lovehatethings

The recent dictum by the Ontario College of Teachers on use of electronic communication and social media reinforces many long-standing beliefs of teacher unions in terms of casting a wide net to protect teachers against potential disciplinary issues. Even those beliefs have evolved however, from archaic  recommendations of “no electronic communications” with anyone or “no signing up for a social network”, to ones of ensuring education is available to illuminate the perils, pitfalls and promise of such media.

The College re-affirmed highly cautious recommendations for keeping teachers safe, including: not being friends with students on social networks, not texting students, and not becoming engaged in personal email or chat conversations with students. These recommendations are based on real-world risks to teachers based on discipline and criminal charges where evidence has been garnered through electronic communications. As a body responsible for upholding the professional image of teachers, while the first-glance cautions may seem overly restrictive, they are an “advisory”.

As engaged members of our culture, educators are becoming active, engaged members of social networks and avid content creators online. Many who have been using social networks for long periods of time have the experience to draw lines between “professional” and “social”. There are many web networking tools that are quite appropriate, monitored, and approved by school boards to engage student with methods that are parallel to the experiences they receive on social networks. In fact, they can even be used to model appropriate behaviours on such platforms.

In the same way that real world social (non-professional) interactions with students are cautioned against, the same lines need to be drawn in the digital world.

The advisory reiterates the College's long-standing mantra that “Teaching is a public profession. Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that teachers’ off-duty conduct, even when not directly related to students, is relevant to their suitability to teach.”

This ominous standard for most teachers has been exacerbated by often nebulous parameters of what conduct makes one unsuitable. The constant evolution of digital culture make the standards even more difficult to define. Any person can call the College of Teachers in Ontario and file a complaint at any time and the College has to investigate. The cautionary tone of the advisory is completely warranted in terms of protecting teachers in Ontario.

Teachers should not, however, have to take a “glass houses” approach to becoming vital contributors to online discussions, or content creators. Teachers still have constitutional rights to “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication." The advisory ends by asking teachers to consider the following ambiguous question: “How does my online presence – that which I control and that which is posted by others – reflect my professionalism, and how does it reflect the teaching profession?"

Such a question is patently ridiculous as it asks teachers to pre-suppose the thoughts of others on their professional standards. The College does not offer concrete examples in the advisory. To hold such a standard/threat over the heads of teachers like the Sword of Damocles gives a clear indication of why many teachers still shy away from social networking as a whole, and why there seems to be such a disconnect from those who sit in disbelief at why teachers (and public boards) are hamstrung in serving the needs of a student base that uses the web as a primary communication medium.

Your music is in my life. Your life is in my music. Two great tastes that taste great together.

The build up to, and execution of, my first official "keynote". Don't know about everyone else, but I had fun.

A long (no, I really mean it - LONG!) podcast which encompasses a talk that I gave on October 26th, 2010 at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. There were questions at the end which I did not gain permission to use others voices, so (instead of assuming) I just chose to edit the questions out and leave the answers. The questions were hard to hear anyway as they did not get up to microphones.

The first question [from a faculty member] concerned the threat to traditional and accepted written language when short-hand and catchy acronyms become part of the communication process.

The second question was a supplemental to the first around the the quality of in-depth thought and expression when communication gets reduced to short social interactions.

The third question was more about what Prezi was all about, but it served to launch me into a final statement on how I gave permission for the university to post the talk on their website and for anyone to remix or otherwise use the words to spread the message.

The link to the Prezi visuals I used during the talk can be found by clicking here.

Whether you call it "New Media", or "Digital Media", or "Social Media", the time is rapidly arriving where the qualifiers have become redundant.

I wish I could say that we could define the divide between "new" and "traditional" media as subjective or objective with the subjective being personal bloggers and podcasters, but it's a sad fact that most network television, radio, or last-gen media is completely subjective as well.

We cannot qualify by level of research or journalistic integrity because all generations of media waft back and forth through actually researching what they're talking about or caring about facts.

As the potential for to reach worldwide to millions of people has outstretched the potential of last-gen broadcasters, it's not fair to distinguish the two by using the term "broadcast". Who is to say that a live streamed web event is not broadcasting?

We cannot call it "personal" media, because some websites have essentially become their own networks with dozens of employees and paid "on air/web" talent.

I even tried to apply a tested and true model for me with regards to artistic pursuits which generally falls to whether the creator is creating for the purpose of the work itself, or instead is doing it for some other purpose which subverts a purer intention. Could we use "art" and "craft" to divide such media? Perhaps, but it would be essentially useless as we could never be accurate without asking every content creator and be assured they weren't lying.

We could use "amateur" and "professional", but the word "amateur" has historical been been seen as a "less than" proposition. [And even more recently by Steve Jobs who indicated consumers wanted to be able to sift through the amateur dreck.]

Would that I could simply say that "digital" media only represented content created by people on computers, but even that distinction falls apart as all television becomes digital, all television cameras and microphones go to hard drives, and all print media is predominantly generated digitally before it hits a press.

With all of these inadequate qualifiers to describe media and indicate something that's becoming progressively meaningless, we seem to have accepted the word "medium" should indicate the tool and not the content. For decades, when someone spoke of "the media", they referred to mass media outlets that would broadcast across a nation, or, more specifically, a group of reporters who may show up to an event. It seemed that the one irreducible primary was the reporter, the writer, or the television anchor.

