While I read this post about the headache caused to an end-user by diigo’s “find your friends” feature with interest, I had linked to the post because I was expecting to read something more along the lines of how the diigolet (really bad name, by the way–reminds me a little to much of toilet) or the diigo tool bar slowed Firefox way down after install. That’s my end-user complaint and it’s based in no fact, and other than that, my other big complaint is that I keep hitting my “post to delicious” button when I’m on a page I want to bookmark since it’s such a force of habit. And then I have to wonder if it even matters because I have so many bookmarks and tags that my only hope of ever finding something I’ve bookmarked is by using the search feature and praying that at the time of reading I labeled what I was reading in such a manner that will allow me to pick the same key words six months later.

But I did not title this post “my inefficient social bookmarking habits.” So first, my unpopular comment. I think this blog post is a little unfair. Back last fall, I received an invite for Quechup and joined and went through the invite your friends routine. And as has been noted by others, instead of checking against one’s email address book and giving a list of names, Quechup emailed everybody. Now I can certainly understand Dean’s frustration with Diigo, since I was extremely annoyed (understatement) with the Quechup incident. And here is my confession: Despite how annoyed I was with that Quechup incident, I still did the “find your friends” search with Diigo, even while thinking, “These people could be total jerks like that Quechup site was and betray my trust and send an email to everyone I know.” And yet I still did it. Even though I was irate beyond belief last September, I still put my trust out there again. And didn’t click the button to submit to everyone who wasn’t in Diigo already and didn’t spam everyone and their mother’s realtor’s brother accordingly. Clicking a button that is labeled in a way that indicates no one will be emailed –and having everyone emailed –that is duplicitous and underhanded. But when an end-user is led through a series of steps that they do automatically, but which produces undesirable results (from the end-user’s perspective), this is a usability issue but not necessarily an unethical company at work.

What can be done to address this as a usability problem? How important is it to an end-user to invite all their “friends”? If it is not very important and a company’s main goal is user satisfaction, is there a way to make it an extra, purposeful step to invite friends that don’t already use the site? Does anyone even use this feature, especially with gmail, where every contact you’ve ever emailed is saved automatically to your address book?

Wow, now that I have my blog home all set up again, I’m so inspired to comment on the massive comments in my aggregator. Through a chain of reading, I see Nate talking about Clarence’s post, which discusses the concept of how students should be assessed in a world where the classroom walls can extend globally and where collaboration can be made transparent through wikis and other web 2.0 tools.

In the original post to which they refer, the author relays an exchange that highlights a huge issue not just with the web 2.0 world of assessment, but with group assessment in general:

Jeff Utecht: How would you assess a student who changed a single word?
Ryan Bretag: Think about contributing one word from a poetry standpoint, how critical is one word? Writing in a hypertext society makes that one word critical.- From the Strength of Weak Ties.

If a group of students is working together and one student serves as the student who conceptualizes an idea, and the other students work diligently to carry out the idea at the direction of the first student, did the self-selected/group-elected leader contribute more?  And now, when collaboration takes place through a more transparent record, for example, if you use a wiki, how do you ascertain individual student’s contributions. One of the references on The Strength of Weak Ties is to a wiki that uses a framework of significant contribution versus constructive modification. The creator of that rubric, David Kuropatwa noted previously on his own blog the distinction between these two varieties of contribution and the special challenge of “constructive modification” as a critical thinking process is addressed. In determining assessment strategies, one could also do as Ben Wilkoff did and turn it over to the students to discuss.

I encounter more often the issue raised by another blogger who noted failure to integrate wikis in a way that led to student creation of content.   Even the earlier example of the math wiki is very structured, with questions I assume were determined by the teacher for students to answer.

Not in these posts and discussions but in society at large, I see a lot of confusion about the purpose of a wiki. And for that matter, a lot of suspicion about externalized collaboration in education. Though a wiki is in written form, it is, for me, at least, an externalization of thought process and collaboration. At its most elaborate (for example wikipedia), it can be a valuable resource, but most of the time it will reflect information that is targeted for a specific community. In some cases, the information gathered might have outlived its purpose (not unlike, by the way, many websites!). The wiki exists not to document forever and ever, but to provide an opportunity for collaboration as those collaborating make connections in their own minds and developed their own questions, ideas, and analyses. That too is the power of the wiki, that it can change and grow as its purpose and function expand. Wikis offer an opportunity to externalize the work of a collective mind, which directly contradicts the typical education model which requires us to assess each student purely for their individual contribution (most of the time). And there are a lot of students and teachers experimenting with how to make it work.

I have to admit, I was trying to blog during the SuperBowl, but my heart wasn’t in it. Greg’s post about the ads yesterday reminded me that I was already missing the boat on relevance a day later and now that it’s Tuesday, and I’m still pulling this post together, and it’s getting to the point of complete irrelevance, which is more a statement of how fast topics move on in importance.

What struck me as I half-watched the ill-fated game was the importance of digital cable and on-demand video for how we view and re-view cultural moments such as the Superbowl and its ads. For example, take the infamous Justin/Janet “costume malfunction” of the 2004 Superbowl half-time show. It was early in my DVR experience, and when the infamous “malfunction” occurred, I was incredulous. Did what I think just happened, happen? Stop. Rewind. Replay. Pause. Stop. Rewind. I can now stop time and slow it to the pace I need. What did we do before DVR?

All of a sudden, TV becomes a fundamentally different viewing experience. Though the NFL has implemented the “instant replay” for the first time in 1986 (and then abandoned it and then brought it back in 1999), now a large number or viewers of television have that power. Furthermore, even if some do not have that ability when watching television, the increasing pervasiveness of online video is making more and more moments available for us to play and replay over and over.

Meanwhile, we take it for granted that we will have access to much content whenever we wish. Ads during the Superbowl this season were touted as being available on MySpace after the game. What other ways has increased user control and on-demand video impacted our role as “audience”?