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Special Insight Reports
05 October 2005 I Riina Vuorikari
Social networking software and e-portfolios foster digital learning networks
Digital knowledge artefacts are any digital traces of learning such as writings, images, multimedia files, blogs and other reflections over the time of lifelong learning. European Schoolnet's latest Special Insight Report presents a new report on the use of social networking software and e-portfolios. The report, entitled "Can personal digital knowledge artefacts' management and social networks enhance learning? " suggests that through sharing one's digital knowledge artefacts with other learners one not only brings online learning in a social context that it is sometimes missing, but also allows new paths of learning with peers to emerge.
The emergence of social networking applications for managing and sharing digital artefacts on-line from URL bookmarks to Web-feeds can facilitate the creation of social networks. Free keywords, also known as tags, play a central role as they allow users to classify, link, share, recommend and distribute their digital artefacts. In the table below this is described as social content.
On the other hand, social networking software attempts to capture person's heterogeneous social networks; people are known to have a variety of networks, ones being though their social life whereas others might be based on interests in professional life, in hobbies and such. How to capitalise on this multitude of networks and contacts for the purpose of facilitating social networking is the challenge that the current applications tackle. In the table below this is described as social context.
This paper suggest that these tools could be used for education, and similar tools could become features of e-learning applications. The paper proposes that e-portfolios could become a suitable hub for integrating such tools for educational use.
The report Can personal digital knowledge artefacts' management and social networks enhance learning? was written by Research Analyst Riina Vuorikari and is downloadable in pdf-format at:
http://www.eun.org/insight-pdf/special_reports/social_networks_learning_vuorikari_9_2005_insight.pdf
The paper presents some current applications and envisages some ways that they could be used for learning purposes. The possible educational implementations as described below are for inspirational purposes, of course many other ways could be envisaged.
| Flickr | http://www.flickr.com |
| Short description: | Flickr is an online photo management and sharing application with two main goals: to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them, and to enable new ways of organising photos. Flickr is a Yahoo! company. |
| Social Content: | Photos with rights (Creative Commons1) and restricted access, tags, user profile, can define groups and create communities. |
| Social Context: | Private and public groups, social navigation through tags (latest, most popular, tag cloud). Web-feeds(user/tag), a third party API2. |
| Possible Educational implementation: | Learners can share images that they have created or integrate in their works (photos, image manipulation, maps,..) to be used in different learning situations from authentic geography to art lessons. Social networks can be built around images through connecting learners, tutors and teachers together via shared tags. Pictures can constitute an important network of distributed repositories for images. |
| Furl |
http://www.furl.net |
| Short description: | Furl's marketing line is to “Save, search and share your Personal Web.” It allows users to save a URL and a personal copy of any page on the Web, tag it using keywords and to share it with others. |
| Social Content: | Social bookmarking: bookmarks, tags, creation of list of subscriptions to other people's bookmarks and subscribe people to yours. |
| Social Context: | Private groups, navigation (latest, most popular, hot topics, people who have this also have this and that..), PeopleRanksm (what's popular), recommends new Web pages guided by the sites the user "Furled", Web-feeds(user/tag), a third party API. |
| Possible Educational implementation: | Sharing personally classified bookmarks among teachers and with other learners to cover a study area. Collaborative filtering and social navigation facilitates new discoveries. Teachers and librarians can already create pre-selected and tagged lists of resources for learners to browse, and be sure that they are found again, as a copy is saved by the system. Bookmarks based on a tag can be aggregated and posted through Web-feeds to learners' and other teachers' blogs or websites focusing in a given area. Commenting and rating on bookmarked urls can be used for recommending as well as for helping decision-making and critical thinking. |
| Del.icio.us |
http://del.icio.us |
| Short description: | del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows adding web pages to your personal collection of links, to categorise those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only among your own browsers and machines, but also with others. |
| Social Content: | Social bookmarking: bookmarks, tags |
| Social Context: | Navigation (latest, most active, tag cloud, by people, others who have this tag, ) Web-feeds (user/tag), a third party API |
| Possible Educational implementation: | del.icio.us is more geared towards “social bookmarking” than Furl. Collaborative collection of links tagged with keywords is facilitated, and they can all be browsed and viewed at once (social navigation) or distributed through Web-feeds. Also, creating related tags is easy, giving more leverage for more elaborated categories. |
