A Year in E-Learning: One Blog’s Progress

Welcome to my blog, The E-Learning Curve.

So began my first post to the E-Learning Curve Blog on this day in 2007. Upon reflection, I don’t think that I really had any idea about what I was letting myself in for, in terms of the discipline and commitment, not to mention the sheer effort required to create and maintain a high-quality blog about Electronic Learning & Development.

I don’t think that I had any real knowledge about how the blog would unfold either; I guess that for me, that was part of what attracted me to the idea of keeping a blog in the first place: I wanted to see what would emerge over time.

In that sense I was lucky: in it’s first year the E-Learning Curve Blog transitioned from a world with a stable economic climate, to the 2007 subprime mortgage financial crisis, through the tipping point of the Credit Crunch, and now, the Great DepRecession* of Aught Eight.

This has given me the opportunity to discuss e-learning in society-at-large, and in the workplace in particular. What better opportunity is there for learning professionals to introduce the benefits of education than now? From my own experience over the last year, I have seen attitudes to e-learning change - for the better – as individuals and organizations I have worked with have finally begun to let go of the idea that e-learning today is not about “Webified” instructor-led courseware, or worse, dull and boring Authorware-style page-turners, but is an effective means to deliver knowledge and information across many channels, and takes a range of technologies under its aegis.

The emergence of the Read / Write Web into the broader consciousness has demonstrated that learning online can be as immersive an experience as a face-to-face training experience.

What better time, then, for individuals and organizations to look at educational strategy and learning technologies than in a period of profound change – these are the times that test the mettle of ideas and concepts and where they prove their value; if the reality lives up to the perception, if the potential can be realized.

What have I learned?

In a response to a recent Learning Circuits Blog Big Question, I once described myself as a 'learnivore' - a bit of a naff term, but accurate. Writing and maintaining a blog is one of the best motivators I know to continue developing my professional knowledge - to discuss the kind of topics I like to cover requires a comprehensive and in-depth knowledge of the subject of e-learning and all that understanding e-learning entails.

As a constructivist, I would assert that the practise of blogging is a excellent example of Bruner's Learning Spiral: the act of writing a blog post transforms information and enables the construction of knowledge, based upon my extant cognitive structures or mental models. These cognitive structures - what Roger Schank calls “scripts” in his Dynamic Memory Model (1982) - provide meaning and organisation to experiences and allow the individual to go “beyond the information given” (Bruner, 1974).

My view is that the e-learning blogosphere is inhabited by a population of knowledgeable, dedicated, and critical (in the positive sense) contributors, and if you want to be in that company, you have to know your stuff; of the blogs I read - see the nav panel to the right - the bar is set pretty high.

Top Ten

On a more practical note, here’s a list of the top ten topics according to the readers of The E-learning Curve Blog, courtesy of the fantastic blog analysis tools available on Statcounter – not just cool because they’re Irish.

1. Definition of E-learning
2. Economic downturn and the challenge to e-learning
3. The principles of constructivism
4. Non-formal learning in the workplace
5. Evaluating Non-formal Learning
6. Open Source E-Learning
7. E-learning & Knowledge Management
8. Using Kirkpatrick's Four-level model
9. Applying the e-learning curve in the corporate environment
10. E-Learning and the Economic Downturn: A Salutary Lesson

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* DepRecession: A portmanteau word to describe the current Recession and / or Depression. Also has the benefit of being an homonym for “Deep Recession”

FOGRA: Googling “elearning blog” about a week ago, this happened:

Certainly an unexpected (but rewarding) first anniversary present!

Thanks to all who’ve read, contributed to, and debated the topics covered over the last twelve months, and I hope you'll continue to engage with me in the times to come.

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References:

Bruner, J. S. (1974) Going Beyond the Information Given. New York: Norton.

Schank, R. (1982) Dynamic Memory: A Theory of Reminding and Learning in Computers and People. Cambridge University Press.

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E-Learning Adoption in Organizations 7: Characteristics of Adopters concluded

Previously, I looked at rates of adoption for

• Innovators
• Early Adopters
• The Early Majority

In this last post in this series, I will describe the final categories of adopters of diffused ideas.

The Majority

As a group, the Majority can be characterized as having less education and are older than the Early Majority. While they participate less in formal and non-formal groups with their peers, they probably form the largest cohort of the membership of such groups. They belong to fewer organizations than the early adopters. They access fewer blog, wikis, and other means of discovering information about new ideas and technologies. They do not participate in as many activities outside the organization than people who adopt earlier.

