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

terrya@athabascau.ca

Interaction in Formal Education Social software Granularity of the many

Groups Networks Collective

Educational applications

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

“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.

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

Assume 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

New Net Pedagogies – George Siemens Connectivism “

A learning theory for the Digital Age

Maybe the Sky Really is Falling!

The Net Creates: Great challenge and Great Opportunity

What is the most cost and learning effective approach to organizing formal learning ???

within the walls of schools.??Towards new learning networks,

Futurlabwithin formal distance education or

e-learning packages ??Within the personal learning

environments of learners ???

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)

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

Learner

Teacher Content

Educational Interactions

Learner /teacher

Teacher / content.

Teacher / teacher Content / content

Learner / learner

Learner /content

•Anderson (2002) Equivalency Theorem

Learner

Teacher Content

Educational Interactions

Learner /teacher

Teacher / content.

Teacher / teacher Content / content

Learner / learner

Learner /content

•Anderson (2002) Equivalency Theorem

Group as educationa

l actorJon Dron, 2007

Learner

Teacher Content

Learner /teacher

Teacher / content.

Teacher / teacher Content / content

Learner / learner

Learner /content

•Anderson (2002) Equivalency Theorem

Group as educationa

l actorStephen Downes,

2006

Stephen Downes, 2006

Learner

Teacher Content

Learner /teacher

Teacher / content.

Teacher / teacher Content / content

Learner / learner

Learner /content

•Anderson (2002) Equivalency Theorem

Group as educationa

l actorAnderson & Dron,

2007

Dron & Anderson

‘Taxonomy of the Many’Dron and Anderson, 2007

GroupConscious membership

Leadership and organizationCohorts and paced

Rules and guidelinesAccess and privacy controls

Focused and often time limitedMay be blended F2F

Metaphor : Virtual classroom

Group

NetworkShared interest/practice

Fluid membershipFriends of friends

Reputation and altruism drivenEmergent norms, structures

Activity ebbs and flowsRarely F2F

Metaphor: Virtual Community of Practice

GroupNetwork

Collective‘Aggregated other’

Unconscious ‘wisdom of crowds’Stigmatic aggregation

No membership or rulesAugmentation and annotation

through use ofData MiningNever F2F

Metaphor: Wisdom of Crowds

Group Network

Social Learning 2.0

Dron and Anderson, 2007

Collective

D

Networks

Groups

Collective

WIKI Blogs

FaceBook

Del.icio.usFlickerFiltering

SecondLife Calendaring Geotracking

Social

Learning 2.0

Email, Skype, IM

LMS/VLEs

RSS, Atom

Google Alert

Commercial PersonalizedServices

ELGG

Meetup

Mail Lists

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?

Social Learning 2.0 Applications in Educational Contexts

1.

Groups

2.

Networks

3.

Collectives

Personal Learning

Environments

Formal Education

Organizational Learning

Social Learning 2.0 Applications in Educational Contexts

1.

Groups

2.

Networks

3.

Collectives

Personal Learning

Environments

Formal Education

Organizational Learning

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

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

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).

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, 1993Laws of Cooperative Freedom

Relationships

Challenges of using INFORMAL social software tools for FORMAL group tasks

Control Support Privacy Assessment Ownership and perseverance

Challenge: Challenge: Creating Creating Incentives to Incentives to Sustain Sustain Meaningful Meaningful ContributionContribution

The New Yorker September 12, 2005

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

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.

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

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.”

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

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

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)

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.

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

Networked Learning example:

Choosing the right tool?

http://www.go2web20.net 1618 apps as of Sept 24, 2007

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

Collective Application - Amazon

Example 2 Aggregation of Crowds

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

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.

GroupNetwork

Collective

Taxonomy of the Many

Social Learning

Summary

Summary (cont.)

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

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

Are Social Networking and Collective activities DisruptiveTechnologies?

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.

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

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

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

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’

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 21st CenturyCommercial Pub.1200 sold @ $135.002,000 copies in Arabic Translation @ $8.

Athabasca’s Open Access Press

New Distance Education and Educ. Technology series www.aupress.ca

“"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 terrya@athabascau.ca

Blog: terrya.edubogs.org

Your comments and questions most welcomed!

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.