Isn't the writer a medium as much as the newspaper, or the anchor as much as the television? And so isn't the blogger, podcaster, vidcaster as solitary a medium as the anchor. In fact, the experience of a solitary blogger or podcaster sequestered behind a basement PC is probably a whole lot less "social" than a production team in a newsroom.

So while some may argue that the worldwide web is a medium for social change that allows individuals to communicate with people quicker and further away than ever before, it could be called a social medium. But the instrument of content is still the person who, while a medium, is no more or less social than Walter Cronkite.

And if the content creator might be a less social medium than ever, have we really become all about the tools and less about the idea? Isn't the irreducible primary still fingers on a keyboard, a voice and a microphone, or a finger choosing how to frame reality?

Don't even get me started on Social Networking.

A reflection on how and why I jumped into the social media sphere when I did, and some of the benefits I reap from participating in its inherent creative outlets.

For you pleasure, edification, copying, redistributing, and printing, I present the Social Media Douchebag Diploma from lovehatethings.com. Just print and insert your favourite SMD's name in some faux script-like Sharpie glory.

Feel free to confer the accreditation as many times as you wish. And remember, it's not an insult, it's an achievement!

SMDdiploma

Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of Lovehatethings and I figured Anniversary Eve would be a good time to reflect on the past year's most valuable lessons in my latest round of blogging. Lovehatethings is not my "side" blog or my picture/clip repository; it is my only solo blog.

1. Subject be damned - I thought, when I first started lovehatethings, that I would try to stay on things tech and web culture with a dash of ephemera thrown in for good measure. I soon came to grips with the fact that no matter how I tried to craft a theme or topic for the blog, ultimately I was the theme. While I never wanted or considered lovehatethings to be a lifestream (and it's not) I was hoping I would have time to write longer sweeping pieces about pop culture on a more regular basis. In lieu of essays and longer reflections, the ephemera fleshed out the opinion and what resulted was a clearer scope of my views on culture instead of the culture itself.
2. Staying current is currency - Having more time in the summer to keep up posting made the first couple of months easy to satisfy at least a post per day, and even when I have had little time to "construct" a written post, I have always tried to maintain some output on a daily basis (this is post number 483 in 364 days).
3. Podcast or Perish - Lovehatethings is/was my first foray into podcasting (I know I arrived on the scene late). 98 podcasts later I've gone through scripted, unscripted, rants, recoils and rambles with the only expectation being that I would have a blast doing them and learning by them... mission accomplished.
4. The medium is the message - In so much as anyone can put up content and hope that people consume, I really have to thank the Posterous team for giving me tools that allowed me to gain greater distribution control of content over the past year. Posting and podcasting by email, notifications, analytics, custom domains - anything I could've wanted in this first year was not only provided but made simple. My career isn't coding, but it does entail some heavy duty communication. I loved that I could handle the words while someone else handled the code.
5. Buying into the community - My work with lovehatethings prompted a greater interest in the subcultures that are blogging and podcasting and social media in general. I attended Podcamps, tweetups, and become an advocate among friends and peers for social media growth and involvement.
6. Words are not dead - As much as many web consumers seem transfixed with keyboard cats and memes-a-plenty, I have found more value in words over the past year than I have in a long time - and this comes from an English teacher. I do not, nor will I ever buy into the fact that a blog idea should be said in as few words as possible. The artistic sensibility in blogging should be found in words. While brevity is certainly economical, I don't read a blog or listen to a podcast to get headlines as quickly as possible. I want to be entertained and a well-crafted story, sentence, or turn of phrase can make the topic more enjoyable no matter how bland it should be.
7. Fueled by stupidity - While I could easily accept others accusing me of this, I really mean to say that the stupidity of the world around me has really inspired some of the better posts on the blog. Whether it's a celebrity or a person who cut me off in a parking lot, disgust, disbelief and sometimes outright rage inject prose with a certain maliciousness that is therapeutic. It is also this stupidity, especially by people around the city, that inspired the Impromptu Podcasts that started up as a way to relieve the podcasting bug when longer written pieces were too far between.
8. Readers and listeners are irrelevant - Not to insult you if you're reading this now, but if I was doing all this work for someone else, without getting paid, and agonizing over results, it all wouldn't be much fun. And it has been fun. I've always enjoyed watching band that were having fun on stage. I don't care how sloppy the arrangements or how many missed notes, but show me a band that smiles at each other and the crowd and I'll show you a crowd who smiles back.
9. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose - As much as many Social Media people like to trumpet the vast differences between "new" and "old" media, the basic construct remains the same: sender to message to receiver. That the feedback loop has been shortened, when required, is an improvement, but has always been available even by Pony Express. The basic tenets of any media studies still apply: know your audience, know your medium, know yourself.
10. The new web realities - Authority is awkward. Recommendations are required. Networking is knowledge. Parsing is premium. Cognition is key. And while some of you will recognize the acronym PWEI from a band called Pop Will Eat Itself, I've become half convinced that such is the fate of the web as bloggers write about other bloggers who write about other bloggers and somewhere in there is a fact or two. Facts are like Waldo.

Tomorrow - the Anniversary Post!