SNS visibility norms (a response to Scoble)

A few days ago, I lamented the tech crowd’s Facebook fetish. Scoble raised the bar by responding to all of my nitpicks. Now, it’s my turn again. Tehehe.

I think that Scoble summed it all up perfectly with this:

“But what I don’t understand is why so much of the tech crowd who lament Walled Gardens worship Facebook.” Because there isn’t anything better. It’s like why we are so gaga over the iPhone. The iPhone is locked up tight and doesn’t let us play. But it is so superior to the alternatives that we’ll put up with all the walls.

He’s totally right. And what he’s really saying is that I should recognize and accept the hypocrisy within the tech crowd. They will happily say one thing loudly, but if the cool new glittery toy that they want has major failings, they’ll bite – hook, line, and sinker. I’m not convinced that FB is “so superior to the alternatives,” but I totally see how it plays into the values and aesthetics of the tech crowd. Maybe we should start calling FB (and other tech toys) “Precious”? And then we can run around in demented voices saying “One tool to rule them all!” ::giggle:: (OK, that’s probably not funny, but it’s late and I’m entertaining myself here.)

Anyhow… what I really want to address was a realization wrt visibility that I had while reading Scoble. In writing my earlier post, I was thinking primarily of teens when I was talking about visibility. Scoble points out that he really WANTS to be super visible, searchable on Google, etc. And he references the career-minded college students who will relish said visibility. This made me think about the different factors at play when it comes to visibility on social network sites.

MySpace started out as PUBLIC PUBLIC PUBLIC. They only added privacy features when they welcomed 14 and 15-year olds and for a while, you had to lie and say you were 14 to get a private profile. While the teen crowd was not using MySpace as a hyperpublic platform, artists were. They wanted to be as public as possible, to get as many fans as possible, to SEE and BE SEEN. This wasn’t just the story of musicians… even semi-porn divas like Forbidden and Tila were all about being hyperpublic and there were certainly teens who thought they’d be the next American Idol or Top Model by being found on MySpace. There are folks who want to leverage the platform to be the object of everyone’s gaze. As it expanded, MySpace received unbelievable pressure to add privacy options, to protect its users (both young and old). Even though a MS Friends-only profile is about as private as you can get, MySpace is constantly shat on for being dangerous because of exposure.

Facebook differentiated itself by being private, often irritatingly so. Hell, in the beginning Harvard kids couldn’t interact with their friends at Yale, but that quickly changed. Teens and their parents worship Facebook for its privacy structures, often not realizing that joining the “Los Angeles” network is not exactly private. For college students and high school students, the school and location network are really meaningful and totally viable structural boundaries for sociability. Yet, the 25+ crowd doesn’t really live in the same network boundaries. I’m constantly shifting between LA and SF as my city network. When I interview teens, 80%+ of their FB network is from their high school. Only 8% of my network is from Berkeley and the largest network (San Francisco) only comprises 17% of my network. Networks don’t work for highly-mobile 25+ crowd because they don’t live in pre-defined networks. (For once, I’m an example!)

The interesting thing is that Scoble wants to make Facebook do what MySpace does. He wants to be a micro-celeb with a bazillion friends/fans and he wants to interact with all of them. And he wants to do it on Facebook because he sees that as more his space than MySpace, even though the other is set up for that. (I can’t really see the porn-Scoble or the emo-Scoble, but it sure would be funny.) He’s bumping up against the fact that Facebook was designed to be closed, to be intimate, to be tight. It was what made its early adopters value it. And now, for whatever reason, Facebook has decided to move in the direction of MySpace – slowly tiptoeing to being a very public service.

It makes sense to attract those who want to be public, but how public can they go without affecting those who relish the closed-ness? For the most part, Facebook has been immune from privacy-related attacks from the Attorneys General and press. They’ve been toted as the “right” solution. Can people who want to be private live alongside those who want to be PUBLIC? How are boundaries going to be negotiated? It seems to me that this all comes back to context and context is really getting cloudy here. It seems to me that there might be two totally different sets of expectations emerging without an in-between solution. And I have a sneaking suspicion that the “solution” is to push people into accepting being public.

