collaborative weBLog
the strategy. get tested together before you have sex
http://NotB4WeKnow.EditThisPage.com
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22tested+together%22

...instead of a limited confab in the one place, consider
new social software
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GayMensHealthSummit/message/3861

By Vicki Suter, Bryan Alexander, and Pascal Kaplan
http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm05/erm0513.asp

New social software technologies can support the conference
experience, and perhaps go beyond, by providing such a container
for persistent conversation and for the social presence of those
participating remotely.

Indeed, new technologies are emerging that not only deliver content
on demand over the Web but also support what might be thought of as
the social architecture of an organization or community.

When these technologies are brought to bear on the experience we
call conferences, they can significantly enhance the value and
effectiveness of the learning experiences and personal interactions
that occur when people gather in traditional face-to-face venues to
share knowledge and ideas, explore new directions for their
professional work, and connect with colleagues whom they may see
only occasionally.

When handled with skill, these social software technologies promise
to transform the conference experience; afterward, communities
might even coalesce and continue to work on their collective
knowledge-building.

We have already seen some experimentation in this area for
individual presentations.2

A conference-wide example is the San Diego Experiment at the
NLII 2004 Annual Meeting.
http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm05/erm0513.asp

By Vicki Suter, Bryan Alexander, and Pascal Kaplan

EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 40, no. 1 (January/February 2005): 46-59.

Social Software and the
Future of Conferences - Right Now

Vicki Suter, Bryan Alexander,
and Pascal Kaplan

Vicki Suter has been Director of NLII Projects since 1999
and is currently a doctoral student in the Graduate School
of Education and Psychology at Pepperdine University.

Bryan Alexander http://cet.middlebury.edu/bryan/ is
codirector of the Center for Educational Technology at
Middlebury College, where he researches, teaches, and
develops programs on the advanced uses of IT in liberal
arts colleges.

Pascal Kaplan is a co-founder and architect
of iCohere, a software platform for learning communities
and online conferences http://www.iCohere.com He was a
professor and Dean of the School of Liberal Arts at John
F. Kennedy University before launching iCohere.

Comments
on this article can be sent to the authors at
vsuter at gmail.com
balexan at middlebury.edu
pascal at iCohere.com

You dont automatically throw a great party by hiring a
room and buying some beer. Someone needs to invite an
interesting mix of people, greet people at the door,
make introductions, start conversations, avert
fisticuffs, encourage people to let their hair down and
entertain each other. --Howard Rheingold, The Art of
Hosting Good Conversations Online (1998)

Consider the following scenario. The Association of
Technology Enthusiasts decides that it can save a
tremendous amount of time and expense--for itself and its
membership--by eliminating its annual conference. Since
its members come to the annual conferences for the
thought-provoking presentations on applying technology to
anything and everything, why disrupt members day-to-day
routines by having them come to a conference at a distant
location and stay at a costly hotel when existing
technology can streamline the conference experience? And
the streamlining process is so simple: all sessions that
are scheduled to be presented at the annual conference
will instead be posted on the associations Web site.
Members will be able to download any and all
presentations. And these are not simply lecture notes or
documents; these are full-featured videos of the
presenters, including animated PowerPoint slides with
voice-overs and with Web site links to additional
references. The associations members will have all the
content they would have experienced at the conference, and
more--because they wont have to choose among overlapping
conference sessions.

Whats wrong with this scenario? The answer is obvious:
conferences are only partially about content. More
important than the content--and after six months, usually
much more memorable--are the opportunities for
collaborative learning, for networking and
relationship-building, and for developing new research or
funding opportunities that emerge from personal
interactions. Its the social context of the
experience--not simply the content--that energizes a
conference and makes it worth the effort and expense.
Should the Association of Technology Enthusiasts actually
eliminate its annual conference, before long even its
members would likely call for the reestablishment of their
face-to-face meetings.

