Social Media U F09 Byte

Social Media U: Best Practices and Case StudiesBYTE 8/09
Rick Reo, rreo@gmu.edu
Instructional Designer, GMU
Adjunct Instructor, AIT & CEHD
Portions adapted from materials by:

Glenda Morgan, Ph.D, GMU
Duke University Libraries
New Media Consortium

What We’re Going To Talk About

What is Web 2.0 & why should you care?
How does Web 2.0 change teaching practices?
Educational Social Software (Web 2.0) tools
Best educational practices

SMU WorkshopSocial Networking/ Resource Sharing Links

Delicious tags for social mediahttp://delicious.com/rreo/socialmedia
Twitter back channel: #byte09
ShareTabs: http://www.sharetabs.com/?byte09
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/rreo

What is Web 2.0?
It’s open to some interpretation.
But what’s important …

What does Web 2.0 mean
to
2006

Poll
Using a scale of 1–7 (1 = very uncomfortable, 7 = very comfortable), rate how comfortable you are with the following:
For each of the following technologies, place an X in the box for those you use and for those you believe your students use.
Using a scale of 1–7 (1 = very uncomfortable, 7 = very comfortable), rate how comfortable you are with the following:

Web 2.0
Social Software
CMC
Web 2.0 includes a broad range of web technologies, services, and tools, and refers to a renewed pattern of web technology adoption and innovation.
Dabbagh, N., & Reo, R. (in press). Back to the future: Tracing the roots and learning affordances of social software. In M.J.W. Lee and C. McLoughlin (Eds.), Web 2.0-based e-Learning: Applying social informatics for tertiary teaching. Hershey, PA: IGI Global (formerly Idea Group, Inc.).
Social software is a subset of Web 2.0 and a continuation of older computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools such as IM, newsgroups, groupware, and virtual communities (Alexander, 2006; Rheingold, 2003, ¶4).

Educational Social Softwareaka Web 2.0 Tools
ESS enable:

lower the barriers to participation and self-authoring:

Web-based & easy-to-use
Community-based & sense of ownership

increased capacity for working together (social interaction, collaboration, resource sharing)

mashups

personalization: goals, interface,

“networked tools that support and encourage individuals to learn together while retaining individual control over their time, space, presence, activity, indentity, and relationship.
~ Terry Anderson, Ch.9, p.227Theory and Practice of Online Learning

We know it when we see it?
http://www.go2web20.net/

What’s All the Fuss?
A new way of interacting with the Internet
The World Wide Web as platform
Ubiquity, mobility, convergence
Flattens the playing field for getting in the game
Much more interactive
Social connectivity
Data rich
Abundance and fluidity of information and data
User-created content (enabled by an Architecture of Participation)
And you can mix the content
Customization and personalization

Why should you care?

Web 2.0 Transforms Practice

Teaching 2.0
Learning 2.0
Library 2.0
Enterprise 2.0
Journalism 2.0

What do these changes mean for Higher Education?
Changes in the way we:
collaborate
communicate
provide content, services, or resources

Why should I care?
In the end, you don’t really have a choice: Embrace 2.0 technologies
most people are probably already social computing aficionados
that is what our student body is expecting
and what our mandates require with our limited resources and increasing demands.
Why Faculty Should Care?
Students are using these tools
Improve disciplinary communication and knowledge sharing
Professional Development
Authentic learning opportunities

Do you have a balanced diet of digital media?
Source WIRED MAGAZINE: ISSUE 17.08
http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/magazine/17-08/by_media_diet

How to Get Startedon Web 2.0?

Source: Marta Kaganhttp://www.slideshare.net/mzkagan/what-the-fk-is-social-media-one-year-later

ISD 2.0?
Don’t start with the hot new technology
Think about your course goals – what are you trying to do?
What are your needs, especially in terms of collaboration, content, and communication
Then you can move to thinking about technology

Web 2.0 Selection Criteria: Save Time Choosing an Appropriate Tool
Source: Sloan-C

Social Software Use Continuum
Prepared by Rick Reo, 8/09

Web 2.0 Toolkit
Source: Educause

Educational Features ComparisonWeb Publishing and Collaboration Tools

Blogs
Way of quickly posting reverse time- ordered content or posts.
Easy to use
Single author (or a group of authors)
Comments and audience participation
Public or private
Increasingly using new media as part of a blog
RSS, Tagging, Blogroll
Audio, video, images

Blogs
Example educational uses:
A group of bloggers using their individual blogs can build up a corpus of interrelated knowledge via posts and comments. This might be a group of learners in a class, encouraged and facilitated by a teacher, or a group of relatively dedicated life-long learners.
Teachers can use a blog for course announcements, news and feedback to students.
Blogs can be used with RSS (below) to enable groups of learners and teachers to easily keep track of new posts.

Blogs
Mark Samples example:
A group of bloggers using their individual blogs can build up a corpus of interrelated knowledge via posts and comments. This might be a group of learners in a class, encouraged and facilitated by a teacher, or a group of relatively dedicated life-long learners.