I feel the need to address folks’ response that it’s all about the privacy settings. Someone out there has to have public data on how frequently people change settings vs. staying with the defaults. (I’ve seen plenty of private reports on this, but don’t know of any that I can cite.) Let’s just say that defaults matter. Very few people change the defaults. They are more likely to shift their behavior (or leave a site) than change the defaults. Thus, a move to force people to “opt-out” is not only about dictating the social expectations, but also setting people up to face the costs of those defaults, even if they don’t really want to. I don’t really understand why Facebook decided to make public search opt-out. OK, I do get it, but I don’t like it. Those who want to be PUBLIC are more likely to change settings than those who chose Facebook for its perceived privacy. Why did Facebook go from default-to-privacy-protection to default-to-exposure? I guess I know the answer to this… it’s all about philosophy. Unfortunately, it’s not a philosophy that most of the teens I interviewed or their parents share. But this type of exposure is far more insidious and potentially harmful than the privacy trainwreck I documented earlier.

I think that one of the reasons that the tech crowd lurves Facebook is because they both want the “transparent society.” This is the philosophy that information dissemination can only be beneficial and that people should not seek to hide things. Embedded in this are unstated issues of privilege and normative views. It’s OK to be transparent when you look like everyone else, but go ask the gay Christian living in an Arab state how he feels about being transparent about his social world. Fleshing out a critique of the transparent society requires a different post, but I’m starting to get the sinking feeling that we’re all part of a transparent society experiment and my discomfort stems from a deep concern about who all is going to get washed up in that tsunami. The goal doesn’t seem to be about helping people maintain privacy; it seems more like pushing them to accept a world where they are constantly aware of everyone around them. Hmm…

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controlling your public appearance

In the last month, I’ve received almost a dozen panicked emails from people who had commented on my blog at one point or another and were horrified to find that their comment was at the top of Google’s search for their name. In each case, I have respectfully altered the comment to an anonymous name. I prefer not to remove these comments because this leaves holes in my blog, especially when others’ comments are based on those earlier comments. Unfortunately, most of these people do not understand how Google’s cache works and write back in rage that it’s not fixed. I politely try to inform them that Google’s cache can take months to update and I cannot do anything to speed this up.

When people bitch about MySpace and Facebook being walled gardens, one of the positive things that I offer in return is, “at least those teens’ profiles aren’t in Google’s cache.” With Facebook’s opt-out decision, this is no longer the case. As I mentioned yesterday, I’m a bit terrified of what this might mean long-term.

As a teenager, I was petrified of my mother finding my Usenet posts. It’s not that I said much on Usenet that would’ve upset her (although the Bad Religion tirades are a wee bit embarrassing), but I didn’t want her to see my political or topical commentaries. (Sidenote: I left the sexuality exploration discussions for IRC which ::crossing fingers:: weren’t recorded.) I used various handles, most of which are not findable by anyone other than my brother (and even he can’t find all of them). That’s not to say that there’s not a lot of embarrassing material online – I’ve been blogging for over ten years and I’ve definitely posted things that would be drudged up if I were to run for office.

The best thing about being an active blogger is that stuff gets buried by repetitive blogging. My new stuff goes to the top of the search engines, my old stuff fades away. And we have a name for anyone who goes out of their way to find that old stuff: stalker. And we don’t really wanna work for, date, or befriend genuine stalkers. If it’s public, but not easy to find, it’s creepy that you went out of your way to find it. (I’m fascinated by the creeps… and journalists… who go through courthouses and other public records places to drudge up tax records, legal motions, housing details, etc. It’s all public, but c’mon now…)

We’ve all heard that privacy is dead, but you can still control your public appearance and it’s really critical that you start doing so. Don’t whimper about how Google is destroying your reputation. Take control!

So here are some suggestions, for adults and teenagers:

