The document discusses using social software effectively for education. It describes three levels of granularity for social learning: groups, networks, and collectives. Groups have clear membership and rules, networks are fluid connections, and collectives harness the wisdom of crowds through aggregation. Formal education can benefit from all three levels by designing activities that leverage their unique affordances and interactions to enhance learning. Choosing the right tools for each level and developing strategies to promote contribution and literacy are keys to success.

1. Effective Educational Social Software: Getting the Correct Granularity 6th European Conference on e-Learning Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark 4-5 October 2007 Terry Anderson Blog: terrya@edublogs.org [email_address]

2. Interaction in Formal Education Social software Granularity of the many Groups Networks Collective Educational applications

3. Athabasca University, * Athabasca University Fastest growing public university in Canada 32,000 students 700 courses Graduate and undergraduate programs Largest Masters of Distance Education program Only USA Accredited University in Canada Athabasca University Alberta, Canada

4. “ Canada is a great country, much too cold for common sense, inhabited by compassionate and intelligent people with bad haircuts”. Yann Martel , Life of Pi, 2002.

5. The Net Changes Everything! Affordances of the Net , Social software, Net 2.0 (user-generated knowledge), e-learning 2.0, semantic web and other jargon names A ssume a world of network ubiquity We construct the real uses of these technologies 94% of 9-17 Americana teenagers use Social Software- with education being a major topic (National School Board Assoc, 2007) 81.6% of USA undergrads use social software ECAR EduCause 2007

6. New Net Pedagogies – George Siemens Connectivism “ A learning theory for the Digital Age

7. Maybe the Sky Really is Falling! The Net Creates: Great challenge and Great Opportunity

8. What is the most cost and learning effective approach to organizing formal learning ??? within the walls of schools.?? Towards new learning networks , Futurlab within formal distance education or e-learning packages ?? Within the personal learning environments of learners ???

9. Educational Social Software defined: “ Networked tools that support and encourage learning through face-to-face and online social interactions while retaining individual control over time, space, presence, activity, identity, relationship, and community .” (Anderson, 2005)

10. Interaction Models of Learning Effective interaction between and among learners, content and teachers makes authentic learning happen. Interaction key ingredient in all forms of learning Content, learner, teacher

11. Learner Teacher Content Educational Interactions Learner / teacher Teacher / content. Teacher / teacher Content / content Learner / learner Learner / content Anderson (2002) Equivalency Theorem

12. Learner Teacher Content Educational Interactions Learner / teacher Teacher / content. Teacher / teacher Content / content Learner / learner Learner / content Anderson (2002) Equivalency Theorem Group as educational actor Jon Dron, 2007

13. Learner Teacher Content Learner / teacher Teacher / content. Teacher / teacher Content / content Learner / learner Learner / content Anderson (2002) Equivalency Theorem Group as educational actor Stephen Downes, 2006 network Stephen Downes, 2006

14. Learner Teacher Content Learner / teacher Teacher / content. Teacher / teacher Content / content Learner / learner Learner / content Anderson (2002) Equivalency Theorem Group as educational actor Anderson & Dron, 2007 collective Dron & Anderson

15. ‘Taxonomy of the Many’ Dron and Anderson, 2007 Group Conscious membership Leadership and organization Cohorts and paced Rules and guidelines Access and privacy controls Focused and often time limited May be blended F2F Metaphor : Virtual classroom

16. Group Network Shared interest/practice Fluid membership Friends of friends Reputation and altruism driven Emergent norms, structures Activity ebbs and flows Rarely F2F Metaphor: Virtual Community of Practice

17. Metaphor: Wisdom of Crowds Group Network Collective ‘Aggregated other’ Unconscious ‘wisdom of crowds’ Stigmatic aggregation No membership or rules Augmentation and annotation through use of Data Mining Never F2F

18. Social Learning 2.0 Dron and Anderson, 2007 Collective Group Network

19. D Networks Groups Collective WIKI Blogs FaceBook Del.icio.us Flicker Filtering SecondLife Calendaring Geotracking Social Learning 2.0 Email, Skype, IM LMS/VLEs RSS, Atom Google Alert Commercial Personalized Services ELGG Meetup Mail Lists

20. Social Learning 2.0 Each of us participates in Groups, Networks and Collectives. Learning is enhanced by exploiting the affordances of all three levels of social learning . Issues, memes, opportunities and learning activities and knowledge can be created at all three levels of granularity. Certain network tools are optimized for each level of granularity - Can they be appropriated for effective use?

