mamamusings

Lately I've been thinking--and reading--a lot about people who choose to out of online social networking tools. The question of who chooses not to engage on sites like Facebook--and why they choose that--was posed to me by a close friend who has mostly lived his life on the opposite side of the social media spectrum from me. Where I have created an account on every system I've encountered, and very much lived my life in public through these tools over the past ten years, he has made only occasional and somewhat reluctant forays into online social spaces...and he was curious about what the causes (and consequences) of those different choices were.

I've been mulling that question over since he posed it back in the spring, and I keep seeing things pop up in blogs and news stories that relate to it. There was Alice Marwick's excellent essay ('If you don't like it, don't use it. It's that simple.' ORLY?) on the impact of opting out of Facebook when your social network is based there. And Jenna Wortham's NYTimes article on 'The Facebook Resisters' last month.

Alice talked in her article about the concept of "technology refusal," but I've found that there seems to be precious little out there in the way of research on this topic. The term itself is used in the context of other educational technologies in an essay by Steve Hodas called "Technology refusal and the organizational culture of schools" from Rob Kling's 1996 collection Computerization and Controversy, but I can't find much that links that essay with anything related to current social networking sites.

It seems to me there are a lot of interesting research questions in this. What are the reasons that people choose to opt out? Does the opting out tend to be global, or specific to individual systems? (For instance, do people who opt out of Facebook also opt out of Twitter? LinkedIn? Tumblr?) Is this more about personality or cognitive type, or about context and experience? Are these fairly static stances, or changeable? And if the latter, what precipitates the change? What's the impact on an individual who opts out when their social and/or professional network opts in?

In fact, there's so much that's interesting, and so little that seems to be out there, that it's all a little overwhelming. I've started a Zotero collection on the topic of "technology refusal," and would welcome any suggestions for things to add to it. (If there's interest, I'm willing to convert it to a group library that others could add to...)

Anyone know of work currently ongoing in this space? I'd love to talk with others who are exploring it!

Years ago, when this blog was very young, I wrote a post entitled "an extrovert speaks (quelle surprise!)" The things I wrote then still ring true, and I've found myself having the same conversation recently with a host of other people, primarily in the context of understanding use of social media.

These conversations tend to start not with the question "why do people feel the need to talk incessantly," but rather with the question "why do people feel the need to share every detail of their lives on Facebook?" And as someone who does indeed share a lot on Facebook...from Foursquare checkins at the gym to photos of my dog to commentary on social and political issues...I find myself trying to explain it.

A friend asked me recently, in jest, "if a tree falls on a house and no one posts it to facebook,did it happen?" In return, I posted a photo to Facebook of a house crushed by a tree, which kicked off an interesting discussion in the comments, including this from me:

This isn't really about social media, it's about extroverted vs introverted methods of sense-making. I once told my off-the-charts introvert friend Elouise that I often didn't know what I was thinking until I heard myself saying it, which she found truly baffling. For someone like me, Facebook and Twitter and email provide an outlet for that "thinking out loud" that I need to do in order to process ideas. Conversation with real live people is far better, of course, but the nature of my life is such that I'm not able to always have the people I want to talk to physically present. It takes a village to support an extrovert, I suppose, and my village is by necessity virtual rather than physical.

As usual, the process of crafting the words helped me to understand what I was thinking. But I also realized, with some dismay, that I'm now doing most of that thinking out loud on Facebook instead of on this blog. Facebook is quasi-public space for me, but it's not truly public. And more important, it's not truly mine. I don't own my data there, and while "timeline" has made it easier for me to find past posts, nobody's likely to stumble on my discussion of trees and houses through a serendipitous search or link.

I'm not one for new year's resolutions overall, but I do want to start shifting my "thinking out loud" back here to a more public space, rather than sequestering in Facebook's walled garden. I can always share the blog posts to my Facebook feed, but I'll retain ownership of them here, where there's more of a chance for them to reach a more diverse audience, and I know I'll always have access to the archive of my thoughts. And where Facebook's interface encourages short-form sharing, blogging has always been more of a long-form medium for me. I've missed that.

I've just started reading the book Hacking the Academy (that's the digital, open access version of the book; a print version will be available next year). I started with the section on "Hacking Teaching," since that's something I spend a lot of time thinking about. There are a number of excellent essays there, and many of them focus on shifting the flow of information so that students are no longer passive receivers of information, but rather part of the construction and communication of knowledge.

I thought I'd share some of the classroom hacks I'm using this fall in my freshman survey class "Introduction to Interactive Media," since they're all intended to make exactly those kinds of changes in the flow of information and knowledge.

First, I've enabled the live chat function in our campus courseware (Desire2Learn). It's a very rudimentary chat system, but I encourage my students to use it during class to ask questions of each other, and of the TAs and other instructors who are also in the chat. I spend a good bit of time in the first lecture talking about appropriate behavior in real-time chat, and reminding them that (a) everything they type is associated with their RIT username, and thus is not really anonymous, and (b) the chats are archived and I do go back and read through them from time to time. This year, I ended the list of caveats with a simple admonition..."C'mon, just don't troll the class chat!" Still, having some "adult supervision" seems to make a big difference in the overall tone.

Why real-time chat? If you've been reading my blog for a while, you'll know that I've always been a big fan of conference backchannels, and this was a way to bring some of those benefits into the classroom. This class is one of the few I teach that includes a large lecture (60-90 students), and the chat encourages them to interact with each other as well as with me.

