I am soooo excited just have to blog! We launched a new feature today in cloudworks, private messaging. Click on message on top rhs and then compose message, enter first or surname of person or people u want to contact - write and send. New messages appear to you when they arrive and u can choose to have email alerts. Think this could be a great new feature. Comments welcome and please try out!!!

I’ve been at the Estionian E-learning conference in Tartu this week. Thanks to Ene Koitla and colleagues for hosting a very well organised event. The conference included some excellent papers by local researchers as well as a number of international speakers (Terry Anderson and Rory McGreal from Athabasca University, Gerry Ignasi Labastida from Barcelona University, and Gerry Hanley from California State University, and Murilo Matos Mendonca from Santa Catarina Virtual University - who is currently visit the OU as an Olnet fellow). The second day included a live video link with a parallel conference happening in Finland. Ville Venäläinen and Tarmo Toikkanen talked about SOMEKU, a ning-based social networking platform they have created for Finnish teachers. I was struck by the parallels with Cloudworks and would like to explore with them more the relationship between the two sites and the insights they have gained from developing and evaluating the use of SOMEKU. I’ve live blogged many of the session here in Cloudworks. I did a talk on social and participatory media and explored the ways in which these technologies are changing learning, teaching and research. I also ran a learning design workshop. It’s been a good few days, lots to reflect on; good to catch up with old friends and meet new ones!  

Got some fresh ideas for more chapters/content for my learning design book, perhaps inspired by recent meetings and conferences. I think I need to put more in about the different ways in which people are using social media to support their practice - such as Twitter, facebook, ning, Elgg etc. Was impressed by the presentation recently about SOMETU.fi a social network for teachers in Finland. Also think I need to include a chapter on metaphors for describing new digital landscapes and practices, going back to Morgan’s work on metaphors such as the brain, ecology system, political system etc., as well as more recent notions of trying to describe both real and virtual interactions. Another idea for a chapter centres around approaches for transferring innovation and here I would like to draw on the experiences we have gained in particular from our OULDI and Design-Practice projects. I wonder also if I should expand the theoretical chapter - and perhaps suggest theoretical perspectives we should be considering but aren’t drawing on much….

I’ve had a bit of a breakthrough this week with my book on learning design. I wasn’t happy with the structure of it and after some really helpful comments from Martin Weller, I have no radically reorganised it and I think it is much more logical and coherent. Here is an outline of the current structure. Thoughts on this very welcome! Copies of the latest draft chapters are available on the Cloudscape I have set up on Cloudworks.Chapters overview The book begins with this introductory chapter, which provides an overview of the book and a rationale for its relevance. This includes an overview of the context of modern education. I argue that we now operate in a context of rapid technological change, which is influencing the nature of education and its purpose. Boundaries between formal and informal learning are changing, as a result I argue that, within this context, the way in which we design, support and assess learning needs to change and the nature of educatioal technologies. Next the characteristics of today’s learners are discussed drawing on key research in the field. It provides a brief definition of the term ‘learning design and argues for the need for a new learning design methodology is discussed, which is the main focus of the book. Finally the audience and  structure of the book are described. Design languages are the focus of chapter two, in particular the use of design notation in music, architecture and chemistry are described. The chapter discusses the challenges of designing for learning, and then focusses on learning design, along with the spectrum of learning design languages that have been developed. The origins of the OU Learning Design Initiative are described, along with a description of how OULDI adopted a Design-Based Research (DBR) approach. Chapter three situates the Open Learning Design methodology discussed in this book in relation to related research fields such as learning sciences, instructional design and pedagogical patterns. Chapter four provides a review of new open, social and participatory media and gives examples of how these are being used to support different pedagogical approaches. It considers the changing digital landscape of education and provides a review of new technologies, which includes: i) the characteristics of new technologies, ii) the impact of web 2.0 technologies, iii) the use of web 2.0 technologies in education and iv) the impact on practice. Highlights from a review of web 2.0 tools and practices are then discussed. Chapter five describes the key theoretical perspectives and methodologies that underpin learning design research. Chapter five describes how the Open Learning Design methodology described in this book draws on Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and in particular the notion of Mediating Artefacts. It also considers the nature of theory and methodology in the field. Chapter six