Just a quick post to say how much I enjoyed my visit to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim this week.  Thanks to Ole Jonny Klakegg and Hans Petter Krane for making my visit so pleasant and so useful. We’re all looking forward to building an ongoing collaboration to enrich both teaching and research in many different ways in future.  As well as a number of business meetings, I was pleased to give  a short workshop on the theme of how to use social media to build academic identity online.  About 12 people attended and I’m hoping to see at least some of them online soon .

Trondheim is certainly a beautiful place, and I’m looking forward to going back, especially to a couple of very good eating places, the Fischmarkt [where they sell fish and will cook you some fresh   ], and the historic Skydsstation.

“Their relative positions on the DZ corporate ladder were obvious to McNihil, just from the density of the swarms of E-mail buzzing around their heads, Some of the execs had only two or three of the tiny holo’d images yattering around them for attention; the bottom rungs had enough that their faces could barely be seen past them……..Harrisch had none; either the corporation was paying for max’d out filtration or he was high up enough to have gone on an elite paper-only status” (Jeter, 1998, p. 14).

Such is the nightmare vision of a post-apocalyptic future where freedom from electronic communication is only available to the corporate elite.  Already, the idea that patterns of privacy and visibility might be clearly delineated in accordance with status is taking hold (O’Hara and Shadbolt, 2010). As yet though, the picture is not so clear.  Notions of privacy are continually being defined and redefined, with each new networking platform providing new pathways and also new challenges to our understanding of who we are in this space.  There are relative periods of calm, punctuated by ‘shocks’ (such as Zuckerman’s statement people don’t want privacy)  that challenges the ephemeral social structures emerging from this new milieu.

Unlike Zuckerman, my colleague Kieron O’Hara speaks of the link between privacy and autonomy, argues that the defence of privacy is a responsibility as well as a right, suggesting that part of being  a socially responsible person, is taking care over what is disclosed.  Another colleague, Tim Greenhalgh talks of the need  for a ‘currency of disclosure’.  Until we know more about the currency of disclosure, we are still placing bets that all will be well if we venture into constructing internet selves (as we are encouraged to do, often by our employers).  Of course there will be solutions, and many colleagues from ICT, Law, Business and Economics all work in this area developing new technology, rule sets and pathways that at heart see privacy as a tangible entity that may also function as a market construct to be assigned economic value.

Yet the complexity of the web is such that it may take some time before these techniques really help us as individuals and as a society.  And legal and economic constructs alone may be too simple to capture the richness of internet life on their own.  This underlying  uncertainty is becoming more pronounced as  we enter a Web 2.0 world, moving from static websites that are narrations of the past to ‘live’  interactive bricolages, where the boundaries between the professional and the private are now blurred in a volatile space (Warren, 2010).  Tim refers to our ‘multifaceted selves’ and in doing so, draws our attention to the widely debated notion of ‘identity’.  This is useful, as this is a good place for social scientists to make a convincing contribution to the debate: we can only defend (or manage) our privacy if we understand how we write our identities into being on the internet.

Influential scholars of identity  such as Goffman, Giddens and Berger and Luckmann have been around for some time.  More recently, in the 80s/90s, authors such as Turkle, Haraway and Castells took the debate into the internet age, once we realised that no-one knew you were a dog.  And of course there have been many others since then, lookimg at the potential of the internet to further decentre and delocalise our fragile postmodern selves.  The challenge for today’s researchers is to take that thinking forward, and also create new ways of thinking about identity, how it is constructed and performed, not only in  Web 2 world, but looking  forward into a web 3 world too.  In doing so, we can make a useful contribution to the debate on privacy – because identity is the nexus between the individual and society, and where so many of the debates are played out.

References

Jeter, K. W. (1998), Noir, Orion: London

O’Hara, K. and Shadbolt, N. (2010) Viewpoint, Privacy on the Data Web, Communications of the ACM, 53/3, pp. 1-3

Warren, L. (2010), The Entrepreneurial Academic in the Digital World: Narratives and antenarratives, abstract submitted for scMOI conference April 2010.

“I can create ‘behaviour’” says Golan Levin, one of the exhibitors at Decode: Digital Design Sensations, an exhibition running at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London until April 11. The exhibition,  a joint collaboration between the V&A and onedotzero showcases the latest developments in digital and interactive design, from small screen based graphics to large-scale installations. Levin’s comment was made in an interview (transcript available in Decode’s accompanying programme) in response to the question, “What do digital technologies allow you to do or investigate that other design tools do not?”. For me, it really gets to the heart of the three themes of the exhibition:

Code as a raw material

interactivity

the network (as in digital traces)

As I walked around the exhibition, it was clear that people were fascinated by the exhibits, excited, laughing, talking to people they didn’t know already…..maybe not new behaviours in one sense, but fairly untypical of formal art exhibitions. And certainly, they were forging new connections, maybe developing new links outside their existing sphere of influence.  These kind of interactions and connections across contexts can be be the spark that ignites innovation – maybe a small, incremental innovation, or maybe something big enough to change a market, society or the world – who knows? That’s the beauty of complexity theory, which underpins much of my research, potentially large effects from small changes in initial conditions.  That is why it is so vital to fund the leading edge artists and groups who are able to to challenge us in ways that make us think and indeed behave differently – especially in the Digital Economy, as I know from my own work with Proboscis*.  Of course it is difficult to quantify that kind of contribution in straitened times, but we can and must do so.

