Social Software and
Education
Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones
Department of Computer Science
Virginia Tech

Web 2.0
The Machine is Us
by Michael Wesch
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g

We need to rethink...
education
• •
Community of learners Information spreads
that go beyond the faster than we can
classroom, major, control it
campus, town
• Collaboration take
• Community of different forms
educators ...
• social interaction is by
• Sharing of resources is both online and
the norm offline

Social Software is...
• ... software enables people to rendezvous,
connect or collaborate through computer-
mediated communication [Wikipedia]
• ...55% of all American youth (ages 12-17)
use some form of social networking site
[Pew Internet & American Life Project,
Lenhart 2007]

Features of Social SW
• Goals vary - identify friends, resources,
staying in touch, sharing interesting news...
• Connections - friends, “following,” groups...
• User-provided tags
• Commenting features... support discussion,
collaboration, exchange
• Syndication in the form of RSS, ics, Atom...
• API - for the techies, build your own stuff

Goals of SSw
• Identify friends (facebook, okrut, friendster)
• education (campusbug, carmun,
rateteachers)
• Share resources: movies (youtube), pictures
(flickr), bookmarks (del.icio.us,
SumbleUpon), status (fliker), news (digg,
reddit), citations (citeulike), slides
(slideshare), exams (koofers)...

carmun.com

Koofers.com

My CS 2 Course @ Koofers.com
koofers

Beauty of Social Tagging
• Free for all tagging, users
pick their own tags Joe Mary
• But social network gives
tag_x
meaning to tags tag_y
tag_y
• Joe receives as a
url_a url_b
recommendation url_b

citeulike.org
• Bookmarking for references

SSw APIs and
Syndication

SSw APIs: Mashups
• Combination of
multiple
applications
• Google maps is a
popular partner in
mashups
http://perez.cs.vt.edu/peer-cs.html

SSw APIs: custom
interfaces
• Syllabus collection
• Computing
News, as a result
of Google search
• Google COOP

Syndication: Embedding

Multiple Personalities
• On the web,
everybody has
schizophrenia
• Accounts in
facebook, flickr,
twitter,
slideshare, etc....

Implications for
Education
• •
the sky is falling, cheating Post some pictures to
is rampant, we are flicker, movies to
doomed YouTube, slides to
SlideShare
• Make use of embedded
• content, rss
Have a presence on
facebook - make
•
students know you are Make use of these
participating examples in classes
• process rss, etc.

Implications for
Education
• •
the sky is falling, cheating Post some pictures to
is rampant, we are flicker, movies to
doomed YouTube, slides to
SlideShare
• Make use of embedded
• content, rss
Have a presence on
facebook - make
•
students know you are Make use of these
participating examples in classes
• process rss, etc.

Trip SIGCSE • Dinner with CREU students
Diversity
HCI REU
CREU: Collaborative Research
Experience for Undergraduates in
Scholars of the Future
Computer Science and Engineering
http://www.cra.org/Activities/craw/creu/
Idris
Sergio
Gregg
Jaime
NSF
Morgan Lauren Sarah
Crystal Tarish
Emily

Questions?