When I was doing a search to find out about the vast array of social networking tools and sites available I came upon the following information. I was only aware of about half of these and am only using a couple of them. Ever heard of friendster? Or yelp? Or Outside.in? I hadn't but I have been getting a number of invitations from Linkedin so I accepted and now I am linked in and there is one more place for me to make connections! - check out these:
Creating social groups is one of the original practices on the Internet. Extending back to the 1970's, people have consistently used online tools to expand, extend, re-invent, and build social groups. Today, social networking has become a major activity online, and many of the functionalities and traditions from decades ago have become cast in different interfaces that include features such as profiles, friend and relationship links, instant messaging, blogs, bookmark-sharing, Web-based discussions, and Web-based email.
· MySpace: a massive social network based on user profiles as well as many other tools to build relationships, communication, and interaction.
· Friendster: a pioneering social network recognized as the first (Web-based) social networking site.
· Classmates: originated as a way for high-school classmates to keep in touch.
· Facebook: originated as a way for college students to get to know each other.
· Linkedin: a professionally-oriented network used to build business and professional contacts or to get in touch with past colleagues and friends.
· yelp.com: a network of people reviewing local restaurants, shopping, nightlife, businesses, and other places. Friend relationships, favorites, and profiles support a range of member-to-member interaction.
· Meetup.com: a social network that aims to connect people through in-person, local meetings on a variety of interest topics.
· outside.in: tracks news, views, and conversations in towns and neighborhoods; individual profiles
· Orkut: a social network affiliated with Google.
· Tribe.net: a social network oriented to metropolitan areas.
· Yahoo Members: a network of members of Yahoo.
· Applications that foster social interaction:
o Blogging: Creating diary-like commentary on life, passing events, people, and ideas has found a form in blogs. Social networks emerge as groups of bloggers work and comment on blogs or make hypertext links from blog to blog. Many social networks that are based on user profiles also include blogs as part of the services they offer to users.
o Bookmarking: Information-sharing can be among a group of people using social networking sites. Altough sharing interesting sites online has been an activity for several decades, these social networking sites oriented to tagging or bookmarking bring it to a more visible, organized, and efficient level.
o Personal Ads: With social networks come social attractions, so it follows that many networks develop specifically for dating. Extending the ancient concept of "computer dating" beyond just matching characteristics like age and preferences for long walks on the beach, personal ad services today provide matching based on personality testing, some of which is based on research.
Social networks are created as we find new niches that need to be filled. What is next? One can only imagine, but in imagining - therein may lie an entrepreneurial opportunity!
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Connectivism: Being Connected in the Ether is Replacing the Classroom as the Source for Learning
Connectivism: Being Connected in the Ether is Replacing the Classroom as the Source for Learning
In his essay “Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age”, George Siemens states, “Formal education no longer comprises the majority of our learning. Learning now occurs in a variety of ways – through communities of practice, personal networks, and through completion of work-related tasks.” Information, though at times vague, ambiguous, opinionated, biased, or just plain false, is ubiquitous. At every turn we find new ideas, the reporting of incidents and opinions, a twist on an old theme, artistic expression, emotional outpouring, new data, old data, and all because we are so connected. Learning is not always deliberate. Sometimes it is accidental or incidental. We are no longer (at least rarely) looking in paper books for information. Instead we are finding it through intentional searches of the oceans of digital data or happening upon it as we float about in social networks, peruse our feeds of personal interest data, or bump up against it as we cruise the information depths (that surfing analogy no longer works as the data pool has become too vast and too deep – we are now becoming experienced submariners in our information quest). As Seimens says, “Know-how and know-what is being supplemented with know-where (the understanding of where to find knowledge needed).
Siemens, in quoting Rocha, “Learning, as a self-organizing process requires that the system (personal or organizational learning systems) “be informationally open, that is, for it to be able to classify its own interaction with an environment, it must be able to change its structure…” brings focus to how critical the malleability of our learning processes must be in the ever changing landscape of our connected lives. We have so many resources available at our finger tip (the one attached to the mouse) that we must spend some time interpreting, verifying, analyzing, and applying the data in order to make truth of all that we find, “The capacity to form connections between sources of information, and thereby create useful information patterns, is required to learn in our knowledge economy” (Wiley and Edwards, quoted in Siemens).
For organizations the expansive universe of information available creates special challenges of connectivity. Siemens focuses on the heart of the problem in stating:
Information flow within an organization is an important element in organizational effectiveness. In a knowledge economy, the flow of information is the equivalent of the oil pipe in an industrial economy. Creating, preserving, and utilizing information flow should be a key organizational activity. Knowledge flow can be likened to a river that meanders through the ecology of an organization. In certain areas, the river pools and in other areas it ebbs. The health of the learning ecology of the organization depends on effective nurturing of information flow.