In one of those quirks of timing, I came home to the fervour for the newly-launched  iPad on twitter.  My colleague Tim Greenhalgh suggests that the iPad will form a nexus between the liberal arts and the network and will change everything.  Whether that device is ‘the gamechanger’ or not, it’s pretty clear that the power to create content, move it around, enjoy it, in all kinds of ways is now out of the lab and into the hands of the public.  Let’s make sure our creative artists have the space they need to make that happen, as Levin suggests, through creating new behaviours.  And as  a researcher in innovation, I want to focus on value creation as new products, service and indeed behaviours emerge.

Footnote

If that last paragraph was about networking and interactivity, where does code as a raw material come in? Perhaps best illustrated by example.  In all the joie de vivre, beauty and colour of yesterday’s exhibition, I was perhaps most taken by a quieter work by Troika, Digital Zoetrope. I do see a lot of beautiful images as I love space stuff, Hubble, NASA and so on.  I love the different renderings.  I also look at fractals a lot, and i have seen interactive installations before.  A fabulous excess!  Troika is diferent, a monochromatic barrel with vertical, horizontal and diagonal typefaces rotating quickly, which merge into letters and words at speed.  It reminded me of Wender’s black and white masterpiece Wings of Desire, where Angels hear sense from the whispered thoughts of thousands in Berlin.  It made me think of two new friends I have made on twitter in the North of England.  It made me think we have joked of having a dvd film festival weekend of German, or film noir, together at some point.  It made me think I should do it soon.  Now, I may be giving an invited talk for one of them, a lecturer in the Performing Arts in early February.  Who knows what may come of that?

*makers of mischief, and pioneers of pie in the sky

There has never been a better time for innovation in the Digital Economy. The barriers to disruptive innovation by non-computer scientists have been lowered by a nexus of possibilities, namely:

• Widespread access to broadband technologies
• Smartphones that enable new forms of communication, handheld internet access and bespoke applications development (Ling, 2004)
• Software platforms that enable a high degree of networked connectivity and communication, such as blogs, wikis, twitter, Facebook, ning, youtube, flickr. As well as connectivity, there is the potential for rapid-fire one-to-many and many-to-many broadcasts and interactions that have the power to amplify any interaction very quickly to a very wide, possibly global audience.
• Readily available real-time geographical location data
• Increasing availability of government datasets to the public, e.g. for e-citizenship (van Deursen and van Dijk, 2009) or for practical applications, such as data from the Ordnance Survey in the UK

It has never been easier to not only access and use technologies, but to extend them, to customise them, to develop mew combinations, to access and develop new sectors and markets. My focus in 2010 will follow on from last year’s work in the creative industries  to seek out new ways of creating value from novelty, towards new business models, new products and services.  Part of that will involve working with those who have the ability to use social media, probably connecting with people outside my existing sphere of influence, developing new activities based on real-time information and breaking news. So this time next year, I could very likely be working with people I don’t know yet on something that hasn’t happened yet — that’s what makes it so exciting!

References

van Deursen, A.J.A.M and van Dijk, J.A.G.M (2009), Improving digital skills for the use of online public information and services, Government Information Quarterly Volume 26, Issue 2, April 2009, Pages 333-340

Ling, R. (2004)The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone’s Impact on Society, Morgan Kaufmann

