Social media tools and
applications in Higher Education
Luís Pedro | Carlos Santos | U. Aveiro | ECIU Glasgow 14-03-08

Context
★ Multimedia in Education Masters
Course
★ Training of active, critical and reflexive
professionals/researchers
★ In-service professionals, mostly
teachers

Why?
★ Conforming learning roadmaps with
strong labour commitments
★ Message inheritance to future
generations of ICT using
★ Flexible learning time management

What? (at curricular level)
★ B-learning offer
★ Sequential curricular structure
★ Face-to-face sessions at beginning and
end of each curricular unit
★ Intermediate activities occur at a
distance

Curricular time organisation model

What (bridging...)
★ Curricular decisions have sound
pedagogical repercussions
★ Concentration on a single curricular
unit at a given moment in time | work
overload, intense information flow,
informed and shared group decision-
making work
★ Potential engagement, communication
and learning problem

What (pedagogically)
★ Technology
★ But for what?
★ Learning about technologies or
learning with technologies?
★ What message are we passing to these
students?
★ What message will they pass for their
students?

What is happening?
★ Globalisation (what is where? what is
now? what is how? what is who?)
★ Epistemological shifts (temporary
nature of knowledge)
★ Ontological shifts (not only a consumer,
but a prosumer)
★ Communication tools and services

Learning and technology 101
★ It´s not about technology, it’s about
people
★ Web 1.0 | Web 2.0 | Web 3.0 or
Semantic Web
★ 3 interacting and mutually influencing
vectors: learning, teaching
methodology, technology
★ It´s up to us to dynamically shape this
triangle

Web x.0

Is it or isn’t it?
★ Framing social context
★ Is the frame part of the picture?
★ Situated learning, contextual learning,
social constructivism...

Why?
★ Sharing and collaborating nature of
work
★ Shared and negotiated meanings
★ Communication | peer and teacher-
student
★ Openness | major social interaction

What?
★ Sharing, interaction and participation
continuous flow
★ Learning communities
★ Social media tools and applications

Sufficiently mine technological solutions?
★ LMS | It is so flexible, wasn’t it?
★ Are students sufficiently in control?
★ Are these platforms sufficiently open?
★ Is it sufficiently easy to integrate
content?
★ Are they sufficiently empowering and
engaging tools?

The Web by Tim Berners-Lee
★ “The basic [idea] of the Web is that [of] an
information space through which people can
communicate, but communicate in a special
way: communicate by sharing their
knowledge in a pool. The idea was not just
that it should be a big browsing medium. The
idea was that everybody would be putting
their ideas in, as well as taking them out.”
http://www.w3.org/1999/04/13-tbl.html (1999)

Quick survey
★ Who has a Web presence besides
institutional ones?
★ Who had put new information in past
week? Past month? Past year?

The Web 2.0 by Stephen Downes
★ “... What was happening was that major parts
of the Web were acquiring the properties of
communication networks, the sort of
networks found to exist (albeit on a much
smaller scale) in the physical world. And that
the Web itself was being transformed from
what was called “the Read Web” to “Read-
Write Web” in accordance with Tim Berners-
Lee’s original vision. Proponents of this new,
evolving Web began calling it Web 2.0 and in
short order the trend became a movement.”
http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&article=29-1 (2006)

The Web 2.0 by Michael Wesch and...
The Machine is Us/ing Us (2007) A Vision of Students Today (2007)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o
Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Kansas State University ...by his students

Web 2.0 in MMEd
★ Previous knowledge and experience
with Web 2.0 tools... very low
★ Previous effective use of LMS... low
★ Students: “Even more tools to
manage?”
★ Expecting some negative reactions...

Learn by doing/Hands-on approach
★ Start with basic concepts related to Web
2.0
★ Show most common tools (blogs, wikis,
social bookmarking,...)
★ Objective: learn how easy it is to use
Web 2.0 tools
★ Result: become Web 2.0 contributors

How to understand it?
★ feel it first...
★ Promote a good experience for first time users (a teacher’s job)
★ Engage students in collaborative learning activities designed to
take advantage of Web 2.0
★ ... reflect and discuss about it next
★ Be curious
★ Learn to find the right tools and strategies for specific needs

blogs

wiki

social bookmarking

student tools
?
?
?
?
? ? ?

syndication and aggregation
the old and slow way
the new and fast way
images from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU (2007)

LMS vs PLE
Scott Wilson (2005) - http://zope.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=20050125170206

How does your presence look like?
★ Where are you? Who are you? Do you
share common interests with me?
★ Where are the non-verbal components
of social interaction in Web scenarios?
★ Synchronous and distributed nature of
interaction

Second Life
★ MUVE - MultiUser Virtual
Environment
★ Social and economic interaction
★ It´s not someone else’s world and
someone else’s imagination

Second Life and Learning
★ Formal learning activities: difficult to
monitor, boring, possible cognitive
overload due to number of interactions
★ Informal learning activities: massive set
of interaction tools, participation and
responsibility promoters

Informal activities in SL
★ Invited specialist (as in with Warwick
presentation on Wednesday)
★ Blurred roles (student, teacher,
specialists)
★ Management and metalearning skills
(CTEd subject)

SL Informal activities

SL UA Island

SL social and scientific activities

Conclusions
★ Learning spaces: closed and carefully
managed or open and flexible?
★ Attitudinal and cultural or
technological skills?
★ University 2.0 Portal (action-research)
★ and... how to use it in Bologna context?

thank you
★ Luís Pedro
★ email: lpedro@ua.pt
★ blog: http://nitratodocaos.blogs.ca.ua.pt/
★ SL: Zes Garfield
★ twitter: lfpedro
★ Carlos Santos
★ email: carlossantos@ua.pt
★ blog: http://napraia.blogs.ca.ua.pt/
★ SL: Carlosss Lukas
★ twitter: csantos