| Technorati |
http://www.technorati.org |
| Short description: | Technocrati is an information retrieval application, a self-proclaimed authority of the blogosphere where it keeps track of tags that people have used in their blogs and of hyperlinks between different blogs. Tracks thousands of updates per hour to monitor the communities (who's linking to whom). |
| Social Content: | User creates watchlists for tags – the service indexes blogs using tags, i.e. a search engine for blogosphere. |
| Social Context: | Search all the bolgs containing a phrase, a URL, a tag. Navigation (most popular, news/books/movies/top100 blogs, tag cloud in all languages, related tags) |
| Possible Educational implementation: | Technocrati can be used to track postings on the blogs on certain tags, the similar could be envisaged for educational ends. Also, it illustrates who is linking to the page the user is on, thus allowing a means to follow the whole distributed discussion that happens in people's blogs, this contrasts with a more traditional use of a one centralised forum for discussions. This service can also help a user to evaluate the trustworthiness of blogs as it can show other people linking to it. |
| Rojo.com |
http://www.rojo.com |
| Short description: | RSS feed reading and discovery with commenting and sharing though keywords and established groups. |
| Social Content: |
RSS feeds: find, track, read and share feeds through tags |
| Social Context: |
Allows setting up groups, also sharing through tags. Recommended Links though Rojo. |
| Possible Educational implementation: |
In the future we can expect that an increasing part of educational content is end-user products, thus learning artefacts created by learners themselves become an important component of learning process. It could be envisaged that learners were to generate selective (privacy and rights) RSS feeds from their own learning artefacts e.g. blogs, photos, bookmarks, etc. and other learners could aggregate feeds through tags and social networks like done in Rojo. |
| ConnectViaBooks.com |
http://www.ConnectViaBooks.com |
| Short description: |
Social networking site using books (reviews, read/reading lists,..) to connect people. |
| Social Content: |
User profile including preferences, location |
| Social Context: |
Connecting people who have listed the same books, by geographical location, too. |
| Possible Educational implementation: | The application could be used as such for literature. Furthermore, if we think of the idea of connecting people with similar learning “histories” we could expand it to learners who have taken the same courses or used the same learning resource, etc. This combined with social networking could allow recommendation of further resources, courses, career options, etc, and also allow people to get together to discuss books, courses, etc. and to share their experiences with peers. The geographical location of users also allows to find like-minded people in the region, a neat feature for educational usage too. |
| 43 Things |
http://www.43things.com |
| Short description: | A site that provides an area where people can write their goals, become inspired by others and share their process as well as learn from others how to achieve goals. |
| Social Content: | Lists of life goals, desired things to achieve and places that people plan and wish to visit. Also “have done this” and user profile. |
| Social Context: | Connections are build between people who have listed similar aims or desires in order to have a peer group to support one another. Connections can also be made between people who want to achieve some goal and the ones who have already done that in order to give guidance and support. |
| Possible Educational implementation: | In an educational context writing down educational goals is an important part of planning one's learning path. Peer-support from people with the same goals can help achieve the setting of targets and sharing the experience. The feature “have done this” would allow learners who have gained certain experiences to act as tutors or help in the scaffolding process. |
| 360°Yahoo! |
http://360.yahoo.com |
| Short description: |
Yahoo!'s service for blogging and networking, allows sharing all types of artefacts, also the ones on external services, with public or restricted groups. |
| Social Content: | Own profile, blog, photos, local reviews, friends, music, lists of favorite books, movies, music, TV shows and groups. A personalised page collects different artefacts either from Yahoo! Services or external ones. |
| Social Context: | Groups (private, friends, friends of a friend, etc) can be created and categorised and artefacts can be shared with groups through Web-feeds, notifications on a messenger, etc. |
| Possible Educational implementation: | Creating accounts for an educational community and to use it for reflection on blogs and sharing information as well as links and such can support community building among learners and allow them to share things beyond everyday learning. The integrated approach is appealing, although not intentionally geared towards educational usage, as for example School Plaza3, a newly launched service by European Schoolnet. |
Web Editor: Paul
Gerhard
Keywords: educational innovation, learning environment, standard, technology
Last changed: Tuesday, 07 February 2006
Keywords: educational innovation, learning environment, standard, technology
Last changed: Tuesday, 07 February 2006
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