I’ve often said when I’ve been advocating Social Media that I find it useful for connecting with industry, spotting trends, looking outside my sphere of influence and noting what’s out there on the periphery. This is useful not only for keeping my own research alive but also for keeping students abreast of where the best upcoming entrepreneurial and innovative opportunities might be. I’ve been asked to explain this further, so here’s an example. As I set out in an earlier post, I do have an affinity for ICTs – although I never worked as a systems developer, I have an MSc in Computing which means I’ve always kept up with new technologies and can at least keep up a conversation with those in the field. So it’s here where I look to for ideas as to what might come next – and I pass on my guessology to students who might be looking to set up their own businesses, or maybe hoping to impress potential employers with a bit of future-proofing. So, a couple of years ago, I would have been pointing them in the direction of i-phone apps. While my students aren’t developers either, they should be able to think about new markets, new product development, business planning, new venture creation and so on, thus aiding others with better technical skills and forming teams with mixed expertise. Where does social media come into it? Just keeping my eyes open and following some of the livelier industry analysts and developers on Twitter. Firstly there’s my mate @Jas , http://www.jasdhaliwal.com/, who in return gets to laugh at my attempts to get stuff working on my laptop. Secondly, @monkchips, James Governor, who occasionally produces quick takes on trends. Both sources are really useful – and I don’t have to understand everything – on the ‘trends’ list for example, I only really ‘get’ the first three, because they link in some way to my work on www.creatorproject.org. I don’t need comprehensive coverage, I could read an industry newspaper or feed for that, but I wouldn’t have time – so tweets are ‘good enough’ as fans of Christensen are likely to say. It doesn’t have to be ‘correct’ or come true, it just has to be interesting, possible, geared to start a dialogue or a conversation. So, that’s how it works for me!

It’s been a busy month in many ways, including lots of theatre trips and concerts, quite a bit of time spent on the train to London.  As well as that, my colleague Lisa Harris and I, www.lisaharrismarketing.com, have been getting what we’ve started to call our ‘Roadshow’ up and running.  The Roadshow has arisen from our own mixture of theory and practice around new technology and social media.    As well as working together on a range of publications, we’ve found that our colleagues are very keen to find out how they can use social media in both research and teaching.  I blogged about this in an earlier post (22/09/09), Building an Online Academic Presence, where you can see the presentation I gave at The Robert Gordon University, in Aberdeen.  Since then, we’ve done a similar presentation for our Masters students, and today we will be delivering a shorter version of that for the University’s Digital Economy Strategic Research Group.  You can see the slides for these sessions on Lisa’s blog, http://www.lisaharrismarketing.com/research/presentation-to-the-digital-economy-research-group/ and http://www.lisaharrismarketing.com/events/how-your-digital-presence-can-help-you-get-onto-the-career-ladder/ .  Early next year, we’re hoping to give versions of this at Salford and, more exotically, the Norwegian University of Science and technology in Trondheim with my new colleague Ole Jonny Klakegg, http://www.ntnu.no/employees/ole.jonny.klakegg.  Our strapline for our academic colleagues is ‘Making Your Work WORK for You NOW’, which was actually coined by my old friend and colleague Rob Smith at RGU Aberdeen Business School, http://iws.rgu.ac.uk/abs/staff/page.cfm?pge=50368.  Peer-reviewed publications are all well and good, but can take 3-4 years to get into print which means they may well be out of date in fast-moving areas such as social media.  So if you want to have any influence now, you need to make your online presence work.  Anyway, must dash – got a presentationto give!

Outcome of the request below: well, we didn’t get a direct offer from the Twitterverse, but we did spot a likely possibiity while we were looking!  And it seems like there may be another possibility on the horizon too!  So things are looking good for the chapter — and thanks for all your help folks :>)

I’m asking the social media community for help in this post! In brief, some colleagues and I have written up a piece of research into the risks, ethics and other issues raised by using social media in the classroom. Through circumstances beyond our control, it looks like the book that we were intending to publish in may not be coming out after all. It’s an academic piece, but very readable, around 7K words, completed not in draft. And we are looking for a good home for it either in another book, or perhaps a journal in the learning and teaching area, maybe a special issue: an important factor is that we want a fast time to publication. Why are we making this request instead of just casting around our selves and resubmitting to another venue? Because we want people to see the piece now, while it’s current and while we want to engage with others interested in similar topics. One of the reasons I started to engage with social media far more widely in the first place is that it helps me make my work work for me NOW! And if this works, it would certainly demonstrate the power of the social media community!

How does social media make a difference? Journal publication timescales mean that after submission, the very best you can hope for is six months to print, and that’s unusual — more often than not, the process of review and revise can take over a year, and perhaps much longer. Most papers require more than one revision and probably two trips to the reviewers overall. So by the time your work comes out, if you are in fast-moving fields, you are almost certainly out-of-date before anyone has even read the final version. Of course conferences help, but they are expensive and audiences can be limited. So, even when publication in journals is going well, timelines are long, and using social media in the meantime can help increase the impact of research, with short blogposts and twitter shortcutting the communication pathways to those who both influence and might be influenced by your thinking.

