Inclusive, international and participatory is the promise of the first ever digital media learning conference, here in San Diego over the next three days. The 2010 Digital Media Learning Conference (San Diego, USA).

Today finds me at the start of the conference hosted University of California Humanities Research Institute at the UC Irvine campus in San Diego. The next 3 days over 500 digital media delegates form around the world are coming together to deliver, attend and discuss at over 60 panel session about digital media learning and literacy in society, education, and policy. As noted in the conference press release as to why this is so important:

“Global digital media are rapidly becoming a driving force in globalization, scientific advances, and the intersection—and sometimes clash—of cultures,” said David Theo Goldberg, director of the systemwide University of California Humanities Research Institute and co-director of the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, which designed and organized the conference. “Every day new questions arise about the ability of traditional systems and institutions to prepare both young people and life-long learners for the social, economic, and political demands of a complex and networked new century.” (Quote: Jeff Brazil)

What makes this conference something I’m excited about is that at the outset, the program was about collaboration and conversation within and across the digital media learning community. To participate delegates contributed to a DML Conference Wiki in 2009, collaborating on ideas and areas of research interest. Session proposals were then submitted for peer review, with each session requiring participants originating from differing institutions and/or organisations.

I first came across the conference on twitter. Connecting through the conference Wiki with two Assistant Professors from University of Central Florida, Dr. Robb Lindgren and Dr. Rudy McDaniel about our similar areas of research interest: researching digital media expertise and knowledge, albeit from three differing approaches. After a number of emails and a Skype hook-up we submitted a proposal on Digital Media Expertise: Three Differing Approaches. Where we propose to discuss “Expertise about digital media. Expertise with digital. Expertise through digital media”.

The conference kicks off this afternoon with a conference introduction from the chair, Henry Jenkins from the University of Southern California, and Opening key note from S. Craig Watkins, who has been researching young peopleʼs media behaviors for more than a decade.

Inclusive, international and participatory – like the digital media we research, use and promote. I hope so, this conference is this and more.

For more information:

Press release by Jeff Brazil

DML 2010 Conference

DML Research Hub

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Increasingly we are seeing hundreds of uses of the term ‘Social Media Expert’ or ‘Web Expert’ on websites, titles, business cards, job descriptions and blog posts about “10 signs of a social media expert’. This is not a new phenomena, we have been interested in expertise and knowledge for generations, who has it, how do you recognise it, how do you measure it, how do you store or capture it?

This is especially evident as it pertains to technology. From computer expertise, to database expertise, system expertise, web expertise, social web (media) expertise. However technology is changing so rapidly, and our ability to keep up and keep abreast of the increasing tide of information starts to beg the question – can anyone really be a technology expert?

From this talk, my intention was to pose to the audience to consider that:

• expetise is about knowledge (type, scope, how acquired) not just usage behaviour, something we often use as a proxy for knowledge.
• different knowledge is acquired in differing contexts so although two things might be similar or related, doesn’t mean you have same knowledge in both.
• think about the terms you use to describe your knowledge, experience and understanding of technology, for what we think we know, doesn’t correlate to what we actually know and terms/labels can be misleading.
• If someone calls themselves a social web (media) expert, chances are they are still learning (and that’s ok!) – its a new young and rapdily changing field. We are all learning. But many of us are not experts.

You can watch my talk below at Ignite Cardiff:

You can also view and download the slides from slideshare or through Issuu:

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Imagine that you’re on stage in front of an audience of hundreds of people, doing a five-minute presentation using slides that automatically rotate every 15 seconds, whether you’re ready or not. What would you do? What would you say? The entry on Wikipedia provides a more detailed overview of Ignite events around the world.

Well having thought about this scary prospect and being an academic who makes a living out of lecturing and talking, I thought I might just be up for the challenge. Can an academic really only talk for 5 minutes?

So tonight at Wales Millennium Centre, I’ll be joining a list of 15 other speakers to talk for 5 minutes on a topic of my choice. My presentation is entitled: “If I can drive does that make me a mechanic!” and stems from two earlier posts on this blog about “the mechanics of social web expertise” and “measuring social web expertise.” Most importantly though this presentation is about my dad!

This Ignite Cardiff event is being hosted in partnership with Cardiff Design Festival and organised by Cardiff Web Scene and sponsored by Box UK.

