SuprGlu Your Kaboodle
Social Networks for Teaching & Learning
Peter Tittenberger and Polly Washburn
February 2006
Learning Technologies Centre
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On today‘s program
four concepts (10 minutes)
1. Web 2.0
2. Folksonomies
3. Online Social networks
4. Community of Practice
six applications (30 minutes)
1. Wikis
2. Blogs
3. Flickr
4. Del.icio.us
5. Kaboodle
6. Suprglu
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Not on today‘s program
RSS/XML – the glue that binds all this stuff
together
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outcomes
Inspire you to use web 2.0 apps in your own
learning
Inspire you to use web 2.0 apps in your teaching
Spend an enjoyable lunch hour
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The Read/Write Web or Web 2.0
Web 1.0 Web 2.0
The web is a publishing The web is an interactive
medium where some write medium where all users
and others read. read and write, interact,
create and collaborate.
Top down.
Bottom up.
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as it so happens . . .
―In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space
for sharing information. It seemed evident that it should be a space
in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute.
The first browser was actually a browser/editor, which allowed one to
edit any page, and save it back to the web if one had access rights.
Strangely enough, the web took off very much as a publishing
medium, in which people edited offline. Bizarrely, they were
prepared to edit the funny angle brackets of HTML source, and didn't
demand a what you see is what you get editor. WWW was soon full
of lots of interesting stuff, but not a space for communal design, for
discourse through communal authorship.‖
Tim Berner-Lee - Submitted by timbl on Mon, 2005-12-12 14:52
http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/38
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Web 2.0 characteristics
http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000547.php
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Web 2.0 foundation attributes
• User-contributed value — Users make substantive
contributions to enhance the overall value of a service.
• The Long Tail — Beating the sales of one or two best-
seller products by using the Internet to sell a cumulatively
greater amount of the products that have low demand or
low sales.
• Network effect — For users, the value of a network
substantially increases with the addition of each new user.
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Web 2.0 experience attributes
• Decentralization — Users experience services on their
terms, not those of a centralized authority, such as a
corporation.
• Co-creation — Users participate in the creation and
delivery of the primary value of a service.
• Remixability — Experiences are created and tailored to
user needs by integrating the capabilities of multiple
services and organizations.
• Emergent systems — Cumulative actions at the lowest
levels of the system drive the form and value of the overall
system. Users derive value not only from the service itself,
but also the overall shape that a service inherits from user
behaviors.
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http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
Web 1.0 Web 2.0
DoubleClick Google AdSense
Ofoto Flickr
Akamai BitTorrent
mp3.com Napster
Britannica Online Wikipedia
personal websites Blogging
Evite upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation search engine optimization
page views cost per click
screen scraping web services
Publishing Participation
content management systems Wikis
directories (taxonomy) tagging ("folksonomy")
Stickiness syndication
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Folksonomies/tagging/metadata
Users assign descriptive tags (metadata)
Links established between tags (clusters)
Communities formed around common areas of
interest (tags)
An essential feature of web 2.0 sites
Problem: no standards (folksonomy not
taxonomy)
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Folksonomies/tagging/metadata
―Today, users are adding metadata and using tags to organize
their own digital collections, categorize the content of others
and build bottom-up classification systems. The wisdom of
crowds, the hive mind, and the collective intelligence are
doing what heretofore only expert catalogers, information
architects and website authors have done. They are
categorizing and organizing the Internet and determining the
user experience, and it‘s working. No longer do the experts
have the monopoly on this domain; in this new age users
have been empowered to determine their own cataloging
needs. Metadata is now in the realm of the Everyman.‖
http://infotangle.blogsome.com/2005/12/07/the-hive-mind-folksonomies-and-user-based-tagging/
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Social Networking
―Social network theory views social relationships in terms of
nodes and ties. Nodes are the individual actors within the
networks, and ties are the relationships between the actors.‖
―the attributes of individuals are less important than their
relationships and ties with other actors within the network‖
―social networks play a critical role in determining the way
problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree
to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals.‖
Online Social Networks are Internet applications to help
connect friends, business partners, or other individuals
together using a variety of tools.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_networks
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Communities of Practice
―Communities of practice are groups of people who
share a concern or a passion for something they do
and learn how to do it better as they interact
regularly.‖
Etienne Wenger
http://www.ewenger.com/theory/index.htm
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COP key characteristics
Domain (shared subject of interest)
commitment to the domain
shared competence
The domain is not necessarily recognized as "expertise" outside
the community
Community (pursue the domain)
members engage in joint activities and discussions
help each other
share information
learn from each other
Practice
Members of a community of practice are practitioners (do
something together)
a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways
of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice
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Communities of Practice
Problem solving "Can we work on this design and brainstorm some ideas; I’m
stuck.“
Requests for information "Where can I find the code to connect to the server?”
