In a TechCrunch post today, Michael Arrington noted that Twitter may suck in terms of downtime and outages, but we need it too much to switch to a competing service that works better (or more often). His post is great and really sums up what I’ve been feeling, mainly that Twitter is quickly becoming invaluable to me.

I’m still developing my network on Twitter, but already it’s one of the main ways I communicate throughout the day. Forgot updating my IM away messages and Facebook status – I just post a new tweet. It’s a single message that gets propagated throughout my web profiles, so everyone knows what I’m up to. Also, Twitter has given me a space to have quick chats with people I might not normally talk very often. It’s not an IM, it’s not an email, it’s not a blog. It’s all of these and it’s none of them. I’m making new friends in Austin by finding and interacting with them on Twitter. I’m keeping up with old friends in other, distant cities by following them on Twitter. I post mini restaurant and shop reviews on Twitter.

So, I guess it’s official. I’m addicted. This is way better than Facebook.

I’m a bit late to this story, but I still want to talk about it. Last month at the University of Chicago Law School, administrators turned off internet access to classrooms. The dean of the law school first wrote in his email to students, “I therefore ask, respectfully but emphatically, that you use computers in class only for class-related purposes.” Then he told them the university shut off internet access in classrooms, just to be sure.

I feel the need to take a stand on this issue. I teach college courses at the University of Texas at Austin (and at North Carolina State University before that), and yes, there are students in my classroom who use their laptops. And I am sure many of them are on Facebook and Gmail or shoe shopping or IMing friends or whatever. But I’m also sure that some of them are doing productive things related to classwork.

I can’t count the number of times we’ve been talking about something and I can’t remember an exact date or statistic and one of my students has quickly looked it up. When all students can connect to the internet, our classrooms become interactive spaces for learning, where we can pull in information from that wonderful world wide web to help us delve more deeply into an issue. It’s a great feeling, knowing that we can find anything we want to help us learn more about a topic, knowing that we don’t have to depend solely on the textbook and my knowledge of a topic.

And so what if some students are using Facebook in class? I’ve been a student myself and there are days when class was boring or redundant or just not on the top of my list. Why can’t I use my time in a way I prefer? It can be disrespectful or rude, but it also is just part of life in the classroom. Students are going to do it, no matter how many rules and suggestions we make to the contrary.

As an instructor, I’ve learned there are a few things I can do to address this issue:

1. I can ignore it, just like we ignore so many things students do in the classroom.
2. I can call out students who are doing it; I’ve found that embarrassing them a little works well.
3. I can make my classroom a more interesting place where students are engaged and don’t want to be on Facebook.

If students have a choice in terms of what they pay attention to, of course they’re going to choose the thing that’s more interesting and useful. If I’m just droning on about material that’s covered in their textbook, why do they need to listen to me? I need to go beyond textbooks and boring lectures, and create an interactive and valuable learning environment. When I do that, students are actively involved in class and not doing other things.

With internet access, students can upload notes to their wikis and webspaces, look up definitions for new terms, IM each other to clarify questions. There are myriad practical, productive uses for the internet in the classroom, and simply shutting off access because of the potential distractions seems like the wrong way to address these issues.

I learned some interesting things with the informal poll I conducted with 50 of my undergraduate students today.

First, all of them have cell phones. Duh. But what is more interesting is that more than half of them have web-enabled cell phones, and many of those are Blackberries, iPhones and other PDAs/smartphones.

Second, they almost all use Facebook. More than 90% of the students in class today have Facebook accounts. Almost half are also on MySpace (and none of them were only on MySpace). A couple are on Xanga and Friendster, as well. Almost half have YouTube accounts (though I don’t know how often they actually upload videos).

In terms of network fatigue, this group really doesn’t seem to be affected. They just aren’t using that many of these sites. Several students don’t have accounts on any social sites at all. And only a couple students were on more than Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. A few have Flickr accounts. Only one student said he has accounts on more than four sites.

We didn’t have time for much discussion or elaboration on these topics in class today, but I am looking forward to learning more about how my students use these tools. In fact, if any of those students are reading this now, I invite them to comment with their perspectives.

A recurring theme at SXSWi this year was network fatigue. As in, a person is on so many social sites - Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pownce, Dopplr, Yelp, and so on – that she can’t keep up with all of them. She’s overloaded, and definitely not communicating and connecting efficiently.