defines Mediating Artefacts, including the different ways in which practice can be captured and represented. It describes a range of Mediating Artefacts and concludes with an illustrative example that demonstrates how an OER created for use in one contexts can be repurposed. Chapter seven introduces the concept of affordances, discussing the range of definitions for the term. It goes on to discuss the affordances of technologies and argues that these can be used as a means of structuring and guiding use of particular technologies for different learning interventions. Chapter eight gives an overview of different design representations and how they can be used to promote new ways of thinking about designing learning interventions. Chapter nine then goes into more detail on different tools that can be used to visualise and represent designs, and in particular on the CompendiumLD tool that we have developed. It begins with a description of the ways in which practitioners currently go about designing learning interventions. Chapter ten critiques the notion of ‘openness’ in terms of open design, delivery, evaluation and research. An important aspect of open delivery is the use of OER, chapter nine gives an overview of the Open Educational Resource movement Chapter eleven outlines two recent OER initiatives, namely Olnet and OPAL.Chapter eleven provides a review of the Open Educational Resource movement. This includes a review of OER initiatives and a description of four illustrative examples. Chapter twelve discusses the outputs and findings from the work being undertaken as part of the Olnet and OPAL initiatives. Chapter thirteen returns to the ways in which open, social and participatory media are resulting in new forms of online communities and interactions.  It defines the terms and looks at different pedagogies of e-learning. It concludes with the introduction of a new Community Indicators Framework (CIF), that can be used to guide the design and evaluation of new social and participatory media. Chapter fourteen describes the Cloudworks social networking site, and in particular the ways in which it is promoting new forms of online interaction, communication and collaboration. Chapter fifteen reviews a number of pedagogical planners that have been developed to guide practitioners in making informed learning design decisions. These planners, the chapter argues provide more structured support for the design process than the visualisation representations and the use of social and participatory media discussed in earlier chapters. Chapter sixteen is the conclusion chapter, which provides a summary and overview of the book. It also looks at the implications of this work, along with reflections on its importance and the associated challenges.

  So what on earth promoted me to write a book on learning design? I think the origins to this work stretch back to my initial experience of teaching in the early nineties. I started my career as a lecturer in Inorganic Chemistry. Soon after I took up the post, a number of my colleagues, past on some of their courses for me to take over. My experience of education was solely based on my own learning at school and as an undergraduate (essentially around lectures, tutorials and laboratory classes). I had no knowledge of educational theories and didn’t even know what a learning objective was I am ashamed to say. In addition to trying to design my teaching sessions based on this woeful lack on experience, I was struggling to build up a distinct research profile through data collection, and the writing of papers and project proposals.  I attended a staff development session which stated that it aimed to support teachers in developing their teaching practice. It was a disaster. The session was run by a staff development woman, who kept rabbeting on about constructivism and other esoteric educational terms I had never heard of. At the end I was demotivated and frustrated. The session had been no help at all and indeed was counter-productive.  I suspect my initial experience of being a lecturer is not uncommon. We are primarily hired based on our research expertise and subject domain knowledge, not on our teaching experience. Luckily today many institutions do have in place a professional practice programmes for new lecturers, to introduce them to relevant educational theories and expose them to examples of good learning and teaching practice.  Nonetheless my own experience sowed a seed in my mind around the question: ‘What kind of support mechanisms can we put in place to support teachers in their teaching practice and to enable them to develop effective approaches to the design of learning interventions?’ On reflection I think this question has been at the core of my research work over the last twenty years. It has lead me through a journey of the development and evaluation of the use of different technologies, and ultimately to the development and evaluation of the Open Learning Design methodology outlined in this book.  This is an exciting time in education, which is operating within an increasingly complex societal context, one of rapidly changing technologies and increasing financial constraints. New social and participatory media have much to offer for learning and teaching, to address this challenging context, however to fully harness this potential we need to radically rethink the way in which we design, delivery, support and assess learning. The tools and methods described in this book are put forward as a means of trying to achieve this, with an underlying aspiration to transform teaching practice and ultimately enhance the learner experience. 

