Networks get things done. They make things happen. People networks can help us find jobs, meet new friends and find partners. It is a social network. The problem with social networks in the real world is that most of the connections between people are hidden. Our networks are only as valuable as the people and connections we can see. This problem is solved with social networking sites as they make these connections visible. You accumulate a list of friends with whom you can see their friends and then theirs and so on and thus the connections are made visible.

Read: Danah Boyd’s article in the Knowledge Tree journal http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2007/edition-13/social-network-sites-public-private-or-what/

Rather than read the article I decided to listen to the podcast.

The following is the abstract of her article:

“Social network sites (SNSes) like MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo are ubiquitous and today’s youth are spending a great deal of time using these sites to access public life. How is public life shaped by social technology? How are the properties of mediated publics, like social network sites, different from unmediated publics? This article seeks to explore the social dynamics of mediated public life in order to help educators understand their role in socialising today’s youth.”

I was hoping that I would enjoy the podcast however, I think that the reason why I didn’t was because it was simply the author reading the article. I prefer podcasts that are more free flowing and not so word for word. I think because she is reading it straight from the paper, she reads too quickly. However, the article does raise points very relevant to our experience of social networking sites today.

“Mediated publics are here to stay; yet they are complicating many aspects of daily life. The role of an educator is not to condemn or dismiss youth practices, but to help youth understand how their practices fit into a broader societal context. These are exciting times; embracing societal change and influencing the norms can only help everyone involved.”

What is your experience of social networks?

I must say that I am a social network addict as I probably check my profile at least once a day. I use it for the purpose of staying connected with my friends and also as a way to share photos and to stay updated with events. The club with which I am part of conducts most of its updating activities via Facebook as we know that the majority of people have and frequently use Facebook.

How could these be used in learning environments?

As mentioned in the articles these social learning sites foster a lot of informal learning. Knowledge is shared and built across communications with one another and through focussed areas such as ‘groups’. The informality of these sites makes it less intimidating to express opinions and because it is a public domain it invites opinions from a number of different perspectives.

“More than one-third of the world’s population is under 20. There are over 30 million people today qualified to enter a university who have no place to go. During the next decade, this 30 million will grow to 100 million. To meet this staggering demand, a major university needs to be created each week.” – Sir John Daniel, 1996

Opening with a quote to set the scene, the article explores the possibilities of supplying education to an increasing demand using emerging learning technologies. Brown and Adler recognizes a need to supply resources to support innovation and productiveness as well as to continuing education in order to remain globally competitive, which becomes increasingly significant in an age where the world changes at an unstoppable pace.

“We are entering a world in which we all will have to acquire new knowledge and skills on an almost continuous basis” (para.2); consequently, the current methods of teaching and learning and the environments in which they take place will become dated as technology becomes more and more embedded in our lives. As such, initiatives that have been launched over the past couple of years as a direct result of the growth and evolution of the Internet have shown that they could provide a means of meeting this challenge. The ‘global’ platform of the Internet has enabled access to formal and informal educational materials and has also “fostered a new culture of sharing” (‘The Brewing Perfect Storm of Opportunity’ para.1) where “content is freely contributed and distributed with few restrictions of cost” (ibid). Two examples provided were the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement and Web 2.0.

Brown and Adler move on to discuss various factors that have contributed towards this push for more emphasis on emerging learning technologies. Beginning with social learning, they provide a definition which describes the concept as “based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but how we are learning” (‘Social Learning’ para.1). This latter statement is indeed supported by the fact that a higher success rate sits among students who engage in study groups. Another important aspect of social learning is the participatory role of the student in their learning, hence the shift in attention from content to learning activities and human interaction.

