The Space Between the Nodes. PLNs & Social Media

I put this post together as a think-piece I prepared for one of my group 2013 NAEA presentation with Craig Roland, Tricia Fuglestad, and Ian Sands.  The topic was PLNs. I also created a group Pinterest board with shared resources about PLNs.

A PLN (Personal Learning Network or Professional Learning Network) is a collection of contacts (friends, associates, colleagues, and loose connections) with whom one connects, shares, converses, and learns from. PLNs are nothing new, and educators and artists all have a PLNs. What's new is all the attention PLNs are currently receiving in the ed-biz. PLNs are both real (face-to-face) and virtual (online). This post is about online PLNs. Being online also means that these PLNs utilize social media. There are ample resources online about PLNs (real and virtual), so I'll share my own insights about and experiences with my online PLNs.  

PLNs and social media.  PLNs and social media go hand in hand, and I fail to see a clear distinction between them. Social media is just that, social. There's an active community on multiple social media sites, or rather, multiple overlapping and constantly changing communities inhabiting these places. Personal Learning Networks are non-hierarchical and self-directed. I engage both my PLNs and social media as means of sharing, connecting, and learning on my own terms. Sometimes I'm all-in (immersing myself in the online environment, learning what I can, and reconnecting with friends and associates). Sometimes I share and participate only intermittently (as time allows and my creative, social, and personal urges dictate). And sometimes, I turn it all off and do other things.

I use social media for creating, sharing, conversing, and learning. I currently maintain accounts (curate content) on several social media sites (mostly Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Scoop.it, and Instagram). I'm migrating off Delicious after they got rid of stacks. I share and manage (curate) content these sites to focus, annotate, and I recently opened and maintain a paper.li account (to aggregate and publish Tweets of interest to art educators). The headers of my website, Tumblr, and blogsite all provide navigation links to one another, and my other accounts link back to my website. Inter-linking these sites allows me (and others if they are interested) an easy way to move from one to another. My work shared is shaped by what I have learned from others, a considerable amount of which I have learned through my online connections to people whose work I admire (aka, my PLN).

Varying in several ways, my online PLN is a loosely connected, multi-dimensional, and dynamic aggregate of people I know, don't know, follow, talk to, learn from, and with whom I share content using social media. Variations in how I engage with my PLN include the following.

• Time invested - When, how much, and how often I connect to my online PLN;  whether my contact is synchronous or asynchronous; and whether it is short term or long term in duration. I have limited time and many interests and projects. Intermittent engagement with various contacts in my PLN and in various sites works for me.

• Relationship to each of my connections - How and how well I know my contacts, where they live, how and why I include these individuals or groups in my PLN, how (or whether) I interact with these contacts. The types of relationships I maintain in my PLN are varied and constantly changing.

• Nature of interaction - My PLN interactions may be casual or focused, planned or unplanned, work-oriented or just for fun. My interactions include my own content sharing, liking others' content, commenting, asking questions, direct messaging, reposting someone's content to my audiences, and (to a lesser degree for me) planning or collaborating with folks. Oftentimes I am just observing (lurking) and learning from what others are sharing online.

• Purpose - My motivation for doing all of this includes staying informed about initiatives and professional practices, staying connected to individuals and groups that I value, looking for help or feedback on something specific I am doing, collaborating on a project, advocacy, self-promotion, and fun.

I share an illustration from my NAEA presentation about how I learned about and from a photographer from Japan (someone I have never met in person).

I often interact in Twitter using an app called Tweetdeck. 

One day in February while perusing my Tweetdeck #iphoneography hashtag column, an image caught my eye.

Wanting to know more, I followed the creator’s link back to her twitter account and followed her there. 

I noticed after clicking on the image that had appeared in Tweetdeck that the photographer had uploaded this image with Instagram.

So I followed her tweeted link back to his Instagram site, and "hearted" (liked) the image. ...noticing also that the image was cross posted to his Flickr account. 