I am trying to come up with a visualisation to describe the key themes of my book on learning design and the relationship between them. The current view I have come up with is this one.    At the centre is the Open Learning Design Methodology (OLDM) that is the main focus of the book. The diagram shows how this draws on four main areas: i) the broader theoretical perspectives and methodology from research in e-learning and Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL), ii) the notion of design languages and how they are used in a range of disciplines, iii) related research areas such as instructional design, and iv) the nature and characteristics of open, social and participatory media. The middle layer shows that OLDM draws, in particular, on the theoretical concepts of Mediating Artefacts and affordances. Then the top layer shows how this feeds into the three main components of OLDM; i) design representations and tools, ii) the nature of openness, and iii) different forms of community and interaction. This almost maps perfectly with the current chapter order, except for the theory and methodology section, wondering if I should reorder and have this as chapter 2 instead of 5 to fit the diagram? Hmmm….

I’ve been putting up draft chapters of my book for people to comment on in Cloudworks and on my blog. Today I set up a drop box folder and put up the lasted versions. I invited people to join the space via fb and Twitter and have been amazed by the response so far! I have already had some useful feedback and Dominic Newbould has kindly offered to give it a ruthless edit. I can’t believe how generous the research community is, real peer learning! I am certain the book will be much better as a result. Email me if you want an invite to the space.

And I am nearly there! Here is a draft of my concluding chapter! Introduction In this final chapter I want to summarise the key messages conveyed throughout the book, along with considering the implications of each topic. I will critically reflect on the implications of each of the topics and, in particular, what impact the Learning Design methodology described in this book is likely have on learning and teaching and how it can help to change the way learning interventions are designed. The central thesis of this work is that we need  new approaches to design in order to make more effective use of new open, social and participatory media.  This book has argued that designing for learning is the key challenge facing education today. To make effective use of the affordances (Conole and Dyke, 2004; Gibson, 1977; Gibson, 1979) of open, social and participatory media, learners and teachers need guidance and support. They lack the necessary digital literacies skills (Jenkins et al. 2006; Jenkins, 2009) needed to embrace the full potential of these technologies. The book has described a new learning design methodology, which aims to provide this support, through: visual designs (to enable teachers to think beyond content to learning activities and overall learner experience), pedagogical planners (which guide the teacher through the design process and provide templates that they can adapt and repurpose) and effective use of social networking tools (so that learners and teachers can be part of a global, distributed Community of Practice (CoP) network) (Wenger, 1998). The visual designs, pedagogical planners and social networking tools, are essentially Mediating Artefacts (Conole, 2008) that can guide practitioners’ design practices and make them more explicit and sharable with others. A key intention of the learning design approach is to shift teachers’ design practice from being implicit and belief based to one that is explicit and design based.  As discussed in Chapter 3, the learning design research work described in this book is located alongside related research fields, such as instructional design, the learning sciences, pedagogical patterns and research on Open Educational Resources (OER). It has shown how learning design is aligned to these, but is also distinct from them. Open, social and participatory media New open, social and participatory media clearly have significant potential to transform learning and teaching. The emergence of these technologies has shifted practice on the Internet away from passive, information provision to active, user engagement. They offer learners and teachers a plethora of ways to communicate and collaborate; to connect with a distributed network of peers, and to find and manipulate information. In addition there are now a significant range of free educational resources and tools. However despite this, technologies are still only used marginally in an educational context. Learners and teachers lack the necessary digital literacy skills to harness these new technologies.  