RSS – Really Simple Syndication and Notification Technologies
Helps you to easily keep up to date with new and changed content, particularly if one is interested in multiple sources of information on multiple web sites.
A feed reader (aggregator) can be used to centralize all the recent changes in the sources of interest, and a user can easily use the reader/aggregator to view recent additions and changes.
Behind the scenes, RSS list changes (these lists of changes are called feeds). A feed reader regularly polls nominated sites for their feeds, displays changes in summary form, and allows the user to see the complete changes.

RSS – Really Simple Syndication and Notification Technologies
In a group project where a wiki is being developed collaboratively RSS feeds can be used to keep all members of the group up to date with changes as they can be automatically notified of changes as they are made. Similarly for new blog posts made by class members.
Feed Readers enable students and teachers to become aware of new blog posts in educational blogging scenarios (see above), to track the use of tags in social bookmarking systems (see above), to keep track of new shared media (see above), and to be aware of current news, e.g. from the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/index.html

Wiki
Easy way to collaborate on content creation by creating/editing a set of interlinked webpages
eg, Google Docs, PBWiki, Wikispaces
Or to find content created collaboratively
E.g., Wikipedia

Local Public Library Example
http://www.loudounpedia.org/
http://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=Wikis

Wikis can be used for the creation of annotated reading lists by one or more teachers (see also social bookmarking below, for an alternative method for doing this).
Wikis can be used in class projects, and are particularly suited to the incremental accretion of knowledge by a group, or production of collaboratively edited material, including material documenting group projects.
Wikis can be used by teachers to supply scaffolding for writing activities – thus in a group project a teacher can supply page structure, hints as to desirable content, and then provide feedback on student generated content.
Students can flag areas of the wiki that need attention, and provide feedback on each other’s writing.

Social Media Sharing Services
These services store user-contributed media, and allow users to search for and display content. Besides being a showcase for creative endeavor, these services can form valuable educational resources.
Compelling examples include YouTube (movies), iTunes (podcasts and vidcasts), Flickr (photos), Slideshare (presentations), DeviantArt (art work) and Scribd (documents). The latter is particularly interesting as it provides the ability to upload documents in different formats and then, for accessibility, to choose different download formats, including computer-generated speech, which provides a breadth of affordances not found in traditional systems.

Social Media Sharing Services
Podcasts can be used to provide introductory material before lectures, or, more commonly, to record lectures and allow students to listen to the lectures again, either because they were unable to attend, or to reinforce their learning.
audio tutorial material and/or exemplar recordings of native speakers to foreign language learners.
Vodcasts for experimental procedures in advance of lab sessions
Distribution and sharing of educational media and resources. For example, an art history class could have access to a set of art works via a photo sharing system.
The ability to comment on and critique each others work; including by people on other courses or at other institutions.
Flickr allows for annotations to be associated with different areas of an image and for comments to be made on the image as a whole, thereby facilitating teacher explanations, class discussion, and collaborative comment. It could be used for the example above.
FlickrCC18 is a particularly useful ancillary service that allows users to find Creative Commons licensed images that are freely reusable as educational resources.
Instructional videos and seminar records can be hosted on video sharing systems. Google Video allows for longer higher quality videos than YouTube, and contains a specific genre of educational videos.

Podcasts
Digital media file distributed over theInternet using an RSS feed
Or, for the rest of us, a sound file you can listen to on your computer or download to an mp3 player
Portable, relatively easy to produce
Podcasting Help, Penn State, iTunes U

Podcasting at Mason on iTunes U
There are a number of ways to use iTunes U for academic and institutional
content. The strategies below focus primarily on uses in academic courses.
As a distribution tool for digital audio and video course materials selected by the instructor
Instructors can post materials in digital audio and video format and organize them into categories called tabs; students can then easily find the materials they need.
As a shared space for student-created materials
Instructors can set up a tab as a "shared" space. Students can post their audio and video files to this tab so that anyone else in the class can see what they have created.
As a drop box for student homework
Instructors can set up a tab to function as a "drop box". Students can use this tab to upload the audio and video files they create as homework. The instructor is the only one who can see content in a drop box, so student homework remains private and is not accessible to other students who have access to the course album.
As a showcase for original student and instructor content
showcase exceptional student-created audio or video (such as presentations, mini-documentaries, travelogues, or short films) by making them available to a larger audience.

Social Bookmarking
Provides users the ability to record (bookmark) web pages, and tag those records with significant words (tags) that describe the pages being recorded. Examples include del.icio.us and Connotea.
Over time users build up collections of records with common tags, and users can search for bookmarked items by likely tags. Since items have been deemed worthy of being bookmarked and classified with one or more tags, social bookmarking services can sometimes be more effective than search engines for finding Internet resources. Users can find other users who use the same tag and who are likely to be interested in the same topic(s). In some social bookmarking systems, users with common interests can be added to an individual’s own network to enable easy monitoring of the other users’ tagging activity for interesting items. Syndication (discussed below) can be used to monitor tagging activity by users, by tags or by both of these.