The link from her Instagram page took me to his Flickr site. After viewing some photos, I added this individual as a Flickr contact and favorited some of her images in Flickr. 

I can now see and comment on her photographs in Twitter, Instagram, and Flickr. In studying her images, I am getting new ideas for my own cellphone photography.

I am intrigued by the dynamics of PLNs and social media. I like that I control when, where, how, how much and with whom I interact in social media sites. I find the links to networks of individuals to be strong and relatively stable by virtue of their association with highly popular social media sites, but my association with any one individual or site at any given time is loose and unpredictable. I am as much of an observer as I am a commentator or content creator, and I spend most of my time in transit. There are some pretty interesting writings about networking theory to consider, but that's another topic, so I'll close with two observations: I like the space between the nodes (using network-theory-lingo), and the benefits of building and interacting within my PLN has exceeded the amount of time I've invested.

Love You, Mean It! The Instagram Phenomenon

2019 Addendum to this post. The nice thing about self-publishing online is that you can endlessly edit and update posts (yes I know some people might find that practice not in keeping with the nature of blog posts, but I make my own rules here).  So with regard to what I wrote in 2013 about IG, it is pretty "dated", IG has grown and changed in interesting ways, Facebook bought it for a bazillion dollars a while back, young people like IG and are abandoning FB because FB is full of boring parents, grandparents, etc.) and I sincerely hope that Zukerberg and his crew don't ruin IG like they did FB.

I've been fascinated with Instagram. Instagram is an iPhone photo-app and online community (also available on Android). But more than that, Instagram is a phenomenon of gargantuan magnitude (90 million active Instagrammers in January 2013, 40 million Instagram posts daily). In my Integrating Social Media post, I noted features of Instagram. Today's post extends and elaborates.

Screenshot of some of my "likes" in Instagram

Instagram is a social media site and photo app that allows users (Instagrammers or Igers) to take pictures, apply filters to their photos, tag them, upload them to Instagram, follow other Instagrammers, and interact online using their iPhones, Androids, and other mobile devices. One can also see and interact with Instagram through a variety of apps and sites that function on computers. According to the Pew Research Center, as of 2012, 13% of Internet users use Instagram, and it is especially appealing to adults ages 18-29, African-Americans, Latinos, women, and urbanites. I'm not sure how many Instagrammers automatically cross post to Twitter, but a 15-second snapshot on Twitter on the evening of February 16, 2013 (see my video below) gave me an appreciation for how active (phrenetic?) the Instagram "community" (if you can call it that) is on Twitter.


Instagrammers often tag (hashtag) their images. Adding hashtags (word preceeded by the # symbol) to uploaded content is a way to make that online content searchable, groupable, and identifiable with a particular group. Hashtags are used in Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr, Flickr, Delicious, Scoopit, and to a lesser degree, Pinterest. Instagrammers' uploaded photos often include multiple hashtags (10 or more sometimes) for maximum exposure and reach. Instagram-related and photography-related hashtags that I identified Sunday Feb. 17, 2013 in about 15 minutes on Twitter included (but were not limited to) the following.

#instagram #instagrammers #instahub #instamood #instagramhub #instago #instatags #instalike #instagood #instagold #instanice #instacool #instame #instababe #instafun #instajoke #instaparty #instabored #instapause

#instablue #instadaily #instaday #instapic #instaphoto #photoinsta #instamovie #instaflash #instagistanbul #instaturkey #instanusantara #ig #igers #igaddict #ignation #igdaily #webstagram #tweegram #statigram

#picoftheday #picofday #bestoftheday #photooftheday #foto #photography #photohub #iphone #ipad #iphonephotography #iphonephoto #iPhoneography #iPhoneographie #iphonesia #iphoneonly #iphone4 #iphone4s #iphone5 #photojojomacro

and #boycottInstagram

Similar findings (commonly used tags) have been shared in several ways. For a list of Instagram's most popular tags, see Webstagram's top 100 tags.

