But yes, we have seen sites like Hi5, friendstar, myspace dissolve within half a decade. Facebook is not showing such sites yet cause I hate to say it but it seems to big to fail. We have seen dispora come and go. Wordpress has buddypress which is only being used as intranet sites (http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/10-of-the-latest-and-greatest-inspirational-buddypress-sites/) which is also provided by sitecore, sharepoint and lots of other enterprise solutions which organizations seem to love more. 

In my opinion, this model is not sustainable as of yet. I heard china and japan has their own version of facebook and the kids there love it. sites like renren.com are doing awesome because of the massive number of users. I think there is another motivation of such sites is the national and governmental pressure. Asian countries seem to have a negative opinion about existing social sites that are run from and by North america. The lack of availability (government shutting down access) is a great motivations for the new generation to move to these home (country) brewed solutions which never goes down. I am speaking from experience of Bangladesh's attempt to shut down facebook (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Facebook#Bangladesh) multiple times by the order of government and no one wants to go thru proxy to access facebook to post a selfie for the world to see. 

Minds.com looks great. I will check it out but I doubt this will go anywhere without a big backing from some company or community. Now I go find my password for diaspora to see if there are any funny cat videos there. 

No centralized site based entirely on the dynamics of networks is too big to fail, thanks to network effects that can destroy as fast as they build. Sadly, though, Facebook are making all the 'right' decisions from a shareholder perspective including the appalling internet.org - but all the wrong ones from a moral perspective. Even if Facebook itself (the site) shrank fast, the company itself is highly unlikely to fail, because it has diversified, very wisely making its bigger acquisitions not too tightly linked to the flagship.

I never had any faith in Diaspora and it was never a threat - it was very telling that Zuckerberg himself invested some small change in it. It was a cute and well publicized idea by a bunch of smart young things who had no idea what they were doing. It was vapourware from the start, and they massively underestimated the complexity of what they were doing, even at a technical level, let alone a social level. At the time there were already at least half a dozen more mature and well considered projects attempting very much the same thing, but none could build the critical mass to take on Facebook.Ben Werdmuller is well worth reading on such things - http://werd.io/ - and has done quite a bit to do something about it, first with Elgg (the software behind this site) now with Known. I suspect that something like https://www.marcus-povey.co.uk/2014/07/10/summary-federated-friending-and-signon-in-a-distributed-social-network/ may be the kind of thing that could work.

Out of left field, I'd say that Wordpress might well be the biggest, albeit the least obvious, threat to Facebook. With nearly a quarter of all sites on the entire Web running the software it is already significantly bigger than Facebook in terms of traffic and, possibly, even in users. It has over 60% of the CMS market so anything it does has a huge impact. It has some quite smart linking already (everything from RSS to trackbacks to social site integration, with many plugins capable of doing far more) so it would only take the widespread implementation of a decent social sharing standard with smart identity management for it to perform much the same kind of role as a distributed social network. Just a thought.

APA format style comes from print format originally..  

 I am not sure if users of small mobile devices will see the difference between APA and no-APA format

thanks

On-line interactions -- more cheating involved,  than face-2-face 

that is why "online version"  has  higher risk assessment  than face-2-face

- Anonymous

Thank you anonymous. Actually, thats false - we do need to bust that myth!

See, for instance:

https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/313061/do-online-students-cheat-more-often

or

https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/661818/does-the-online-environment-promote-plagiarism

There is plentiful other evidence to support this. Conversely, cheating in physical institutions is rife, particularly those that have not taken into account the fact that the Internet exists yet and continue to teach and test just as they always did, that make a huge issue out of the credentials they offer, and are surprised when students take shortcuts. Some reports reckon 70% or more cheat on exams, while figures are even higher for coursework, in physical institutions. In some countries the figures are higher still. This is an epidemic that, if it were a disease, would wipe out the human race.

I suspect there are two main reasons that online cheating is no higher than face to face, despite some obvious temptations and apparent lack of oversight (another myth - we are awfully careful and have many tools at our disposal to detect and dissuade cheats). The first is that, on average, distance learning tends to attract motivated students that are really interested: it's still not an easy option, despite massive gains in recent years, so those that make it through tend to be very keen. The second is that, on average, those of us that teach online tend to think more carefully about the activities and assignments because we have to do so - there is no simple 'tell them in a lecture then test them' for us, so we have to build pedagogies that work and, on the whole, that discourage or disenable cheating. It's far from universally true - there's good and bad both online and off, and there are some awful for-profit accreditation-mills out there that let the side down royally - but on average these factors are quite significant.