21. Social Learning 2.0 Applications in Educational Contexts Organizational Learning Formal Education Personal Learning Environments 3. Collectives 2. Networks 1. Groups

22. Social Learning 2.0 Applications in Educational Contexts Organizational Learning Formal Education Personal Learning Environments 3. Collectives 2. Networks 1. Groups

23. 1. Formal Education in Distributed Groups: Comfortable, classes and cohorts Increases over independent learning: completion rates, achievement satisfaction ( Jung, Choi, Lim, & Leem, 2002) Same logistic challenges as for institutional, campus -based learning Can operate ‘behind the garden wall’ to allow freedom for expression and development Refuge for scholarship

24. Formal Learning and Groups Long history of research and study Need to optimize: Social presence Cognitive presence Teaching presence (see communitiesofinquiry.com) Strong identification with group Little use of anonymity Need for high trust levels

25. Group Tools Calendars to synchronize activities Collaborative and distributive file management Group editing systems that support versioning and review of collaborative work. Communications tools – asynchronous and Synchronous Often wrapped together and deployed as Learning Management Systems (LMS).

26. Problems with Groups Confining in time, space pace, & relationship Often overly controlled by teacher expectation and institutional curriculum control Foster learner dependencies Isolated from the world of practice Not scaleable Morten Paulsen, 1993 Laws of Cooperative Freedom Relationships

27. Challenges of using INFORMAL social software tools for FORMAL group tasks Control Support Privacy Assessment Ownership and perseverance

28. Challenge: Creating Incentives to Sustain Meaningful Contribution The New Yorker September 12, 2005

29. Example: How are Blogs used in Groups? “ You are required to post at least two messages to your blog and respond to the postings of at least two other enrolled students in our class. Please use your postings to address the issues discussed on pages 34-38 of your text. Your post and responses will be assessed for 10% of your final grade To protect your privacy, your blog is not accessible outside of the VLE and postings will be destroyed at the end of the course.” Paraphrased from major UK university graduate course requirements

30. Assessing Reflective writing If we don’t assess the blog, will group based students use them?? Only learners should be able to decide on the audience - no-one; everyone (including Google); teacher; class; program; parents; etc.) Elgg supports this capacity.

31. Group Strategies in Formal Education Use real time tools (web, audio and video conferencing) to increase social presence afforded by immersive environments Deploy powerful, open standard based tool sets such as Moodle Support standards and tool sets such as Open ID that permit Group control of access to Group conversation and artefacts in a seamless and easy to use fashion Develop and deploy distributed production and content management tools such that Group products are easily created and distributed

32. 2. Formal Learning with Networks Each of us belongs to many networks Networks are fluid and generative Networks can connect self-paced and independent learners Network leadership arises in multiple formats Evolve forms of self-organizational planning Allow connectivism to flourish (Siemens 2006) “It is not what you know, but who you know to ask.”

33. Formal Education and Networks (cont.) Provides a ‘commons’ from which students’ extract and contribute information In school one should learn to build, contribute to and manage one’s networks Through exposure, provides application and validation of information and skills developed in formal learning Mix of weak and strong ties to gleam benefits of both ( Granovetter 1973 , 2004) Basis for ongoing support and advise from alumni and professional communities

34. Network Tools Most web 2.0 apps including: Inviting: Profiles, finding significant others Blogging - outside the garden wall Recommending (Slashdot, Diig, Cite-u-like) Scheduling meet-ups for study, debate, collaboration Connecting people and resources - syndicating

35. Interaction and Extremism Unplanned, unanticipated encounters are central to democracy itself. Such encounters often involve topics and points of view that people have not sought out and perhaps find quite irritating. They are important partly to ensure against fragmentation and extremism, which are predictable outcomes of any situation in which like-minded people speak only with themselves (Sunstein, 2001, P.8)

36. Networks are today’s most widely used public spaces Public spaces have many purposes in social life they allow people to make sense of the social norms that regulate society, they let people learn to express themselves and learn from the reactions of others, and they let people make certain acts or expressions ‘real’ by having witnesses acknowledge them. (Arendt 1998) from Danah Boyd 2007 Group spaces are not public spaces.

