For Class Discussion:
We are all familiar with social networks, such as Facebook. It is big and here to stay, and who knows, the next big thing can be something other than Facebook. Compared to all those tools covered so far, applying a social or personal network for teaching and learning may be more informal and less structured (but most IDT professionals agree, designing learning environments or leveraging communities is becoming more important). For adopting social network for education or development, you should have clear purposes and plans (especially for how to co-evolve the space with and by users), and also, if considered at the organization level, strong leadership is a must. Think about two different organizations, one bans using Facebook during work/school, and the other encouraging Facebook for social learning. Regardless of your opinion or preference, our students and learners use these tools very actively, so you must know what they are and what benefits and pitfalls they have to guide proper use.
We are all familiar with social networks, such as Facebook. It is big and here to stay, and who knows, the next big thing can be something other than Facebook. Compared to all those tools covered so far, applying a social or personal network for teaching and learning may be more informal and less structured (but most IDT professionals agree, designing learning environments or leveraging communities is becoming more important). For adopting social network for education or development, you should have clear purposes and plans (especially for how to co-evolve the space with and by users), and also, if considered at the organization level, strong leadership is a must. Think about two different organizations, one bans using Facebook during work/school, and the other encouraging Facebook for social learning. Regardless of your opinion or preference, our students and learners use these tools very actively, so you must know what they are and what benefits and pitfalls they have to guide proper use.
- Myths and Opportunities: Technology in the Classroom an Alan November video (13 minutes) - The concept of a student, learner, and contributor
- Educause’s 7 Things You Should Know About Personal Learning Environments
- Educause’s 7 Things You Should Know About Facebook
- Educause’s 7 Things You Should Know About Facebook II
- I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You by Clive Thompson, NYTimes
- Comparing Social Networking to Online Communities by Lee and Sachi Lever
- Spectacle at Web2.0 Expo… from my perspective by Danah Boyd
- Facebook (can sign in with yahoo account)
- Wiggio
- Ning
- Google Plus
- Of course, if IDT majors, Adobe Communities
Further Resources - These are for those who want to explore further...
- Social Networks for Educators (looking for sharing as members of educational network(s) worldwide? This is it!)
- Sharing: The Moral Imperative by Dean Shareski (26 minute video)
- My Personal Learning Network in Action by Karl Fisch
- Questioning the Future of the Open Student by Vicki Davis
- Kiva.org - Microloans for less fortunate
- TakingItGlobal.org - connects you to social issues that affect us all
- Mashable - latest news and trends on social media
You can comment on any of the following:
- Which social or personal network did you focus for what purpose (e.g., personal development, informal learning, civic engagement, etc.)? What is your thought about social or personal network? If you are asked to design one, or facilitate/promote participation, how will you do it? Do you think a school or workplace must actively use tools introduced in this week? Why or why not? If you are the designer or teacher, what should you consider in adoption or implementation?
28 comments:
Naturally Facebook is my favorite tool out of all of the tools. I can only assume this will be the choice of most of the other people in this class. I use it to keep in contact with people and find out about upcoming events. I really have not used any of the other tools and the only one that I have really heard anything about is LinkedIn. LinkedIn would be the only one that I would consider adopting. At this time though Facebook is plenty for me. trying to keep up with that at times can be quite tedious as is. LinkedIn I would use as more of a personal tool to keep up with my professional side of life. I do not really think it is necessary for schools of workplaces need to adopt or use Facebook. I believe enough time is spent on it as is by most. LinkedIn I believe could be adopted by workplaces on the other-hand.
