e-Learning and Social Networking Handbook

Resources for Higher Education

Frank Rennie, Tara Morrison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136320170
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Digital resources—from games to blogs to social networking—are strong forces in education today, but how can those tools be effectively utilized by educators and course designers in higher education? Filled with practical advice, the e-Learning and Social Networking Handbook, Second Edition provides a comprehensive overview of online learning tools and offers strategies for using these resources in course design, highlighting some of the most relevant and challenging topics in e-learning today, including:

• using social networking for educational purposes
• designing for a distributed environment
• strengths and weaknesses of delivering content in various formats (text, audio, and video)
• potential constraints on course design
• implementation, evaluation, induction, and training

Illustrated by short, descriptive case studies, the e-Learning and Social Networking Handbook, Second Edition also directs the reader to useful resources that will enhance their course design. This helpful guide will be invaluable to all those involved in the design and delivery of online learning in higher education.

1 Social Networking as an Educational Tool

Yet Another Trend …

DOI: 10.4324/9780203120279-1

The popularity of a wide range of social software, particularly with young people, has led many educators to think that this practice and enthusiasm could be turned to educational use. The purpose of this book is to assist this process by providing some guidelines for integrating social networking into course design and by documenting the activities of the early pioneers who are experimenting with innovative practices in their teaching. In this first chapter we aim to show that the roots of social networking are not a paradigm shift from what went before but a growth or development from previous practice and theory. Of course, there have been other media which educators were convinced could transform teaching and learning:

• Television and then videoconferencing were going to render most ordinary lecturers redundant because every student would have easy access to outstanding lecturers, with resulting cost savings.
• Computer-based training was going to allow learners to work at their own pace, practicing as often as necessary and receiving programmed feedback from the ever-patient computer.
• Artificial intelligence was going to provide a truly responsive “tutor” who would “understand” the student’s misunderstandings and respond appropriately.
• Asynchronous computer conferencing was going to support global education in which students from different time zones around the world could take courses from prestigious universities without having to leave home or work.

The list could go on. Educational hype has a long and resilient history of jumping on the latest technology as the means of making education better, cheaper, more available or more responsive. Is social networking going to be any different? Our answer is, probably not, but this may be the wrong question. Ignoring social and technological trends is not the way forward for educators any more than is chasing after every new movement because it is new. If a university were to issue each student with a slate and chalk it would be ludicrous, but equally, to expect all students on all courses to benefit from keeping a blog or creating multimedia items in their e-portfolio, is not a sensible way forward either. What we are advocating in this book is an open mind to the possibility that using some form of social software could be beneficial in most courses, given imaginative course design. The emphasis is squarely on how to use social software creatively, not on any assumption that these tools are predisposed to improving education, reducing costs, widening participation or any future priorities of higher education. These are merely tools; however, as we know, man is a tool-using animal!

What are the Tools?

The various tools to be considered in this book are all part of what has been called web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2005). The underlying practice of web 2.0 tools is that of harnessing collective intelligence, and we have explored the relevance of this for education in a previous book (Rennie & Mason, 2004). As users add new content and new sites, they are connected through hyperlinking so that other users discover the content and link to it, thus the web grows organically as a reflection of the collective activity of the users. O’Reilly cites Amazon as an archetypal example:

Amazon sells the same products as competitors such as Barnesandnoble.com, and they receive the same product descriptions, cover images, and editorial content from their vendors. But Amazon has made a science of user engagement. They have an order of magnitude, more user reviews, invitations to participate in varied ways on virtually every page—and even more importantly—they use user activity to produce better search results. While a Barnesandnoble.com search is likely to lead with the company’s own products, or sponsored results, Amazon always leads with “most popular,” a real-time computation based not only on sales but other factors that Amazon insiders call the “flow” around products. With greater user participation, it’s no surprise that Amazon’s sales also outpace competitors. (O’Reilly, 2005)

Other examples of social software with relevance to education are:

• Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia in which the content is created and edited entirely by users.
• Folksonomy sites such as del.icio.us and Flickr in which users tag with keywords their photos or other content entries, thus developing a form of collaborative categorization of sites using the kind of associations that the brain uses, rather than rigid, preordained categories.
• Blogging, a form of online diary, adds a whole new dynamism to what was in web 1.0, the personal home page.
• Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary (RSS) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts.
• Podcasting is a media file that is distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds, for playback on mobile devices and personal computers.
• E-portfolios encourage students to take ownership of their learning through creating a dynamic, reflective, multimedia record of their achievements.
• Real-time audio and shared screen tools are used for multi-way discussions.

The web has always supported some forms of social interaction, such as computer conferencing, e-mail, and listservs. The level of social interaction they afford has become an established component of distance and even campus-based education. What has changed with web 2.0 is the popularity of social networking sites which Boyd (2006a) claims, have three defining characteristics:

1. Profile. A profile includes an identifiable handle (either the person’s name or nickname) or information about that person (e.g., age, sex, location, interests, etc.). Most profiles also include a photograph and information about last login. Profiles have unique URLs that can be visited directly and updated.
2. Traversable, publicly articulated social network. Participants have the ability to list other profiles as “friends” or “contacts” or some equivalent. This generates a social network graph which may be directed (“attention network” type of social network where friendship does not have to be confirmed) or undirected (where the other person must accept friendship). This articulated social network is displayed on an individual’s profile for all other users to view. Each node contains a link to the profile of the other person so that individuals can traverse the network through friends of friends of friends.
3. Semi-persistent public comments. Participants can leave comments (or testimonials, guestbook messages, etc.) on others’ profiles for everyone to see. These comments are semi-persistent in that they are not ephemeral but they may disappear over some period of time or upon removal. These comments are typically reverse-chronological in display. Because of these comments, profiles are a combination of an individual’s self-expression and what others say about that individual.