Nonadopters

The final category include the nonadopters. This group has the least education and is the oldest. They participate the least in formal groups and other initiatives.

Conclusion

In my view, one of the phenomena that emerged form researching this topic was the power of informational social influence, or social proof:

[It] is a psychological phenomenon that occurs in ambiguous social situations when people are unable to determine the appropriate mode of behavior. Making the assumption that surrounding people possess more knowledge about the situation, they will deem the behavior of others as appropriate or better informed.

(Wikipedia)

We can say, based upon the evidence of Bohlen’s and Beal’s research, that people often do and believe things because many other people do and believe the same things.

In this context, innovators – pioneers - are initially ignored by the majority during their initial evangelizing of a new idea or technology, almost as if their preference for such an idea is idiosyncratic because of an innovator’s role. only after early adopters (who are perceived by the community-at-large to be the “smart money”) take on a new idea, will true diffusion begin to take place. This is case of “the pioneers get the arrows, the settlers get the land.”

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References:

Bohlen, J. M., Beal, G. M. (1957) The Diffusion Process, Special Report No. 18 (Agriculture Extension Service, Iowa State College) 1: 56-77. [Internet] Available from: http://www.soc.iastate.edu/extension/presentations/publications/comm/Diffusion%20Process.pdf [Accessed 3rd November 2008]

Wikipedia contributors, "Social Proof," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia [Internet] Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof (accessed November 10, 2008).

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E-Learning Adoption in Organizations 6: More Characteristics of Adopters

In this, the penultimate post in this series, I will describe some more categories of early adopters, before concluding the series tomorrow.

As discussed in yesterday’s post, there are there are five categories of adopters of diffused ideas:

1. Innovators
2. Early Adopters
3. Early Majority
4. Majority
5. Nonadopters

I covered the first category, Innovators previously.

Early Adopters

The second category of adopters are Early Adopters. Typically, they are younger than the majority of adopters (but are not necessarily younger than Innovators). They are also better-educated that people or organizations that adopt at a slower rate, or do not adopt at all. They tend to participate more in the community of users through organizations like the ASTD and the E-Learning Guild, as well as using blogs, wikis and forums.

According to Bohlen and Beal (1957)

there is considerable evidence that this group furnishes a disproportionate amount of the formal leadership in organizations.

(p.5)

Early Majority

The third category of adopters is called the Early Majority. Table 1 (below)demonstrates that the rate of diffusion increases rapidly after this group begins to adopt.

Table 1 Rate of diffusion

[Click on image to enlarge]

The early majority are slightly above average in age, education and professional experience. They tend to participate in the community of users through organizations like the ASTD and the E-Learning Guild, as well as by reading blogs, wikis and forums occasionally. They have medium-high social and economic status. While less active in peer-related activities than early adopters, they participate more than the majority of adopters.

In many cases, they are not formal leaders in organizations, but they are active in and influencing formal leaders to promote new ideas and technologies in organizations. It can be said then, that the early majority are likely to be informal leaders – in a sense they are a “weather vane” that indicates to the majority “which way the wind is blowing.”

People in this category are typically more conservative than Innovators or Early Adopters: “they must be sure an idea will work before they adopt it” (p.6). Because this category of people have fewer resources than the previous two, they “cannot afford to make poor decisions.” The people tend to associate with their own group within organizations. They value highly the opinions of their peers, as this is the primary source of their status and prestige.

More…

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References:

Bohlen, J. M., Beal, G. M. (1957) The Diffusion Process, Special Report No. 18 (Agriculture Extension Service, Iowa State College) 1: 56-77. [Internet] Available from: http://www.soc.iastate.edu/extension/presentations/publications/comm/Diffusion%20Process.pdf [Accessed 3rd November 2008]

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E-Learning Adoption in Organizations 5: Rates of Adoption

People (and organizations) do not adopt new ideas at the same time. Some adopt ideas when they are first introduced; others wait for varying periods of time; some never adopt an idea. In The Diffusion Process, Bohlen and Beal maintain that "...the time span over which people adopt ideas will vary from practice to practice" (p.4).

The diffusion curve (see Table 1) illustrates the typical slow initial rate of adoption, the a substantial acceleration of update, followed by leveling off of the adoption rate. Bohlen and Beal's research shows "significant differences" (p.4) in the individual and social characteristics of people in alignment with the time they adopt an innovation.