Seeking experience "Has anyone dealt with a customer in this situation? “
Reusing assets "I have a proposal for a local area network I wrote for a client last
year. I can send it to you and you can easily tweak it for this new
client.“
Coordination and synergy "Can we combine our purchases of solvent to achieve bulk
discounts?“
Discussing developments "What do you think of the new CAD system? Does it really help?“
Documentation projects “We have faced this problem five times now. Let us write it down
once and for all.“
Visits "Can we come and see your after-school program? We need to
establish one in our city.“
Mapping knowledge and identifying gaps "Who knows what, and what are we missing? What other groups
should we connect with?"
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COP in education
―Internally: How to organize educational experiences that
ground school learning in practice through participation in
communities around subject matters?
Externally: How to connect the experience of students to
actual practice through peripheral forms of participation in
broader communities beyond the walls of the school?
Over the lifetime of students: How to serve the lifelong
learning needs of students by organizing communities of
practice focused on topics of continuing interest to students
beyond the initial schooling period?‖
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Specific Technologies
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Wikis
What are they?
A wiki is a type of
website that allows
users to easily add and
edit content and is
especially suited for
collaborative writing.
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Wiki charactistics
Easy to use
Plain text editing
Simplified markup syntax?
Open editing
Version control / history / difference feature
Pages can be locked and/or password protected
Wiki vandalism
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Wikis
Use in education
– Academic Uses of Wikis
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Notable wikis
Wikipedia
Wikibooks
LTC wiki
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Blogs, vlogs and podcasts
Blog = Online text, photo
and web links journal
Vlog = Video Blog
Podcast = Audio Blog
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Blogs, vlogs and podcasts
How Does It Work/ How do you use it?
•Free to create blog on sites like Blogger, MySpace, LiveJournal
•Free to post video or audio to OurMedia or possibly campus
servers
•Free to list in iTunes, FireAnt or other directories
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iTunes U - Stanford
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Blogs, vlogs and podcasts
“Coursecasting”
– Chance for students to review lecture
– Especially useful for EFL students
– Students listen to a podcast before class, and show up ready for
discussion rather than lecture.
iTunes U
- Stanford – public lectures, concerts
- Carlton U – Chemistry 1000 vodcast
- Buffalo State – lectures, poetry readings
- U Michigan Dentistry School
– UM-Dentistry students can access iTunes using their UM identification and
password.
– a designated student begins recording a lecture at the beginning of class and
stops the recording when the lecture is over. The student then posts the lecture
audio online as soon as possible.
– more than 300 lectures on the web site
Purdue – 70 courses via MP3 on website – had earlier provided taped lectures at library
- A faculty member who wants to have his or her lectures put online can simply
show up to class and wear a small microphone while speaking. Purdue's
technology staff members then retrieve the recordings and put them online.
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Blogs, vlogs and podcasts
• Other strategies for use in
educational environment
- Can create group pages for entire class to post
thoughts/video/audio to
- Can find and share historical/artistic content like
this
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Flickr.com
What is it?
A way to upload, download, store, manage and share
photos on the web
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Flickr key characteristics
Photos can be grouped into collections (sets)
Titles, descriptions, date added to photos
(metadata)
Photos are tagged and tags are searched
(metadata/folksonomy)
Comments/favourites are possible
Interestingness
Thematic groups (domains)
Personal profiles
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flickr
Use in education
a visual image can be used a a stimulus for
discussion or comment
Students can share one account to create an
image portfolio
Students can form thematic groups to share
photos
Set up a ‗community of practice‘ to share, learn
from each other, do something together
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del.ici.ous
What is it?
Stores bookmarks (URL‘s) on the web
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del.ici.ous key characteristics
Bookmarks can be accessed from any computer
User assigned tags (metadata)
Public publishing of user‘s bookmarks
Ability to subscribe to other bookmark collections
Every tag has it's own page: del.icio.us/tag/politics
Every user has his or her own page for favorites:
del.icio.us/geoffrey
View favorites tagged "france" and "politics" (an
intersection): del.icio.us/tag/france+politics
View your subscriptions: del.icio.us/inbox/ext504
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del.ici.ous
Uses in education
Web based research
Collaboratively construct list of web resources
Set up a ‗community of practice‘ to share,
learn from each other, do something together
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• What It Is:
• A site to ―scrapbook‖
web pages and get
feedback from others
• Example
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• For use in educational environment:
– Students collect websites, give comments and
―rate‖ the websites submitted by others
– Favourite sites will rise in rankings as positively
rated
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• What It Is:
– A way to pull together content from these
other services
• You can enter del.icio.us, flickr, blog
sites to ―pull‖ information/feed from
• Can enter any RSS feed
• RSS = Really Simple Syndication
– (not so simple but aggregators like Suprglu
make it more so)
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• Strategies for use in educational
environment
• - pull feeds from multiple
blogs/delicious links, kaboodles
• Examples
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This presentation online at:
umanitoba.ca/learning_technologies/resources/brownbag/supr_feb06.ppt
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