  • Create a public Internet identity. I strongly recommend blogging, but even a homepage will do. Have a genuine all-accessible identity online that you’re cool with grandma and your boss reading. Don’t make it uber drab, but do provide context for who you are, what you do, what you’re passionate about, etc. Think of it as a digital body and dress it up as if it were going into a job interview. Blogging is especially good because you can keep updating your identity over time in a way that shows that you think. It’s much easier to get a sense of someone through their commentary on public affairs or life around them than through a static page.
  • Say NO! to Facebook’s public search option. Click “privacy” – “search.” Under “Who can find my public search listing outside of Facebook?” uncheck both boxes. Be proactive about this. You might not think you care now, but having your Facebook profile at the top of a search for your name might not be what you want when you’re looking for a job.
  • Expect unexpected audiences. Your profile on Facebook and MySpace might be “private” but when you join the Los Angeles Network or when you accept someone who knows someone, you might find that the audience viewing your profile is not who you expected. Are you prepared for this? Make sure that profile says what you want it to say, even to those you don’t expect. If you want to be a porn diva and make it in Hollywood, put up that slutty photo, but if you want to be a lawyer, you might regret that photo a few years from now. Of course, I’m sure there are porn stars who later became lawyers, just like there are actors who became governors.
  • Write blog comments as though you’re writing your own blog. The more popular a blog, the more likely the comments from that blog are to show up high on Google’s lists. If you write inflammatory shit on those blogs just to piss people off, it will come back to haunt you. (It depresses me that a huge chunk of the comments on BoingBoing’s new comment system are extremely negative.) Personally, I don’t think that you should be anonymous on a blog. I think that you should stand by your name, but write articulately. And blog on your own blog so that the comments are not at the top.
  • Treat video and audio just like text. Right now, video and audio aren’t searchable, but they will be. Don’t think that you can say or do anything you want on a video and it will never come up. That Neo-Nazi video you made and put up on YouTube cuz you thought it was funny will eventually be searchable and associated with your name. Are you really ready for that to appear at the top of a Google ego search?

(If you have other suggestions, add them to the comments.)

But above all else, seriously, create a public Internet identity, maintain it, link to it, build it, love it, hug it, and call it George. I can’t tell you how important this is. I used to say that a LinkedIn profile would do, but now that they’re so locked down to people who don’t pay, they don’t provide that value any more. If you don’t want to go through the hassle of registering a domain and figuring out HTML, just make a Blogspot account and make the Title your name. But keep it up-to-date so that when people want to look up who you are, they’re going to see that page and go, “wow, she’s really interesting.”

Yesterday, I was talking about this uber smart college frosh to one of my colleagues. His name is about as generic as it gets and he shares it with a few celebs – “Sam Jackson” – so I wasn’t expecting much when I threw his name into Google. Much to my pleasure, his college blog comes up as #4 on Google. Here is a newly minted college freshman who put together a blog about applying to college when he was in high school, has commented on others’ blogs in an articulate and engaging manner, and is genuinely actively engaged in thinking about the world around him. He’s attracted the attention of all sorts of folks and I have no doubt that people who wish to hire him (or admit him) have looked at this blog to get a sense of who he is. He makes it clear that he understands this medium and how to present himself accordingly. Hell, I intend to hire him precisely because he gets it.

Carefully crafting and cautiously managing one’s public image is a critical aspect of living in a mediated public world. Every advice column I’ve read warns people of the dangers of living online. I think that this is idiotic. People need to embrace the world we live in and learn to work within its framework. Don’t panic about being public – embrace it and handle it with elegance.

[PS: I’ve said a lot of this before in the Harvard Business Review.]

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confused by Facebook

Social network sites have become powerful tools and platforms for all sorts of content and cultural producers. Starting with Friendster, artists leveraged the network capabilities to communicate with their fans. This took on a new level with MySpace, resulting in the explicit creation of artist profiles. Even within the constraints of Facebook, artists built groups and found other ways to collect and communicate with their fans.

Unfortunately, artists are continually learning that when they rely on someone else’s platform to distribute their message, they’re under their control. Friendster did everything possible to discourage bands from communicating with fans on their site. MySpace reversed this trend by supporting artists, generating all sorts of kudos from the artistic community. Unfortunately, Facebook seems to have taken on a more Friendster-esque policy. My friend Baratunde was recently burned by Facebook. In an effort to curb spam, they killed off legitimate uses of mass messaging, silencing those well-intentioned users that adored them.

I am utterly confused by the ways in which the tech industry fetishizes Facebook. There’s no doubt that Facebook’s F8 launch was *brilliant*. Offering APIs and the possibility of monetization is a Web 2.0 developer’s wet dream. (Never mind that I don’t know of anyone really making money off of Facebook aside from the Poker App guy.) But what I don’t understand is why so much of the tech crowd who lament Walled Gardens worship Facebook. What am I missing here? Why is the tech crowd so entranced with Facebook?