Table 1 Rate of Adoption over Time (after Bohlen and Beal, 1957)

[Click on the image to enlarge]

As we can see form the table, there are five categories:

1. Innovators
2. Early Adopters
3. Early Majority
4. Majority
5. Nonadopters

Innovators

The very first to adopt a new idea are innovators. Innovators probably have a high net worth and a large amount of risk capital. "They can afford to take some risks" (Bohlen and Beal, p.5). Innovators have prestige and respect within their society or culture (and at the macro level, within their organization). Their sphere of influence often goes beyond social or organizational boundaries.

Innovators typically belong to formal organizations such as user groups and professional associations (such as the ASTD and the E-learning Guild) - such informal and formal associations provides them with access to more potential sources of information. Innovators also get their information from higher level research; they go directly to subject matter experts and researchers. Innovators also tend to subscribe to and regularly read specialized blogs, forums and wikis about current and potential future innovations.

Interestingly, Bohlen and Beal discovered that while their peers may watch the innovators and know what they are doing, they are not often named as colleagues or influencers that they (the peers) rely on for information.

More...

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References:

Bohlen, J. M., Beal, G. M. (1957) The Diffusion Process, Special Report No. 18 (Agriculture Extension Service, Iowa State College) 1: 56-77. [Internet] Available from: http://www.soc.iastate.edu/extension/presentations/publications/comm/Diffusion%20Process.pdf [Accessed 3rd November 2008]

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E-Learning Adoption in Organizations 4: Complexity of Practices

As outlined in yesterday's post, research undertaken by Bohlen and Beal (1957) indicated that complexity of practice is a significant factor in determining the value of a diffused idea or technology in organizations. They defined the following categories of complexity:

• Change in material and equipment
• Improved practice
• Innovation
• Change in enterprise
• Cost

Change in material and equipment
By most measures, changes in materials and equipment are the simplest to implement. In the e-learning context, this could include changing from one authoring platform to another (i.e. from a commercially-available to an open-source content slide editor).

Improved practice
This second category of complexity, improved practice involves a change in methodology. An example of this would be moving from at traditionally content development cycle to a Rapid E-Learning approach.

Innovation
This category of innovation typically involved not only modifying the previous two categories, but also changes in regard to their use. An obvious example of innovation is an organization changing from an instructor-led learning and development approach to integrating e-learning into their strategy. Initially, this may look simple - the organization are merely changing the delivery channel(s) of content. But the adoption of e-learning demands a more sophisticated set of changes which affect everything from the theory and practice used to develop courseware, the skills and resources needed to develop materials, through to the impact of the innovation on the learners within the organization. Managing change successfully at this level requires the development of an effective adoption strategy to ensure learners are guided through the Innovation Decision Process. Ultimately, an innovation will only be successful if the intended audience adopt it.

Change in enterprise
The next category of complexity of practice typically involves many innovations. An example of a change in enterprise would be the adoption of Rosenberg's Smart Enterprise Learning and Performance Architecture.

Cost
An important factor to consider when implementing a new set of ideas or technologies is cost.

Those practices which cost little seem to be adopted than more rapidly than those which are more expensive.

(p.3)

Similarly, those innovations which provide the greatest ROI in the shortest time are more likely to be adopted. For example, if, after an initial evaluation, followed by a pilot or trial, an e-learning initiative is deemed to have enabled the upskilling of a greater number of workers than the equivalent ILT course, or the costs associated with training (time out of production for workers, learning resources, time and expense associated with travel etc), then it is highly likely that this innovation will be implemented more widely across an organization. Once such an initiative has been rolled out, innovations seem to reach a tipping point - "the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable" (Walsh, 2007). Once this point is reached, we can say that the innovations have become embedded as well-used practice .

More...

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References:

Bohlen, J. M., Beal, G. M. (1957) The Diffusion Process, Special Report No. 18 (Agriculture Extension Service, Iowa State College) 1: 56-77. [Internet] Available from: http://www.soc.iastate.edu/extension/presentations/publications/comm/Diffusion%20Process.pdf [Accessed 3rd November 2008]

Rogers, E. M. (2003) Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed.. Simon & Schuster International.

Walsh, Bryan (2007-10-12). A green tipping point Time Magazine. [Internet] Available from: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1670871,00.html [Accessed on 19th November 2008]

E-Learning Adoption in Organizations 3: Stages of Diffusion

According to Everett M. Rogers, people’s attitude toward a new technology is a key element in its diffusion. Roger’s Innovation Decision Process theory asserts that innovation diffusion is a process that occurs over time through five stages:

1. Awareness
2. Interest
3. Evaluation
4. Trial
5. Adoption

Awareness
At this first phase in the diffusion process, individuals or organizations become aware of a new idea or technology, but lack detail about it. For example, they may be aware of it's name (i.e. e-learning) or the underlying technology (Web-based content delivery), but not know how how this manifests itself, or how it works.