Of course, the pathway to journal publication does not always run smoothly. Your work might be rejected, even at quite a late stage and you might have to start the process all over again with another journal. Or, and this is particularly annoying, a vehicle that you are targetting may fall through. This has happened to me twice this year. Firstly, a special issue of a journal did not come to fruition as not enough sound papers were generated to justify the specific focus. Fortunately, I and my co-authors were bailed out by an understanding Editor who aided us in quickly shaping the article for the ‘main’ journal, because he recognised that we had lost a year through no fault of our own. In this new case, it seems that the intended publishers have had second thoughts as their circumstances become more constrained. Well, that’s pretty unfortunate for our chapter – but really, we just don’t want to lose the energy that we’ve built up in our team! We’re of course happy for the piece to go through any peer review processes – we just don’t want to wait for ever! If you can help, please get in touch and I’ll send you the copy!

To me, it’s really obvious that an academic needs to build a sound online academic presence – in fact, that’s why I’ve spent most of the summer building this blog, with the help of @Jas.  In fast-changing times, academics are in a global marketplace and you need to be able to make your work count for you as quickly as possible.  Of course it’s imoortant to publish in a range of outlets on and offline, but the timescales to publication offline can be so long that by the time the work comes out, it’s long past it’s sell-by date.  I’ve been having some good conversations with @lisaharris about this recently.  From a practical standpoint, we’re both up and running (see www.lisaharrismarketing.com) and are also  ready to take the show on the road, as I did in an embryonic form at Aberdeen RGU this year (see the presentation below).  Conceptually, I bring my work about entrepreneurial identity to the fore, while Lisa brings her thinking concerning digital marketing. I’m really looking forward to getting some good work together in this space soon – more later!

neurial identity to the fore, while Lisa brings her digital marketing expertise into the frame.  More later, but I think we can start to get some good theory/practice linkages going in this space.

In a recent blogpost my colleague Lisa Harris presented an overview of the idea of the ‘digital native’, that is, someone who has grown up with the technology and uses it proficiently and naturally [How competent are new students with technology (really), www.lisaharrismarketing.com].  In the post, she shows that while there is some evidence for the existence of the digital native student, there is quite as much against.  She highlights that Bennett, Maton and Kevin (2008) consider that ‘it may be that there is as much variation within the digital native generation as between the generations’ (p779).

Indeed in our everyday experience (we work together in  the University of Southampton’s School of Management) we find many students, both postgraduate and undergraduate, who are quite weak in technology skills and reluctant to engage with new learning styles based around, say, social media. Underneath this debate, informal conversations with undergraduate students worry me – they seem at times to reveal an over-confidence in their skills (perhaps fuelled by the digital native discourse) that may not be justified in a fast-changing world where the use of social media and mobile communications is changing what is needed.  If universities are to respond to this, and support our students in their efforts to meet the needs of the job market, we need to be clear about what is meant by digital competence.  With that in mind, reflecting on all the conversations I produced the categorisation below:

In short, passives are quite adept with using technology to acquire and re-present information and communicate with others, using mobile phones, or sites such as Facebook.  Essentially they consume the outputs of others.  And they may do this very efficiently and effectively, although their usage tends to be largely at the individual level – they join and use group, but again not very proactively.  Creators however take things a little further – they produce material, perhaps uploading videos, soundfiles, acquire collections of bookmarks and perhaps keep a (regularly updated) blog.  They are more active users of say, Facebook, perhaps using it to organise events, rather than just tag along.  They may well network actively online, but largely among existing friends.  Disruptors are the most skilled, defined by their maintenance of a strong online personal identity; they may download applications to smartphones, develop new activities as a result, and use social media to bring in contacts and resources from outside their sphere of existing influence.

Experience suggests that there may be a pyramid here, with most students falling into the passive category, and only a few  aspiring to be disruptors. I would very much like to continue my research on this topic!!  What is worrying is that those in the passive category may consider themselves to be quite skilled.  This needs to be challenged if students are going to impress employers.  Just this Tuesday, I flew back from Guernsey sitting next to a guy from one of the town’s leading accountancy firms.  As we compared our views on the performance of our Blackberry Bold phones (yeah, I know) it was clear that he was expected as part of his everyday job to be able to download, and use new applications on a smartphone – this is not tomorrow in business, this is not for technologists, this is NOW.  We owe it to our students to take this agenda forward.  I’ll finish with a quote from Lisa, as I really couldn’t have put it better myself,

“At a time when universities face criticism for declining standards and graduate unemployment is at record levels, producing individuals with the skills, time and confidence to navigate and manage the online environment is increasingly important. Such students will stand out from the crowd by gaining access to new career opportunities, finding niche or potentially global audiences for their work, or enriching the lives of others. Those who do not display such initiative risk being marginalised or left behind.”

References

Bennett, S., Maton, K. and Kervin, L.(2008) The ‘digital natives’ debate: A critical review of the evidence, British Journal of Educational Technology 39/5 775-786

Harris, L. J., Warren, L., Leah, J. H. and Ashleigh, M. J. A. (2009), Small steps across the chasm: ideas for embedding a culture of open education in the university sector, OpenEd2009, August, Vancouver