Educators are collegial by nature (that's where the word came from in the first place). Yes, institutions may compete for students and dollars or even U.S. News rankings, but by and large, I observe that educators and researchers are naturally more collaborative than workers in other industries.

Educators and Researchers have some unique challenges as well. They need more money than they have to get their work done (despite ever higher tuition rates). Just look at the cost of the Superconducting Super Collider. As a market, they are not typically well-served by traditional businesses because they are viewed as requiring low margins to be successful. Further, schools and universities by necessity are geographically broadly distributed so if economist want to collaborate with other economists they either need to do a lot of travel or embrace technology that helps collaborate from home. I think this need alone is what propelled the adoption of the Internet when it was still primarily a education and research network. Finally, institutions often need the latest and greatest technologies to get their unique jobs done and are willing to be early adopters to get access to it.

Since Sun was born out of the academy and we've been working with educators and researchers for the past 25 years, we understand these dynamics and have been creating communities of common interests to solve unique problems even before we had social networking technology.

The two latest examples of this are PA-SIG and I-SIG. Our researchers and developers work with customers to solve problems that wouldn't be solved working separately. It the classic premise defined by Alvin Toffler in his book Powershift (Published in 1991) where the consumer becomes engaged in the production of goods they ultimately consume. (He originally coined the term prosumer to explain this concept, not Donald Tapscott who took credit for it in his book, The Digital Economy published in 1995.

This is why we are so excited about launching EduConnection.org on October 27^th, an online community of educators, technologists and contributors dedicated to sharing best practices. We've got the experience and engagement of great customers that we want to expand to all domains of education and research.

EduConnection is an eNewsletter with more than 35,000 worldwide subscribers. These are education customers, partners and experts with exceptional experiences and information. Each year Sun has brought these education advocates together to learn, to share and to make connections at the Education and Research Conference. We're now taking that conversation further by our existing EduConnection newsletter to an interactive community that still has the opportunity to come together in face to face meetings around the world. Subscribers of the online EduConnection.org community will be invited to join, experience and contribute if they choose. This way instead of just being a 1 way communication on education technology - a monologue from Sun to the subscribers – we're shifting the conversation to one where community members can select the content they want, define useful content via connection with other members, contribute articles, linked blogs, videos, podcasts and more.

Educators, researchers and administrators who join will get access to valuable Education industry content and conversation, whether a contributor or reader.

Join the conversation

I hate the term social networking as it applies to business communities. It may make sense to call these technologies social networking if you're referring to the early applications in places like Myspace, Facebook, and even Linkedin.

I heard a speech recently from the CTO of Linked In and I liked the humorous metaphor he used to describe the three big social networking sites. Myspace is the bar, Facebook is the backyard barbeque and Linked In is the office water cooler. I think it accurately describes at least the original purpose of these social networks.

But now we have the capacity to use technology created out of social networking to address shared concerns across multiple audiences and groups of people. Social networking won't replace the human need to get together face to face with others. Rather, social networking technologies augment and extend interactions, providing more value for participants than a stand-alone meeting would.

My Palm Treo is on is on its last legs, so as I've been waiting for the new iPhone to come out, I've been trying to figure out how I'll export my Palm address book and use the native Apple Calendar, To-Do lists, and other applications. At the same time, I've also been trying to figure out how a bunch of social networking technologies work together (or not), and which ones I'll use. This post is about what I've learned so far.

The native Mac personal productivity tools have deficiencies, and I only hope that Apple addresses these in the near future. For example, "To-Do" lists don't have categories. If you want to categorize your to-do lists, you have to create a different calendar. This quickly becomes unwieldy.

Palm has allowed up to 20 categories in its To-Do lists since about 1998. Why doesn't Apple? I really like the approach that "Things" software does to solve this problem. It lets you tag your action items on the fly, much like you can with iPhoto.

Here's a problem with the Calendar: if you want to share it, you can only do so via the .Mac service, which Apple is going to rename "MobileMe."  I'll have to wait and see what they fix  MobileMe, but with its predecessor .mac, you could use groups in address book and you couldn't edit your calendar via a plain old brwoser.

At the same time that I've been preparing to convert my phone, I've also been trying to figure out how I should use Plaxo, LinkedIn and Facebook. I've become a convert to the benefit of social networking as a way to connect with friends and colleagues I don't necessarily see all the time. After all, my old-fashioned Christmas card list inevitably loses one or two people every year.