I’m also befuddled by the slippery slope of Facebook. Today, they announced public search listings on Facebook. I’m utterly fascinated by how people talk about Facebook as being more private, more secure than MySpace. By default, people’s FB profiles are only available to their network. Join a City network and your profile is far more open than you realize. Accept the default search listings and you’re findable on Google. The default is far beyond friends-only and locking a FB profile down to friends-only takes dozens of clicks in numerous different locations. Plus, you never can really tell because if you join a new network, everything is by-default open to that network (including your IM and phone number). To make matters weirder, if you install an App, you give the creator access to all of your profile data (no one reads those checkboxes anyhow). Most people never touch the defaults, meaning that they are far more exposed on Facebook than they realize. zrven a college network is not that secure. MySpace on the other hand is rather simple: public or friends-only. Friends-only is far more secure than the defaults on Facebook. And public is well-understood to mean anyone could access it (and often this is the goal). But I know all too well that privacy has nothing to do with reality – it’s all about perception. And Facebook *feels* more secure than MySpace, even if it’s not. Still, I can’t wait to see how a generation of college students feel about their FB profile appearing at the top of Google searches. That outta make them feel good about socializing there. Not.

It seems odd to me that Facebook is doing all sorts of things to go against what gave them such strength: group support for people who wanted to gather around a particular activity, tightly controlled privacy defaults, and simple/clean profiles (which have been made utterly gaudy by Apps). I think I’m missing the logic here. ::scratching forehead::

I guess it’s that they’re trying to attract a new audience. There’s no doubt that the 30+ crowd has jumped on board over the summer (although many seem already sick of it). Is that crowd sustainable? Is it worth it monetarily? Is it affecting the college participation?

To all you professors out there… what are your students’ attitudes towards Facebook this fall? Are college students still super enamored with it or has it lost some of its appeal?

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pointer remix in a culture of copy/paste code (MySpace layouts as remix)

Back in May, Dan Perkel and I gave a talk at ICA called “Copy, Paste, Remix: Profile Codes on MySpace” (an abbreviated crib of the talk is here). We wanted to explore whether or not MySpace profiles operate as a form of remix. We started sussing out something that I’d like to call “pointer remix.” I want to try to lay this out here because I think that it has tremendous implications for the conversations around remix that keep emerging.

One way to think about remix is as the production of a new artifact through the artistic interweaving of other artifacts. Many hip-hop songs are “remix” in that they mix different tracks to create a new one. Video mashups are a form of remix when a combination of video, audio, and images are reconnected to form something new. You can even argue that collage or 1970s punk clothing is a form of remix, as both took the old, chopped it up and made something new. Levi-Strauss’ discussion of “bricolage” is relevant here, as is the montage effect known as the Kuleshov Effect (especially for arguing that something “new” is created). Lots of work around remix is bubbling up, often with other terms (like Aram Sinnreich’s “configurable culture”). Getting into the nitty gritty of remix would take a dissertation, but hopefully you get the concept that I’m referencing.

All of this work on remix assumes that the artists possess the original or a copy of the artifact that will be remixed. The artist may or may not have the “rights” to possess or modify that artifact, but they have a copy none-the-less. When they create a remix, they are structurally able to distribute it (even if the legality of such distribution is challenged). Part of this has to do with the nature of digital media – a copy is often no different than the original. And making a copy is pretty trivial at this point.

With this in mind, think about an average MySpace profile. What should come to mind is a multimedia collage: music, videos, images, text, etc. This collage is created through a practice known as “copy/paste” where teens (and adults) copy layout codes that they find on the web and paste it into the right place in the right forms to produce a profile collage. One can easily argue that this is remix: a remix of multimedia to produce a digital representation of self. Yet, the difference between this and say a hip-hop track is that the producer of a MySpace typically does not “hold” the content that they are using. Inevitably, the “img src=” code points to an image hosted by someone somewhere on the web; rarely is that owner the person posting said code to MySpace (and thus, the ongoing question of “bandwidth theft”). The profile artist is remixing pointers, not content. If the content to which s/he is pointing changes, the remix changes.

An example that we discussed at ICA concerns the ever-loved world of cats. Say that my profile is filled with pictures of cats from all over the world. The owners of said cat pictures get cranky that I’m using up their bandwidth (or thieving) so they decide to replace the pictures of cats with pictures of cat shit. Thus, my profile is now comprised of pictures of cat shit (not exactly the image I’m trying to convey). This is what happened to Steve-O.

One of the most high profile cases of such content replacement came from John McCain’s run-in with MySpace profile creation. His staff failed to use images from their own servers. When the owner of the image McCain used realized that the bandwidth hog was McCain, he decided to replace the image. All of a sudden, McCain’s MySpace profile informed supporters that he was going to support gay marriage. Needless to say, this got cleaned up pretty fast.

