A POD presentation on the potential of social software for education. October 23, 2007

1. Building Community
Communication
Collaboration
Cooperation
with social software
blogs, bookmarking, forums, IM,
media sharing, web clipping, wikis

2. A traditional
community of
learners

3. A traditional
community of
learners
Do these
students
think of
themselves as
a community?

4. community building
works easily
offline

5. community building
works easily
online
from theonion.com

6. What is social software?

7. Software that supports group interaction
— Clay Shirky
What is social software?
It's the opposite of project-oriented collaboration tools that places people
into groups. Social software supports the desire of individuals to be
pulled into groups to achieve goals.
— Stowe Boyd

8. Blogs
Instant Messaging
Media Sharing
Social Bookmarking
Web Clipping
Wikis

9. Web 2.0 Increasing semantics of social connections

10. Why use social software
in education?

11. Building Community
• generates excitement and interest in
learning
• creates an infrastructure for learning
shared questions, shared methods, opportunities for
critique and feedback
• provides opportunities to cultivate social
skills involved in knowledge acquisition,
evaluation and distribution

12. ‣ rapid feedback and critique
‣ stimulating creativity Potential Benefits
‣ facilitating collaborative study
‣ providing a real audience for Uses for Social
student work
Software in
‣ fostering the development of Education
critical thinking
‣ platform for academic Susan Connell
discourse
‣ address conflicts of time and
space
http://soozzone.com/690review.htm
March 1987 AAHE Bulletin, Chickering and Gamson

13. Good Practice • encourages student-faculty
interaction
• encourages cooperation
among students
• encourages active learning
• gives prompt feedback
7 • emphasizes time on task
principles of good practice • communicates high
in undergraduate education expectations
• respect diverse talents and
ways of learning
March 1987 AAHE Bulletin, Chickering and Gamson

14. Some examples of
social software

15. Blogs
• online journal or weblog
• posts displayed in
reverse chronological
order
• users can
‣ easily post new entries
‣ comment on entries
‣ include media and
external links
‣ use sidebar to post
stable information

17. Media Sharing
Music, photos,
videos, podcasts,
slideshows

18. Instant Messaging
• one-to-one messaging
• more immediate than email
• familiar to students

19. Web Clipping
• highlight selected text
• save clippings
• add sticky notes or annotations clippings
• bookmark favorite pages or websites
• create tags for your bookmarked sites
• search your sites or the sites of others
• share your clippings and notes

20. Social Bookmarking
• store, organize and share
your bookmarks
• visit your collection from
different browsers and from
different computers
• users can share each
others’ bookmarks
• search through tags or
interest groups

21. Social Bookmarking
tags are “free-form labels assigned by the user and not drawn from
any controlled vocabulary” — Hammond

22. Wikis
• collaborative authoring
• users can
‣ create, edit and delete
pages
‣ user friendly markup
language
‣ easily link one page to
another
‣ comment on text
‣ review the history of
changes
• soft security

24. How to use social software
to build community

25. community building online
? ?

26. community building online
? ? Which applications?
What assignments?
How do I assess this?
Training for faculty and students?

27. community building online
What do you want to accomplish?
‣ I want students to get to know each other.
‣ I want students to communicate with each other.
‣ I want to facilitate peer evaluation.
‣ I want students to learn from each other.
‣ I want students to produce something
collaboratively.
‣ I want to manage my course more effectively

28. community building online
What do you want to accomplish?
Foster skills for
‣ cultivating working peer relationships
‣ collaborative and cooperative problem solving
‣ producing and presenting something in
collaboration with others
‣ adapting to new technologies
‣ effective communication

29. community building online
suggestions for an smooth transition
‣ start small — start simple
‣ period/place for experiment (sandbox)
‣ introductory activities
‣ closing activities
‣ extra credit activities
‣ be prepared to make adjustments

31. Thank You
Rudy Garns
LA 232
572-5528
garns@nku.edu