Apace of Change

by Damian Bariexca, Ed.D.

Archive for the ‘Web 2.0’ Category

I’m Damian Bariexca, and This Is How I Internet

I can’t pinpoint exactly why, but five years after joining Facebook, I’m starting to sour on the service.  In my experience, it’s good for a few things like keeping up with people from my past or sharing jokes and kid pictures with friends and colleagues, but beyond that, it just feels like it’s kind of there in my life without any other specific value.

I’m not going to delete my Facebook account; even if I was, I’m not that dramatic that I’d do so with such fanfare.  Much like my telephone or postal address, it provides me with one avenue of connecting with people.  But in his Lifehacker article “Why I’ve Opted for a Piecemeal Social Network over Facebook or Google+”, Adam Pash pretty well addresses at least one of the reasons I’m not so big on Facebook any more: instead of focusing on one or two services and doing them well, it tries to be everything to everyone (e-mail replacement, photo sharing service, location check-in) and only does a so-so job of it.

Of course, the flipside to that coin is that one can choose to use many different services, all of which only serve one or two of Facebook’s many functions.  As Pash notes in his article, the benefit to doing this is that if I become unhappy with any service (remember the Great Instagram TOS Debacle of 2012?), I can feel free to pull the plug entirely on that service without losing EVERYTHING.

In my grand tradition of tech-related navel-gazing self-reflection, I’ve put down a few thoughts about how I use what I use, and why I use it:

Top Tier Services

Twitter: My first social network (I was active there several months before joining Facebook), I use Twitter primarily for professional purposes: connecting with other educators and sharing resources and education-related articles (with occasional silliness!).  To contrast my use of the two, I’d say I use Twitter more for professional connection, and Facebook more for personal.

My blog: This is my personal, public space where I can write and reflect.  Unlike Facebook Notes, this space of mine is open to the world, and as I’ve said before, since I pay for the domain name and webhosting, I feel a greater sense of ownership over it than when I wrote on a free, hosted blog.  Edit, 2/17/13: Just came across this piece by Doug Belshaw that frames the self-hosting argument in light of the recent announcement that Posterous is shutting down.  Greater ownership, but also greater control.

Flickr: After a hiatus, I’ve come back to Flickr for sharing photos.  The Pro accounts are somewhat pricey, but Flickr has a robust community of photographers, and I am more comfortable with the level of control I feel I have over how my photos are used, or if I allow them to be used at all (via Creative Commons licenses).  I deleted my Instagram account amid the aforementioned TOS kerfluffle, and I’m still not entirely comfortable with Facebook’s approach to user photos; as a result I don’t tend to post a whole lot of personal pics on the service.  In addition to Flickr (which is for public sharing), I also keep my family’s digital photo album on Picasa.  It’s not for public consumption, but I can share privately with family members via a specific link so my parents, in-laws, etc., can see them as well.

Aside from Facebook, these are the services I use most often (and most dynamically) for social networking.  Other services I use either much more infrequently or without the same social focus.

Second String Services

Foursquare: I sometimes push my location checkins to Facebook or Twitter if I feel they are share-worthy (most aren’t), but I use it mostly to update the map on my professional portfolio website.

Google+: I’ve tried so hard to get into G+, but I just can’t, at least not now.  Maybe it’s social network overload, but I just can’t.  I push my blog posts to my G+ account, when I remember.

LinkedIn: This one probably makes the most sense to maintain and keep current, which I do.  Right now it’s pretty much just to have a presence there, but it may become more valuable to me in future endeavors.

Goodreads: I enjoy seeing what my friends are reading, and occasionally chat with them on this service.  I use it mostly for my own record keeping about books I’ve read or want to read.

RunKeeper: Same rationale as Goodreads.  Tracking my running stats is incredibly motivating for me; the social piece of this service is secondary.

Diigo: I use this to bookmark sites relevant to special education & school psychology.  I auto-publish my Diigo saves to Twitter via IFTTT, but don’t actively “friend” people on Diigo itself.

Delicious: Same as Diigo, but I use Delicious to maintain an archive of interesting articles I share to Twitter.  This service replaces the long-defunct “Shared Items” function in Google Reader.

Of course, much of what I do on these services gets pushed to Facebook anyway, but that’s primarily because that’s where most of “my people” are.  As with any social network, the real value is in the people, not the tool, and right now, most of the people in my life are on Facebook, which keeps me tethered there to some extent.  It’s why I didn’t leave Twitter for identi.ca back in 2008, and why I haven’t quit Facebook for Google+.  Still, on the tool side, I’m finding less use for Facebook these days and more for these other services.