This new learning context raises some thought-provoking issues. In a world where content and services are increasingly free, what is the role of formal education? What new teaching approaches and assessment methods are needed? How can we provide effective learning pathways to guide learners through the multitude of educational offerings now available? How can teachers develop new approaches to the design of learning activities and whole curricula that takes account of this new complex, technologically enhanced context? What assessment strategies are appropriate? Falconer and Littlejohn (2008, p. 20) argue that there are three challenges facing teachers: i) the increasing size and diversity of the student body, ii) the increasing requirement for quality assurance, and iii) the rapid pace of technological change. Conole (2004) has argued that there is a gap between the promise and reality of the use of technology in education and that there is little evidence that education has changed fundamentally. Much use of technology appears to simply replicate bad classroom practice resulting in simple Web page turning (Oliver, 2000). Similarly Masterman (2008a, p.210) argues that the lack of uptake of technologies is due to a number of factors: lack of awareness of the possibilities, technophobia, lack of time to explore the use of technologies, aversion to the risks inherent in experimentation and fear of being supplanted by the computer. Agostinho et al. (2008: 381) suggest that the uptake of the use of high-quality ICT-based learning designs in higher education has been slow. Factors include: low levels of dissemination of ICT-based learning projects, lack of ICT-based learning examples to model, lack of time, support and training. Sawyer (2006, p. argues that the impact of the significant investment in computers in schools has been disappointing. There are few studies that show that computer use is correlated with improved student performance. Similarly Koedinger and Corbett (2008, p. 61) write that as new technologies have emerged, many hoped that they would have a radically transformative effect on education, but in reality the impact has been much less than expected.  The gap between the potential and actual use of technology is a paradox and this is at the heart of the growth of a new area of research that has emerged in recent years. Learning design research aims to better understand this mismatch. It focuses on the development of tools, design methods and approaches to help teachers design pedagogically effective learning activities and whole curriculum, which make effective use of technologies.  Therefore there is little doubt that open, social and participatory media enable new forms of communication and collaboration for both learners and teachers. They can provide us with mechanisms for sharing and discussing learning and teaching ideas. However, as discussed in Chapter 14, the nature of online communities and interactions in these spaces is complex, evolving and distributed. Learners and teachers need to develop new digital literacy skills to effectively participate in these spaces, as well as an understanding of the nature and form of their digital identity. How do they want to be represented in these spaces? To what extend do they want to adopt open or more closed practices? The implications of fully harnessing new technologies in an educational context are profound. We are seeing a blurring of boundaries: learners and teachers, learning and teaching, formal and informal modes of learning, and real and virtual spaces. We need to rethink all aspects of learning and teaching; how courses are design and delivered, the ways in which learners are guided and supported, and the mechanisms for assessment. Old practices of assessment strategies are no longer appropriate and indeed are woefully inadequate in terms of providing learners with the necessary skills and competences to participate in an increasingly complex and global societal context. Institutions are also being challenged by these new technologies.  Firstly, increasingly researchers are opting to make their research publications publicly available, often via institutional repositories. Some are going further by making their actually data available. Initiatives such as the Open Access Movement (OEM) and tools such as the ePrints repository  (Harnard and Hey, 1995; Harnard et al., 2004; Hey, 1997, Hey, 2004) have changed the ways in which researchers are distributing their findings. Indeed, many institutions now require academics to deposit their outputs in institutional research repositories and national level research assessment exercises add an additional pressure in terms of academic accountability and measure of the impact of their research. Secondly, sites such as iSpot  and Galaxy Zoo  (discussed in Chapter 11) demonstrate that researchers are beginning to harness the collective wisdom of the crowds (Surowiecki, 2004), through use of distributed networks of users to collect data on a global scale. Such sites play a dual function; in terms of raising awareness of science and as a mechanism for researchers to gather data on an unprecedented scale. Thirdly, as Weller argues (2011), digital scholarship is becoming increasingly important and is changing the way in which academics communicate, as well as how they disseminate their teaching practices and research findings. All of these are challenging traditional publication mechanisms. Publishing houses need to develop new business models to take account of this.  