Interest
At this point, the individuals or organizations want to know more about the concept or technology: what it is, how it works and it's potential. This can be understood to be the "WIIFM" ("what's in in for me?) stage, as the potential user investigates how it may enhance productivity and performance, or revenue generation, for example.

Evaluation
The next cognitive process concerns assessment; the individual or organization mentally "tries out" the idea or technology. The information attained in the previous is applied to their particular circumstances.

Trial
If the diffusion is deemed to have some potential, the individual or organization will try it out. Typically, this is a small-scale pilot implementation which provides specific information about how the solution aligns with the individual's or organization's requirements. According to Bohlen and Beal (1957),

...individuals need to test a new idea even though they have thought about it for a long time and they have gathered information concerning it.

(p.2)

Adoption
The final stage in the cognitive path is adoption. The phase is characterized by large-scale continued use of the idea or technology, and by "satisfaction with" (p.2) the idea. This does not mean that the the individual or organization that has accepted the idea will use it constantly, rather, it means that the diffused idea has been integrated into their schema or metal model as a valuable asset or resource.

Individuals or organizations will typically go through these processes at varying speeds, depending on factors ranging from the cost, time, and effort required to implement the diffused concept, the return on the investment, how well it aligns with their previous experience with similar concepts, as well as the complexity of the idea or technology under consideration.

More...
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References:

Bohlen, J. M., Beal, G. M. (1957) The Diffusion Process, Special Report No. 18 (Agriculture Extension Service, Iowa State College) 1: 56-77. [Internet] Available from: http://www.soc.iastate.edu/extension/presentations/publications/comm/Diffusion%20Process.pdf [Accessed 3rd November 2008]

Rogers, E. M. (2003) Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed.. Simon & Schuster International.

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2008 Edublog Awards – Nominations now being accepted

You know it’s getting close to Christmas when the Edublog Awards nominations open for business…

Just in case you’re not aware of Edublogs.org:

Edublogs hosts hundreds of thousands of blogs for teachers, students, researchers, professors, librarians, administrators and anyone and everyone else involved in education. Edublogs are completely free, and come with 100MB of free upload space and a heap of great features. [They] also cater for schools and universities looking to create, manage and control blogs at their own domain, with all the features of Edublogs… called Edublogs Campus.

This year is the fifth year of the Awards, and the categories for nominations are:

• Best individual blog
• Best group blog
• Best new blog
• Best resource sharing blog
• Most influential blog post
• Best teacher blog
• Best librarian / library blog
• Best educational tech support blog
• Best elearning / corporate education blog
• Best educational use of audio
• Best educational use of video / visual
• Best educational wiki
• Best educational use of a social networking service
• Best educational use of a virtual world
• Best class blog

You can find out more about the awards here, and click here to sign up for a free Edublog or get in touch with them to talk about Edublogs Campus. I’m sure they’d like to hear from you!

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E-Learning Adoption in Organizations 2: Characteristics of the Diffusion Process

Getting a new idea adopted, even when it has obvious advantages, is difficult.

(Rogers, E., Diffusion of Innovations, p.1)

In yesterday’s post, I began looking at the challenges of driving adoption of e-learning in organizations, and how looking at organizations from a Functionalist perspective could enable us to understand ways to drive the broad adoption of e-learning.

Innovation and change - new ideas, processes, technologies, and work practices are a common part of the workplace environment. Sometimes these emerge spontaneously, and are disseminated organically, but more typically, new or different approaches are implemented as part of a strategic plan, or imposed upon workers under an operational or performance enhancement program.

I think I can say without fear of contradiction that anyone who has tried to develop an e-learning initiative for an organization has met with resistance at some level, whether it be a C-level exec with a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude, or workers simply refusing to take advantage of the resources placed at their disposal, citing reasons including:

• perceived poor focus of the initiative
  • (“this doesn’t apply to me”)
• lack of time to learn a new way of working
  • (“I’m too busy to learn a new way of working”)
• too much effort to change
  • (“my approach works just fine – why should I bother to change?”)
• lack of awareness
  • (“I didn’t know about it”)
• resistance to change
  • (“I’m not going to change”)

Understanding why workers exhibit these behaviors can be an effective means to counteract potential blocks to implementing new initiatives and to transition people in organizations to align with changes.

Diffusion of innovation is a theory of how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread through cultures. Based upon research undertaken by Joe Bohlen and George Beal in the late 1950’s, Everett M. Rogers developed and generalized the theory in his 1962 text Diffusion of Innovations, stating that

Diffusion is the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system. It is a special type of communication, in that the messages are concerned with new ideas.