Of course, these sites aren't really new. LinkedIn has been around since 2002. Had I understood the idea, I would have "linked in" all my Sun colleagues a long time ago. As they moved to other companies, I could have more easily stayed connected to them. But I was afraid of being endlessly hounded by people looking for jobs or trying to sell me something, so I didn't connect to LinkedIn until very recently.

Plaxo, for me, was in the same boat as LinkedIn. I joined a long time ago, but I didn't like being bugged by members of my network to update my business card, so I didn't add to it.

In the process of trying to figure out how to overcome the limitations of my Mac, I stumbled upon Plaxo again and discovered its great little Mac Address Book add-on. The problem with Plaxo, though, is that it forces you to create yet another social network in order to access a contact's business card. The last thing I wanted to do is create a third network on top of my LinkedIn and Facebook networks.

So I played around with LinkedIn. Since it has the capability to import and export addresses, I wanted to see if I could use it instead of Plaxo, eliminating the need to create yet another social network in my life. I knew that there was a widget that connected LinkedIn with Facebook. I wanted to see if I could manage my address book in Linked in.

The answer was no. LinkedIn doesn't export contact information beyond a name and email address. But I wanted the phone numbers, since the phone was the catalyst for this whole investigation in the first place.

So here's how I've decided to use these technologies.

1. Use Plaxo. After linking to someone else, you can get access to their contact information. I can then sync it to my Mac's Address Book and get it on my (future) iPhone. Plaxo also lets me view and edit my calendar, to-do liast and address book for free, via any client Web browser. (I don't have to pay that .Mac extortion fee!)

I paid for a Plaxo premium membership to test the Plaxo and LinkedIn sync. The problem is that it hasn't been available, even though they advertise that it is. When I called "premium support," they told me that there were technical problems and that the service would be available any day. That was about a month ago, and it's still not available, so I canceled my premium service.

However, I did like the de-duping feature of the Plaxo premium service. It did a much better job than the native Apple apps.

2. Use LinkedIn or Facebook, or both, based on personal preference. LinkedIn contacts can be imported into Facebook through a widget, but it's still kind of clumsy. And Facebook hasn't returned the favor to LinkedIn.

My wife forwarded me an email she received that was attributed to Tom Faulkner, publisher and managing editor of IHRIM Press. The email invited recipients to "an anti-social network:

"Announcing the launch of the first Virtual Anti-Social Network—all you have to do to is nothing:

• No log-ons


• No passwords


• No memberships


• Nothing to add to your favorites


• No need to create a phony profile


• No uploads or downloads

[Read More]

...doesn’t mean it’s a new idea.

This is the first lesson I learned from our annual Worldwide Education and Research Conference (a.k.a. the WWERC) in February. We picked the theme “The Power of Communities” for the conference because open source and the communities that support it are a key part of Sun’s strategy. I believe that communities are also critical to the success of academic, administrative and research computing.

For each of these segments, there are community development projects at various stages of maturity. In the academic computing arena, Sakai, a free, community source collaboration and learning environment, is already fairly well established. It's in production at over 150 institutions and being piloted by over 100 more. Kuali , a suite of open source software for administrative computing, is a more recent effort. In the research community, sharing open source code has been a key part of doing research for years, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.

So given that there are all these academic communities, and given that we were just about to hold an education focused on the power of communities, I thought we should eat our own dog food and actually launch an online community of our own. So we created one on Ning.com, and invited all of the confirmed WWERC attendees to join.

Of that original list of about 500 people, 180 have joined. Of those, a small number connected online before the conference. Since the conference, however, activity in the community has dwindled. Maybe it will pick up again before the 2009 WWERC. I don't know. But we're looking into ways to re-energize it.

What I’m learning is that communities—be they in the physical or virtual worlds—don't just happen overnight. It takes work to be successful. It requires a commitment of time and money and an offer of value to (and from) the community members themselves. The difference, of course, between physical and virtual communities is that in the latter, it's easier to significantly increase the number of people in a community as well as geographic scope (among the digital “haves” of the world, at lest). But as I wrote in a previous blog posting, just having a bunch of people in a community isn’t useful by itself. It can simply result in a modern-day Tower of Babel.

So I’m going to document, right here in my blog, our journey of creating a purposeful online community. Now that the original catalyst for creating our online community (i.e., the WWERC) is over, the first step is to define what this community is for, in the long term. Is it a place for us to distribute information about Sun in education? Listen to our customers? Get them excited about Sun, our products and technologies? Give them a place to ask their colleagues questions? Let them give us suggestions for better products? Or all of the above?