Profile creation on MySpace is all about identity production and the remix that takes place there is clearly to that end. Yet, the artifacts that are produced (profiles) do not require creators to ever have the content that they are using in their possession in any form – they are simply remixing the pointers to display something unique about who they are. It is a bricolage of brands and images for identity purposes, created solely through a truly poststructuralist practice of pointing.

We craft our identity through pointing all the time. Language is mostly about pointers (“signs”). The list of favorite TV shows, movies, and music on social network sites are a linguistic pointer to these cultural referents. Yet, in a multimedia world, instead of having to just reference them by name, I can reference them by image, video, and audio, pulling a much more rich set of content into the fold. In some senses, these practices are the same as they both involve constructing a semiotic pointer to a cultural object. Yet, because multimedia referents are “hosted”, multimedia pointers can be altered. Furthermore, there’s a perceived cost to pointing (namely, bandwidth). And, besides, we never think of uttering the linguistic referent as making a “copy.”

As remix is ridden with questions of legality, I can’t help but wonder what the legal ramifications of pointer remix might be. We live in a world obsessed with copyright and IP, but isn’t pointing to something fair use? Imagine how ridiculous the world would be if you could only consume, but never link (linguistically or through html).

But let’s take a different angle for a moment. What about cultural and historical significance? There are all sorts of physical artifacts that must be preserved because of their historical importance (you’ll find Boston to be filled with all sorts of historical placards on houses). Might there be a time when we feel compelled to preserve the remix MySpace profile masterpiece of someone? Would the owner of content being pointed to be required to maintain that content? To pay for bandwidth? To permit a copy be made and then hosted on another server to relieve the bandwidth costs? While many argue that copies should not be permitted without permission, and some argue that pointing should not be permitted without permission (a.k.a. “deep linking”), what happens when a culture exists that rests on pointer remix for identity construction? Everything about our culture is recursive – we are all standing on the shoulders of giants and it’s definitely turtles all the way down.

We live in a world where cultural objects are consumed to produce identity (gotta love de Certeau). Pointer remix is part of how this is happening. And yet, there seems to be something funny about it… It’s not quite remix, it’s not quite collage, but it’s definitely a powerful semiotic practice. Dan and I are going to keep playing with these ideas, but I figured y’all might enjoy toying with them some too, especially if you have a mind for semiotics.

[Note: If you aren’t familiar with Dan Perkel’s work, you should be because he kicks ass. His blog is here. And a really good paper for all of you interested in education is Copy and Paste Literacy? Literacy Practices in the Production of a MySpace Profile.]

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my favorite books

Lately, quite a few folks have written me asking for booklists for this that or the other – course syllabi, lit reviews, summer vacation reading, etc. I decided that I should probably put together a list of my favorite books. I’m sure that there are things that I’ve forgotten, but this probably paints a decent picture of where I’m coming from. So if this is of any use to you, enjoy!

my favorite books

Full disclosure: I get a small kick-back for the links to Amazon. What I make from Amazon does not even cover the costs of server space for this blog, but it does help, especially since I’ve chosen to keep this blog ads-free.

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chemistry as architecture

Jo Guldi and I were musing last night about architecture and I got to thinking about Lawrence Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. He lays out a framework that there are four regulatory forces operating in society: law, market, social norms, and architecture. The core of his argument is that code (the programming matter that makes up all things digital) is architecture.

One of the things that he points out is that when all regulatory forces align, change happens effectively and efficiently. A good example of this (not in his book) is domestic violence. The concept didn’t exist 50 years ago, but in the 1970s, social norms and law teamed up against domestic violence. The role of the market and architecture is a bit more of a stretch, but in some states, wages were withheld for domestic violence (in conjunction with divorce) and that rethinking of the home as a space that law could regulate was part of the puzzle. Still, I got to thinking about what made domestic violence spike back up in the 1990s. Domestic violence has long been associated with alcohol… and then, in the 90s, with crystal meth.

So I started thinking that there’s a third element of Lessig’s architecture:

Objects: architecture of space
Code: architecture of information
Chemistry: architecture of people

It is easy to discount chemistry as an architecture of humanity if we assume that it’s out of our control. But as we increasingly live in a world of DNA programming, pharmaceutical manipulation, and mood-altering substances (from the crap in Doritos to crystal meth), we must start accounting for the ways that chemistry serves as an architecture of human behavior and, thus, a force in regulating peoples and practices. I don’t think that it’s a distinct force, by a third leg of what constitutes “architecture.”

