so I thought I’d refresh  myself with a few that I like. (I’ve written about ithere on the blog quite often over the years!)

Personally, I’m of the school of thought that lurking is a form of legitimate peripheral participation, that in most cases, if everyone actively participated we’d be overwhelmed, that we often and appropriately lurk offline and that lurking is not always “take and no give,” that people do in fact take what they learn one place and often use it and contribute elsewhere. It is more generalized reciprocity.

First, is an old discussion summary from the Online Facilitation list from 2003, compiled by Chris Lang which still has value to me. You an find it here   TIPs for Facilitating Lurking

Second is another distillation of conversation, this time from CPSquare. Download file.

Of course, this has been studied in the academic community, such as this paper on why lurkers lurk, from Jenny Preece and Blair Nonnecke (pdf prepub).

Finally, some fine blog posts on lurking by friends and colleagues. (Edited to add more links March 30)

My bottom line is one’s approach to lurking is context dependent. If full participation is a stated requirement (as in a job or a course) one must find ways to facilitate and enable that participation. The larger and more open the group, the more lurking is a natural and expected behavior.

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International Online Conference 2010 Sneak Peek

I’m going to help kick off the 8th annual Online Conference for Teaching and Learning with the topic,  “Should we be using communities for learning?” Now don’t worry. I have not abandoned community. I just feel we need to increase our discernment of when to USE it! Here is a sneak preview short podcast and the intro. (Dates: March 17-19, 2010.)

If you are interested in participating in this fully online event, you can find the details here. If you want a discount of $10 USD off, use this code: nwfc9 . I have one free full registration to give out to the first person who posts their reflections on the use of community in learning either here as a comment or on their blog. If you blog, drop a comment with the link here.

We are navigating a tumultuous and very interesting transition of how we think about learning. We are stepping beyond the boundaries of “course,” questioning the continuum of formal and informal learning — all in a time when technology is fundamentally changing what it means to “be together.” From this context, the idea of using the social structure of “community” for learning has come center stage. Community has shown to be valuable in some contexts. But should it be the structure? Is structuring our educational frameworks around community central, or does it deserve a different place along the continuum of individual–community–networked learning. When is community the sweet spot? When is it the trap? Let’s talk.

Check out a preview podcast with Nancy White, hosted by LearningTimes GreenRoom hosts Susan Manning and Dan Balzer.

via International Online Conference 2010 » Program.