We attend conferences for the conversations, among other
experiences. Through conversation, we create a common
ground from which we can explore the issues and problems
of our professions and practice, as well as potential
solutions. Conversation is the engine for work, for
community, for decision-making, and for collaboration.
However, the conversations we have at conferences are
ephemeral. If we could find a way to make the
conversations persistent, what effect would that have on
our ability to construct knowledge collectively?
Certainly, synchronous digital communications, such as
chat or instant messaging, can be persistent in character,
especially if a transcript is saved. According to Thomas
Erickson: Persistence expands conversation beyond those
within earshot, rendering it accessible to those in other
places and at later times. Thus, digital conversation may
be synchronous or asynchronous, and its audience intimate
or vast. Its persistence means that it may be far more
structured, or far more amorphous, than an oral exchange,
and that it may have the formality of published text or
the informality of chat. The persistence of such
conversations also opens the door to a variety of new uses
and practices: persistent conversations may be searched,
browsed, replayed, annotated, visualized, restructured,
and recontextualized, with what are likely to be profound
impacts on personal, social, and institutional practices.1

Further, part of the power of conferences is that we are
co-located. We are together in space and time, and we are
able to give and receive immediate feedback. If we could
find a way to provide a powerful sense of the presence of
others who were not physically at the conference, how
might that expand the network of interconnections that
conferences make possible?

A Definition of Social Software

On May 8, 2003, Tom Coatess entry in his weblog,
plasticbag.org, sparked a lively discussion, involving
Howard Rheingold and others, exploring the various
definitions of social software

http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2003/05/my_working_definition_of_social_softw\
are.shtml
These definitions
include descriptions of social software as a tool (for
augmenting human social and collaborative abilities), as a
medium (for facilitating social connection and information
interchange), and as an ecology (for enabling a system of
people, practices, values and technologies in a particular
local environment). The last is closest to our definition
of social software for the purposes of this article. This
is only proper, given that the genesis of the current
article was in the experiences of the three authors at the
NLII 2004 Annual Meeting, where the conference theme was
New Learning Ecosystems.

New social software technologies can support the
conference experience, and perhaps go beyond, by providing
such a container for persistent conversation and for the
social presence of those participating remotely. Indeed,
new technologies are emerging that not only deliver
content on demand over the Web but also support what might
be thought of as the social architecture of an
organization or community. When these technologies are
brought to bear on the experience we call conferences,
they can significantly enhance the value and effectiveness
of the learning experiences and personal interactions that
occur when people gather in traditional face-to-face
venues to share knowledge and ideas, explore new
directions for their professional work, and connect with
colleagues whom they may see only occasionally. When
handled with skill, these social software technologies
promise to transform the conference experience; afterward,
communities might even coalesce and continue to work on
their collective knowledge-building. We have already seen
some experimentation in this area for individual
presentations.2 A conference-wide example is the San Diego
Experiment at the NLII 2004 Annual Meeting.

The San Diego Experiment

Pascal Kaplan and Soren Kaplan, co-founders of iCohere
http://www.icohere.com and developers of the Web-based
collaborative environment of the same name, worked with
Vicki Suter and a team of NLII Fellows (past and present)
and NLII VCOP (Virtual Community of Practice) facilitators
to create a temporary parallel virtual environment, termed
the San Diego Experiment, at the NLII 2004 Annual Meeting.
Every meeting attendee had access to the San Diego
Experiment to explore new Web-based collaboration
technologies and to share resources during the meeting.
Most meeting presentations, handouts, related URLs, and
notes taken by theme synthesizers were available on the
site immediately after sessions. As a keynote speaker,
Bryan Alexander utilized the environment. Those who wanted
to comment on his presentation during his session could do
so publicly via the wiki he set up; others could discuss
the presentation in the San Diego
Experiment--synchronously in informal virtual meeting
spaces and asynchronously with the presenter and others in
a discussion on New Learning Ecosystems--and attendees
contributed additional resources relating to the
presentation themes. Recommendations, feedback, and
activity within the San Diego Experiment informed the
design of the Bridging VCOP, which then served as the
environment for the NLII spring 2004 online focus session,
Empowering Institutional Communities of Practice to
Transform Teaching and Learning, and as the virtual
environment for the NLII face-to-face summer focus
session, Bridging Communities of Research and Practice to
Transform Higher Education Teaching and Learning.