Popularity in Instagram is measured in terms of followers and likes. Instagrammers want to be seen, they want to be followed, and they want to be liked, or in the world of Instagram, "hearted".



Interestingly, Instagrammers like (heart) much more than they comment. (It's faster and easier to click than it is to type), although one also occasionally sees some very long posts. Comments are typically short, descriptive, or funny; and they often elicit shorter and sometimes equally amusing replies. Unsurprisingly, one can even buy Instagram followers and likes.

Instagram image subject matter varies as widely as its users. On the morning of February 19, 2013 I did a little study on Instagram. For about 15 minutes, I used Tweetdeck to watch the #instagram hashtag feed (Tweetdeck allowed me to see tweets in columns, grouped by whatever hashtags are included in each tweet). I collected (re-tweeted with a new hashtag) some of the images that caught my eye, using the hashtag #15minutesofinterestinginstafindsontweetdeckfeb192013 (yes, it was a ridiculously long hashtag) to group my Instagram-finds so I could look at them later. Common Instagram photos included travel photos, landscapes, cityscapes, nightclubs, street life, road trips, parties, beach scenes, ski trips, food, flowers, fashion, nails, tatoos, shoes, animals, celebs, friends, family, selfies, events, objects of desire, etc. etc. Some images were highly stylized through filters and apps. Others seemed to be unmodified snapshots. There's a sense of immediacy, a here-and-now quality, in many of these images. Others are quite intimate, sometimes too much so, and perhaps a bit narcissistic. Some are blatantly transgressive or voyeuristic. Not surprisingly, there are a lot of self-identified photographers sharing really beautiful pictures, and a lot of creative people making and sharing all sorts of unusual images (art?) in Instagram. I couldn't help but wonder, who are all these 90 million people (beyond the snapshot provided in the 2012 PEW study)? But I guess there's no easy answer to that question. Instagrammers' names and bios and are as unpredictable and diverse as their images. Some of my favorite IG names from my February 2013 foray included:

purelyethereal

superherodiva

personyoumayknow

swaggernonstagger

betweenthepanels

Kinkyclown

dream_in_color

Cutestcatseverr

tiedyed_tacos

tinydinosaurs

lululove

gracieguineapig

sucklord

hazeystate

swaggernonstagger

13thwitness

worldonpause

cultofbeauty

missprofessor

thelastsuppernyc

instagrampitbulls

and

poundsofbread

The overwhelming popularity of Instagram has spurred all kinds of secondary markets, ready to transform Instagram images into other things (canvas prints ready to hang, tee shirts, coffee mugs, etc.); to sell Instagram images to businesses; and to monitize the Instagram phenomenon by any means possible. Purchased in 2012 by Facebook for a reported 1 billion dollars, one can safely speculate that the monetizing of Instagram will only grow, and that Instagram users will need to scramble to stay abreast of changes in Instagram terms of service.

So, what do I think of Instagram after about a few short months of immersion? I like the diversity, weirdness, banality, creativity, and monumental size of Instagram. There's something about Instagram that captures something larger than just what's being depicted or commented on in individual images. Like many art forms, Instagram captures the universal in the particulars. Individual Instagram images convey our collective interests, experiences, stories, and values. While critics decry Instagrammer bad behaviors, and the pointlesness and redundancy of much of what gets posted to Instagram, my own forays into Instagram-world give me pause for appreciation and even awe of this  vibrant, unwieldy community. I also like my own little corner of Instagram. I follow about 100 people, only about half of whom I know, and I am similarly followed. I enjoy some of the images I see, and I study and learn from others. And I just love getting Instagram hearts! At first glance, a sense of affiliation within the Instagram community or any particular Instagram hashtag group seemed incomprehensible to me. There's just too much, it's all quite diffused, and connections amongst Instagrammers seem nebulous and opaque. Yet, within my own tiny little circle of follows, followers, and hearts, I both seek and sense a loose connection to my own little Instagram network. One can only conclude that this feeling is similar for other Instagrammers. So in summary, I see tremendous potential in/with/through Instagram for creative personal expression, social commentary, fun, experimentation, exploration, connecting, and learning...all of which are good ingredients for art education

p.s.,  - you, mean it!

