Many Students Loosely Joined: Social Software to Support Learning

1. Many Students Loosely Joined: Social Software to Support Learning EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Web Seminar Terry Anderson, Ph.D. Canada Research Chair in Distance Education

2. Overview • Setting the Context • Affordances of the Web • Emerging Pedagogies • Granularity of Social Learning 2.0 • Social Learning 2.0 across: • Personal Learning Environments • Formal education delivery • Institutional learning • Design principles for educational social software

3. Athabasca University, Alberta, Canada Fastest growing university in Canada 34,000 students, 700 courses 100% distance education Graduate and Undergraduate programs Master & Doctorate – Distance Education Only USA Regionally Accredited University in Canada * Athabasca University • Athabasca University

4. Values • We can (and must) continuously improve the quality, effectiveness, appeal, cost and time efficiency of the learning experience. • Student control and freedom is integral to 21st Century life-long education and learning. • Education for elites is not sufficient for planetary survival • ‘...one cannot understand an organization without trying to change it...’ Curt Lewin • (http://www.solonline.org/res/wp/10006.html)

5. The Net Changes Everything! • Affordances of the Net, Net 2.0, e-learning 2.0, Semantic Web and related other acronyms: • Content • Communication • Agents • (Anderson and Whitelaw, 2004) • New pedagogies

6. Affordance 1. - Massive Amounts of Content • Any information, any format, anytime, anywhere • Customizable content • Interactive content • User created content • Open access content

7. A Tale of 3 books Open Access 90,000 downloads 4 years after pub. - 6,000/month 350 hardcopies sold @ $50.00 Free at cde.athabascau.ca/online_book E-Learning for the 21st Century Commercial Pub. 1200 sold @ $135.00 2,000 copies in Arabic Translation @ $8. Commercial publisher 934 copies sold at $52.00 Buy at Amazon!!

8. Content - conclusion • Abundant, cheap or free • Need to learn to develop business models and culture allowing us to share and re-use content • Don’t build your value on your content - cost of copying and distributing dropping to zero • Content is necessary, but not sufficient, to create a quality learning experience

9. Affordance #2High Quality, Low Cost Communication • Multi mode • Synchronous, asynch • Text, audio and video • A2A (avatar to avatar) • Stored, indexed and retrievable • Reflective, emotive and cognitive • Mobile, Embedded & Pervasive • Learner, teacher, community and commercially created

10. Affordance #3 Agents • Google Alerts • MeetingWizard • RSS • Athabasca • Freudbot AIML • E-Advisor • Are you ready for AU? Agents

11. Your Comments or Questions?

12. Together create Social Software Content Learning Objects Open Access Press Del.icio.us Flicker Filtering WIKI Blogs FaceBook Learning Agents Communication SecondLife Calendaring Geotracking RSS Email, Skype, IM Google Alert

13. Mashups by Chaz Maloney www.slideshare.net/ccosmato/conferencing-on-the-cheap-with-web-2

14. Challenge: To Create Incentives to Sustain Meaningful Contribution The New Yorker September 12, 2005

15. Who is Using the Net? Pew/Internet "Teens and Social Media” 2006

16. Choosing the right tool? http://www.go2web20.net 2082 apps as of Feb. 18, 2008

17. 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

18. 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

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

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

21. Social Learning • Each of us participates in Groups, Networks and Collectives. • Learning is enhanced by exploiting the affordances of all three sources of social learning. • Issues, memes, opportunities and learning activities arise at all three levels of granularity. • Tools are optimized for each level of granularity

22. Social Learning Applications in Educational Contexts

23. 1. Formal Education and Groups: • Classes and cohort • Increases: • completion rates • achievement • satisfaction • 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 • Longest history of research and study • Need to optimize: • Social presence • Cognitive presence • Teaching presence (Communitiesofinquiry.com) • Established sets of tools – • LMS • Synchronous (video & net conferencing) • Email

25. Problems with Groups • Confining in time, space pace, & relationship • Often overly confined by teacher expectation and institutional control • Isolated from the world of practice • Do not lead to self directed lifelong learning Relationships Paulsen 1993

26. Challenges of using informal social software tools for formal tasks • Control • Support • Privacy • Assessment • Ownership and perseverance

27. Example: The Educational Blog • Structural characteristics: • Multimedia • Chronological order • Web based, easy to edit • Networked Characteristics • Linked to other sites • Syndicated (RSS, Atom etc) • Comments and Trackbacks– spammed • Pedagogical • Reflective, personal, archival, communicative, public

28. How are Blogs used today 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. • Please use your postings to address the issue 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 LMS and postings will be destroyed at the end of the course.” Paraphrased from major UK university graduate school requirements

29. 2. Formal Education and Networks • Provides resources 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 • Networks last beyond the course - basis for ongoing support and advise from alumni and professional communities

30. Formal Learning with Networks • Each of us may belong to many networks • Network use creates social capital • Networks connect self-paced and independent learners • Network leadership arises in multiple formats

31. Network Tools • Most web 2.0 apps including: • Profiles: Finding significant others • Blogging - outside the garden wall • Resource recommendations finding highest quality content (Slashdot, Diig, Cite-u-like) • Scheduling meet-ups for study, debate, collaboration • WIKIs and other open collaboration tools • Commercial Social Networking sites- Facebook etc.

32. Network Pedagogy • Connectivism • Learning is network formation: adding new nodes, creating new neural paths • “It is not what you know, but who you know to ask.” Siemens, G. (2007) • Learning as a tool to develop social capital • Social capital and social relationships “enlarge the concept of individualism to include the ability and obligation to work with others when the task demands it.” Edgar H. Schein, 1995

33. Elgg.org Network Tool Set Text Text Stepanyan, Mather & Payne, 2007

34. Network Pedagogy Will Richardson http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mghGV37TeK8

35. 3. Formal Education and Collectives • Collectives aggregate, then filter, compare, contrast and recommend. • Personal and collaborative search and filter for learning • Smart retrieval from the universal library of resources – human and learning objects • Need to develop and practice skills and interest to easily contribute 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

36. Collective Tools Crowd Sourcing

37. Collective Example:Terry’s Store From Collective, to network, to group

38. Explicit • Explicit recommender systems:

39. Blog indices by topic, readers, value

40. Digg Monitoring collective recommendations is real time

41. Your Comments or Questions?

42. Steven Warburton, 2007

43. Design Principles for Many Student Loosely Joined • Principle of Adaptability; • Principle of Evolvability; • Principle of Stigmergy • Principle of Constraint, • Principle of Parcellation; • Principle of Scale • Principle of Sociability • Principle of Trust • Principle of Connectivity • Principle of Context (Dron, 2007)

44. Strategies for Social Software Adoption • Try a new tool every term • Use the right tools for the right context • Social software applications must: • Radically improve access, enjoyment and effectiveness of learning and teaching. • Must not significantly increase costs, while developing opportunity for new revenues • Must be visible, easy to use and accessible • Be viral

45. Conclusion: Benefits of Using Social Software tools and concepts • Lifelong learning skill • Enhances involvement with and awareness of learning process • Creates legacy and real world artifacts • Supports collaborative learning • Supports reflective learning • Meets expectations and competencies of ‘net generation’ • Increases integration with institution, teacher, other students & larger communities

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