Educational Social SoftwareThe Use of Social Network Sites for Teaching and Learning

Marvin LeNoue, PhD – Saudi Electric Services Polytechnic

Educational Social SoftwareLambropoulos and Romero (2010):

ESS is Web-based software supporting learning via group interaction.

Under this paradigm we can consider a range of applications such as Weblogs, wikis, social bookmarking and syndication systems, multiplayer online games, discussion forums, or even 3D worlds.

Dave Cormier -- George Siemens Stephen Downes -- Terry Anderson

ESS

Social Network Websites

Web-based services that allow individuals to:

1) Construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system,

2) Articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection,

3) View and traverse their list of connections and those of others within

the system. (boyd & Ellison, 2007).

Hundreds of social network sites in active operation worldwide.

Most well-known in the United States: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Bebo

Unique aspect of social network sites:

Allow users to make visible their social networks.

Effect is to make user connections available to other users as potential connections.

(boyd & Ellision, 2007; Greenhow & Robelia, 2007).

Social Media Affordances

Support for:Connectivity, social rapport, community Support for conversational interactions Support for social feedback Collaborative information/content discovery Information/content sharing Knowledge and information aggregation Content creation and modification Multimodal presentation and communication Multiple learning styles

(Educational) Social Network Sites as Teaching (Educational) Social Network Sites as Teaching ToolsTools

A well-designed SNS offers course participants:A well-designed SNS offers course participants:

• Multi-modal and multi-media communication and content delivery Multi-modal and multi-media communication and content delivery capabilities. capabilities.

• Facilitation and stimulation of broad and dense interaction patterns.Facilitation and stimulation of broad and dense interaction patterns.

• Collaborative information discovery and processing.Collaborative information discovery and processing.

• Multiple-style learning opportunities. Multiple-style learning opportunities.

A dedicated educational social network website provides a virtual space where course participants can meet and take part in various formal and informal interactions centered on shared learning objectives. This social space can be a positive component of an online course.

Rena Palloff & Keith PrattThe Virtual Student

Community

Learners in the online environment are able to successfully build and maintain communities of learning by engaging in many of the same processes and behaviors associated with offline communities.

Online educators must look for ways to promote community in the online context and thereby gain its benefits for individual members.

(Haythornthwaite et al. 2004; Kazmer, 2004; Rheingold, 1993)

Transparency

The objective of educational social network site use is increased awareness of the activities of other individuals within the network. The SNS functions to push work into a virtual shared space. (Dalsgaard, 2008; Dalsgaard & Paulsen, 2009)

Voorstel rondjePresence

E-learning in the 21st Century

D. Randy Garrison & Terry Anderson

Personal Learning Environment (PLE): The tools, communities, and services that constitute the individual educational platforms that learners use to direct their own learning and pursue educational goals. (Educause, 2009)

The PLE is a technological tool, but it is simply a tool that allows us to do the sorts of things that we’ve done since prehistory in order to learn, in order to become a part of our community. (Downes, 2010)

Knowledge in the typical learning management system – is usually static, declarative, authority-based. Like books. Like a lecture. (Downes, 2010)

Knowledge in the personal learning environment is dynamic, tacit, not declared, not explicit, created by people who are working inside the personal learning environment. (Downes, 2010)

Social Network Sites in Education: There But Not There

One reason why some of the features of digital technologies are difficult to implement in educational practices is that they challenge the traditions of teaching and learning on which institutionalized learning has been based. Through its impact on our culture and communicative/cognitive activities, technology becomes significant to a rather radical restructuring of how we develop skills and exercise intelligent action (Saljo, 2010).

“Our teaching and learning habits are useful but they can also be deadly. They are useful when the conditions in which they work are predictable and stable. They are deadly if and when the bottom falls out of the stable social world in and for which we learn. According to Zigmunt Bauman (2004), this is not merely a future possibility – it is the contemporary social reality.”

Erica McWilliam – Unlearning How to Teach Innovations in Education and Teaching International Volume 45, Issue 3, 2008 Special Issue: CREATIVITY OR CONFORMITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION?

Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.

Michel Foucault, The Discourse on Language

"You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." ―Morpheus to Neo

m_le-noue@sesp.edu.sa