What is this thing called “Ning”?
I've been playing around with Ning (http://www.ning.com), which seems to be the "in"
thing at the moment – well, it was last week anyway. To understand what Ning is,
think MySpace. It's a way of connecting people with a common interest, and there
is plenty to interest people in education.
It is, in short, a social networking site. Or, rather, it’s a site that
enables anyone to create their own social networking site.
Like MySpace it has certain features, such as a blog feature and the facility
for uploading photos and videos. Unlike MySpace it has a forum facility and it
seems easier to customise. Well, easier for oldies like me, at any rate.
It's dead easy to set up your own community: I've set up two without needing
any technical know-how at all. I'll come back to them in a second.
The networking bit
So, where does the "networking" aspect come in? in three ways. Firstly, you
can join communities as well as or instead of creating them, which means that
you have different places in which to meet like-minded people. Secondly, you can
add people as “friends”. Thirdly, you can click on a person's name and see what
communities *they* belong to, and join them if they seem likely to be of
interest.
On the whole I like Ning, but it does have some annoying "features", the most
frustrating of which, for me, was the lack of a batch delete facility for
pictures. I inadvertently uploaded nearly 200 ones that had nothing to do with
the subject matter, and had to edit each by hand. It took ages. However, the
Ning people are promising a batch edit/delete facility soon.
I think that to understand phenomena like MySpace you have to experience
them, and this is a good, ie easy and harmless, way of doing so. So far I
haven't been pestered by people purporting to be teenaged girls from Russia or
anything like that, which I have experienced in MSN and Yahoo's Instant
Messenger.
Also, the community-style interface does lend itself to discussion and the
posting of resources.
The two communities I've set up are one for the second edition of Coming of
Age, at http://comingofage.ning.com
and one specifically for readers of my newsletter (Computers in Education) and
visitors to the ICT in Education website (http://www.ictineducation.org). That's
here: http://ictineducation.ning.com/.
I've started a discussion about the internet, and provided links to (at the
time of writing) 4 videos which you may find interesting. What I'd like to do is
invite you to experiment with me in using this kind of resource. Join the Coming
of Age community by going to http://comingofage.ning.com, and then
you'll be able to contribute to the discussion, start a new one, add videos
yourself and view the ones already there.
I think that used wisely this sort of thing can save time, even though it
seems time-consuming at first. Certainly for my own part I've discovered that a
few exchanges with others can save hours of tracking down useful stuff.
The $64,000 question: what’s in it for me?
It’s generally recognised these days that things get done better, in some
sense, if people feel part of a community. There is now much more emphasis on,
and belief in the value of, peer-to-peer interaction than
teacher-student/student-teacher interaction. That’s not to say that the latter
is unimportant, of course, but a recognition of the fact that people can and do
learn from each other. I should point out, too, that the “student” referred to
just a moment ago could also be a teacher, if the context is professional
development.
Ning communities therefore represent a fairly low-cost means of interacting
with, and learning from, people similar to yourself.
The nice thing about all this from the point of view of the community “owner”
is that it's not dependent on that one person. In the Coming of Age community,
for example, I've kick-started it, but it's really up to the community, ie you,
whether this becomes a useful port of call or not.
Let’s be friends…
Ning communities, like other social networking set-ups, are very much based
on the birds of a feather principle, ie: If I belong to community X, and so do
you, we must have something in common.
By becoming “friends”, we get to see not only the other communities we each
already belong to, but also any that we subsequently join. You could do that
without becoming friends, but once the number of like-minded people you come
across exceeds about a dozen, I’m not sure how you would remember who they all
are.
Clearly, it does stretch the definition of “friend” somewhat, but that’s just
a detail: it’s the principle that matters.
… but with discrimination
Of course, everybody likes to be popular, and given that one way of measuring
a person’s popularity is counting the number of friends they have. The same is
true in the virtual world, but there is a problem here. Young people may try to
collect as many “friends” as possible in their online social networks, but not
always in the best possible way. For example, posting sexy pictures of herself
would be a good way for a girl to accumulate “friends”, but not necessarily the
most sensible.
I actually believe that many young people already know that (read, for
example, Sarah Hillier’s evaluation of MySpace). But I think
there is an insidious aspect to all this in that all of these social networking
sites do tend to encourage a view of friendship which is very utilitarian, ie
predicated on the “what’s in it for me?” question. Maybe that’s fine if everyone
knows upfront that that’s the whole point of it, which is the case with
Linked-in (http://www.linkedin.com/), for
example. This openly describes itself thus:
“Our mission is to help you be more effective in your daily work and open
doors to opportunities using the professional relationships you already have.”
I’m not convinced it’s a great idea for 14 or 15 year-olds to start to get
the idea that friends are people who are there to be used. But, in the age-old
tradition of talking and answering oneself, I have to say that I take a much
more sanguine view than that, especially in light of the fact that most of the
young people I come across are so sensible and worldly-wise that I almost
start to worry about the opposite issue: whatever happened to the innocence of
childhood?
But perhaps it’s just in the nature of older generations to worry about
younger generations, regardless of the facts of the matter!
Conclusion
In conclusion I’d say that Ning is promising in itself, and that you should
try it in order to gain some insight into what young people experience in
MySpace etc. Or, to put it more commonly: don’t knock it if you haven’t tried
it.
Here are my URLs once again: http://comingofage.ning.com and http://ictineducation.ning.com. See
you online, I hope!
This article is taken from the forthcoming second edition of Coming of Age: An Introduction to the New Worldwide Web. Join the Coming of Age Ning community for news of developments, previews and the release date.
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