Pingbacks: Hiding in full view

I have Andrea Stringer's tweet1 to thank for pointing me towards the blog post which prompted me
to write this. “22 Ways To Use Twitter With Bloom’s Taxonomy”2 was written by Aditi Rao,
@TeachBytes3 on Twitter. Usually when an item like this came into view, I’d make brief research
notes describing what I saw and adding a few reflective comments. In January of 2017 when I read
Aditi’s post, I remarked neither on Aditi’s brief introduction to the graphic contained in the post,
nor on the graphic itself. What struck me more was the effect it was having on other people and
how they might be learning from it. My attention was therefore drawn to the ways in which other
people had interacted with the post and their reactions to it.
As I scrolled down to the comments section of Aditi’s post, I first passed the social media metrics
which revealed the post had been shared 179 times on Facebook, twice on Pinterest and, given that
I arrived at the post from a tweet, somewhat surprisingly, not at all on Twitter. I’m more than
sceptical about figures like this as indicators of the influence of social media. The tweet which led
me to Aditi’s post and which contained the graphic had 42 RTs and 43 Likes. If we also take into
account that the post itself had also been Liked by 12 bloggers, it would be fair to say a good
number of people have seen the graphic, and the resharing of it suggests that it has been largely well
received. We can’t really say if the readers have learned much from it or whether it had an effect on
their practice, but that’s where the Comments come in.
Wordpress blogs often open the comments section with “n thoughts on blog title.’ This particular
post had 19 thoughts or comments (as of 15th Jan 2017), so I thought I’d perhaps learn something
of how people used or reacted to the graphic. In fact, only two of the comments were written
comments: one was slightly critical of Bloom’s used in this way, then there was a reply from Aditi.
The other comments were all Pingbacks, which is to say automatically generated links to this post
from other blog posts, which Wordpress detects and presents.
“For example, Alice writes an interesting article on her Web log. Bob then reads this article and
comments about it, linking back to Alice's original post. Using pingback, Bob's software can
automatically notify Alice that her post has been linked to, and Alice's software can then include this
information on her site.”
Langridge & Hickson, 2002
If you click on the pingback link, you’re immediately taken back to the blog post which linked to it.
When I made my research notes at the time, I checked a couple of the pingbacked posts on Aditi’s
post and briefly remarked on their contents. Originally I left it there, but as I returned to my notes I
started to sense that pingbacks might be more significant than I had originally considered.

1 https://twitter.com/stringer_andrea/
2 https://teachbytes.com/2013/03/25/22-ways-to-use-twitter-with-blooms-taxonomy/
3 https://twitter.com/TeachBytes
I’ve never really thought about Pingbacks on blog posts; they just appear. On my own blogs, most
of the pingbacks are in fact internal referencing as I link from one post to another. But maybe
they’re not as mundane as they might at first appear and in fact they work much harder than I first
thought? When someone reads a blog post and is subsequently minded to write their own post,
either referencing or extending the ideas in the original, they are extending knowledge. Were it not
for the pingback, the link between the two posts would be one way only, from the body of the new
post back to the original. The pingback is initiated automatically from within the original post
platform and consequently makes this a two-way exchange by providing that link to the new post.
This extending of the knowledge web offers opportunities, but I wonder to what extent people use
it? I know that if I write a post which attracts a pingback, I usually follow it up to check out the post
and the author. The outcome might be that I learn something new about what I originally thought,
or that I find a new blog to follow, or a new person with whom to connect. The interesting part is
that it's an algorithm or script that's doing that. A nonhuman. My learning is once more being
affected and enabled by a nonhuman actor.
With those thoughts, I decided to 'follow the (pingback) actors' on TeachByte's post and see where
they led. Here is each of the destinations:
Pingback: The Best Resources For Helping Teachers Use Bloom’s Taxonomy In The Classroom | Larry
Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…
Pingback: Twitter to Blooms Taxonomy | Maurizio De Rose
Pingback: 22 Ways To Use Twitter With Bloom’s Taxonomy | TeachBytes | Learning Curve
Pingback: EDC3100 » Using Twitter with Bloom’s Taxonomy
Pingback: My Personal Learning Network » Blog Archive » 22 ways of using Social Media With Blooms
Taxonomy
Pingback: » Blooms really is a great resource, I find that over and over again ict and pedagogy
Pingback: Using Bloom’s Taxonomy | Oh, the places you'll go!
Pingback: Teagan » Twitter
Pingback: Combining Twitter and Blooms « EDC3100
Pingback: Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) » Blog Archive » Bloom’s Taxonomy &
Twitter
kmachamer Reblogged this on Teaching with Tech K-12 and commented:
These are great ways to make Twitter a social, but educational tool and teach kids how to use social media
for other things!
Pingback: 22 Ways To Use Twitter With Bloom’s Taxonomy ~ teachbytes | harmonteach
Pingback: Week 13 Blog | Jami's 6100 Blog
Pingback: 22 Ways To Use Twitter With Bloom's Taxonomy | ...
Pingback: 22 Ways To Use Twitter With Bloom's Taxonomy | ...
Pingback: Projects half Done | Social Media Tips and Tricks

Each of these posts may of course spawn their own pingbacks; Larry Ferlazzo's post itself had 53
comments, of which 11 were pingbacks. It's easy to see how a knowledge repository can soon build
up, but interesting to speculate on whether someone with Larry’s clout (influence? popularity?) has
to be part of that.
I then followed each of the above pingbacks to their source to see how far information was
diffusing, but here I encountered an issue. Many of the pingbacks came from what appeared to be
trainee teacher blogs who seemed to be on the same course (EDC3100) together and had perhaps
been given an assignment on Bloom's. Few of their blogs seemed currently maintained, and there
were no pingbacks leading out. A couple of the above listed pingbacks gave 404 errors, the blogs
presumably having been dismantled.
I then went on from there to Larry's blog to see where the second level of pingbacks came from.
After searching fruitlessly for a tool that would crawl these automatically, I attempted instead to
collect them manually, with the intention of producing a visualisation. I chose NodeXL for this,
entered the blog names/authors and from where the pingbacks had come:

I'd much have preferred the image to be interactive so you could jump out to the sites 'live' so to
speak. Nevertheless, at least you get a sense of the extent of the network which is assembled. We
can see that after Larry’s post, the pingback trails ceased; some were again 404 errors and one was
spam. I was rather surprised though and expected more of a cascade effect, with each new site
visisted offering links through the pingbacks to multiple other sites. This might be an indicator that
teachers’ blogs in general simply don’t attract that much traffic. Mine doesn’t. Or perhaps it was the
subject matter? Bloom’s taxonomy has a strong following in some circles, but is heavily criticised in
others; a marmite topic. Of course in focusing on the pingback, I’ve neglected the other more
textual contributions within the comments sections; these can also be followed back to the source,
though that often isn’t a blog post. The other aspect which isn’t particularly visible in this case is
what prompted the post from which I chose to start. Aditi claims it was colleagues asking questions
about Twitter, but how Bloom’s came to form part of her solution isn’t clear. Perhaps a post she
had read had helped prompt her in this direction, but without the backwards link, we can’t know.
Any starting point we choose, Larry’s post for example, will likely have precursors.
So, even in this single example, we start to get a sense of how the learning builds, grows, spreads and
changes. What began as a fusion of Twitter and Bloom’s may continue as someone discusses the
same topic in their post, or perhaps they use this in the context of a discussion purely about Bloom’s
and its applications. Alternately they may be prompted to think about Twitter in a different way, or
even segue into a different but related topic like educational technology implementation. The
knowledge assemblage becomes richer and more diverse with each iteration, but is tied together by
the pingbacks. I wonder if a Deleuze and Guattarian view might see these as potential lines of flight
for a learner?
One other aspect which struck me here was the 404s and what they indicated. The visualisation I
produced of the pingbacks fails to reveal any temporal features and is more of a snapshot in time.
The web of connections and the knowledge assemblage which forms grows with time as I
mentioned earlier, but it also decays too. There are plenty of reasons why what was once on the end
of the pingback may no longer be there: people shut down blogs or move them to new locations, or
blog platforms fail (RIP Posterous). There’s an almost natural cycle of growth and decay, and even
regeneration here. The tweet Andrea used which started the ball rolling is captured in my research
notes, but is no longer on the Twitter platform. The tweet to which she pointed and which directed
me towards Aditi’s post was fresh (as of Jan 2017), but referred back to a 2013 post, thereby
breathing fresh life into it and perhaps starting a further round of pingbacks. Growth and decay.

Twitter’s role
The preceding discussion has largely centred on pingbacks, a feature of blogs, rather than
microblogs. I have two points to make here: firstly that microblogs and Twitter may have features
which function in a similar way to pingbacks. The retweet for example provides a similar link to a
text or resource that someone else has produced. I’ll admit that it has less permanence than a
pingback which patiently waits at the foot of a blog, ready to whisk the reader off to the linked blog.
The structure and function of Twitter is one of flow and change rather than permanence and
accumulation.
Secondly, my point of entry to the blogs and their interconnected web of enabling pingbacks was a
tweet. Two actually. Andrea’s tweet took me to another tweet which referenced Aditi’s blog post;
had I not been on Twitter and had Andrea and I not made a connection through that platform, the
likelihood of me ever being aware of Aditi’s post and the learning opportunities that it and its wider
assemblage brings together would be minimal.

A sociomaterial view
I’ve used the word assemblage a couple of times now and I perhaps need to lay out how learning is
perceived when one comes to it with a sociomaterial sensibility. Conventionally, learning is often
framed as either cognitive 'acquisition' arising within the individual (growth in representational
knowledge) or social 'participation (skilled participation in the practices of a social group assumes
that learning is an outcome of social interaction and that the practice of participation is an
exclusively human one.) Sociomaterial perspectives on the other hand:
“...do not privilege human consciousness or intention, but trace how knowledge, knowers and known
(representations, subjects and objects) emerge together with/in activity.”
Fenwick, Nerland & Jensen, 2012
It’s not the people alone who are immersed in the enactment of learning, it’s the materiality too in
the form of the Wordpress platform and its algorithms, It’s a ‘a performative knowledge practice
constituted and enacted by people and tools in complex collectives or assemblages’ (Mulcahy, 2014)
and as such, what professional learning is depends entirely on how it is performed by those (humans
and nonhumans) involved.
I’m still working at conceiving learning as more than a process which is contained solely within
human consciousness, but I’m getting there. Each time I write or talk about it, I’m enacting a
knowledge assemblage of keyboards and texts, projectors and visualisations, which together
constitute my (our?) learning. Getting there.

Fenwick, T., Nerland, M., & Jensen, K. (2012). Sociomaterial approaches to conceptualising
professional learning and practice. Journal of Education and Work, 25(1), 1-13.
Langridge, S., & Hickson, I. Pingback 1.0 (2002). URL http://www. hixie. ch/specs/pingback/pingback.
Mulcahy, D. (2014). Re-thinking teacher professional learning: A more than representational
account. In T. J. Fenwick, & M. Nerland (Eds.), Reconceptualising professional learning: Sociomaterial
knowledges, practices, and responsibilities (pp. 52-66). New York: Routledge.