Siemens concludes appropriately,” Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know today.” The ocean of knowledge is getting deeper and wider, but the ships we use to sail on it and in it are getting better too, as is the equipment with which we navigate. Now we just need to be sure to stay abreast of the changing sailing techniques. It has become evident, and sometimes painfully so, that we are not turning to the salty old dogs for tutorials, but instead we look to the Ishmaels of the digital sea as our models.
In his essay “Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age”, George Siemens states, “Formal education no longer comprises the majority of our learning. Learning now occurs in a variety of ways – through communities of practice, personal networks, and through completion of work-related tasks.” Information, though at times vague, ambiguous, opinionated, biased, or just plain false, is ubiquitous. At every turn we find new ideas, the reporting of incidents and opinions, a twist on an old theme, artistic expression, emotional outpouring, new data, old data, and all because we are so connected. Learning is not always deliberate. Sometimes it is accidental or incidental. We are no longer (at least rarely) looking in paper books for information. Instead we are finding it through intentional searches of the oceans of digital data or happening upon it as we float about in social networks, peruse our feeds of personal interest data, or bump up against it as we cruise the information depths (that surfing analogy no longer works as the data pool has become too vast and too deep – we are now becoming experienced submariners in our information quest). As Seimens says, “Know-how and know-what is being supplemented with know-where (the understanding of where to find knowledge needed).
Siemens, in quoting Rocha, “Learning, as a self-organizing process requires that the system (personal or organizational learning systems) “be informationally open, that is, for it to be able to classify its own interaction with an environment, it must be able to change its structure…” brings focus to how critical the malleability of our learning processes must be in the ever changing landscape of our connected lives. We have so many resources available at our finger tip (the one attached to the mouse) that we must spend some time interpreting, verifying, analyzing, and applying the data in order to make truth of all that we find, “The capacity to form connections between sources of information, and thereby create useful information patterns, is required to learn in our knowledge economy” (Wiley and Edwards, quoted in Siemens).
For organizations the expansive universe of information available creates special challenges of connectivity. Siemens focuses on the heart of the problem in stating:
Information flow within an organization is an important element in organizational effectiveness. In a knowledge economy, the flow of information is the equivalent of the oil pipe in an industrial economy. Creating, preserving, and utilizing information flow should be a key organizational activity. Knowledge flow can be likened to a river that meanders through the ecology of an organization. In certain areas, the river pools and in other areas it ebbs. The health of the learning ecology of the organization depends on effective nurturing of information flow.
Siemens concludes appropriately,” Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know today.” The ocean of knowledge is getting deeper and wider, but the ships we use to sail on it and in it are getting better too, as is the equipment with which we navigate. Now we just need to be sure to stay abreast of the changing sailing techniques. It has become evident, and sometimes painfully so, that we are not turning to the salty old dogs for tutorials, but instead we look to the Ishmaels of the digital sea as our models.
Friday, February 20, 2009
The New Learning Paradigm
"Living and Learning with New Media" from the MacArthur foundation states, "Youth using new media often learn from their peers, not teachers or adults, and notions of expertise and authority have been turned on their heads." So if students are not learning from us perhaps they are learning in spite of us and we had either get out of the way or climb onto the vehicle students are using to learn, social media, and guide them to the content they need enable them to embrace the exponential growth that is taking place in the digital world and that they will need to compete in an ever changing career market. In addition, the question . . . "what would it mean to enlist help in this endeavor from engaged and diverse publics that are broader than what we traditionally think of as educational and civic institutions?" places the challenge to teachers to explore the digital commons to find the places that students reside and meet them there and help them to find their way through to new and exciting information relevant to their lives. We need to build a bridge that not only fords the "digital divide" that exists between their in school and out of school use of the digital commons, but a bridge that gets a lot of traffic. As teachers we should want our students to be able to make connections between classroom learning and their own lives.
During a week away from school with 30 students in a remote setting in Northern Thailand I had the opportunity to listen to them about the way they are spending their time using digital media out of school and I learned that much of the time they spent "playing" is not neccessarily frivolous. Several student talked about the game "Spore" that they have been playing and how cool they found it. A visit to wikipedia found that "Spore is a multi-genre massive single-player online metaverse video game developed by Maxis and designed by Will Wright. It allows a player to control the development of a species from its beginnings as a unicellular organism, through development as an intelligent and social creature, to interstellar exploration as a spacefaring culture. It has drawn wide attention for its massive scope, and its use of open-ended gameplay and procedural generation." Here is a gaming platform that incorporates biology, socialogy, anthropology, earth science, and astronomy, with science fiction and fantasy. I've yet to explore the game myself but I can imagine the applications and implications of using it as part of that bridge accross the digital divide. As "Living and Learning in the New Media" states,"Once teens find a way to be together—online, offline, or both—they integrate new media within the informal hanging-out practices that have characterized their social worlds ever since the postwar emergence of teens as a distinctive youth culture, a culture that continues to be tightly integrated with commercial popular cultural products targeted to teens."
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