Social Bookmarking
Examples educational uses:
Teachers and learners can build up collections of resources, and with a little ingenuity can also use social bookmarking systems to bookmark resources that are not on the web.
In this way it is easy to build up reading lists and resource lists. These may, with the use of multiple tags, be structured into sub-categories.
Groups of users with a common interest can team together to use the same bookmarking service to bookmark items of common interest. If they have individual bookmarking accounts, they all need to use the same tag to identify their resources.

Folksonomy
Internet-based information retrieval methodology consisting of collaboratively generated, open-ended keywords, e.g. tags or labels, that categorize any content, such as Web-pages, online photographs and Web links.

Folksonomy
Arise in Web-based communities where special provisions are made at the site level for creating and using tags, i.e. the Website or service supports user-generated metadata.
Good examples are sites like del.icio.us or Flickr.Here is a link to delish tags page: http://delicious.com/tags/rreo

Here is a link to delish Popular tags: http://delicious.com/tag/

Folksonomy
My Delish Tags
Popular Delish Tags

Social Networking
A way of making and keeping connections with others
Best known are Facebook and MySpace
But there use goes beyond youth
Professional networks LinkedIn, Sermo

Case Studies
Educause -- 7 Things You Should Know
Educause/ELI – Emerging Technologies and Practices section
Duke Case Studies on Web 2.0 Tools
Twitter Experiment by Dr. Rankin, Prof. of History at UT Dallas.
Comments: http://www.utdallas.edu/~mar046000/usweb/twitterconclusions.htm
The video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WPVWDkF7U8

DUKE - Using web-based tools (Web 2.0) for academic work
Instructors and students at Duke and other universities are making use of a
new generation of web-based applications such as Google Docs, Flickr,
del.icio.us and Second Life to support their course work. These new tools –
often referred to as Web 2.0 – provide for dynamic user participation, social
Interaction and collaboration. Web 2.0 tools offer several benefits to
instructors, including:
Ease of use
Interactions/integrations with other commonly-used tools
Filling needs not currently met with other tools
Inspiring creativity and exploration in teaching
Source: Web 2.0 Toolkit http://cit.duke.edu/resources/getting_started/web20toolkit/index.html

Duke Case Studies
Source: http://cit.duke.edu/help/consult/web20casestudies.html

Misc. Mason Web 2.0 Tool Kit or Faculty Blogs
Mark Sample, English Dept.
http://www.samplereality.com/2009/08/14/pedagogy-and-the-class-blog/
http://www.samplereality.com/2009/05/13/teaching-technologies-for-large-classes/
CHNM/Dan Cohen & Mills Kelly
http://digitalcampus.tv/
Glenda Morgan
http://gmu-tac.typepad.com/
http://accidentalpedagogy.typepad.com/accidental_pedagogy/web-20/
Instructional Uses of:
Wikis / Blogs
Social Media
RSS
Social Bookmarking
Twitter

Case Study -Twitter Experimentby Dr. Monica Rankin, UT Dallas
Problem
Large lecture class (90) - wanted to find a way to involve students in the materials via discussions
Solution
Twitter posts short messages that can be posted in real-time (with mobile devices via texting as well as via Web-based tools on laptops/netbooks.
Setup
Course Twitter account, hashtags, Tweetdeck, how-to training, factor down time for trial and error use
Good Practices
Experimented with strategies for producing constructive discussions
Twitter most effective when it was combined with other discussion strategies (small group discussions, Interaction with instructor, time to process as an entire class) also organize discussions by topic, needed TA to monitor Twitter stream on computer and respond to questions
Conclusion
Twitter did not replace more conventional discussion formats; instead, it enhanced the discussions and brought more student interaction
http://www.utdallas.edu/~mar046000/usweb/twitterconclusions.htm

Developing a Social Software-based Learning Environment
Start with a foundation -- my tostada metaphor
You can add any of the toppings you want, but it's nice to have a solid refried bean or chili con carne base to build upon.
You can add all sorts of fun tools but strong base
Often a blog or a wiki
But start by looking at what others have done.
Scott Leslie’s workhttp://edtechpost.wikispaces.com/The+Pros+and+Cons+of+Loosely+Coupled+Teaching

Social Software-based Learning Environment -- Course Examples
My Examples
Blog - http://blogs.gmu.edu/rreo/edit772-module-3/
http://rreo.edublogs.org/
Wiki- http://edit772-sp2009.wikispaces.com/
Startpage - http://www.pageflakes.com/rreo/7151276
Other Examples
OpenEd Class - http://opencontent.org/wiki/index.php?title=Intro_Open_Ed_Syllabus#INST_7150_Introduction_to_Open_Education.2C_Fall_2007
Econ Class Blog -- http://econ300.umwblogs.org/

Other Resources
User Guides & Educational Best Practices
RSS Ideas for Educators (PDF) v2.0 by Quentin Souza - A compendium of ideas for using RSS
Univ of Minnesota – TLT resources: http://dmc.umn.edu/teach.shtml
Privacy and Security
Common Craft, Plain English Video Series – Social Media Pack
Tools
Rick’s Delish links for tools (http://delicious.com/rreo/tools)
Content
Connexions
Wikimedia
Wikieducator

Copyleft

Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2009

Questions?
TurracherSchwarzsee (Austria)
Source: Wikimedia Commons