Fourthly, more open practices (in terms of the use of Open Educational Resources and the growth of ‘free’ courses such as the Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC) discussed in Chapter 11) are challenging traditional educational offerings. In a world where content and expertise is free, what is the role of traditional educational institutions? As with the publishing houses, institutions will need to develop new business models. Nascent work is already occurring in this respect. For example, in terms of OER, Downes (2007) has described a number of new business models that have emerged in recent years. Arguably, institutions need to shift away from a focus on content as a commodity, to providing effective learning pathways for learners, along with flexible accreditation models. A number of new types of organisations are beginning to emerge that adopt more open and flexible offerings. For example, the OER University,  a consortium that provides a mechanisms for members to flexibly accredit learners who are using OER and the peer-to-peer university,  which has developed a peer-support ‘badging’ system to recognise learners’ competences.  Fifthly, learners are also changing (Sharpe et al., 2010), embracing new technologies to support their learning and adopting more just-in-time and collaborative approaches to learning. However, despite the fact that today’s learners are indeed technologically immersed, it is not evident that all of them have the necessary skills to make effective use of technologies to support their learners. Many are confused by the plethora of resources and tools, and lack the necessary academic skills to make effective choices about which resources and tools to use. They need guided learning pathways to help them and this is clearly a role that educational institutions can provide.  Sixthly, legacy institutional systems are at odds with the tools and services that are now available in the cloud (Katz, 2009). What services should institutions be providing and what should they be outsourcing? What is the relationship between institutional Learning Management Systems (LMS)  and freely available tools and services? Learners are now creating their own personalised digital learning environment, mixing institutional systems with their own choice of tools.  The learning design methodology introduced in this book aims to address the challenges described above. A number of recommendations can be made for the key stakeholders involved in education.  For learners, institutions and teachers, in particular, need to provide appropriate support mechanisms to enable learners to develop the digital and academic literacies they will need to effective engage with new technologies. Enabling them to see the opportunities that social and participatory media afford in terms of adopting more constructivist and socially situated pedagogies. In this respect, teachers need to facilitate more learner-centred approaches. Also we need to think of how technologies can be harnessed to encourage communication and collaboration amongst learners and their peers. Finally, we need to shift from a focus on content to activities. For academic staff, we need to recognise that these new technologies provide a plethora of new approaches to learning, teaching and research, and hence we need to be aware of and take account of these. Academics need to adopt more explicit and reflective practices and embrace the full potential of the notion of digital scholarship. Engagement with new technologies cannot be at arms length; it is only through technology immersion - learning by doing and through the technologies - that academics will come to understand how they can appropriate their technologies to support all aspects of their practice. We need also to use the technologies to encourage a networked community of academics, sharing and discussing learning, teaching and research ideas.  At an institutional level, we need to put in place appropriate strategies and policies that reflect the changing context of education, and that take account of the implications of using technologies for learning, teaching and research. We also need to have adequate resources and support to facilitate the shift in practice needed. Strong leadership, with an understanding of the issues (pedagogical, technical and organisational), will be needed, along with a re-visioning of institutional structures and processes. Alongside the strategic directives, institutions will need to have in place appropriate  professional development and incentives for academics, to help them make more effective and increase use of technologies.  Finally, at a national level, we need to develop an infrastructure to support the growing range of free resources, tools and research outputs. We need also to facilitate the creation of a distributed professional networks and communities to promote and share case studies of good practices. As at the institutional level, nationally there will also be a need for appropriate strategies and policies (and associated funding) around using technologies. Finally, we need mechanisms to support the an ongoing horizon scanning of technology trajectories, so that we can future proof how emergent technologies might be used for learning, teaching and research and what might the implications be for individuals and organisations.   