The social software idea has taken off as a movement
recently, based on the key insight that technologies can
work not only as autonomous entities, such as a games
artificial intelligence, but also as social multipliers,
enhancing our abilities to connect with other people,
share ideas, work collaboratively, and form communities.
As Howard Rheingold notes, we should expect the unexpected
when previously separate technologies meet.3

New Web applications have proliferated to support this
social drive: Friendster http://www.friendster.com/
LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/ Tribe.net
http://www.tribe.net orkut http://www.orkut.com/
Flickr http://www.flickr.com/ Eliyon
http://www.eliyon.com/ and even a campus-based version,
Thefacebook http://www.thefacebook.com/ And Web
publishing tools, such as blogs and wikis, have developed
new means for connecting people: the URL post-connector
TrackBack, the personal linking analysis tool Technorati,
and the blogosphere-scanning index Blogdex.4 At the same
time, social network analysis (SNA) theory has grown in
depth and application, allowing us to better understand
the connective patterns between people.5

The social software movement rekindles our thinking about
the socializing features of virtual spaces, which cease to
become individual sojourns in isolated content and emerge
as zones for information-sharing, collaboration,
exploration, and extended community process. In this
sense, the software supports a sense of social presence as
well as place. At a conference, such a virtual space can
help strangers connect through content items, even if they
dont recognize each others appearance. The content can be
pre-populated or can be generated live during events.
Public and private interaction levels offer different ways
to approach other participants. Synchronous and
asynchronous options allow different timelines, and time
can be shifted in another way as well: the conference
experience can actually begin before the conference and
extend well after it.

Lets look ahead to the near future, to a conference in
which the material and the virtual are fully intertwined
and functioning through well-designed, well-integrated
social architecture and technical architecture. The social
architecture would enliven the experience and includes the
roles, processes, and approaches that engage people
together--whether face-to-face or online--in relationship
building, collaborative learning, knowledge sharing, and
action.6 The technical architecture would include software
and hardware for social computing, communication,
collaboration, geolocation, and content/knowledge
management--all working together in a wireless mesh that
is persistent, pervasive, and mobile.

Before the Conference

Registering for a conference provides a participant with
immediate access to a secure conference Web site. This Web
site provides the standard travel, hotel, and scheduling
information that one expects from a site publicizing a
conference, but it is based on collaborative community
software. Such software delivers content and also provides
a variety of mechanisms for launching the interactive and
social networking dimensions of the conference.

To begin, each participant fills out a
professional/networking profile and uploads a photograph.
Because these can be searched by keyword, participants
start contacting one another using the built-in tools of
the platform: real-time meeting (chat) capabilities or
private messaging within the platform. As shared interest
areas emerge--areas that might reflect the structure of
the upcoming conference or complement it by expanding on
core themes--subgroups form spontaneously among the
participants. Such subgroups or special-interest groups
organize themselves into discussion forums and begin the
process of collaborative interchange and learning. Because
sufficient time is allowed before the conference,
participants are not limited to exploring just one or two
tracks but can dip into as many of these special-interest
areas as they like, expanding the horizons of their own
understanding and learning by seeing how lines of
exploration of secondary or even tertiary interest to them
might nevertheless relate to their areas of primary
concern.

In addition, small subcommunities of interest organized
around a particular conference theme might identify all
the conference presentations on that topic, contact all
those speakers, and offer the speakers the opportunity to
share their presentations beforehand, so that they can get
feedback from the community and learn about the
relationship of their projects to those of others who are
already working in the same area. (This approach is
already being used by the NLII Electronic Portfolio Action
Committee [EPAC] Virtual Community of Practice.7) The
result might be better presentations and more fully
integrated tracks, with each presentation being a clear
part of a larger, thematic whole.

The conference community thus starts to coalesce and
become energized before any session presenter begins to
talk.

At the Conference: Day One

With social software environments--where content,
interaction, and collaboration are integrated--the
conference experience is no longer confined to content
delivery. Because presentations have been available online
weeks before the face-to-face session, the time that
people are actually together in physical space can be
transformed from the standard one-way lecture format into
a wide array of interactive and experiential learning
opportunities.

