As many of you are aware, I spend a fair bit of time trying to debunk the myth of the so-called Digital Native. Here’s a link to a blogpost in the new Tech publication, The Kernel.

Looking forward to working with Lisa Harris, Alan Rae and Cristina Cost tomorrow, giving a workshop in Southampton on how to get out there using Social Media.  My part of the presentation is here but for more detail, see Lisa’s blog here.

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.

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!

Many years ago now (1990-91), I achieved an MSc in Computing at Bradford University.  The course was built on foundational computer science concepts, the basics of binary data transmission, logic gates, modular programming techniques, system architectures.  At the time, I was very irritated with the course.  Although I could wire up a board to switch a mini-traffic light on and off in sequence, I didn’t have any training in office software packages, or the new GUIs such as the newly emergent Windows 3.0 clunking along on a 286 chip (although I did, for my project, use Macromind Director to animate some cute 3D molecular models to demonstrate the concepts of stereochemistry, which shows how far Macs were ahead in those days, I guess).  So I thought my course wasn’t relevant.  How wrong I was!

I never worked in systems development, instead moving into education where I’ve always pretty much worked at the user end of emerging technologies, culminating in my current post as an academic in the innovation field.  The knowledge I gained during that MSc was so sound that it kept me going right up until the advent of Web 2.0.  As far as Web 1.0 and PC LANs went, even though they were in their infancy back in 1991, I still found I had enough vocabulary to keep me going, using technology very effectively myself, showing others how to do that, and helping entrepreneurs see into the future.  However, over the past year or so, that feeling of confidence was starting to erode a little.  Things seemed to be changing quickly, and although I’ve never had any problem (apart from time) with picking up new applications, I felt I was becoming far less sure than I ever had been as to what was going on underneath — and for me that is CRITICAL if I want to anticipate what’s coming next.  There was a lot of hyperbole out there, but while that was exciting the public imagination (great!), my needs weren’t met.  Many of the books I tried were just too technical to make the connections I needed to my students, customers, clients, research partners.  Or, conversely, not technical enough. Then by chance, (or through twitter, whichever way you want to look at it), I came upon this book, which for me has definitely filled the gap – making the link between the technical and the market in a way that respects the importance of both equally, and indicates some possible gaps in service provision for future developers.

This is without doubt the best book I have read on Web 2.0.  It actually spells out in detail what is meant by Web 2.0 from both a systems architecture and an applications point of view, in a way  that incorporates the user at the outset.  Further, unlike some other books in this space that make rather hyperbolic predictions about what Web 2.0 might (or might not) mean for business, this text instead sets out boxed ‘entrepreneur alerts’ which point out gaps where innovation could occur.  This is so useful in providing *meaningful* linkages between technical possibilities and market realities.  Supporting that, there are plenty of practical checklists for actually making things work, such as “What Web 2.0 Users Will Demand of User Interface Designers”.

There is of course lots of technical material that will interest developers seeking to enter this field, with Chapter 7 identifying ‘Specific Patterns of Web 2.0′, fundamental system arrangements that provide a foundation for applications; each section is linked to business contexts.  The authors point out this debate is still ongoing, as the systems context is constantly evolving.  However it is clear that constructs such as, for example, Service-Oriented Architecture, Collaborative Tagging and Participative-Collaboration will be around for some time.  Earlier chapters underpin this important set of conclusions with introductory material on the nature of Web 2.0, with examples (Chapters 1-3) and discussions of modelling paradigms (Chapterts 4-6).  Concluding, the final chapter takes a look into how to create services that last into an uncertain future.

Finally, as well as being useful for systems developers and aspirant entrepreneurs, there is some useful material for anyone seeking to just know more about internet basics: what it is, how messages are transmitted, how it has developed and some explanation of terms such as HTML, Java, AJAX.  Certainly the most useful book I’ve read in while.

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