Social Media: Work, Play, Share

By most accounts, and for better or for worse, social media is shaping the manner in which humans interact and affiliate. Humans have always engaged in social networking. But new digital media (web-based and mobile platforms, applications and sites) take social networking into an entirely new realm as tech savvy, media hungry content creators, conversationalists, curators, and consumers upload, download, post, and blog to their heart's desire. Popular social media sites allow our uploads to automatically cross-pollentate (feed into) other sites. That's a nice feature, making it possible to post an image, comment, and tags to multiple sites at the same time. Many sites allow uploading of content through both old technologies (computers) and new technologies (mobile applications, aka apps).

I've been messing around trying to integrate Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Instagram so that I can upload content from my iPhone to multiple sites at the same time, without repeated posts of the same material going on any single site. My DIY strategy is trial and error, checking out the Help tools and FAQs in each site, Googling a question, and consulting a contact (viewing the online content of or direct messaging members of my Personal Learning Network (PLN) via my favorite just-in-time go-to places - Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, and/or Flickr).

Not all of these sites "play nice" together, and some of their sharing features are just confusing or don't work well. And there are interesting recent demographic trends occurring amongst users of various social media...worthy of further consideration.

Things that stood out today as I experimented on my compact-handheld-electronic-multimedia-communication-device (aka cellphone) with multi-site sharing features.

1. Instagram. Instagram is a mobile app that has become increasingly popular amongst both tweens and artists. Instagram is a contraction of the words Instant+telegram. On my iPhone Instagram offers the option to simultaneously post content to Tumblr, Flickr, and Facebook. I only had to sign in to my other sites once to allow Instagram permission to post to them. Statigram is a web-based platform for viewing Instagram images from a computer rather than from a smart phone. (See my Statigram). Webstagram performs similarly, and I'm sure there are other  sites that similarly display Instagram collections by account holder. In Instagram (mobile) and Statigram or Webstagram (laptop) you can follow people, see who your followers are, and "like" images (like, in Instagram means clicking on the heart symbol). You cannot upload images from your laptop to Statigram. I noticed that Instagram crops pics to a square format (a tribute to the olden days of photography). That's not good when you don't want your images cropped. I posted this issue as problem on my Facebook page, and one of my FB contacts shared a fix (InstaSize) that retains the rectangular format of my iphone pics posted to Instagram. I tried InstaSize and went back to the regular Instagram square format. 
2. Tumblr. Tumblr is an increasingly popular micro-blogging host. You can micro-blog in Timblr from a laptop or a cellphone (cellphone requires the Tumblr app).  Uploading an image from my iPhone to my Tumblr works well, and I had already set up Tumblr (on my laptop) to automatically post my Tumblr content to Twitter. In my web-based version of Twitter the "view photo" feature works for my shared Tumblr content. The Tweet also inserted a link back to my Tumblr where the image was originally posted. But in Tweetdeck (an app that works on both computers and smart phones), there is only a link back to Tumblr to see the content, no nifty "view photo" option.  For those who want to see content immediately, and not have to follow links to see a pic, this isn't cool.
3. Flickr. Flickr is a web-based photo sharing site. I described Flickr in my previous post, so I won't dwell on it here other than to say that I can share content from my Flickr web site to both Facebook and Twitter, and the Flickr app for my iPhone also allows multi-site uploading of images and accompanying texts.
4. Don't double share same content. This part gets tricky for newbies like me. Many social media sites allow cross posting to multiple sites at the same time. Instagram, Flickr, and Tumblr each will cross post to one another and to Twitter and Facebook if you tell them to. Sometimes I've cross posted a picture from my Tumblr account to Twitter without knowing, other times I've accidentally double posted a picture to a site. I've played around with my settings, specifically in my permissions for access in Flickr and Tumblr (to other sites), to see how my cross posts appear on my other sites. 
5. Tag everything. Tags both make your content searchable, and they allow you or someone else to aggregate content within a social media site identified with a word or phrase. Twitter users have developed a sophisticated and robust hash-tagging system. Tumblr also has tags that work similarly (but without the hash mark). Without the tags or hashtags your posts are unsearchable. 
6. Adult thumbs, adult standards. From an iPhone, it's almost impossible to correct typos in the comment box or subject area accompanying an upload. From my laptop, scrolling back and forth across the text is a breeze. That makes my mobile uploads subject to text errors, which I'm then compelled to fix, which means removing or deleting the content and starting over. Mobile is supposed to be fast and easy, but maybe built for 13 year olds who text all day, have small thumbs and don't care about spelling.

