Social software and higher education

A mid-2008 survey

Plan of the talk1. Pieces of

Web 2.02. Storytellin

g3. Pedagogies

(Vermont trees and sky, winter 2008)

Thematics

• Emergence in

time and space

• Pedagogy• Open

determinism

(“Sorpdragon,” Voicethread 2007)

Memes

• Shadow IT• Storytellin

g• Giants

(Middlebury bridge,

January 2006)

One problem

How to apprehend emerging technologies?

•Panic/siege mode•Vendors•Futurism methods•Networks

One odd metaphor

Web 2.0 and education is like gaming and education: awareness is challenging

• Huge, financially and quantitatively successful worlds

• Global and rapidly developing scope• Bad anxieties, policies, and media

coverage• Perceived lack of seriousness

Five responses

Web 2.0 and education is like gaming and education: intersections are happening

• Take advantage of preexisting projects and services

• Mod/warp/hack • DIY• Literacy: new media• Influence

(World of Warcraft)

I. Web 2.0

(Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator, http://emptybottle.org/bullshit/)

“Technorati is now tracking over 70 million weblogs, and we're seeing about 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day. That's about 1.4 blogs created every second of every day.”

(David Sifry,April 2007)

(Flickr blog, March 2008)

Will YouTube kill the podcasting star?

(eMarketer, February 2008; Via Podcasting News)

(Le Monde, January 14 2008)

(March 2008http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/10M_articles)

The term’s history: Tim O’Reilly, 2005

• Expands “social software”

• Draws on Web history

Microcontent, rather than sites or large documents

(NITLE blog Liberal Education Today, http://b2e.nitle.org)

I. Web 2.0

Multiply authored microcontent

Open content and/or services and/or standards…

(Pepysblog, 2003-)

…leading to networked conversations

(Pepysblog, 2003-)

O’Reilly: Web 2.0 is a platform for development

• Open APIs• Access to data• Virtue of the lazyweb

(http://www.hurricanearchive.org/, Center for History and New Media,George Mason University)

• Programming staff• Perceived recognition

Web 2.0 components, movements• Collaborative writing platforms: the wiki way

-Viégas, Wattenberg, Dave (Historyflow, IBM, 2004)

Wikis are (often) textually productive

Web 2.0 components, movements• collaborative writing platforms: the

blogosphere

(Radio Open Source blog/podcast)

State of the blogosphere, more• Diversity: diaries, public

intellectuals, carnivals, knitters, moblogs, warblogs home and abroad…

• 12 people million using three platforms, including LiveJournal: majority women (Anil Dash, MeshForum 2006)

NIH guidelines, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=citmed.section.61024

Social images• Flickr, Picasa• 2 billion

images in Flickr (3/2008)

• 26 million searchable, shareable images in Flickr (December 2006)

(Ben Harris-Roxas, 2006)

Some implications

• Metadata is good enough

• Folksonomy• Gaming

inspiration• Archival

uses

(Library of Congress crowdsourcing project, 2007-

http://flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/)

Social news:• Memeorand

um• Tailrank• Digg• TechMeme

Social bookmarking

• Del.icio.us• Also Furl,

Scholar.com, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, MyWeb (Yahoo)

What’s happened since “podcasting” in 2004? Neologisms:

• godcasting• nanocasting• podfading• podsafe• podspamming• podvertising• porncasting

(Missing Link podcast, Southwestern University)

Web 2.0 influences rich media: video

(Gootube? Suetube?)

Videoblogging(vlog? vog?)

(Ask a Ninja; Rocketboom; Howard Rheingold)

Social object: the person

• FaceBook• MySpace• LinkedIn• ZoomInfo• CyWorld…

“Less than four years after its launch, 15 million

people, or almost a third of the country's population,

are members.” (BusinessWeek, September 2005)

Social organization of information, new forms: folksonomy

• Search• Retrieval• Self-

awareness

http://del.icio.us/

for DoctorNemo

Community surfacing

• Ontology

• Concepts • Collaborative research

Keeping up

NITLE workshop tag cloud, 2008

Extrapolating principles: Ton Zylstra on the social object:

“In general you could say that both Flickr and del.icio.us work in a triangle: person, picture/ bookmark, and tag(s). Or more abstract a person, an object of sociality, and some descriptor...”