First, I’ve got a bunch of questions for you all out there:

1. What's the most effective way to tap into the collective wisdom of the community? Such tools as social bookmarking like del.icio.us,  Digg, reddit and StumbleUpon are interesting, but I don’t want to know what the whole world is bookmarking, I want to know what members of my ERC community are bookmarking. I want to know what books and articles they're reading, as well.

   
   

2. How can we get members of the community to contribute time and insights to Sun as well as to each other? What is reasonable given our target demographic? (I’ll write a future blog about what I’m learning about this from a blog-soon-to-be-book called Groundswell from a couple of Forrester analysts, Charline Li and Josh Bernoff.)

   
   

3. What technologies or platforms should we embrace? For example, we chose Ning to host our first generation of the ERC community. We needed something that was fast to launch and global in reach. Facebook is primarily focused on the US, and doesn’t necessarily have a good reputation among our target audience. Still, it has a huge membership. So should we sit on top of Facebook or be standalone? Should we link to Facebook or other communities, and if so, how?

   
   

If anyone has insights into these questions I’d love to hear from you. After all, just because these are new thoughts or questions to me, it doesn’t mean the community hasn’t already come up with the answers. That really is the power of community.

 
 

In the original Tower of Babel story, all the humans on earth spoke a single language and lived in a single place. They decided to build a structure that would reach into the heavens and implicitly show that humans were as powerful as God. Well, God had other plans. He invented a multitude of languages and scattered the people across the world. The Tower of Babel project was abandoned.

In the 21st century remake of this story, humans accidentally invented social network sites. Millions of people, primarily college-aged adults, join the communities. They start engaging in the communities in an attempt to build as large a “Friends” list as possible. Well, it's hard to interact with millions of people, so members create groups within these larger communities. (Facebook now hosts thousands of groups appealing to every interest conceivable, from Burritos in Oxford to Friends of the Sun Microsystems Foundation.) Sometimes they create separate communities altogether, such as LinkedIn (for professional networking). In fact, many people lose confidence in these new "Towers of Babel" and try to leave them, only to discover that leaving isn't as easy as joining.

Yet social networking as a technology is a powerful extension of the quintessential human strategy of banding together for a common interest. Think of the cavemen, who had to work as a team to take down the larger and more powerful wooly mammoths. How can organizations—be they corporate or academic—use this technology without losing the trust of their members? As Facebook and MySpace attempt to become a platform upon which others build their communities, what assurances do we need that our members won't be exploited beyond their willingness to be exploited? Should we instead build our own communities on stand-alone technology platforms where we can assure our members are protected?

Answering these questions is one of the key objects of our annual Worldwide Education & Research Conference this week in San Francisco . We've got an incredible array of speakers on the power and limits of communities. We're streaming the main presentations over the Web if you want to watch in real time (the link will be live on February 27), and we'll make them available asynchronously for later playback as well.

The first Tower of Babel didn't work out so well because of divine intervention. Perhaps these modern-day Towers can be effectively harnessed for productive use, but not without changing the fundamental compact that exists between a community and its members. Because unlike the real world, it's much easier to scatter on the Web if the Tower starts to crumble.

By the way, here's the original story from the Book of Genesis:

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Come, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Come, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children builded. And the Lord said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them." Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand  one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there  confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

 (Image: The Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1563), courtesy of Wikipedia.)

"On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog."

This classic New Yorker cartoon (which you can see here, since I don't want to risk copyright infringement) captured one of the earliest virtues of the Internet: the anonymity enjoyed by its users, which gave them the freedom to say anything, or be anyone. But like most virtues, take it too far and it become a vice. The most extreme example is the sad, sick story of the troubled Missouri teen who killed herself because of a hoax perpetuated on MySpace by a mother and her daughter masquerading as a teenage boy.  Even though I'm a news junkie, I somehow missed this tragedy when it first came to light over a year ago. What finally caught my eye this past week was the agreement between MySpace and legal authorities in 49 states for some kind of age verification and other child  protection measures. These measures were partially spawned by what has become known as the "MySpace Suicide," but it's clearly not the only case where anonymity has been abused on the Internet with tragic results.

I'd like to replace the complete anonymity of the early Internet with accountability and confidentiality.  I use joe.hartley@sun.com as my AIM sign-on.  It's easy for  people to remember, and they know who I am.  That of course doesn't mean I'm actually that person; it could be an imposter using my email address. That's where some kind of validation or federated  identity system needs to be created—a trademark of sorts that proves that I am who I claim to be.  Of course, we can't completely do away with anonymity on the Internet. It has its place, especially in communities related to providing people with online support for medical conditions or domestic abuse. But in the majority of areas, we've got to start demanding accountability of online sources and identities.

