Apophenia. Like everyone who cares about Crisis Text Line and the people we serve, I have spent the last few days reflecting on recent critiques about the organization’s practices. Having spent my career thinking about and grappling with tech ethics and privacy issues, I knew that – had I not been privy to the details and context that I know – I would be outraged by what folks heard this weekend.
I would be doing what many of my friends and colleagues are doing, voicing anger and disgust. But as a founding board member of Crisis Text Line, who served as board chair from June 2020 until the beginning of January 2021, I also have additional information that shaped how I thought about these matters and informed my actions and votes over the last eight years. As a director, I am currently working with others on the board and in the organization to chart a path forward. Texters come to us in their darkest moments. First: Why data? Storing data immediately prompted three key questions: I’m a scholar. 1. Learning with Networks. A recent paper by Jon Dron has stimulated my thinking about social learning from two perspectives.
First is renewed appreciation for the value of a loosely knit networks as distinct learning resources and second the increasing value of learning networks (as opposed to tight, class or institutional bounded communities of practice) in both formal and informal learning. Some years ago I spent time discussing the various types and function of interaction in formal (usually distance) education contexts.
I picked up on Michael Moore’s conceptualization of the three classic types of interaction (student-student; student-content and student-teacher) and expanded these to a discussion of the other three dyads teacher-content; teacher-teacher and content-content. The notion of extracting value from networks is at the core of social software and web 2.0 applications and has very immediate value in the informal world of life-long learning.
So what can we expect from the network? Conclusion. William Allen.