In closing, I should add that it has not gone unnoticed that 14 year old kids are already doing much of this, and K-12 teachers are, well, kindof behind. If there is a take-away from all of this, I would hope that the real message of this post is that everyone is creative; mobile media can be fun, exploratory, and educational; and that art educators have an important role to play in teaching, working with, playing with, and even learning from their already tech-savvy students.

Falling in Like with Flickr

I'm kindof liking Flickr these days. I've been using Flickr to back up, organize, and share my iPhone and digital camera photos, and to connect to other Flickr users. Flickr is a terrific online photo sharing site and community for artists. Flickr is free up to a point. After I accumulated too many pics, I bit the bullet and upgraded. I still consider myself a novice Flickr user, so perhaps this post will be beneficial to other Flickr newbies. (My Flickr sets)

Things I like about Flickr: (click on the images to see larger)

Sets. Your Flickr images appear in what Flickr calls a Photostream. Flickr sets allows you to organize your photos from your Photostream into sets. You can easily add, delete, and relabel images in your Flickr sets. Fashioning a Flickr set of your own images is  like putting an art exhibit together (aka online curating).
Easy upload from iPhoto. iPhoto has a share feature that connects right to Flickr. You can send one image, multiple images, or an entire event with all of its images to your Flickr site. You can send images directly to specific Flickr sets or to your Photostream.
Mobile App. Flickr's mobile app is easy, free, popular with tech enthusiasts. You can upload and label multiple images at once from your smartphone. Everything you upload appears in your Flickr Photostream.
Privacy settings, Labels (Tags). Flickr allows you to determine who can see your images. This is a great feature for a student group or project in which you want to limit public access to the images, or if you want share photos only with selected family/friends. You should both caption and "tag" your Flickr images as soon as you upload them. Tags (labels) are like "keywords" that you add as text content that always accompanies your image. Tags make your own Flickr images searchable at a later time, by you or by others. This comes in handy when looking for a pic you uploaded a year ago. In your own search for specific kinds of images uploaded by other Flickr users, searching by keywords (tags) is very convenient (if others have added tags to their Flickr images).
Photo-editing. Flickr now has a built-in photo editing feature (called Aviary) for cropping, adjusting, and/or applying various filters to your uploaded images.  The Flickr editor is located under the flickr Actions icon. Flickr's new mobile app and photo editing features allow Flickr to now compete with Instagram and Twitter.
Contacts. Flickr contacts - you can follow and be followed by anyone in Flickr. You can comment on or designate as favorites your contacts' images, and they on yours. This is a great way to keep current with your flickr contacts' new works, and a great way to build an audience for your work.
Groups. I love the Flickr groups, people sharing images in just about any style, theme, or genre one can think of. You can join as many groups as you like. Some groups are moderated, and require permission to join and upload images. Others are completely open. Lots of peer-to-peer participatory possibilities for art educators and students here.
Flickr favorites. Favorites. You can mark just about anything created and shared by others in Flickr as a "favorite", and create a collection of your own consisting of your Flickr favorites. This is a nice way to collect images and ideas, and to share with others (students, peers, etc.) how people make images.
Student Participation. Flickr offers wonderful possibilities for students to create galleries, see one another's work, and comment on selected pieces (their own and the work of peers). You can create closed groups in Flickr for this purpose, and you can control commenting features. See the gallery of student work from High School Art Teacher Deborah Brock's photography class.  As mentioned above, you can adjust Flickr's privacy settings to limit who sees uploaded images.  This might be necessary if you are showing images created by students who are minors and your school requires limited access to their content.