Most  importantly, we need to teach our children (and some adults) that you can't assume that someone you meet in the virtual world is the person they say they are. It could just be another dog.

I'm simultaneously excited and perplexed by the social phenomena of Web 2.0. I'm excited because through these new technologies, people have a way to stay connected throughout their lifetimes in a way they've never been able to before. I graduated from college in the early 1980s -- before cell phones, email or the public Internet. Since that time, I've had 10 different physical home addresses and phone numbers. The same holds true for most of my friends. I know it's cliché, but one way I've stayed connected with those friends over the years is through the annual Christmas card. (We publish a brief poem with a picture every year and send it to our friends.) Inevitably, people move and their change of address cards never arrive or the US Postal Service forwarding orders expire, so the cards are “returned to sender” and we lose touch.

In contrast, people graduating from college today can have the same phone number, email address and Web site their entire life. I'm excited by the benefits that we as a species will accrue as that ability to stay connected and transfer life experience will improve our lives much the same that the elders helped our ancestors survive in prehistoric times. (Does anyone know if there's been any research on how these technologies are affecting people and their social connectedness?)

The social networking phenomenon also perplexes me because I didn't grow up with some of these technologies, so I'm trying to figure out what some of these social networks are and which I should belong to. I joined Facebook, and I'm encouraging other executives at Sun to do so as well because it seems that Facebook is the best way to connect the college you attended with Sun (which is very important to Sun). To my dismay, very few of my “Class of '83” classmates have joined Facebook, so it may not be the best way to connect to my friends whose connections I've lost over the years of Christmas card exchanges. Hopefully that will be rectified with time as Facebook use expands to the “older” generations.

But what about MySpace? or LinkedIn? Should I belong to all of them? There's even some controversy out there about which network has which demographics or appeals to which social class. At what point does all this social networking reach a point of diminishing returns? I'm also trying to figure out the utility of Digg, del.ic.ous, and StumbleUpon (which is one way I'm discovering some of the creative things people are inventing).

 Human beings are social animals. We like to get together with other human beings to do things. Evolutionarily speaking, it's how humans have survived. We got together and learned what foods to eat (or not). We banded together to hunt down prey much bigger and stronger than us. We shared ideas about tools to make life easier.

I think tech companies and the press often forget this fact. We have a tendency to overstate the impact of technology on human beings. We miss some things altogether: YouTube was a social phenomena as much as it was about technology. It was started by a couple of guys who wanted to share home movies with their extended families. They certainly didn't set out to create a revolution in the entertainment industry, but that's what they did by creating a way for people to share similar videos in a community. We overstate others, such as “distance education.” In many ways, “distance education” or “elearning” has been around since at least the early days of television (especially outside the US). This technology didn't put universities out of business, as many predicted. Just the opposite has happened. It's giving universities new revenue streams and enabling students from all over the world to connect with each other around academic disciplines.

Remember Web 1.0 or the Internet bubble? Many people actually thought that the Internet was going to put brick-and-mortar stores out of business. Someone thought that receiving dog food by mail was going to be more successful than conventional pet stores. They were wrong. Going to the pet store is not just getting pet supplies. It's about connecting with other humans who share similar interests. It's about learning what works or doesn't for your pet. It's about connecting with other people who share your love of dogs, cats, rats -- or even iguanas, for that matter. A sock puppet dog can't compete with that. 

One of my favorite books on this subject is Guns, Germs & Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond. If you want an approachable and thought-provoking history of the world in 300 pages, get this book. I think he does one of the best jobs I have ever seen of describing the benefits of these social capabilities in making humans survive and thrive. For example, compared to most animals, we have one of the longest development periods before being able to take care of ourselves (16 to 20 years, or longer for some people I know.) One way we've survived, given this developmental time span, is that elders have lived long enough to pass on important learning to the youth. (What foods to eat.     Where or how to hunt, etc.) 

So we're social animals, and now the Web is expanding our ways to stay connected with people we care about as well as to connect with new people who share similar interests. It's going to transform us in ways we are only beginning to imagine.

(Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Interesting articles I've discovered on this topic since posting this.

BusinessWeek, Sept 17, 2007  "O.K. (Sigh), I'll Join Facebook" New York Times, Sept. 12, 2007, "New Social Sites Cater to People of a Certain Age" Business Week, Sept. 4, 2007, "Worlds Colliding: My Mom's on Facebook!"