Social learning is indeed the backbone of communities of practice in which people work together to produce and edit content. With many online arenas already established, such as Wikipedia, learners are increasingly building knowledge and sharing knowledge through collaboration. This move of social learning online has also given birth to many other new tools for extending education in many different fields as evidenced in the examples given by Brown and Adler – Terra Incognita project of the University of Southern Queensland (Australia), Harvard Law School and Harvard Extension School fall 2006, Digital Study Hall (DSH), Faulkes Telescope Project, Hands-On Universe (HOU), Bugscope Project and The Decameron Web. The examples provided by Brown and Adler, are nowhere near the scope of how many different learning tools that are out there on the Internet. Among them all are an infinite amount of courses of study which is a number unmatched by the physical institutions in which are currently educated. The authors recognize that “for any topic that a student is passionate about, there is likely to be an online niche community of practice of others who share that passion” (‘The Long Tail in Learning’ para.3). Furthermore, “Finding and joining a community that ignites a student’s passion can set the stage for the student to acquire both deep knowledge about a subject (”learning about”) and the ability to participate in the practice of a field through productive inquiry and peer-based learning (”learning to be”). These communities are harbingers of the emergence of a new form of technology-enhanced learning-Learning 2.0-which goes beyond providing free access to traditional course materials and educational tools and creates a participatory architecture for supporting communities of learners.” (ibid. para.4).

The points that Brown and Adler have raised in their article are extremely relevant to education today and as a concluding point, they discuss the necessity of a ‘reflective practicum’. They touch on the concept of learning about learning and stress the need for this reflective approach so as to continually improve technologies by taking into account the experiences of the learners. In discussing these different aspects, Brown and Adler propose a solution to the problem we face of not having the resources to accommodate an increasing number of learners.

It is what they call the demand-pull approach to learning and is, in their own words, “based on providing students with access to rich (sometimes virtual) learning communities built around a practice. It is passion-based learning, motivated by the student either wanting to become a member of a particular community of practice or just wanting to learn about, make, or perform something. Often the learning that transpires is informal rather than formally conducted in a structured setting. Learning occurs in part through a form of reflective practicum, but in this case the reflection comes from being embedded in a community of practice that may be supported by both a physical and a virtual presence and by collaboration between newcomers and professional practitioners/scholars. / The demand-pull approach to learning might appear to be extremely resource-intensive. But the Internet is becoming a vast resource for supporting this style of learning. Its resources include the rapidly growing amount of open courseware, access to powerful instruments and simulation models, and scholarly websites, which already number in the hundreds, as well as thousands of niche communities based around specific areas of interest in virtually every field of endeavor.” (‘From the Web 2.0 to Learning 2.0′ para.4-5)

This article was a very interesting read and shed some light on an issue I hadn’t even considered. It is true that the demand for education is ever increasing from all facets of society and we definitely need to consider alternatives to the institutional systems we have now. That is not to say that we do not need them, but rather we need the infrastructure in place to support these institutions. Education is extremely vital to society and indeed survival in the global environment and the learning technologies that are emerging are worth exploring and investing in.

Read: The 2008 Horizon Report and the 2007 Horizon Report http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki/Main_Page

What are the 6 key emerging technologies identified by the 2008 report?

The 6 key emerging technologies identified and explained by the 2008 Horizons Report were:

1. Grassroots Video – Grassroots video has emerged as a key technology as almost anyone can produce video clips thanks to inexpensive equipment such as mobile phones and free or nearly free software. Video sharing sites have also enabled these user-generated clips to be broadcast and distributed in the public domain. The content itself continues to evolve and is being created for a number of purposes. Indeed in the educational context, video is becoming a popular means of sharing knowledge.

2. Collaboration Webs – The move of collaboration onto the web has enabled people to edit group documents, hold online meetings, swap information and data, and collaborate in any number of ways without ever leaving their desks. It has also been made increasingly seamless by a host of complimentary developments in networking infrastructure, social networking tools, web applications and collaborative workspaces. The constraints that were once posed by distance are now becoming less evident as collaboration webs are taking off in the educational and organisational context.

3. Mobile Broadband – As innovations continue in mobile technology, it has made it possible for users to remain connected using a compact portable device. Mobiles are now equipped with cameras, audio recorders, digital video recorders, pocket datebooks, photo albums, music players, video players, web browsers, document editors, news readers, and more. The accessibility of the Internet from these devices has allowed people to stay in touch with their networks from almost any location, which was something previously provided by laptops. As mobile technology advances, its popularity appears to overtake that of the laptop.