Second, in my studio sessions (30 students each), I've divided the students into groups of 5-6 and required them to use Google Docs for collaborative note-taking. RIT has its own Google Apps installation, and during our first studio session I break them up into groups, and walk them through the process of creating a docs collection, adding all the group members to it, and adding me, my TA, and my grader. I then tell them that their groups are responsible for taking notes at every class--lecture and studio--but that it's up to them how they want to divide up the work. During the quarter I'll occasionally review what they have, and will occasionally add comments or corrections; my grader will also check regularly to see if there are groups that aren't getting notes up, or whose notes are really weak, so that he can give me a heads up to review them. At the end of the quarter, I'll assign a grade for the notes, and then adjust that grade up or down based on a peer evaluation they'll do of their group members.

There are a number of good things that come out of this hack. They learn how to use collaborative editing tools, something that will be valuable to them in many project contexts. They learn how to work with a group to divide up responsibility. They have a set of notes they can rely on if they miss class, as well as when they have to work on their final project (a poster, presentation, or video detailing 20 things they learned in the course). And I have the ability to see just what they're taking away from my classes, which provides an invaluable feedback loop--far better and more constructive than any end-of-quarter evaluation form.

Third, instead of textbooks (all of our readings are online), I have students buy the iClicker that we've standardized on at RIT for in-class polling. But instead of using this for multiple-choice quizzing, I use this for things like "Choose Your Own Lecture," in which students pick which path I take through the lecture material, or for polling the students on what they thought about a required reading or video, or for letting them vote on whether we should end class early on a beautiful day and go outside. It's not perfect, but it's a way to discourage passivity.

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All of these hacks are still being refined--I've made significant changes from how I used them last year, and I'm sure this year will result in more modifications. But it's already clear to me that they're improving classroom engagement--and, I hope, student learning.

While cleaning off the cluttered dining room table last night, I came across a copy of Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, which had been part of Alex's homeschooling work on poetry last year.

"I celebrate myself, and sing myself."

Such powerful words. Most of us don't do nearly enough of this. We're told not to, by people and and culture and custom. We encourage humility, discourage boasting (particularly in women, but that's another post).

But one can have both humility and self-love, and the latter is too often missing--or at least it has been for me.

Today marks the end of a year of self-transformation for me, and this week I'm trying hard to celebrate myself, to sing myself, to remind myself of my intrinsic value.

On August 4th of 2010, a few days after returning from a wonderful road trip with Alex, I stepped on my relatively new Withings scale, and was shocked to see the number: 144 pounds. I hadn't weighed that much since I was pregnant with Alex. It had happened gradually, but had finally reached a point where I realized I was really unhappy with my body. Not just the way it looked, but the way it felt. I made a decision that day to make some real changes in the way I cared for myself physically. I started getting to the gym on a regular basis, and changed the kinds of foods I kept in the house. I knew that for these changes to matter, they had to be sustainable. I couldn't cut out all carbs, for instance, because it would make me miserable and I'd eventually give up.

So, how'd that work out? Here's a graph showing what happened:

The objective I set for myself was 110 pounds (that's the white line near the bottom). I hit that in May of this year, and have stayed there since then, with minor (and normal) fluctuations. Lately, as I've added more weight training into my workout routine, my weight has crept up by a pound or two, but my lean mass has gone up right along with it. (The place in the middle where the color changes is the point where I crossed over from an unhealthy weight for my height and age to a healthy one.)

I've been off my antidepressants for a year now, as well, and wanting to stay off them keeps me going back to the gym 4-5x/week. I know my mental health history means that the exercise may not always be enough on its own, but for now it's doing the trick, and I'm happy not to have to deal with the expense or the side effects of the medication.

Other benefits? My food budget has dropped quite a bit, since I prepare more foods myself rather than grabbing fast food on the way home. My kids are getting healthier meals and developing better eating habits. I've discovered the joy of shopping at the Rochester Public Market. My physical and mental energy levels are the highest they've been in a very long time. My cholesterol, which was dangerously high, has dropped into a very healthy range.

I honestly don't know what changed for me a year ago, and made it possible for me to successfully change my lifetime of bad eating and exercise habits, but I'm grateful that I did, and that everything I've done to reach this point seems easily sustainable moving forward.

When I went to see my doctor for an annual checkup last month, he congratulated me on "taking charge of my body," and that resonated for me. This week I'm splurging a bit on little luxuries to celebrate my physical self--a pedicure, some new clothes, things like that. But the real reward is being able to look at myself in the mirror and be proud of what I see.

No matter how many hours I spend at the gym, it won't make me 20-something or long-legged. But I'm okay with that. Being twenty-something wasn't all that great, as I recall. Been there, done that, glad I don't have to do it again. This 49-year-old body is the one I've got, and my goal now is to care for it well. My success in doing that this year is indeed worth celebrating.

Spring took its sweet time getting here this year--normally the forsythia is in full bloom on my birthday (4/16), but this year there was hardly a blossom to be seen. Today, however, the sun is shining, the temperature is rising, the forsythia is resplendent, and it really, truly, finally feels like spring is here.

Yesterday afternoon, while we were driving home, Gerald looked at me and said "green is gold." And indeed, it finally is. So here's the ninth installation of my annual spring-welcoming poem posting.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

—Robert Frost

I got an email this week from Russell Davies, one of the participants in this year's Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium, thanking me for my "conference organizing/curating." And I realized that he'd perfectly summed up the process of putting on an event like SCS. Yes, there's some organization...but more importantly, there's a lot of curation--choosing themes, picking the right people to speak about those themes, putting the content in an order that reveals a narrative.

For next year's event, I fully intend to have Moo cards printed up with the title "conference curator" on them. :)