(p.5)

Rogers considered that the “special” (p.6) characteristic of diffusion centered upon the notion of innovation, or newness. This newness means that a certain degree of uncertainty is bound up in diffusion. Implicit in this is “a lack of certainty, of structure, of information” (p.6). Information (delivered by any one of a number of channels) is a means of reducing the degree of uncertainty.

Rogers asserted that innovation diffuses through organizations in an S curve (see Figure 1), as early adopters initially select the innovation, followed by the majority of users, until a technology or innovation is common.

Figure 1 Charting the Diffusion of Innovation

In tomorrow’s post, I will look in-depth at the phases of diffusion.

FOGRA: Well done to Munster yesterday, nearly a miracle.

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References:

Bohlen, J. M., Beal, G. M. (1957) The Diffusion Process, Special Report No. 18 (Agriculture Extension Service, Iowa State College) 1: 56-77. [Internet] Available from: http://www.soc.iastate.edu/extension/presentations/publications/comm/Diffusion%20Process.pdf [Accessed 3rd November 2008]

Rogers, E. M. (2003) Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed.. Simon & Schuster International.

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E-Learning Adoption in Organizations: Diffusion of Innovation, Part One

As the globalized economy becomes more complex (especially in the context of the continuing financial crisis) it becomes increasingly important to understand the educational processes that lead people and organizations to accept new ideas, and to adopt them into their activities. I have written before about how I believe that e-learning is a recession-proof industry, in that the performance (and ultimately revenue-generating) benefits accrued by organizations that implement e-learning strategies will enable them to retain the flexibility needed to survive in the post-industrial world.

In ‘Recession and the Challenge to E-learning’ I asserted that

through familiarization and use, learners expectations are more reasonable about what can be achieved (and perhaps more importantly how it can be achieved through digitally mediated delivery) ...But is it perceived as a necessity or a luxury?

When describing e-learning from a decade ago I stated:

Over-compressed images, poor animation, and very poor audio - hardly the immersive learning solution that e-learning flattered to promise at the time. Assuming the learner could access the content successfully, the chances were that the PC (for it was always a PC) that they were using to view their content was processing and displaying the date at a rate that we wouldn't find acceptable on a PDA now (screen-size excluded). Pentium or pre-Pentium processors, 8-bit sound cards, 16 colors, 800x600 pixel displays. And so on.

and I quoted “e-Learning Guru” Kevin Kruse, who described 2001 as the year that

...brought the harsh, steep slope of unfulfilled promises. Several high-profile providers shut their doors while many more announced large-scale layoffs in the face of missed revenue targets and crashing stock prices. E-learning advocates retreated to the more defensible ground of "blended learning. This year [went] down as the Trough of Despair.

Figure 1. The E-learning Hype Cycle

As learning professionals I suggested, we could see the potential, but our imaginations exceeded the available technology.

In that post, I provided what I would call a Structural Functionalist approach (in the anthropological sense) to the topic. This perspective can be described as

the contribution made by any phenomenon to a larger system of which the phenomenon is a part.

(Hoult. 1969. p.139)

Over the next few blog entries, I will revisit this subject from the Functionalist or organizational angle, looking in particular at the concepts of Diffusion of Innovation, social proof, how new ideas, practices, and processes are integrated into organizations, and how learning professionals can operationalize e-learning to align with organizational goals.

More…

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References:

Hoult, T.F. (1969) Dictionary of Modern Sociology. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Kruse, K. (2002) The State of e-Learning: Looking at History with the Technology Hype Cycle. [Internet] Available from: http://www.e-learningguru.com/articles/hype1_1.htm [Accessed 12th February 2008]

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Manufacturing a New Consent: the Arrival of Social Media in Mainstream Culture

Barack Obama has over 100,000 followers on twitter. According to Twitterholic, that’s a lot more than anyone else. On Facebook, Obama has 2.2 million “friends” compared to 745,000 for McCain. On MySpace during the US Presidential Election, Obama had 588,000 friends compared to McCain’s 188,000.

Thanks largely to unprecedented use of the internet, Obama’s campaign attracted 632,000 new donors in September 2008. By some estimates Obama’s internet activities have now raised more than 1 billion dollars since he started campaigning. That’s more than ten times as much as John Kerry raised over the internet just four years ago.