Of course, additional content may still be presented in
conference plenary sessions and smaller breakout sessions.
But now these sessions are recorded--in audio and/or
video, including slides and even drawings made on physical
whiteboards or flip-charts--and are uploaded into the
virtual conference space. Thus, new content becomes
available almost immediately for those who could not
attend the session or those who want to deepen their
understanding by reviewing it again. And since this new
material is posted directly into discussion forums in the
virtual conference space, it not only is available for
downloading and viewing but also becomes the basis for
further interaction among audience members. During session
breaks or after conference hours--indeed, even during the
plenary itself if the presentation has been uploaded
beforehand--participants can discuss the material online
and can expand on the presentation threads that seem most
worth exploring.

Meanwhile, Back at Campus

The capability of uploading conference activities in real
time (or immediately after an event) opens the possibility
of extending the reach of the conference to an even larger
audience back home. Those who can afford the time and
expense to attend the face-to-face conference benefit from
the many forms of interaction that unfold during a
multi-day conference, of course. But those who are unable
to participate physically can nevertheless participate
virtually by logging into the conference site, either
individually or with organized gatherings of colleagues in
extended breakout rooms. As individuals and as
self-defined subgroups, they can actively participate in
the parallel, online dimension of the conference. Overall,
conference attendance increases thanks to the
accessibility of these extended breakout rooms; the impact
of the learning and of the knowledge-sharing is broadened.

In October 2004, at a meeting during the EDUCAUSE 2004
annual conference in Denver, a spontaneous demonstration
revealed the power of intertwined virtual and face-to-face
environments, the social presence that blended
environments can afford to those who are not in
attendance, and the high quality of dialogue that can
result from such interaction. Several members of the
Horizon Virtual Community of Practice (VCOP) were meeting
to discuss emerging technologies, and Jim Gaston was
briefing those in attendance about an interactive agent (a
robot, or bot) developed by his team at South Orange
County Community College District. Jim was explaining that
the agent uses instant messaging (IM) networks and a
conversational interface based on natural language
processing to respond to student queries about
administrative policies and procedures 8
http://mysiteagent.com

During the meeting, one of the VCOP meeting attendees,
Gardner Campbell, was engaged in a chat with several staff
members back at his home campus, the University of Mary
Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He mentioned Jims
interactive bot to one of these colleagues, Martha Burtis,
and sent her the URL for the project. In the chat, Martha
commented about the possibility of using these types of
bots/avatars for any kind of academic use--rather than
just providing general university information. The
participants in the face-to-face meeting were beginning to
explore the same question at that very moment!

three hours, a conversation occurred simultaneously in
three environments: in the face-to-face meeting in Denver;
in a three-way chat among the University of Mary
Washington staff; and in a shared virtual meeting space
(one of this articles authors, Vicki Suter, was taking
notes about the face-to-face conversation in an iCohere
virtual meeting space, where several of the meeting
attendees were also posting notes and comments). One
person, Campbell, was participating in all three
environments and so served as a conduit between them (and
posted the exchanges from the other chat window into the
Horizon VCOP meeting space).

The conversation was a lively, intense, and productive
discussion about the pedagogy and technology of
intelligent agents for instructional use. The separate but
parallel discussions were only periodically connected--a
kind of syncopated pacing, via Campbell, so that they did
not disrupt each other. Occasionally, Campbell would share
insights between the two parallel conversations, setting
off a new line of thought and inquiry in each. The quality
of the combined discussion--and some of the group insights
that were achieved about interactive agents, intelligent
agents, and how these might be used for teaching and
learning--are no less than remarkable and will likely
prove the source of much more reflection and, ultimately,
publication. Campbell remarked, This was equal to a month
of staff development--for all of us.

Over the course of the next week, participants reflected
on what all agreed had been a compelling, generative
experience, and they continued their analysis of what had
happened. Nick Noakes, one of the participants, speculated
that it was a matter of pacing: neither of the parallel
discussions settled into a pattern but instead accepted
and incorporated the periodic dissonance (one discussion
into another) in a creative, productive way. Campbell
agreed but suggested that the chat/f2f dynamic was a kind
of interactive multiple-conversations event--a kind of 3D
turn-taking.