Considering Comments

One thing I love about the Internet is the potential for falling down several rabbit holes as you poke around in the hypertext – maybe not so great when you have a finite task to accomplish, but as a leisure activity it beats channel surfing for me any day of the week.

One such recent excursion led me to this post by Matt Gemmell, a Scottish iOS and Mac developer (not my usual reading fare).  In his post “Comments Off”, Matt outlines his reasons for shutting off comments on his blog (in the interest of brevity, I’m just quoting the major points with my responses in between; click through to Matt’s post for his full explanations):

They’re for a tiny minority. Compared to page-views, only the smallest fraction of people will actually leave a comment on the article itself.  Twitter mentions (for my particular readership/audience) are at least three times as common.

This has been my experience as well.  Whenever I publish a post, I advertise it on Facebook, Twitter, and more recently, LinkedIn.  While I occasionally get some comments on the blog, more discussion tends to take place on Facebook and Twitter.  I guess that’s where most folks “live” these days, and it’s easier to comment under a link on the site you’re already on than to click through and comment on another site.

You should never read the bottom half of the internet. This doesn’t tend to apply quite so much to this blog, but generally speaking, comments on the web don’t contribute very much. […]

Comments encourage unconsidered responses. […] If your blog allows comments, you’re inviting people into your house – but sadly, some of them don’t conduct themselves appropriately.

Comments allow anonymity and separation of your words from your identity. […]

I grouped points 2-4 together because they’re all variations on a common theme.  Love the first sentence above.  Never really thought about it that way, but maybe there’s something to it.  Most comment threads on the news sites I read end up devolving into “lol republicans” and “lol democrats” and drown out the discussion.  As for anonymity, I think it can be a good thing – it allows for frank discourse without fear of retribution, but certainly we know the flipside of that particular coin.

Comments create a burden of moderation on the blog owner. […]

Not such a big problem for me and this little ol’ blog, but for more widely read blogs?  I can see this.  The Akismet WP plugin has done an excellent job of keeping the spam at bay with only a handful of false positives in the three years or so I’ve been using it.

Matt suggests three alternatives to commenting: writing a response on your own blog (as I’m doing now), discussing on Twitter (follow me there!), or sending the author an email.  I’m OK with the first two – I’d even add Facebook as another venue for discussion, if you have such overlap in audience – but I can’t recall a single blog post I’ve read in the five years I’ve been reading them that inspired me to send an email to the author.  I guess if you feel strongly enough…

Look, I’ll be honest: I don’t get a ton of comments on this blog, so it’s probably a bit presumptuous for me to even go here, but Matt’s post got me thinking about whether or not to shut off the works over here as well.

As a reader (and perhaps writer) of blogs, what do you think of this?  Are comments superficial conversation, or do they allow for constructive feedback?  Have Twitter and Facebook made blog comments obsolete?  I haven’t shut off comments (yet), so please weigh in below!

Re-Statement of Purpose: Why I Blog

Today marks exactly 4 1/2 years since I wrote my first blog post here at Apace of Change.  In it, I laid out my initial intentions for this blog:

…I want to engage with other educators – not just teachers, but administrators, psychologists, LDTCs, and others in the education field – as to uses for much of the technology that is available to us.

[…]

I’ve titled my blog “Apace of Change” because it so precisely sums up my life situation: trying to keep abreast of ever-changing technology while also dealing with significant changes in my personal and professional lives.

[…]

I’m really doing this for the collaborative aspect – I need to talk about these issues with people, and where else other than Edublogs am I likely to find such folks?

So what’s changed?  I’m clearly no longer hosting with Edublogs, and I’ve since expanded the scope of my writing.  At first, I wrote a wanna-be ed-tech blog.  Now, I write a wanna-be blog about the broader landscape of education.  This shift has mirrored the changes in my professional life, from classroom teacher to school psychologist and professional development facilitator to aspiring administrator.  As my professional perspective and concerns have changed, so has the focus of my writing.

I’m also more comfortable in my own digital skin.  I think at the beginning I was modeling my writing very much on the other blogs I was reading, education and otherwise.  It took me a little while to find my own voice, but having done so – along with purchasing my own domain and hosting space – gives me an even greater sense of ownership over this digital space of mine.

Speaking of which, there’s also this statement from my portfolio website:

Since 2007, I have blogged at Apace of Change about the challenges, successes, and failures I experienced in attempting to infuse technology into my instruction and assessment as a high school English teacher.  From 2009 on, I shift focus to broader issues in education, with some focus on special education and school psychology related issues, including the use of read/write Web tools as assistive technology.