On a positive note, social and participatory media provide learners and teachers with a rich set of multimedia representations of content and multiple communication challenges. Learning resources can be accessed anywhere, anytime to support flexible and personalised learning. There is now an abundance of free tools and resources that learners and teachers can use. Access on a truly global level means that learners and teachers can connect with each other on an unprecedented scale and for researchers the new media mean that their research outputs can have far greater impact to a wider audience almost immediately.  On a negative note, the digital divide (Warschauer, 2004) is still present; narrower but deeper; whether this is because of lack of access or skills or through personal choice not to engage with these technologies, it is a reality and needs to be taken account of when designing for learning. The very richness of the online digital space means that is is complex and difficult to traverse, it may be true that everything a learner or teacher might need is on the Web, but finding what is appropriate for a specific purpose is far from trivial. There are also access, privacy and ownership issues; whilst licenses such as Creative Commons have gone some way towards addressing the copyright issues associated with resources, it has not answered all the concerns many still have. Many social networking sites are using personal data in convert ways, unknown to the users. Furthermore, this form of re-appropriation of data and digital surveillance is only likely to increase as the data mining tools behind such services become ever more powerful. A digital equivalent of Foucoult’s Panopticon (Foucoult, 1977) is now very much evident.  Future research directions Arguably we are now at an important watershed in terms of learning design research. Over the last decade or so, research in this area has given us rich insights into practitioners’ design practices, along with an indication of the barriers they face. A number of distinct sub-research areas have emerged (principally on design languages and visualisations, pedagogical planners and the use of social networking tools to share and discuss learning and teaching ideas and designs). There is now a need to build on this work and develop a more coherent learning design framework, which will enable practitioners to use all of these approaches in a seamless and holistic fashion. Achieving effective uptake of these approaches, beyond the early adopters, will require systemic change. Therefore, learning design approaches will need to be embedded in institutional systems and processes; in particular; the course approval process and course quality assurance mechanisms. This is the only way that wide scale change in practice can be achieved.  Learning design needs to address the needs of all stakeholders involved in education; learners (in terms of the way in which the intended design can be made more explicit to them, in order that they can use this effectively in undertaking their learning activities), teachers (in terms of guiding and making the design process more explicit and hence shareable with others), institutional manages (in terms of design being an embedded part of institutional systems and process) and policy makers (in terms of future directions for policy and strategy to promote effective and innovative pedagogical processes and associated funding and initiatives).  A series of themes are interwoven across the book. These include: the nature of openness, promoting creativity, new ways of thinking about design, issues around social inclusion and exclusion, and new practices and pedagogies. So what might an agenda for future learning design research look like? Here is a list of some of the key questions I think as a research community we should be addressing in the coming years: What might a coherent learning design language look like and how might it be shared? What other Mediating Artefacts do we need to develop to enable learners and teachers make more effective use of technologies to support learning? What are the different ways in which learning interventions can be represented? How can we foster a global network and Community of Practice to enable learners and teachers to share and discuss learning and teaching ideas? How can social networking and other dialogic tools be used to enable teachers to share and discuss their learning and teaching practices, ideas and designs? What tools do we need to guide design practice, visualise designs and provide a digital environment for learners and teachers to share and discuss? What are the implications and likely impact of social and participatory media for education and how can they be harnessed more effectively to support learning? What will be the impact of new emergent technologies on the stakeholders involved in education?  