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Often in the discussion of expertise about technologies, many fall into the trap of associating the length of usage as an indicator of expertise. In the blog entries mentioned in the previous post, many discussed ‘usage’ of social web technologies – how many years used, in what ways, which tools – as an indicator of expertise.

Technology usage as an indicator of expertise is not new or unique to the social web context, but is most certainly fatally flawed.

Usage as a Proxy for Expertise

While researching consumer knowledge of technologies, I found that many research studies about technology, actually use experience (e.g., how long you have been using a technology) as a proxy for how knowledgeable or ‘expert’ you are. In other words, the longer the usage in duration, frequency and past experience than the higher reported expertise.

I found this methodology really flawed as it assumes people learn in the same way, from the same information and at the same rate. But why do they do it? Because it is easier to measure.

This is like saying that two people who have bee driving cars for 20 years, a car mechanic (who fixes cars) and a non-car-mechanic (who drives cars), have the same knowledge about how to drive a car and it’s inner workings.

In essence it ignores the context from which knowledge about a specific domain might be acquired,  the scope of this knowledge (is it specialised or more common knowledge) and assumes we all learn in the same way and at the same rate.

In the doctoral research about web knowledge, a study of over 2,500 web designers and users; and from one of the preliminary studies (see below) that compared the knowledge and usage of web design students and non-web design students, it was found that

• Length of usage experience with the web had a very weak relationship with what a a user actually knew about the web.
• User perceptions of how knowledgeable they were – also an indicator of confidence – had a weak relationship with what was actually stored in their memory.

So if someone says they are web expert, even if they honestly believe it, they are possibly not, as they are not the best judge of what they actually know. That would be like my students marking their own exam papers!

Here is a brief commentary about a research article on the measurement of actually web knowledge (what is stored in memory) that was published in the journal Psychology & Marketing.

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Usage of the Social Web & Expertise

In contrast, in the context of the social web, we are seeing usage as a criteria for expertise being used in a different way. In this context it is not so much how long you have been using the social web, it’s the fact that you are personally using it and the extent of this personal usage!

If you are on the most popular social networks (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Bebo etc), you have a large number of followers or friends, you use RSS feeds and have a blog, than you must be a social web expert! Well, maybe not!

Just because I subscribe to 3 of the most popular cooking magazines, have bookmarked some of the most trafficked recipes sites, watch religiously TV programmes starring Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsey and Nigela Lawson, and dine out with my friends 3 times a week – this doesn’t mean I can call myself a Chef!

As denoted in the last post, social web expertise goes beyond usage experience. It’s about the type, scope and acquisition of specialised knowledge about the social web, and the application of this knowledge – be it for research, client or self.

So perhaps if you think you are an expert, you just might not be! And just because you use the social web alot, this also doesn’t make you a social web expert.

This is where the role of peer and community recognition that you are an expert becomes very important and the use of case studies and case examples to show the application of your knowledge.

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As the avid researcher I am, I did a little research to see what others had to say on the topic of social web expertise. By searching the phrase ‘social media expert’ on Google it returned  around 306,000 search results (I read the first two pages), on delicious 1027 bookmarks (of which I read 10) and I sat and painfully watched 6 of the 164 videos about it on YouTube.

What about Twitter? Well a Twitter Search showed we are certainly tweeting about it. Twist shows a direct correlation between use of the terms social media and expert.

I also came across a number of really interesting blog posts discussing social media expertise. These are well worth a read.

• Joel Mackey in his post ‘You are not a social media expert, you idiot!’, categorises five types of social media experts using criteria such as knowledge and usage of social web technologies, and the breadth and depth of social network reach
• Jay Fowler talks about ‘What makes you the expert?’ using criteria of how well and how frequently an individual uses social web technologies as key criteria in categorisation.
• Chris Brogen, a once self-confessed social media expert, now espouses ‘What I want a social media expert to know!’, from the strategic to the tactical.
• Dave Fleet offers a number of posts about ‘When can we start to say Expert?‘ given the early days of social web technologies, and in his post ‘Where are the experts?‘, provides a list of people he regards as social media experts given when they write – he reads!
  
• Dan Schawbel provides a list of reasons from inability to command a premium salary, too little bases for differentiation and confusion as to what a social media expert is as to why ‘You shouldn’t brand yourself as a social media expert!
• In response to Dan’s post and annoyed by the growing anti-expert meme, Suw Charman-Anderson in her post ‘Hi, my name is Suw and I’m a social media expert!’, provides a thought provoking read about why we should be calling ourselves social media experts.
  

