Building Community

Building Community

with social software

Communication

CollaborationCooperation

blogs, bookmarking, forums, IM, media sharing, web clipping, wikis

A traditional

community of learners

A traditional

community of learners

Do these students think of

themselves as a community?

community building

works easily offline

community building

works easily

online

from theonion.com

What is social software?

What is social software?

It's the opposite of project-oriented collaboration tools that places people into groups. Social software supports the desire of individuals to be pulled into groups to achieve goals.

— Stowe Boyd

Software that supports group interaction — Clay Shirky

Blogs

Social Bookmarking

Wikis

Instant Messaging

Web Clipping

Media Sharing

Web 2.0 Increasing semantics of social connections

Why use social software in education?

Building Community

• generates excitement and interest in learning

• creates an infrastructure for learning

shared questions, shared methods, opportunities for critique and feedback

• provides opportunities to cultivate social skills involved in knowledge acquisition, evaluation and distribution

March 1987 AAHE Bulletin, Chickering and Gamson

‣ rapid feedback and critique

‣ stimulating creativity

‣ facilitating collaborative study

‣ providing a real audience for student work

‣ fostering the development of critical thinking

‣ platform for academic discourse

‣ address conflicts of time and space

Susan Connell

Uses for Social Software in Education

http://soozzone.com/690review.htm

Potential Benefits

• encourages student-faculty interaction

• encourages cooperation among students

• encourages active learning

• gives prompt feedback

• emphasizes time on task

• communicates high expectations

• respect diverse talents and ways of learning

7principles of good practice in undergraduate education

Good Practice

March 1987 AAHE Bulletin, Chickering and Gamson

Some examples of social software

Blogs

• online journal or weblog

• posts displayed in reverse chronological order

• users can‣ easily post new entries‣ comment on entries‣ include media and

external links‣ use sidebar to post

stable information

Media Sharing

Music, photos, videos, podcasts,

slideshows

Instant Messaging

• one-to-one messaging

• more immediate than email

• familiar to students

Web Clipping

• highlight selected text

• save clippings

• add sticky notes or annotations clippings

• bookmark favorite pages or websites

• create tags for your bookmarked sites

• search your sites or the sites of others

• share your clippings and notes

Social Bookmarking

• store, organize and share your bookmarks

• visit your collection from different browsers and from different computers

• users can share each others’ bookmarks

• search through tags or interest groups

Social Bookmarking

tags are “free-form labels assigned by the user and not drawn from any controlled vocabulary” — Hammond

Wikis

• collaborative authoring• users can

‣ create, edit and delete pages

‣ user friendly markup language

‣ easily link one page to another

‣ comment on text‣ review the history of

changes• soft security

How to use social software

to build community

community building online

??

community building online

Which applications?

What assignments?

How do I assess this?

Training for faculty and students?

??

community building onlineWhat do you want to accomplish?

‣ I want students to get to know each other.

‣ I want students to communicate with each other.

‣ I want to facilitate peer evaluation.

‣ I want students to learn from each other.

‣ I want students to produce something collaboratively.

‣ I want to manage my course more effectively

community building onlineWhat do you want to accomplish?

‣ cultivating working peer relationships

‣ collaborative and cooperative problem solving

‣ producing and presenting something in collaboration with others

‣ adapting to new technologies

‣ effective communication

Foster skills for

community building onlinesuggestions for an smooth transition

‣ start small — start simple

‣ period/place for experiment (sandbox)

‣ introductory activities

‣ closing activities

‣ extra credit activities

‣ be prepared to make adjustments

Thank You

Rudy GarnsLA 232

572-5528garns@nku.edu