The entire exchange was captured in the Horizon VCOP
virtual meeting space and was then made publicly available
on a wiki,
http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/wiki?VickiSuter/HorizonVCOPNotes
Participants continue to use these notes to
reflect on the experience (and Burtis and her University
of Mary Washington colleagues continue to explore the
educational use of intelligent agents).

At the Conference: Day Two

The best professional-development conferences are, at
heart, learning environments. Many of the deeper learning
principles suggested for the use of technology in higher
education teaching and learning hold true for professional
development as well. Deeper learning
* requires ownership,
* encourages engagement,
* is a social process,
* is contextual or situated, and
* is an active process.9

Its a bit ironic to attend a conference on deeper learning
and the improvement of teaching and to find oneself
sitting in a large auditorium, watching PowerPoint slides,
and listening to someone deliver a traditional-style
lecture. Even if the presentation is thought-provoking,
even if the presenter is charged with enthusiasm, even if
the slides are animated, even if the podium is shared with
a panel of highly respected thought leaders in learning
theory, even if . . . , one is left with the feeling that
a grand opportunity has been missed, that gathering
together so many creative and talented people could have
resulted in an experience with a very different
quality--or at least different from that of sitting in a
lecture hall.

Although a well-prepared and enthusiastically presented
lecture can indeed spark ideas and insights, the
electricity really starts to flow after the formalities,
when those who have been sparked by some idea or insight
in a presentation come together at the front or the side
or the back of the room and engage with colleagues and the
presenter(s), to share stories and experiences that play
out the implications of what has just been presented.
Further, if one thinks of a conference environment as a
learning environment, and reflects on how technologies
might facilitate learning for the participants (which is
certainly reasonable if the conference is about the use of
technology to transform teaching and learning), the idea
of a virtual environment that echoes the physical and
intellectual conference space--and likewise, of a physical
conference space that has virtual extensions--becomes even
more compelling.

We already know many of the benefits of using virtual
space for teaching and learning. For example, one of the
best-known advantages of a virtual space is the lack of
geographical identification. A student posting to a class
blog or wiki could be living in Vermont or Moscow, whereas
the class lecturer next week might be streaming audio in
from Tokyo. In the conference context, those who arent
able to attend because of geographical restrictions can
still participate and make important connections with
ideas, practices, and people.

More recent work has also reinforced a kind of spatial
tethering--the linkages between virtual space and physical
space--by seeking to geolocate digital materials. Web
sites like GeoURL http://www.geourl.com and thinkers
like David Weinberger (The Semantic Earth)10 have followed
the pioneering work of J. C. Spohrer, whose 1999 work
Information in Places first argued for the possibilities
of tying access to spatial location.11 For example, a
student in an arboretum could annotate a digital space for
an arboreal point with comments and images, to which a
faculty member could reply from elsewhere. Geolocation
overlays the physical with the digital, adding a layer of
data associated with the space. Thus documents and objects
could be stationed throughout a conference. A meeting room
for an interactive session could have a virtual echo, with
all of the necessary materials (e.g., white papers,
handouts, PowerPoint presentations) and resources (e.g.,
URLs) placed on a table in the back of the room, virtually
speaking. Even more important, this virtual room could
continue to exist after the face-to-face session, with
participants (and other interested parties) coming back to
engage in dialogue after theyve had a chance to
reflect--or returning to pick up a resource they had not
earlier realized they needed. The digital reinforces the
physical by adding a layer of meaning and description,
just as an e-mail conversation can enhance ones sense of a
Web forum or as a telephone call can deepen ones
perception of a person known via the Internet.

Groups that emerge through discussions could also stake
out new virtual spaces for themselves. This can lead to
breakout sessions grounded more firmly in the rich
intellectual and social content brought by all the
participants, not just by those selected as presenters.
And groups, such as work groups and committees that
typically conduct side meetings in and around conferences
to complete specific tasks, can have their own meeting
spaces within the virtual conference space to support
their collaborative efforts.