Buzz News

Now read on…

As I discussed last time, the "Propaganda model" views the private media as businesses selling a non-media product — readers and demographic groups — to other businesses (advertisers). The theory postulates five general classes of "filters" that determine the type of news that is presented in news media. These five filters are:

1. Ownership of the medium
2. Medium's funding sources
3. Sourcing
4. Flak
5. Anti-Ideology

Ownership

Herman and Chomsky argue that since mainstream media outlets are either large corporations or part of conglomerates (e.g. Westinghouse or General Electric), the information presented to the public will be biased with respect to these interests. Such conglomerates frequently extend beyond traditional media fields, and thus have extensive financial interests that may be endangered when certain information is widely publicized. According to this reasoning, news items that most endanger the corporate financial interests of those who own the media will face the greatest bias and censorship.

It then follows that if to maximize profit means sacrificing news objectivity, then the news sources that ultimately survive must be fundamentally biased, with regard to news in which they have a conflict of interest.

Funding

Since the mainstream media depend heavily on advertising revenues to survive, the model suggests that the interests of advertisers come before reporting the news. Chomsky and Herman argue that, as a business, a newspaper has a product which it offers to an audience. The product is composed of the affluent readers who buy the newspaper — who also comprise the educated decision-making sector of the population — while the audience includes the businesses that pay to advertise their goods. According to this "filter", the news itself is nothing more than "filler" to get privileged readers to see the advertisements which makes up the real content, and will thus take whatever form is most conducive to attracting educated decision-makers. Stories that conflict with their "buying mood", it is argued, will tend to be marginalized or excluded, along with information that presents a picture of the world that collides with advertisers' interests. The theory argues that the people buying the newspaper are themselves the product which is sold to the businesses that buy advertising space; the news itself has only a marginal role as the product.

Sourcing

The third filter concerns the mass media's need for a continuous flow of information to fill their demand for daily news. In an industrialized economy where consumers demand information on numerous worldwide events unfolding simultaneously, they argue that this task can only be filled by major business and government sectors that have the necessary material resources. This includes mainly The Pentagon and other governmental bodies. Chomsky and Herman then argue that a symbiotic relationship arises between the media and parts of government which is sustained by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest. On the one hand, government and news-promoters strive to make it easier for news organizations to buy their services; according to the authors (p. 22), they

• provide them with facilities in which to gather
• give journalists advance copies of speeches and forthcoming reports
• schedule press conferences at hours well-geared to news deadlines
• write press releases in usable language
• carefully organize their press conferences and "photo opportunity" sessions

On the other hand, the media become reluctant to run articles that will harm corporate interests that provide them with the resources that the media depend upon. Chomsky and Herman state (p. 22),

It is very difficult to call authorities on whom one depends for daily news liars, even if they tell whoppers.

This theoretical relationship also gives rise to a "moral division of labor", in which "officials have and give the facts," and "reporters merely get them". Journalists are then supposed to adopt an uncritical attitude that makes it possible for them to accept corporate values without experiencing cognitive dissonance.

During the year 2005 in the USA, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) criticized the George W. Bush administration for the preparation and distribution of videos which falsely give the impression of being interviews made independently of the administration. The New York Times reported that "more than 20 federal agencies, including the State Department and the Defense Department, now create fake news clips. The Bush administration spent $254 million in its first four years on contracts with public relations firms, more than double the amount spent by the Clinton administration." In April 2008, the New York Times revealed how the US Pentagon and Defense Department traded access to valuable information and powerful decision makers to ex-military officers, many now military contractors, who were parroting administration talking-points and providing favorable "analysis" regarding the Iraq War and related topics on/in major television, radio and print media.

Flak

For Chomsky and Herman "flak" refers to negative responses to a media statement or program. The term "flak" has been used to describe what Chomsky and Herman see as targeted efforts to discredit organizations or individuals who disagree with or cast doubt on the prevailing assumptions which Chomsky and Herman view as favorable to established power (e.g., "The Establishment"). Unlike the first three "filtering" mechanisms — which are derived from analysis of market mechanisms — flak is characterized by concerted and intentional efforts to manage public information.

Flak from the powerful can be either direct or indirect. The direct could include the following hypothetical scenarios:

• Letters or phone calls from the White House to Dan Rather
• Inquiries from the FCC to major television networks requesting documents used to plan and assemble a program
• Messages from irate executives representing advertising agencies or corporate sponsors to media officials threatening retaliation if not granted on-air reply time.

The powerful can also work on the media indirectly by:

• Complaints delivered en masse to their own constituencies (e.g., stockholders, employees) about media bias,
• Generation of mass advertising that does the same,
  By funding watchdog groups or think tanks engineered to expose and attack deviations in media coverage that endanger vital elite interests.
• By funding political campaigns that elect politicians who will be more willing to curb any such media deviations.

