Social Networks
Where social software exhibits 'social translucence', personal social networks may be visible implicitly. For example, Moodle offers the chance for participants to see who is in their space or course, and who else is online at the same time, as this screen shot shows.
500pxThis knowledge of who is in their course and whether or not they are online may provoke multi-channel communications such as private messages, forum posts and emails that can strengthen participants' personal social networks. Clicking on Frances Bell's name in the example above would allow logged in users to send her a private message, access her profile (where she may have provided links to other channels such as Skype), and check forum posts she has made.
Free commercial social networks such as Facebook allow individuals to make their personal networks visible explicitly by use of 'friending' and other relationship management features.
Facebook was started by Mark Zuckerberg and co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes when they were students at Harvard. University networks still use a valid email address to establish membership of a Facebook University network. Universities have made use of Facebook for social and marketing purposes but there are obstacles to the incorporation of its use into 'official' educational activities. Students may object to academics entering what they see as 'their space', sometimes called the 'creepy treehouse' effect (Stein,2008) . Institutions may also be wary of their staff instigating dialogue in spaces where they have no control over blocking users or deleting offensive posts, yet being found guilty by association when problems occur. There is a subtle difference between Blackboard's Sync Facebook application that pushes course information out to students and the Open University's Course Profiles application that is based on student self-reporting and open information-sharing of recommendations on course. University of Leicester used Facebook to encourage socialisation between students on an online course.
Two examples of social networking software that takes account of educational needs are elgg and Ning. Elgg is an OSS package that facilitates social networks for learning, with v1.0 released in August 2008, for example the University of Brighton's social network for students and staff Community@Brighton http://community.brighton.ac.uk/.
Ning is a social networking service that allows users to set up their own networks, all hosted on Ning servers, usually based around a common interest. There is a 'free' service, funded by advertisements, and a paid-for service with some additional features . http://education.ning.com
Drupal, an OSS Content Management System (CMS) is also used for educational purposes, and offers modules to support social networking . Implementing your own site using Drupal or elgg gives institutions maximum control over data and functionality but requires an investment of resources in customising, installing and maintaining the site. A Ning network allows a teacher (or anyone) to set up and manage a network fairly easily, but the data resides on a Ning server.
Read more about this topic: Social Software In Education, Current State of The Art
Famous quotes containing the words social and/or networks:
“Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the delusion of masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the assurance that, even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave and torture a man.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“The great networks are there to prove that ideas can be canned like spaghetti. If everything ends up by tasting like everything else, is that not the evidence that it has been properly cooked?”
—Frederic Raphael (b. 1931)