Part of why I think it’s important to highlight the role that chemistry (and to a certain degree biology) play as an architectural force is that it seems to me that there’s too little attention payed to the ways in which chemistry & social norms and chemistry & the law connect (while there’s a lot concerning objects and code). There are some great STS scholars in this area, including Cori Hayden (author of When Nature Goes Public) and Joe Dumit (author of Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity (In-formation)). Because of Big Pharm, there’s a lot of public talk about chemistry & the market, but I’m not aware of a lot of broader discourse about how chemistry is a regulatory society force (although Quinn Norton’s Bodyhacking Talk is fantabulous on this).

If we do conceive of chemistry as another aspect of architecture, how must we think of its regulatory powers and the needs to regulate it? In what ways is chemistry similar to and different from code or objects? (Or am I totally off base?) Anyhow, just some musings for the weekend…

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Australian Education.AU seminar talks

Earlier this month, I had the great fortune to go to Australia as a seminar speaker for Education.AU. Everyone warned me that it was winter and would be frigid, but to my delight, the weather in Melbourne and Brisbane was not any colder than a San Francisco summer day. I didn’t get to see much of Australia (saving the ‘roos for next time), but I did have a fantastic time. The people were wonderful, the food was delicious (go Melbourne), and it was just so great to be around so many folks invested in education who were not afraid of technology.

To my delight, there are recordings of my talks available for those of you who couldn’t make it. There are lots of recordings cuz there was a LOT of me. In fact, I think I talked continuously for four days… many hours of which are on tape for your viewing/listening pleasure. The general topic was “Generation MySpace” and I was talking about social network sites, education, and learning. I did two keynotes, two sets of questions and answers, two panels, and a fireside chat (on top of lots of press and more 1-1 and small group conversations). Here are links of some of those pieces:

Video:
– Keynote, Day 2, Melbourne

Audio:
– Keynote, Day 1, Brisbane, Part 1
– Keynote, Day 1, Brisbane, Part 2
– Keynote, Day 1, Brisbane, Part 3
– Q&A, Day 1, Brisbane, Part 1
– Q&A, Day 1, Brisbane, Part 2
– Q&A, Day 1, Brisbane, Part 3
– Panel, Day 1, Brisbane, Part 1
– Panel, Day 1, Brisbane, Part 2
– Panel, Day 1, Brisbane, Part 3
– Keynote, Day 2, Melbourne, Part 1
– Keynote, Day 2, Melbourne, Part 2
– Panel, Day 2, Melbourne
– Fireside Chat with Mark Pesce, Day 2, Melbourne

Personally, I liked my Day 2 keynote better (cuz I thought I was funnier) but your mileage may vary.

[More will come when I find all of the links.]

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airport extreme wifi failure: help?

The Apple stores near me have no appointments so I thought I’d see if anyone out there might have suggestions before I camp out at the store for a few hours. My Airport Extreme was working quite fine until this morning. I see my network in the list of networks, but when I try to go to it, I’m told that there is an error joining it. I’m able to connect to the Extreme via a tethered Ethernet cord. I updated the firmware and I restarted it. The light is green and it’s in my list of networks but I can’t actually join that network (nor can my Airport Express). What on earth am I doing wrong?

Update: and the prize goes to DK for suggesting that I just needed to tell the router my lucky number and all would be well. (Tx to Dan and Joe and Jacob for taking the time to help me debug. Another techno doom averted!)

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MacArthur Competition wrt New Digital Media and Learning

The MacArthur Foundation (the folks who fund my advisors and thus support my research) have just announced an open competition to encourage innovation and knowledge-sharing surrounding new digital media and learning. There are two types of awards:

– Innovation Awards will support learning entrepreneurs and builders of new digital environments for informal learning. Winners will receive $250,000 or $100,000.

– Knowledge Networking Awards will support communicators in connecting, mobilizing, circulating or translating new ideas around digital media and learning. Winners will receive a $30,000 base award and up to $75,000.

If this might be up your alley, check out their announcement and the competition homepage for more information.

Personally, I’m really interested in the knowledge networking awards. This is explicitly to help get knowledge out far and wide, to put theory into practice, and to make practice replicable. This is a great opportunity for educators and journalists and others who want to take what is known to the next level. Too many good ideas get locked down in small experiments or academic articles that few will ever hear of. The more effort there is to scale good ideas, the better we’ll all be! So start brewing some good ideas!

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