Anti-Ideologies

A final filter is anti-ideology. Anti-ideologies exploit public fear and hatred of groups that pose a potential threat, either real, exaggerated, or imagined. Communism once posed the primary threat according to the model. Communism and socialism were portrayed by their detractors as endangering freedoms of speech, movement, press, etc. They argue that such a portrayal was often used as a means to silence voices critical of elite interests.

With the Soviet Union's collapse, proponents of the propaganda model have argued that the functionality and credibility of anti-communism has been fundamentally compromised. Proponents state that new, more functional anathemas have arisen to take its place. Chomsky and Herman argue that one possible replacement for anti-communism seems to have emerged in the form of "anti-terrorism".

I would assert that to an extent social networking and the Read/Write Web has provided a means to enable people to circumvent the traditional filters of information dissemination. I would suggest that attempts to discredit the Obama campaign largely failed (or in some cases even rebounded on the proponents of the flak) due to the availability of information through channels other than the national and local broadcasters and print media, for example.

However, we must ensure our enthusiasm for the seemingly democratic nature of social media is tempered with rational analysis and reflection. In the previous paragraph I said that the RWW negated the five filters "to an extent" because much (but certainly not all) of the information distributed over the channels originated from the Democrat's campaign, and as such must be assessed as adhering to their agenda, to achieve their goals. In this context then, consumers of content would be well-advised to apply the same level of critical thinking to social media channels as to the traditional media.

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References:

Buzz News [Internet] Available from: http://www.culture-buzz.com/blog/Top-5-Barack-Obama-s-Viral-Marketing-1875.html
Accessed 12 November 2008

Herman, E.S., Chomsky, N (2002). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books.

Manufacturing dissent: Noam Chomsky and the crisis of the Western Left. [Internet] Available from: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Manufacturing+dissent:+Noam+Chomsky+and+the+crisis+of+the+Western...-a0127013020 Accessed 12 November 2008

Wikipedia contributors, "Propaganda model" Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model Accessed November 6, 2008.

Social Software: the Runtime Effect

In yesterday’s post I alluded to the idea that Barack Obama’s recent US Presidential Election win could, in no small part, be attributed to his effective utilization of social media, including the use of tools and technologies like YouTube, Facebook, blogs, and even PayPal (and other online payment solutions). Citing James Surowiecki’s 2004 text The Wisdom of Crowds, I indicated the characteristics of crowd wisdom, and outlined the four criteria that separate wise crowds from irrational ones.

Social networking guru Clay Shirky describes the phenomenon of group dynamics mediated through Web 2.0 technologies as a “Run-time effect:”

You cannot specify in advance what the group will do, and so you can't substantiate in software everything you expect to have happen… [but social patterns emerge] that …are core to any software that supports larger, long-lived groups.

…there's this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening, and the decision they make at that moment is: This is good and must be protected. And at that moment, even if it's subconscious, you start getting group effects. And the effects that we've seen come up over and over and over again in online communities.

I would assert that this is the group run-time effect that was leveraged by the US Democratic Party, and that ultimately galvanized such a substantial number of voters to become involved in the democratic process. Shirky describes a number of ways in which these social patterns manifest themselves including:

Table 1 Run-time effects of groups

Pattern	Characteristics	Example
Identification of enemies	The identification and vilification of external enemies as a driver for group cohesion	The Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties versus Microsoft, as personified by Bill Gates
Veneration	The nomination and worship of an icon or a set of tenets. The pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that's beyond critique	Negatively criticizing Lord of the Rings on a Tolkien newsgroup or discussion forum

These group patterns emerge on the Internet, not because of the software, but because it's being used by people.

An Idea whose Time has Come

I would suggest that one of the primary reasons that social networking software played such a significant role in the 2008 US Presidential Election was precisely because of the nebulousness and loose structure of the read / write Web. But before we can look at this, it’s worthwhile to understand the role of traditional media in distributing information. As I’m not a broadcast media expert, I will investigate this through the filter of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Propaganda Model.*

First presented in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the "Propaganda model" views the private media as businesses selling a non-media product — readers and demographic groups — to other businesses (advertisers). The theory postulates five general classes of "filters" that determine the type of news that is presented in news media. These five filters are:

1. Ownership of the medium
2. Medium's funding sources
3. Sourcing
4. Flak
5. Anti-communist ideology

I would strongly argue for the position espoused by Herman & Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent that as mass media news outlets are run by large corporations, they are under the same competitive pressures as other businesses. According to the authors, the pressure to create a stable, profitable business invariably distorts the kinds of news items reported, as well as the manner and emphasis in which they are reported. This does not occur as a consequence of market selection: those businesses who happen to favor profits over news quality tend to survive, while those that present a more accurate picture of the world tend to become marginalized. In a nutshell, the Republicans had the politically conservative Fox News to deliver their campaign messages (reflecting the vested interests of powerful lobby groups, trans-national corporations, and the military-industrial complex in maintaining the status quo).