(Zylstra in Second Life, 2007)

“…In every triangle there always needs to be a person and an object of sociality. The third point of the triangle is free to define[,] as it were.”

-http://www.zylstra.org, 2006(emphases added)

(“Online Communities”, XKCD, April 2007 )…

For academia, this can seem a bit overwhelming

(“Online Communities”, XKCD, April 2007 )

Already out of date

For academia, this can seem a bit overwhelming

Flickr and storytelling

• Tell a story in 5 frames group

“Gender Miscommunication”, Nightingai1e, 2006

“Gender Miscommunication” (Nightingai1e, 2006)

Social photo stories

Or remix social media into narratives

Example: "Farm to Food", Eli the Bearded (2008)

• Library of Congress collections

Social photo stories

Social photo stories

Social photo stories

Flickr, Tell A Story in Five Frames group (http://www.flickr.com/groups/visualstory/)

Example: "Food to Farm", Eli the Bearded (2008)

Social photo stories

Example: "Food to Farm", Eli the Bearded (2008)

Social photo stories

Pedagogies:• Remix• Archive work• Social

presentation• Visual

literacy

(http://www.flickr.com/groups/visualstory/discuss/72157603786255599/;http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/ )

Social workshopping

In the Tell a story in 5 frames group, 'Alone With The Sand' , moliere1331 (2005)

Pedagogies and publications

Teaching with Web 2.0: it’s not all new - Web 1.0, internet pedagogies• Hypertext• Web audience• Discussion fora • Collaborative document authoring• Groupware

Teaching with Web 2.0: it’s not all new

Earlier pedagogies• Journaling• Media literacy

Teaching with Web 2.0: principles

http://smarthistory.blogspot.com/

Distributed conversation

Collaborative writing

Object-oriented discussion

Connectivism (G. Siemens, 2004)

Wiki pedagogies• Collective

research• Group writing• Document

editing• Information

literacy• Discussion• Knowledge

accretion(Romantic Audiences project

Bowdoin College, 2005-present

• Discussion• Knowledge

accretion

Social object pedagogies

• Prompts• Discussion

object• Compositio

n materials

More social object pedagogies• Annotate details• Remix (“Make it mine”) Edugadget

http://www.edugadget.com/2005/05/07/flickr-creative-commons

RSS pedagogies• Shaping Web reading• Pushing student-created

content (mother blog, Feed to Javascript)

• Web 2.0 wrangling

(Bloglines)

Teaching with Web 2.0: “net.gen”:“Fully half of all teens and 57 percent of

teens who use the Internet could be considered Content Creators, according to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.”

http://www.pewtrusts.com/pdf/PIP_Teens_1105.pdf

“[S]tudents… write words on paper, yes— but… also compose words and images and create audio files on Web logs (blogs), in word processors, with video editors and Web editors and in e-mail and on presentation software and in instant messaging and on listservs and on bulletin boards—and no doubt in whatever genre will emerge in the next ten minutes.

Note that no one is making anyone do any of this writing.”

Kathleen Blake Yancey, "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key." CCC 56.2 (2004):297-328.Emphasis added.

Academic open archives for social media

Freesound archive

•DIY copyright•Social networking values•University of Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona)

(http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/)

Podcasts and teaching: profcasting

• Bryn Mawr College: Michelle Francl, chemistry

• Duke: “Classroom recording”

• Learning objects: Gardner Campbell, University of Richmond

• Duke: “Course content dissemination”

• Information literacy

Student program podcasting on campus

• War News Radio (Swarthmore College)

•PEPI courses (University of British Columbia, department of Land and Food Resources)

Media to enhance other media

• Podcast + pdfs: Allegheny College, Gothcast

Podcasts and research• Public intellectual

– Out of the Past– Engines of Our

Ingenuity – In Our Time– University

Channel– The Missing Link

New forms of scholarly communication

CommentPress implementation, Institute for the Future of the BooksMcKenzie Wark, Eugene Lang College

Still more bookblogging

Siva Vaidhyanathan, University of Virginia

Combining Web 2.0 forms• Podcasting• Blogging• Digital storytelling• Web-based photography• YouTube• Video mashups

Middlebury College, Jason Mittell and Barbara Ganley

• Blend teaching with research

• BG now involved in rural community media

National Institute for Technology and Liberal

Education(NITLE) http://nitle.org

Liberal Education Today blog http://b2e.nitle.org