Congratulations to Clancy  J.  Wolf,  Ed. D, who won the Social Web Survey iPod Nano giveaway! Clancy has worked with students, teachers, and researchers from Forks, Washington, to Key West, Florida, exploring how technology helps students learn and challenging students to think about their role in the world around them. He is   the past President of the Northwest Council for Computer Education, the country’s oldest organization for teachers who   use technology in the classroom.

*What does your organization do? 

IslandWood's Mission is to provide exceptional learning experiences and to inspire lifelong environmental and community stewardship.  We do this in several ways at our campus - a 255 acre center 30 minutes from Seattle by ferry.  During the week we house 5th & 6th graders - 100 at a time - for outdoor environmental ed programs.  On the weekends we work with educational groups, community groups, and even corporations for leadership and training in sustainability and social responsibility issues.  Concurrently, we run a one year graduate program for folks interested in sustainability and community stewardship in both traditional and non-traditional educational settings.   

One thing we haven't been able to do is create an "elevator statement" that easily explains what we do in the course of an elevator ride.  Please go to our website:  http://www.islandwood.org to find out more about what we do.  (Such as our really neat, environmentally friendly buildings...)

*Where did you hear about this survey?
 

I'm not sure where I heard about the survey.  I constantly spend time perusing the net for resources and ideas for my graduate students, as well as potential collaborators. 

*What are the challenges facing your organization's use of social web
tools? 

Communications tools on the web (as well as the web, and even computers) are very young and, consequently, awkward.  There are many types of people who takes to these communications tools, and there are many types who don't.  There is still a matter of access to the tools needed to communicate, and that also precludes the involvement of many.  The biggest challenge I see is in being able to include your entire community in an easy, seamless way.  

I also have minor fears that social web tools can be used to reinforce anti-social activities.  People with fringe ideas used to be forced to interact with the public in *some* way - going to the store, etc.  Now, I can be a flakey/whacko/whatever as I want, and through wonderful and cheap communications technology, I can create a community of others, anywhere, who reinforce my beliefs.  I worry that it may make it too easy to retreat into our own worlds.  (In the 2000 election, or maybe even the 1996 elections, I recall two websites "The Right Side of the Web" and "The Left Side of the Web"  The left (liberal) side did the liberal thing, and placed a link to the Right Side on their page.  The "Right Side" did not.  Intellectually I can understand both positions...

*What new tool would you like to see created?
I really get excited about some of the tools I see for developing online communities. I'd love to see a tool that includes the features of a wikippedia (a collective knowledge base) as well as significant user profiles (such as Classmates.com) that allow us to share ideas and information about each other in an open manner.  Unfortunately, I started with al this stuff before the term "Internet" was used, and it was still a fairly small community of academics at research universities..  Back then, there were already social standards in place,  which were often self imposed.  As the internet has become a tool for commerce, we've seen a lot of exploitation of information, which requires us to build anti-social elements to our systems.

In the early 80's I was involved with several projects using a tool called Confer (Actually, Confer II) developed by Bob Parnes at the University of Michigan.  It's frequently cited in histories of online discussions - I remember one article in late 80's that referred to it as the "Ferrari" of communications tools. What I don't hear much about was that a major element of it was a decision making strategy that was designed to help protect/honor/involve the views of minority groups.  It's based on a system of "flotes" and "votes" where:

1. The group decides which issues upon which to vote,

2. Individuals cast their "flotes" as they choose against all issues

3. Final decision is chosen at random from all flotes cast per an issue

After an election, flotes are redistributed equally among the members.

Lots of interesting implications.  It was detailed in a paper called "Redesigning Democracy" but I don't recall the author of that piece - probably in the mid 70's and now lost in that "dark matter" part of human knowledge known as "print material"