How to design educational social software?
Terry Anderson reflects thoughtfully on Fred Stutzman’s post on egocentric (e.g. Facebook) and object centric (e.g. Flickr) social softare. Anderson deliberates the same thing that has puzzled me for a long time: how to get students active in the online side of blended learning. He also presents a term new to me: ESS (educational social software).Recently I have wondered, where the “recess” is in more traditional LMS-based learning? It usually does not exist. Students are motivated to come to lectures or to the campus – or feel pleasure in coming – because they also meet their peers, their friends. This issue is often ignored in online learning design. Anderson says the same in his blog post:
“After all, one of the major reasons learners put themselves through the strenuous, often boring and usually expensive ordeal of formal education is to meet new friends and create new social networks.”
I have come to the conclusion that one of – or perhaps the biggest obstacle – to activating students in blended courses is that online environments are used only in a few courses, so they play such a small role in their daily activities. I presented some of the key properties – POP: Participation, ownership and presence in my previous blog post. So, the solution could be a more modifiable and personalized intranet, which takes account the P.O.P.
The ownership can be promoted through the use of social software, or by designing a more comprehensive learning environment to allow students to modify and control it, and by adding properties that have been found to be useful in both ego-centric and object-centric sites. This can lead to increased participation and feeling of presence – and actually form functioning communities of practice. A one that sees learning as a a process, not a product. The environment could be linked to students’ more informal environments, such as Facebook. I like Scott Wilson’s PLE figure very much, and find it very close to my ideas. The more different systems we make students to use, the less they spend time in actually meaningful work.
But how to make the ICT administration understand the pedagogical issues, the usability issues, and in music, the copyright issues, possibilities for creative musical activities etc. in one personalized but centralized system?
Elgg serves as one model, since it allows users to create their own groups or networks, and define to whom the contributions are published to. And naturally it reads and send rss-feeds. The great thing about Ning is the feeling of ownership through one’s own pages, the feeling of participation throuhg notifications, and profile pictures, possibilities for commenting everything etc. In a course on ning, our students have started some ad-hoc discussions and contributed videos relating to the subject matter. I have not seen this in our LMS-courses – ever. But Ning is not centralized in the way it should be: all networks are separate. It also lacks a wiki for collaborative writing. In my view, both Elgg and Ning are great concepts, but not solutions.
Many times students are conducting their less formal activities relating to the educational institution in Facebook. Our students have formed a facebook group, and notify each other of their upcoming performances, comment others’ performances, distribute pictures and even videos, and perhaps discuss school related subjects. I am sending messages in facebook instead with e-mail to several students, and I am using the myoffice app in a student project. So, it has moved closer to ESS – because it is the system that they use anyway. The problem however is, that while doing more formal work, they may spend way too much time checking news on their friends profiles, and playing with different entertaining applications. And it probably will not be interesting to people after a while – as Stutzman states.
It is also true, that Facebook is for many the first social software they use more frequently. The good thing is, that people get used to networking online – no matter how entertaining it is. There is a lot to learn from their behaviour. Another problem about FB is that it is so closed. Yes, I could make a del.icio.us feed function on my page – sort of..
Tags: learning environment, PLE, social software