So in response to this problem, some smart folks have come up with some clever solutions - FriendFeed and Socialthing! two of hottest. Just in time, too, because I was about to be buried under my growing pile of network connections. The idea behind FriendFeed, Socialthing! and other services like them is that you can get one account to track all your other accounts. So on your FriendFeed site, you are notified whenever a friend posts something to one of the various social sites; instead of having to log into potentially dozens of other sites, you can log into one.

I do think this is a good idea. Probably an inevitable one, too. For the past four or five years, more and more of these social sites have been popping up, each offering an interesting angle or different community. But the more we sign up for, the harder it gets to manage. Imagine having 15 different cell phones – one for each set of people you want to talk to or topic you want to talk about. I’d have one phone to talk about photography, another to talk about work stuff, another to talk to people I knew in high school, plus a dozen more. That would be a mess! So it’s great to have one cell phone, one central space to manage all the others.

Or is it? How many people actually suffer from this network fatigue? Facebook has approximately 68 million users. There are somewhere between 6 and 7 billion people in the world. Which means somewhere around 0.1% of the world uses Facebook. Of course this is a silly argument – there are billions of people who don’t or can’t use even the internet, let alone a social networking site – but it provides a little perspective. And of course, any business would be happy to have 68 million customers; that is still a ridiculously huge number of people. But how many of those 68 million people have accounts on multiple other social sites?

At South by Southwest, it would appear that everyone does. They also all have iPhones and MacBooks. The people who attend the interactive conference are a very specific group, and they do use multiple social sites. They use them a lot. But when I leave the wonderful little bubble of SXSW, I don’t see as many people using all of these sites. In fact, I see most people using only a couple.  Almost everyone has a Facebook or MySpace account and then one or two others (usually LinkedIn, Flickr or Yelp). And these are middle class, well-educated Americans in their 20s and early 30s – one of the main demographics for social networking sites. If these people aren’t using much more than Facebook and MySpace, why do they need FriendFeed? And if they don’t, who does? Besides the group of early-adopting super-users who frequent conferences like SXSW, of course.

I’m going to do an experiment. I teach a class of 60 undergraduates. Tomorrow I’m going to find out which sites they use, which sites they’ve heard of, and how they feel about network fatigue. Because I do think sites like Socialthing! and FriendFeed are very interesting, and will personally help me manage my networks. But I just wonder how prevalent this network fatigue actually is.

An update on this experiment soon…

At a recent kickball (yep, kickball) game with some fellow grad students, the topic of academic transparency came up. We’ve been talking for a while about the benefits of sharing information about our successes and failures with each other, specifically as they relate to the publication and grant processes. It is incredibly valuable to learn from others’ experiences with what works (and what doesn’t) in getting articles published in highly respected academic journals, for example. However, as expected, several people expressed concerned with issues of privacy, theft, and reputation.

Academics are notoriously protective of their ideas; in an industry where publishing lots of good ideas on a regular basis means job security and the esteem of your peers, of course you’re going to protect your best ideas. You don’t want someone else publishing your ideas before you can. However, I think there’s an important distinction between keeping your ideas quiet and keeping your process quiet.

We can learn a great deal from talking to others about their experiences. With the publishing example in particular, if I couldn’t talk to other students and faculty who had submitted articles before, I would have no idea where to start or what to do. And part of that means sharing failures and mistakes, not just successes.

But this is where many people resist. No one wants to talk about their failures. Even though we live in a culture that is relatively accepting of failure, we’re still quite tight lipped about our personal failures. People are often reluctant to share these experiences. Why is this? Are we afraid of looking bad in front of others? Stupid? Naive? Less competitive? Maybe we’re worried that one day this information will come back to us in some unfortunate way, that it may damage us professionally.

But will being open about our failures actually hurt us? It seems to me that everyone fails at some point in their lives, many of us do it all the time! Maybe being open and discussing these failures with others will help us learn from our mistakes and feel better about ourselves, a sort of failure therapy. And in the process, others will learn from these mistakes and not have to experience them themselves. It seems win-win. So why are we so reluctant to participate in these kinds of conversations?

I’m in the process of moving this blog to my website – deeringdavis dot com. So go there for the latest until I get everything straightened out.

I successfully defended my prospectus this morning! So now, according to the university and the Communication Studies department, I am officially ABD. Hooray.

Now I just have to write that pesky little paper.