If it could be hooked into a learning record store then it might be useful to record evidence of learning too

Well, given the fact that it is unlikely we will ever see the moodle gradebook hooked to the Newton grading system, I really doubt any other hookup will occur.

We seem to becoming a really great "tail wags the dog" university. SCC is by/of/for admins and not academics and especially not tutors, email is going away - at least functional email is likely to disappear soon IMO, and so many other systems are driven by anything except academic requirements. Academics are in danger of becoming an extinct species around this place.

Thanks for the post Jon. The 20/80 split btw academic and administrative is a red hering.I have no doubt that the split switches for tutors because we call tutors for academic questions and call centres for admin help. Seems reasonable. Context is important.

The key measure is the actual frequency of academic calls (emails, phone, ?) compared to actual tutor numbers that we don't collect or reliably report. Does the SSC inhibit academic contact? I suspect it does since it certainly generates alternate paths to AE contact.

I also agree that siphoning resources away from the academic side to service a real student admin need will further weaken our ability to engage students. 

I would like to see the consolidation bewteen the Info centre, helpdesk and the admin side of the SSC consolidate so that scale and efficiencies could be realized. Regardless of the split, the numbers from SSC reveal, at the very least, there is a real need by students for this type of service, a service that should be funded by admin side, not the academic side.

Thanks Bob - I'm not sure where the 20/80 figure came from but it has surfaced in almost every discussion when the idea has been challenged as a justification, which seems very wrong-headed to me. It's like noticing there are lots of sick people dying of an easily preventable disease and choosing to increase the efficiency of hospital treatments instead of preventing it in the first place.

Consolidation makes sense - one place to shout 'help' with the assurance of being heard seems quite reasonable to me: it could be the start of a bit of useful relationship-nurturing if we did it right. I'm much in favour of a better help tool that could help to connect people as well as to provide answers and generate useful data to support improved learning. It could be done, though it would be foolish, slow and costly to attempt to do it with GreyMatter or any other off-the-shelf CRM tool.

@Richard - I think the Gradebook problem (which should at last be resolved this year) is largely due to the over ambitious attempt to replace Newton in one fell swoop. Integration would have been a much safer and quicker approach and could have eventually led to replacement at a later date. As long as we use open standards and tools, and we don't outsource the wrong things, incremental evolution works better in IT systems most of the time. The trouble is that, from an IT departmental perspective, replacement looks cheaper. This is because the cost of maintaining integrated systems can be quite high, thanks to all those interlinked dependencies, which can really tie up an IT department with inadequate resources and tortuous waterfal processes (ie us).  It's just a local saving though. The cost to the organization as a whole of making people adapt to machines rather than vice versa, at least when the organization is fairly large, typically far outweighs the IT department's savings. It's localized thinking that causes the dog-wagging problem. Systems theory should be a prerequisite course for all IT managers. At the very least, all should be required to read Sytemantics!

they are not ready yet. sorry

- c

I'm going to find out soon - my first 3D printer (rather more expensive than this) is about to be ordered! I've held off for a good decade but the time has come to experiment. This is the future - maybe not yet perfectly formed and certainly unevenly distributed, but it is here already - and I'd like to know what it holds in store.

Excellent points!

Sometimes, having an avenue closed by legislation can spark inventiveness and lead to new opportunities. In some ways I am quite glad that (for instance) we are excluded from hosting with Google, Microsoft or Amazon, because it opens up a bit of the field for companies within national borders, which is good for diversity and so for innovation.

It can be a bit odd though. For instance, I administer a site in Australia that is made for schoolkids (yes, we do need to think of them!) which has to be hosted there thanks to Oz privacy laws, but, of course, the packets passing back and forth across the Pacific as I administer the site are likely going via the US and winding up here on my machine in Canada. I am, naturally, using an encrypted connection for this but it does seem a bit strange that (say) I could not simply encrypt the data on the disk itself and host it in the US.

I find it amusing how much people get upset when their information is leaked after they made it readily available. Not all information requested has to be provided and the ones you do provide you can by coy about them. I am not saying this to condone the illegal phishing of data nor the US blatant disregard to need of asking before collecting.

My humble opinion is that fear has been constantly used as the driving force behind the need for law agencies to collect data. “If you don’t have anything to hide then you shouldn’t mind”, I am not sure why someone would say something like this knowing that one of the most treasured thing to someone is his/her privacy.

The fact of the matter is if you want to live in this century and use all the little gadgets and “stay on the grid” then there has to be some compromise. Be mindful of where you enter your data, Research on new technologies and see if you want to be a part of it.