What new pedagogies are emerging as a result of these new technologies? What are the implications for learners, teachers and institutions of new social and participatory media? How will the processes of supporting learning (design, delivery, support and assessment) change as a result of new technologies? What social exclusion issues are arising with the increased use of new technologies? How can we promote more socially inclusive practices? How are Open Educational Resources being design, used and repurposed? What are the implications for formal institutions of the increasingly availability of free resources, tools and even total educational offerings, such as Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs)? What digital literacy skills do learners and teachers need to make effective use of these technologies and resources? To what extent are they evident and how can they be developed? How are the ways in which learners and teachers communicate and collaborate changing with the use of these technologies? How can we create effective new digital learning environments to promote the use of social and participatory media and OER? How can informal learning using OER be assessed and accredited? What kinds of policy directives are in place to promote social inclusion through the use of OER and how effective are they? What new methodologies and theoretical perspectives will be needed to address these research questions and to interpret the findings? Conclusion Applying the learning design methodology described in this book, I argue, will enable teachers to harness the power of new technologies, resulting ultimately in a rich, learner experience. This aspiration is echoed in the National Science Foundation Cyberlearning report (Borgeman et al., 2008): which begins with a scenario of a learner of the near future: Imagine a high school student in the year 2015. She has grown up in a world where learning is as accessible through technologies at home as it is in the classroom, and digital content is as real to her as paper, lab equipment, or textbooks. At school, she and her classmates engage in creative problem-solving activities by manipulating simulations in a virtual laboratory or by downloading and analyzing visualizations of real- time data from remote sensors. Away from the classroom, she has seamless access to school materials and homework assignments using inexpensive mobile technologies. She continues to collaborate with her classmates in virtual environments that allow not only social interaction with each other but also rich connections with a wealth of supplementary content… (Borgeman et al., 2008: 7). These are exciting, but also difficult times for education. Learners and teachers have a wealth of tools and resources to draw on to support innovative and effective pedagogies. But education is operating in a climate of increasing financial straits and it is becoming more and more evident that traditional educational offerings are inadequate and do not provide learners with the necessary skills they need to be part of an increasingly complex, globally networked society. Educational establishments therefore, I would strongly argue, must change; the way in which we support and assess learning must change. We need to recognise the implications of social and participatory media and harness their potential. The learning design methodology presented in this book aims to help teachers make effective use of these technologies and to rethink there design practice. 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Giving LinkIn and Google+ another go has made me think what is the role and purpose of my social network? At the media and learning conference last week we had a great panel session on the implications of social and participatory media. As usual the room was divided… some people were very into social media, others couldn’t see the point and just didn’t understand how those using these tools find the time and energy to interact. Now I am the first person to admit I am rubbish at email, as anyone out there who has found that I have taken ages to reply will testify but Twitter and fb have become essential daily tools for me. I use them in different ways, fb is more about social stuff connecting with friends and family, banter with the likes of Martyn Cooper, etc… but also a good way to keep in touch with/connect with people I meet at conferences. Twitter is more about knowledge sharing on work related stuff. It’s also great as a means of asking questions of the network. Recently I couldn’t find a full references for a paper by Kay, I spent hours looking for it on Google, tweeted and in five minutes had five replies all giving me the same full reference! Now that is the power of the network!!! Of course new social media are emerging all the time. I am in Google+ and LinkedIn, but to date haven’t found any value in them beyond what I have with fb and Twitter, maybe I just haven’t had my ah ha moment yet…. But surely there is a limit to how many networks we can be part of and is there an issue of defragmentation across these different tools? I don’t know the answer to this and if anyone else does please let me know! Also interestingly as a result of using these tools I am blogging less, but blogging (like this) IS useful, it is a different more reflective tool, I must find more time to give some tlc to my sadly neglected blog. 

The other thing that occurs to me is that the way I interact in social networks has changed what I do and how I do it. I rely more and more on my Twitter network for up to date information on interesting reports and as a network to ask questions of…. I used to spend a lot more time watching dvds etc and now find I can easily spend an evening on fb, twitter, skype etc - reading posts, commenting or chatting to people. I feel I have got to know so many more people better through this and it’s lovely to meet someone face-to-face that you have communicated with online. Social networking has definitely changed my practice for the better, yes its time consuming, but its worth it…..