37. Network Learning Applications Examples: Extract and comment on a themes from last month’s IT Forum – blog results Create an analysis of the affordances of Second Life for educational purposes – blog results Search and summarize from Technorati the roll-out problems in OLPC’s $100 laptop program? Post a request to a professional educational group requesting examples of use of OER materials, blog your analysis for group and network feedback

38. Networked Learning example:

39. Choosing the right tool? http://www.go2web20.net 1618 apps as of Sept 24, 2007

40. 3. Formal Education and Collectives Smart retrieval from the universal libraries of resources – human and learning objects through use of collective space and tools, information is continuously gathered and rendered for the benefit of all individuals Requires high skill and literacy skills to effectively exploit Requires contribution to the collective (tagging, sharing whenever possible, leaving traces) only 16% of users are taggers (Pew, 2005) Allows discovery and validation of academic norms, values and paradigms

41. Collective Application - Amazon

42. Example 2 Aggregation of Crowds

43. Collective Tools explicit or implicit selection or recommendation from the Many aides decision making Aggregation and selective analysis of aggregated behaviours Wisdom of crowds or stupidity of mobs May suffer from Mathew Effect: rich get richer

44. Collective Strategies Strategies to increase visibility, compatibility and perceived relative advantage by teachers and users Strategies to insure high levels of Collective literacy and efficacy Strategies to promote contribution to not only increase individual social capital but also increase institutional brand Strategies to support collective knowledge use in organizational Networks and Groups Support for access to collective knowledge outside the organization – during work time Support for active harvesting of collective knowledge to provide insight into threats and opportunities for organization and individuals. The design and deployment of software that uses algorithms that include negative feedback loops Interaction design that provides sign posts rather than fence posts, so as to prevent runaway mob behaviour.

45. Taxonomy of the Many Social Learning Group Network Collective

46. Summary

47. Summary (cont.)

48. How do you design effective activities for Groups, Networks and Collectives ??

49. Design principles for Social Learning 2.0 (Dron, 2007) Emergence, Evolution and Complexity: Principle of Adaptability ; Principle of Evolvability; Principle of Stigmergy Architecture and Design; Principle of Constraint, Principle of Parcellation; Principle of Scale Social Psychology & community, Principle of Sociability Embedded opportunity for building relationships ; Principle of Trust – personal control Networking Theory Principle of Connectivity Principle of Context

50. Are Social Networking and Collective activities Disruptive Technologies? Disruptive technologies: Start out as not being good enough for the established market Have scalability, mass production advantages Appeal to non traditional consumers Not understood by mainstream organizations Clayton M. Christensen Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave , his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma .

51. Should you establish a formal institution presence in FaceBook? Is it ‘their space’ or ‘our space’ or ‘everyone’s space’?? Where will Facebook be in 12 months? Who really owns my Facebook space? We are obliged to explore these contexts as responsible professionals

52. Don’t Expect help from your IT department “ in the bowling alley (pre tornado, rapid adoption phase) you are asking a company to adopt a new paradigm in advance of the rest of the market. This is not in the interest of the IT department. It means extra work for them, and it exposes their mission-critical systems to additional risk.” p. 46-47 Moore’s 1995 Inside the Tornado

53. Strategies for Early Adopter Leadership Use the tools you want others to exploit Develop formal and informal learning activities in new Network and Collective spaces Develop an action or design-based research program to validate and learn from your interventions Communicate the results through your networks Use a new application in every course you teach

54. Conclusion: Benefits of Using Social Learning 2.0 tools and concepts Essential lifelong learning skills Enhances involvement with and awareness of learning processes –unfreezes old patterns Creates legacy and real world artifacts Supports collaborative and reflective learning Increases integration with institution, teacher, other students across the ‘Taxonomy of the Many’

55. A Tale of 3 books Open Access 84,000 downloads plus indiv. chapters 350 hardcopies sold @ $50.00 Free at cde.athabascau.ca/online_book Commercial publisher 934 copies sold at $52.00 Buy at Amazon $$$ E-Learning for the 21 st Century Commercial Pub. 1200 sold @ $135.00 2,000 copies in Arabic Translation @ $8.

56. Athabasca’s Open Access Press New Distance Education and Educ. Technology series www.aupress.ca

57. “ "He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever." - Chinese Proverb Terry Anderson [email_address] Blog: terrya.edubogs.org Your comments and questions most welcomed!

58. Collective Strategies Strategies to increase visibility, compatibility and perceived relative advantage by teachers and users Strategies to insure high levels of Collective literacy and efficacy Strategies to promote contribution to not only increase individual social capital but also increase institutional brand Strategies to support collective knowledge use in organizational Networks and Groups Support for access to collective knowledge outside the organization – during work time Support for active harvesting of collective knowledge to provide insight into threats and opportunities for organization and individuals. The design and deployment of software that uses algorithms that include negative feedback loops as well as interaction design that provides sign posts rather than fence posts, so as to prevent runaway mob behaviour.