4. Data Mashups – A mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source via a single, unified tool. The availability of large amounts of data is converging with the development of open programming interfaces for social networking, mapping and other tools. Data mashups are powerful tools for navigating and visualizing datasets; understanding connections between different dimensions such as time, distance, and location; juxtaposing data from different sources to reveal new relationships; and other purposes. It is essentially about uniting large amounts of data in a manageable way.

5. Collective Intelligence – Collective intelligence is a term used for the knowledge embedded within societies or large groups of individuals. Divided into two categories, explicit collective intelligence and implicit collective intelligence, the former is knowledge that is gathered and recorded by many people (eg: Wikipedia) whereas the latter is the data that is collected over time by the activities of people. This data reveals patterns, correlations and flows amongst people and provides accurate predictions about people’s preferences and behaviours which has helped researchers and everyday users understand the map relationships, and gauge relative significance of ideas and events.

6. Social Operating Systems – Social operating systems are the essential ingredient of next generation social networking. The way in which they are organized will be based around people; which is an indication of how valuable connections and relationships are becoming. The first social operating system tools, only just emerging now, understand who we know, how we know them, and how deep our relationships actually are. They can lead us to connections we would otherwise have missed. As they develop further, these tools will transform the academy in significant ways we can only begin to imagine. This is much more than facebook, which only shows a minute scale of the networks we interact with. Social operating systems are advancing to include more detail and analysis of our relationships.

Which of these technologies are you familiar with, and in what context have either used them, or heard of them?

I have encountered each of these technologies, mainly in recreational contexts. For example, grassroots videos are available through Youtube and more and more, my friends are starting to post their videos onto their facebook profiles. In the case of mobile broadband, I have accessed the Internet from my mobile phone to check emails and to download music. I have never accessed the Internet for extended periods of time mainly because of the cost associated with it. Data mashups are most encountered in facebook when photos of myself or friends of mine are tagged. It’s funny how these tags often show friends that are from different groups by coincidentally know each other in some other way, it definitely shows how small the world is becoming.

As for collaboration webs, collective intelligence and social operating systems, as part of some of my group assessments I have had to use wikispaces to communicate and share knowledge with my peers. Collaboration webs in particular, have been used when I communicate with my club executives – we use google docs to view documents and edit them as we gather more information. Again with the work I do with my club, there is extensive emailing and gmail, considering social operating systems, sort of tracks our history by having all our previous emails tabbed behind the most current email.

Review the significant trends (p.6) – how do these relate to your experiences of technology in learning contexts?

The significant trends identified in the 2007 Horizon Report were user-created content, social networking, mobile phones, virtual worlds, the new scholarship and emerging forms of publication and massively multiplayer education gaming.

Reviewing these technologies:

• User-created content is content that is produced at almost all levels of experience found in blogs, photostreams, wikibooks, machinima clips and so on. It is a new form of contribution and an increasing trend towards authorship.
• Social networking are the sites that connect people with their friends, colleagues, or strangers who have a shared interest. Truly engaging social networking offers and opportunity to contribute, share, communicate and collaborate.
• Mobile phones are becoming the gateway to our digital lives. They provide instant access and their capabilities are ever increasing very rapidly.
• Virtual worlds mirror the real world through imaginative and almost fantasy-inspired environments. They present the chance to collaborate, explore, role-play and experience other situations in a safe but compelling way.
• The new scholarship and emerging forms of publication are becoming more apparent as new tools and new ways to create, critique, and publish are influencing new and old scholars alike.
• Massively multiplayer education gaming are engaging and absorbing users in a way that commercial games have. Although relatively small, new games are emerging as barriers are brought down.

Thinking about the way in which these technology have related to my experiences in learning contexts, I can honestly say that they are truly embedded in the way I communicate with my peers and to a great extent the way I am gaining knowledge and producing work. Blogs have now become a part of my educational experience, although yet to become a habitual acitivity. Social networking enables me to connect with people from different groups that I interact with. My mobile is perhaps the one thing that goes everywhere with me. However, virtual worlds and massively multiplayer education gaming have yet to become immersed in my learning experiences.