Finally, learning is intensely personal. The experience of
using such a learning environment through a wireless,
mobile connection is subtly different from the experience
of working on a tethered desktop machine. Most of us feel
a more personal connection to small portable devices,
especially as they become more like clothing that we wear.
A highly networked, wireless conference setting provides
the entire conference space with a parallel virtual layer;
the two layers can be intertwined into a complete, robust
learning environment. Participants can check out, on the
spot, resources and ideas that the presenter is
mentioning. A remote participant can post comments to a
presenters wiki during a busy question-and-answer session.
And because the virtual representation for the
presentation persists past the particular time slot of the
session, the presenter and other participants can reply to
commentary from attendees later, continuing and building
on themes that would otherwise fade into memory. In short,
mobility combined with asynchronicity can enhance the
social multiplier effect of the software.

After the Conference

As currently organized, the three- or four-day conference
tends to be one of those experiences that are
discontinuous with the rest of our activities. We leave
home and office, travel to the conference venue,
reacquaint ourselves with people we have met at previous
such venues and acquaint ourselves with new colleagues,
open ourselves to be stimulated (and overstimulated) by
the nonstop opportunities to listen to and actively
participate in discussions on topics of professional
interest, and then pack up and return home--soon to find
ourselves reimmersed in our day-to-day responsibilities,
with the fresh energy awakened at the conference fading
(slowly or quickly) from our awareness.

Thats not bad; after all, vacations are discontinuous, and
they are refreshing precisely because we remove ourselves
from our day-to-day habits of thought and feeling and open
ourselves to new interactions and engagements. The
difference between a conference and a vacation is that
conferences are ideally designed to stimulate ongoing
learning and to reinvigorate the intellectual and
professional lives of the participants. Conferences cannot
become vehicles for deep learning if all sense of
continuity is lost as soon as the last suitcase is loaded
into the airport shuttle. Moreover, some amount of
retrievable conference discussion could bring back that
moment of reflection into even the busiest schedule.

An integrated conference learning environment does not
allow the continuity to be lost so easily. Instead, by
remaining accessible and active for weeks or months or,
potentially, years after the face-to-face event, the
online collaborative environment sustains and augments the
energy generated during the physical event. The site is
not simply an archive of the original event: the
environment now morphs from being a conference support
site into a venue for one or more ongoing communities of
practice to explore the important themes that surfaced.
Such an environment builds a sense of continuity between
the experience of attending a conference and the reality
of returning to the dailyness of ones professional life,
by enabling a wide range of ongoing connections and
interactions. It thus has real potential for changing
practice. Consider the following examples:
* Threads of stimulating conversation sparked by a
chance hallway interaction expand into ongoing topics
in discussion areas, engaging colleagues from distant
campuses.
* Research summaries that extend and illuminate
presentations from the conference are linked to the
online version of the presentation and help expand the
context and deepen the significance of the issues
being investigated.
* Private messaging and real-time chats/meetings
continue to support spontaneous, ad-hoc interactions
among the participants of the conference community.
* Because the community is an interactive site and not
simply a repository of conference proceedings, the
dynamism of the conference experience--the social and
professional networking that is so central to such
events--is extended over time as colleagues reflect on
and share the practical and theoretical outcomes of
what they learned at the conference.

In addition, as experiences from the blended,
face-to-face/virtual conference are shared with colleagues
across professional networks, new attendees request access
to the living conference archives as a way of entering
into the experience after the fact. These new participants
can fuel additional dialogue.