But these posts still left me feeling that perhaps the simple line of what really is an expert in the digital economy is getting lost in the deluge of social web examples, content, technology and a need to self-promote.

So this post is not so much about social web expertise, as it is about knowledge of technology.

Knowledge of Technology

In the early days of my research career looking at questions of usability I started researching knowledge of technology. More specifically comparing novice and experienced web users in how they differed in Web Knowledge. This later formed the basis for my PhD on Web Knowledge and Web Usability. Warning: It is 350 pages long!

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A detailed review of the insights from this 350 page research thesis is best left for another blog post. However, from this research a number of core questions came up that provide some interesting food for thought as to how we think about ‘expertise’ in the digital economy – what ever the trend, platform, tool or technology.

So What Really is an Expert in the Digital Economy?

Before we really can use a term, be it to label ourselves or someone else, we need to know what it is and the appropriate context for it’s usage. Increasingly in digital or technological arena’s we use the terms expert, novice and experienced users alot, but often inconsistently.

The preliminary secondary research of academic studies and industry reports we did about knowledge, expertise, and usage (be it of technology or other complex products) revealed that very few could agree on what knowledge is and how it differed from experience, expertise or the process of learning. There was also limited agreement on the differing types, scope, levels of knowledge and how it could be measured.

So we did some primary research of users with differing experiences with technology (be it designers, users or project managers) and spoke to industry recognised leaders to help develop some standard considerations around the notion of expertise, especially as it relates to technology.

The research identified that an expert in digital technology actually denotes someone as:

1. having differing types of knowledge about technology stored in their memory,
2. differing breadth and depth of knowledge (scope) about the technology, and
3. having acquired this knowledge by differing means than an average consumer, user or member of the general population.

To be more specific:

• The main types of knowledge we store in our memory are declarative (e.g., definitive knowledge about what Twitter is and why use it) and procedural (e.g., process knowledge about how Twitter works or could be used for marketing).
• These types of knowledge can differ on a continuum in scope from being more specialised and technical knowledge (e.g., design, development and socio-cultural impact of Twitter) to more common, generally known principles (e.g., it’s domain twitter.com and tools such as Tweetdeck to manage it’s usage)
• We acquire knowledge through different experiences or episodes (also called episodic knowledge). These can include formal education (e.g., masterclass about Twitter), informal learning (e.g., reading a blog post or report about Twitter), direct usage (e.g., Frequency and length of use, Tweeting for oneself or designing/implementing strategy for client) or vicariously through our social networks (e.g., friends, colleagues) and media networks (e.g., BBC, CNN). These episodes provide a contextual reference for the learning, usage and application of the knowledge acquired.

Note: The example given would relate to the scope of expertise about Twitter, not the wider social web.

As you can see, the extent of expertise someone poses is about the knowledge stored in their memory: its type, it’s scope and it’s acquisition and the use of this knowledge, it’s application. It is not just that they think they are an expert.

Recognising a Social Media Expert

So how do you recognise someone or a team as possessing social web expertise? When faced with the opportunity for partnering on a CASE Insights project I consider the following questions?

• What is their past experience with technology, not just the social web?
• What is their current usage experience with the social web, and not just Facebook and Twitter – think bigger picture?
• How long have they been consulting or advising? To whom? About What?
• What is the contextual application of their experience – which clients, which industries – I look for case studies?
• Do they talk beyond the technological implications of the social web to the social-cultural implications?
• What is their strategic springboard – marketing, PR, communications, sales? Do they have one?
• What is their tactical focus – design, management, measurement, monetisation?
• What is their tone of relationship? Do they sound like they want to sell me something, advise on something, share or create something?
• Are they industry or community regarded – be it from past clients, colleagues, followers and case examples – as possessing specialised knowledge.

In summary, subject to what some might think I believe given I don’t like using the term expertise to promote my own work or self, it’s not that I think the term expert shouldn’t be used. I just think we should be judicious about who uses it, how and when we use it (context) and conscious of what it is we are indicating someone has with this label.

Expertise is about possessing differing types and scope of knowledge and how we use this knowledge, not just the usage of digital technologies.

In essence, I wouldn’t call myself a mechanic if I just changed a tyre or a chef if I made a bowl of pasta. Just like the culinary expertise of Executive Chef Mark Eskew at the Gordon Ramsay Three-Michelin Star restaurant in London would greatly differ to that of a service-cook at the Moto road-side cafe at Reading on the M4.

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