These three attributes do not immediately suggest an educational use. Throughout this book, however, we will try to demonstrate ways in which they can be integrated in courses and programmes. More recently the term People Power on the web has been noted in relation to the success of blogging, user reviews, and photo sharing (Anderson, 2006); and observers speak of a “gift culture” on the web whereby users contribute as much as they take. Examples include YouTube, MySpace and Flickr. The primary focus in social networking is participation rather than publishing, which was the primary feature of web 1.0 activity. Bloch (n.d.) links web 2.0, mashups and social networking as “all intertwined in the brave new Internet, the so-called second phase of the evolution of the online world.” The essence of social networking is that the users generate the content. This has potentially profound implications for education.

User-Generated Content

The theoretical benefits of user generated content in education are fairly obvious:

1. Users have the tools to actively engage in the construction of their experience, rather than passively absorbing existing content.
2. Content will be continually refreshed by the users rather than require expensive expert input.
3. Many of the new tools support collaborative work, thereby allowing users to develop the skills of working in teams.
4. Shared community spaces and inter-group communications are a massive part of what excites young people and therefore should contribute to users’ persistence and motivation to learn.

However, this assumes a transition between entertainment and education which has never in the past been an obvious or straightforward one. The early champions of educational television had a difficult time persuading learners that this entertaining (but passive) medium could be a tool for active and demanding education. Similarly, how will current users of computer games, blogging, podcasting, and folksonomies be convinced that they can use their favourite tools for getting a degree? O’Reilly suggests that we look at what commercial organisations are doing:

One of the key lessons of the web 2.0 era is this: Users add value. But only a small percentage of users will go to the trouble of adding value to your application via explicit means. Therefore, web 2.0 companies set inclusive defaults for aggregating user data and building value as a side-effect of ordinary use of the application. As noted above, they build systems that get better the more people use them…. This architectural insight may also be more central to the success of open source software than the more frequently cited appeal to volunteerism. The architecture of the internet, and the World Wide Web, as well as of open source software projects like Linux, Apache, and Perl, is such that users pursuing their own “selfish” interests build collective value as an automatic by-product. Each of these projects has a small core, well-defined extension mechanism, and an approach that lets any well-behaved component be added by anyone, growing the outer layers of what Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, refers to as “the onion.” In other words, these technologies demonstrate network effects, simply through the way that they have been designed. (O’Reilly, 2005)

What is the comparable onion in relation to education? We claim in this book that it is course design. Through appropriate course design, we can help learners to pursue their “selfish interests” of passing the course, while at the same time adding value to the learning of other students.

Another way of looking at user-generated content, and one that is possibly less contentious, is to see it as a network. In a report from FutureLab, Rudd, Sutch, and Facer (2006) note that:

Castells, for example, argues that the network is now the fundamental underpinning structure of social organisation—that it is in and through networks—both real and virtual—that life is lived in the 21st century. This perspective is also advocated by social commentators such as Demos, who argue that networks are the “most important organisational form of our time,” and that, by harnessing what they describe as “network logic,” the ways we view the world and the tools we use for navigating and understanding it, will change significantly. The ability to understand how to join and build these networks, the tools for doing so and the purpose, intention, rules and protocols that regulate use and communications, therefore, become increasingly important skills. This concept of the “network society” calls into question what it means to be “educated” today—what new skills, what new ways of working and learning, what new knowledge and skills will be required to operate in and through these networks? It requires us to ask whether our current education system, premised not upon networks but upon individualised acquisition of content and skills, is likely to support the development of the competencies needed to flourish in such environments. (p. 4)

The wise use of web 2.0 technologies in education addresses this call for students to develop 21st-century skills. Blogging, wikis, e-portfolios and social networks are all excellent tools for allowing learners to clarify concepts, establish meaningful links and relationships, and test their mental models. Furthermore, they provide a public forum in which the cumulative process of concept formation, refinement, application and revision is fully visible to student peers and teachers. By providing a comprehensive record of how concepts take form through multiple clusters of knowledge, such media can promote more complex and lasting retention of course ideas among students (Boettcher, 2007).

What are the Limitations?

Critics of user-created content refer to a breakdown in the traditional place of expertise, authority and scholarly input. They express concerns about trust, reliability and believability in relation to the move away from the printed word to the more ephemeral digital word (Poster, 1990). The web contains a plethora of unauthenticated, unfiltered information and most students lack the critical skills to penetrate this mass of undifferentiated material. In short, traditional notions of quality in higher education seem to be abandoned in the move to web 2.0 learning.

Another line of criticism is that course designers who use these technologies are merely pandering to the net generation, which is not in their best interests. Carlson (2005) notes that “not everyone agrees that Millennials are so different from their predecessors, or that, even if they are different, educational techniques should change accordingly.” These critics feel that new technologies encourage a short attention span and lead students to demand immediate answers, rather than thinking for themselves.

Furthermore, if content is created by users on different systems (e.g., podcasts, blogs, wikis, chat systems, and other social networking software), then it can be difficult to keep track of where everything is, and to access it with ease, both for the users and the casual visitor. This in turn calls for new tools to help users search and integrate across content that may be quite fragmented.

Other commentators question whether social networking has real learning value and point to the superfic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface to the 2013 Edition
• Chapter 1 Social Networking as an Educational Tool: Yet Antoher Trend...
• Chapter 2 Designing for a Distributed Environment
• Chapter 3 Selecting the Media Palette
• Chapter 4 The Tools in Practice
• Chapter 5 Constraints on Course Design
• Chapter 6 Postscript
• References
• Index