Conclusion

We tend to think of a virtual space as some sort of
alternate electronic analog for face-to-face, as a
replacement location when the physical is not available.
Given the evolution of increasingly sophisticated social
software and of the social architecture that can manage
its effective uses, we might realize significant
advantages if we think of virtual spaces as interwoven or
intertwined with face-to-face experiences in equal
partnership. The combination may augment the benefits of
each--through complementarity (the strengths of each
compensate for the weaknesses of the other) and synergy
(the joining creates properties that did not exist when
the experiences were separate).12

Until recently, the models for conceptualizing activities
in physical space and in Internet space have been limited
by the thought that we have to choose one or the other. An
initial integration of these apparently disparate spaces
emerged when participants in face-to-face meetings (e.g.,
annual professional society meetings) supplemented their
meetings in physical space by creating follow-up listservs
and e-mail lists for communication in virtual space. The
new conference paradigm we have identified here takes such
integration to the next step, allowing the virtual and the
physical to intersect. A face-to-face meeting becomes a
social archive--accessible, amendable, and mixable
throughout the year. The overall conference thus develops
into a richer, more useful combination of event and
object, an enduring container for experiences and
knowledge.

Web bonus

An extended version of this articlethe online-only, Web
bonus The Future of F2Fadds scenarios, real-life
vignettes, and links to resources describing in more
detail how new social software technologies can support
face-to-face experiences such as conferences and meetings.
More speculative ideas are explored, including how such
software might provide a container for the social presence
of remote participants and also for a shared, persistent
cognitive space that can better support ongoing personal
learning, as well as collective knowledge-building. See
Vicki Suter, Bryan Alexander, and Pascal Kaplan, The
Future of F2F.

Notes

1. Thomas Erickson, Persistent Conversation: An
Introduction, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
(JCMC), vol. 4, no. 4 (June 1999),
http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol4/issue4/ericksonintro.html

2. Two examples are Small Technologies Loosely Joined:
Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, an experimental
presentation (by Alan Levine, Brian Lamb, and DArcy
Norman) framed as a wiki-blog-chat-fest at the 2004 New
Media Consortium (NMC) Summer Conference, which also
tapped into participants around the Internet (see
http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/wiki?SmallPiecesLooselyJoined

and the NLII session at EDUCAUSE 2004, Opportunities
for Engagement: Creative Commotion and Focused Chaos,
which used wikis and weblogs for structuring and capturing
the small group discussions (see
http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/wiki?NLII

3. Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social
Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Basic Books, 2003). See also
Howard Rheingold, The Art of Hosting Good Conversations
Online (1998),
http://www.rheingold.com/texts/artonlinehost.html

4. The blog Many2Many is a fine source of information
about social software: http://www.corante.com/many/

5. Albert-L?szl? Barab?si, Linked: The New Science of
Networks (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2002). See also
Duncan J. Watts, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected
Age (New York: Norton, 2003), which goes into greater
depth.

6. The definition of social architecture--developed by
Soren Kaplan, co-author with Vicki Suter and Darren
Cambridge of NLIIs Step-by-Step Guide to Designing and
Cultivating Communities of Practice--is available for
download from
http://www.educause.edu/VirtualCommunities/576

7. See the Electronic Portfolios Virtual Community of
Practice:

http://www.educause.edu/ElectronicPortfoliosVirtualCommunityofPractice%28EPAC%29\
/1154

8. For more information about the Horizon Project and the
Horizon VCOP, see
http://www.educause.edu/HorizonCommunity/1155
Jim
Gaston presented on his interactive agent at the EDUCAUSE
2004 Western Regional Conference; see

http://www.educause.edu/Speakers/Session/1450?MODE=SESSIONS&PRODUCT_CODE=WRC04/S\
ESS09&MEETING=wrc04

9. From the NLIIs Deeper Learning and Learning Theories:
http://www.educause.edu/DeeperLearning/2623

10. David Weinberger, The Semantic Earth, Release 1.0,
January 2004, abstract available at
http://www.edventure.com/release1/abstracts.cfm?Counter=4432792

11. J. C. Spohrer, Information in Places, IBM Systems
Journal, Pervasive Computing Special Issue, vol. 38, no. 4
(1999),
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/384/spohrer.txt

12. D. Robey, K. S. Schwaig, and L. Jin, Intertwining
Material and Virtual Work, Information and Organization,
vol. 13, no. 2 (April 2003): 111-29. One question for
future exploration and experimentation is, How might
social software, new content syndication and meta-tagging
capabilities, and knowledge management practices
facilitate collaborative, collective knowledge-building at
conferences?

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