Blogging has great potential as a tool of reflection, and I have found that frequent and thorough reflection has helped me to become a better educator, psychologist, husband, and father.  Whereas some may prefer to write in a journal or simply reflect in thought, blogging allows for interaction with an audience.  In some cases, this interaction provides me with affirmation; in others, my thoughts are challenged.  Either way, as long as the discourse remains constructive, growth occurs.

There’s no two ways about it – I love getting comments on my blog, and do my best to respond to each one as best I can.  I’ve found, however, that as the years have passed, I’ve been more focused on the personal reflective aspect than the conversational aspect.  I don’t comment on other blogs as much as I used to, and I’ve noticed that comments on my blog have fallen off proportionately.  I’m OK with that, though, since a) as I write I’m reflecting and refining my thoughts as well as my words, and b) I get most of my discourse via Facebook and Twitter these days – another big change from the summer of 2007.

I know, I know – it’s 2012, and blogging is dead (or is it?), but as long as I still have ideas, problems, questions, or concerns about education, this blog is staying alive.


Shifting My Sharing

Despite the periodic blog posts heralding the death of RSS, I remain a huge fan of the syndication format (not familiar with RSS?  Check the wiki).  I have been an avid user of Google Reader for nearly five years now, and I use it daily to aggregate and read, at last count, nearly 200 blogs, education-related and otherwise.

Until recently, one of my favorite features of Google Reader has been the ability to “share” (read: publish) interesting articles to my own personal RSS feed, which I cross-published to my Twitter account and on a sidebar feed on my portfolio website.  Additionally, Google Reader users could subscribe to each other’s Shared Items feeds right in Reader, which was a great way for me to read the posts my friends found insightful or useful without having to rely on Facebook or Twitter, where they would be too likely to be overlooked due to the high signal to noise ratio.

This past fall, however, Google saw fit to remove the sharing function (the generic nature of which allowed users to publish to just about any service) and replace it with a “Share to Google+” button (which forces users to use their social networking product to share stories).   This turned an incredibly powerful, relatively open publishing platform into yet another walled garden, a move I (sort of) understand from a business standpoint, but one that frustrated me immensely as a user.

Despite Google’s shortsightedness, I’ve still been able to rely on RSS to help me concoct another solution for when I want to share interesting articles from my Reader.  I have repurposed my Delicious account to be my surrogate Shared Items feed.  If you would like to read the articles I find interesting, you can now find them at Delicious.com/damian613 (or if you use RSS too, subscribe to the feed).

So what happened to the existing items in my Delicious account, the special education/school psychology related bookmarks (that I also published to my portfolio website)?  Simple – I moved them all over to Diigo (RSS feed), with tags intact.

If you’re interested in either my shared bookmarks in special ed/school psychology or the blogposts I share periodically in the areas of technology & education, please feel free to drop by my Delicious & Diigo accounts, or better yet, subscribe to the RSS feeds (while the format is still alive!).

TL;DR: Moved some of my public stuff around:

Get Your #Chat On

It was a little over a year ago when I wrote about the weekly Twitter-based chat on special ed issues founded by Deven Black and originally moderated by me, #spedchat.

While I can take or leave the real-time chat format on Twitter (it can be maddeningly difficult to keep up with if too many people are on at once, and the 140 character limit is, well… limiting), I’ve found that hashtags are a great way to toss resources or questions out into the ether and ensure that interested parties (i.e., the people who regularly search for the hashtag) will see them.  It becomes a public archive of both discussion and links to resources, and I find that use of hashtags more valuable than the live chat in many cases.

With that in mind, I’ve started following two more education-based Twitter chats I thought I’d share with you:

  • #psychat: Moderated by high school Social Studies teacher @mrpotter, this chat focuses on issues pertinent to teaching psychology.  While I no longer teach (high school, anyway), I hope to be able to contribute from my current perspective as a school psych.  Live chat takes place Wednesdays from 8-9pm Eastern.
  • #1stchat: Moderated by @CYarzy, this chat is primarily for teachers of first grade (see their archival wiki here).  I don’t work with students this young, but I am following the chat because I’ve got a slightly more personal stake in it: my son started first grade earlier this week!  Live chat takes place Sundays from 8-9pm Eastern.  (And yes, there’s also a #2ndchat, #3rdchat, #4thchat… I stopped searching after #7thchat).

Of course, the #spedchat live chat continues to run Tuesdays from 8:30-9:30pm Eastern.  The torch has been passed to the next generation of moderators & organizers, and judging by the enthusiasm and participation of recent chats, they’re doing a fantastic job.

For more education-related hashtag chats on Twitter, see this Google Calendar by Sarah Kaiser.