In summary, there are plenty of online sites to share and archive (back up) images these days. If for no other reason, and without all the Flickr bells and whistles, Flickr remains a great site to store, organize, and share images. Its copyright policies are clear and the site is easy to use. I can make my material private if I so choose. And there are over 6 billion images in Flickr to inspire my own art, research, or teaching.

Playing with apps

Active learning, learning by doing, just-in-time, DIY...  These catchphrases fit the amped up digital world where global kids, aka millennials know more about new creative media than their teachers. Hey, kids have more free time on their hands, don't work for a living, pay mortgages, or maintain households, and mom and dad are footing the bills for all those the digital toys.

So how do busy adults and teachers catch up?  

In a word, PLAY. (act like kids)  Below are some images from apps I've played with on my iPhone.  These apps meet my criteria for utilization: ever present, easy to learn and use, free, fast, and gratifying. The captions underneath the images link to sites that describe features of these apps.

Hipstamatic	PS Express	Instagram
MySketch	ColorSplash	CamWow

I'll be posting and commenting about my mobile snaps and apps to a Flickr set, Tweeting my favorites with a couple hashtags (#iphoneography #apps), and sharing some of them on my other micro-blogging sites Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram.

A not so ordinary day in the life of a public servant

A not so ordinary day, May 1, 2012

On May 1, 2012, I taught my last class at the University of Illinois, locked the door of my seminar room, and drove home. After 23 years there, I had recently been promoted to the rank of full professor. I was the first female faculty member in the then 50 year-old art education program at this university to have ever attained full rank.  As any female academic working in the ivory tower knows, this was no easy accomplishment. My work at UI was filled with amazing opportunities and recognitions for which I am very grateful. These include research, fellowships, and grants; publishing and presenting my research throughout the world; teaching and developing innovative new courses; working with smart talented undergraduate and graduate students; advising terrific student Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations; collaborating with highly respected scholars in other disciplines; organizing and hosting events; chairing the art education program and overseeing our now 45 year old Saturday morning laboratory art school (a community-arts program serving about 400 k-12 students each year); initiating and participating in exciting public engagement endeavors; and receiving a wonderful array of national and campus awards. 

I have always considered my work as an art educator to be a worthwhile and needed form of public service. In 2011 I examined the spate of attacks on the public service sector (and teachers in particular), but I remain steadfast in the conviction that teaching is a critically important profession. In my own professional work throughout my years at UI (and continuing to the present), have I creatively blended teaching, research, and public engagement. I have articulated some strategies that facilitated my public outreach efforts at UI. These strategies include positioning teachers as public intellectuals, adapting entrepreneurial strategies, utilizing digital and social media, and remain connected to my community of practice. (BTW, I tweeted a link to my "Entrepreneurial Strategies" essay after it was published, and Richard Florida retweeted it!). 

In my post-UI professional life, I am currently teaching for the University of Florida Online Masters in Art Education degree program. I also recently accepted a part-time art teaching position at a local high school. I continue to edit the research journal Visual Arts Research this year. And I remain active in the National Art Education Association (this year as co-president of the NAEA Women's Caucus). 

 честита нова година, 新年快乐, سنة جديدة سعيدة, bonne année!, glückliches neues Jahr!, שנה טובה, नया साल मुबारक हो, Buon anno!, hauoli makahiki hou, 賀正！새해 복 많이 받으세요, С Новым Годом, ¡Feliz Año Nuevo, selamat tahun baru, Heri ya Mwaka Mpya , Chúc mừng năm mới, Happy New Year