However, ranged against this (probably for the first time in history) was the availability of an alternative set of media channels to disseminate information combined with a new generation of voters familiar and comfortable with the media supported by the Internet.

And that’s what I’ll look at next time.

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References:

Herman, E.S., Chomsky, N (2002). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books.

Shirky, C. (2003). A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. A speech at ETech, April, 2003. [Internet]. Available from: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html Retrieved 14 October 2008.

Surowiecki J. (2004). The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. Doubleday.

* …and yes, I’m aware of, and entitled to my own biases – IMFB

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Citing texts: great reference site

If, like me, you reference your research in your blog posts (and I suggest that you do, for reasons ranging from trustworthiness, competence of the author to elucidate on a topic, as well as not been accused of plagiarism), you probably know the irritation of formatting your references correctly.

Personally, I use the Harvard Style (because that’s what was specified in my under- and post-graduate programs) but you may use APA, Chicago, or one of myriad others.

While undertaking research for a blog post recently, I encountered a little gem of a resource online; it’s called CiteULike and as it says in their FAQ:

CiteULike is a free service to help you to store, organise and share the scholarly papers you are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser so there's no need to install any software. Because your library is stored on the server, you can access it from any computer with an Internet connection.

Like Delicious, CiteULike is tag-based, and has a flexible information filing structure. It also supports BibTeX formatted references, as well as the ability to generate bibliographies.

Fantastic!

Even this level of functionality is a godsend for nerds like me. But, as the saying goes, there’s more. CiteULike will also take your reference details and format them according to a style of your choice.

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References:

CiteULike Website http://www.citeulike.org

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Collective Knowledge and the Wisdom of Crowds

Today, I’m minded to discuss the concept of the effect of information-sharing on the collective consciousness and individual decision-making (and yes, friends, this series of posts will probably allude to the use of social software in the success of Barak Obama’s recent US Presidential election campaign, and maybe even a little about how we can leverage social software technologies for e-learning).

Now read on…

In his seminal 2004 book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki discussed the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he asserts, are often better than choices that could have been made by any individual member of a group. The author suggests that typically people look for what he calls the “single decision-maker;” an acknowledged expert who uses their judgment to provide solutions or answers, whereas the better strategy is probably to look for “as diverse and wide a pool of decision-makers as [possible].”

Table 1 Characteristics of crowd wisdom

Cognition	Market judgment, which Surowiecki argues can be much faster, more reliable, and less subject to political forces than the deliberations of experts or expert committees.
Coordination	Common understanding within a culture allows remarkably accurate judgments about specific reactions of other members of the culture. For example, knowing the Rules of the Road has the benefit of optimizing traffic flows.
Cooperation	How groups of people can form networks of trust without a central system controlling their behavior or directly enforcing their compliance.

However, we know that not all groups are wise. Consider, for example, violent mobs, investors in stock market bubbles, or property developers in Ireland in the second half of this decade. According to Surowiecki, four criteria separate wise crowds from irrational ones:

• Diversity of opinion
  • Each person should have private information even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.
• Independence
  • People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them.
• Decentralization
  • People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.
• Aggregation
  • Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.

Clay Shirky (2003) asserts that there was no real means for any group to meet these four criteria until the emergence of social software:

Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table. There was no technological mediation for group conversations. The closest we got was the conference call, which never really worked right -- "Hello? Do I push this button now? Oh, shoot, I just hung up." It's not easy to set up a conference call, but it's very easy to email five of your friends and say "Hey, where are we going for pizza?" So ridiculously easy group forming is really news.

It can be said that e-mail, blogs, wikis and so on are not social per se: Shirky considers that these technologies enable other communications channels including broadcasting (spam), one-to-one (SMS texting), and one-to-many (blogs), as much as collaborative interaction. More accurately, network-based internet technologies are not necessarily social, but they can support social patterns.

More…

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References:

Shirky, C. (2003). A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. A speech at ETech, April, 2003. [Internet]. Available from: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html Retrieved 14 October 2008.

Surowiecki J. (2004). The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. Doubleday.