The document discusses using social networking tools like Delicious and Flickr to enhance teaching and learning. It details a project where academic librarians tagged and shared educational resources on Delicious. Students were then assigned to search for tags, add bookmarks, and build on the curated resources. The social tools helped promote collaboration, knowledge sharing, and community building among distance learners.

1. Social networking’s potential for teaching and learning Mary Thorpe and Philip Greaney Institute of Educational Technology Thanks to Stuart Brown, Keith Honnor, Mick Jones, Sheran Slade, Non Scantlebury and AL s involved in the project Social Networking for Practice Learning (SNPL)

22. In this way students will add to the B823 tagged bookmarks created by tutors as they do their research for TMAs…At the end of the course they will have built up a supplementary ‘Managing Knowledge’ resource that will continue to be available after the course. The work they have done on this presentation, in tagging sites, will be a starting point for the next cohort of B823 students. The description fields on the tags can be used to build up different ideas of the value of the page in the context of managing knowledge…Pages that get very few tags can be deleted by a student but he/she can justify that in the course forum.

33. Some social software tools Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/ Citeulike (academic social bookmarking socftware) http://www.citeulike.org/ SocialLearn presentation (Martin Weller) http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2008/02/the-sociallearn.html Dipity (timeline creation software) http://www.dipity.com/ Google maps http://maps.google.com/ Facebook http://www.facebook.com

34. E-learning references, with especial focus on collaborative activities and learning Brown, R. (2001) ‘The process of community-building in distance learning classes’, JALN , vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 18–35; also available online at http://www.aln.org/publications/jaln/v5n2/index.asp Carson, S. (2005) MIT OCW 2004 Programme Evaluation Findings Report , Cambridge, MA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; also available online at http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/90C9BC91-7819-48A0-9E9A-D6B2701C1CE5/0/MIT_OCW_2004_Program_Eval.pdf Castells, M. (2001) The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (New York: Oxford University Press) Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (2002) How Do People Learn? , CIPD Dalsgaard, C. (2006) ‘Social software: E-learning beyond learning management systems’, European Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning [online], http://www.eurodl.org/materials/contrib/2006/Christian_Dalsgaard.htm Dirkx, J and Smith, R ‘Learning to Learn in Online Collaborative Groups’ in Roberts, T. (ed) (2004) Online Collaborative Learning: Theory and Practice (Information Science Publishing: London) Mason, R. and Rennie, F. (2004) The connecticon: learning for the connected generation (Information Age, US) Paulsen, M.F. (2002) Online Education Systems: Discussion and Definition of Terms [online], http://www.nettskolen.com/forskning/Definition%20of%20Terms.pdf Roberts, T. (2005) (ed) Computer-supported Collaborative Learning in Higher Education (Idea Group: London) Karen Swan and Peter Shea ‘The development of virtual learning communities’ in Hiltz, S. and Goldman, R. (ed) (2005) Learning Together Online: Research on Asynchronous Learning Networks (Lawrence Erlbaum, New Jersey) Weller, M. 2007 ‘Is education intrinsically a bit dull?’ EdTechie Blog http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2007/07/is-education-in.html