Honestly, although I appreciate the networking services tools offer, I'm not a huge fan of facebook. The only reason I use facebook is to keep in touch with friends from high school (all of whom have some aversion to simply calling one another). I work in an office on campus, and I'm already seeing the ill-effects services such as facebook have on people who use them the most. Since communication between teenagers occurs primarily through text and among peers, phone etiquette has fallen to the wayside. Even in an increasingly web-based work environment, phone skills are still vital in the workplace and continue to be a strong mode of communication. I'm not sure facebook should be a tool integrated in a school or work environment. Ultimately, I've found facebook to serve a distraction more than anything. However, teaching students to use facebook responsibly in the classroom may have some benefits. But in classrooms where students number over twenty, teachers might not be able to ascertain which students are acting responsibly and which are not. It's just not a good situation. As for the workplace, there are many other tools available to promote collaboration and professional networking, such as LinkedIn.
I personally do not have a favorite tool for the ones we went over this week in class. Although most college students have a Facebook, I am on of the few that can say they no longer have it. I personally felt that Facebook was a great tool for keeping in touch with friends. Facebook began to become a priority before my academics and this definitely affected my grades. Since deleting it I feel that I have so much more free time than I did when I had it. Even though Facebook is not necessarily for me, there still is a tool that I am seriously considering becoming a part of. That tool is LinkedIn, which is similar to Facebook except is used for professional development. I can see this becoming very helpful when your information can be looked up by different companies and the people of groups that you know can also be utilized as resources. This is definitely a tool that I can see myself using in the near future.
Overall I use facebook because that is what my contact have chosen. I do not like facebook but I have a difficult time keeping track of my friends and family. They are scattered throughout the world. Facebook allows me to manage these connections well. However it has gone down hill greatly. It used to be only people with college accounts could use it. Which was a good thing, now I see grandparents and little siblings. It has become less about maintaining connections and more about sharing everything about yourself with everyone. To much of it is useless information no one cares about any more. A friend of mine does not have an equivalent to western online so her teacher uses facebook instead. It seems to work well. I can see how facebook can be useful in school and in the workforce. However it also can consume people they become to involved and wrapped up in it. Facebook has made drama abundant. One gets out of facebook what they put in. Overall it is a useful tool that should be re limited to what it once was all about.
I think that schools should use these tools because they provide a good social setting for the virtual classroom. Classes can use Facebook, or any other social website for that matter, to be used to talk to students in the class by chat or create a group for students to join. This would be a good way for students to keep connected to other classmates, even after they move to a new school or graduate. Instructors can use social websites to post announcements, remind students of class assignments, and even add events by connecting with students by using social websites.
One of the major problems I see with using social websites is that the instructors cannot control these sites and students have the freedom to add whatever information, or who ever they meet to their pages. Security is a big problem and it is hard for an instructor to protect their students. Parents have a hard time tracking down what their children post on the site as is. Schools that implement Facebook or any other social network tool may need to have the students sign a wavier before using it in the classroom to protect the school.
Another problem I can foresee would be Facebook being a distraction from the course objectives and lessons. Some students would be distracted by what is going on in their social life and chatting. It would make it hard for the student to pay any attention to the course lecture if the instructor were actively using the social networks along with the lectures. The social network games on Facebook would also distract the student and it would be hard to get the student to follow along.
I believe all the tools here are extremely great for learning wise. These tools here have their own special thing, that attracts people to use them. To me personally, I would stick to Facebook, because I can keep in contact with my close friends from different schools. I personally agree with Micheal on here, that Facebook can be a distraction because you want to see what's going on with your friends and it does affect your grade. That's why I use Facebook to a certain extent, because if I don't know something or I want to find out something, I would make a post asking my friends about it and have them comment on it.
When I started this week's project on Facebook I wasn't sure how much information I would find in favor of using the site for educational purposes. It turns out that quite a few educators favor integrating the tool into their classrooms and several universities have researched social media as an educational tool. I'm still not sure how I feel about using Facebook in the classroom, it still seems like there is a great possibility for wasting time and the privacy issue remains a concern. I really didn't have a favorite tool this week. I use Facebook, but it doesn't take up as much of my time as it does for others. I have some friends that have moved around the country and some that will be moving and I like being able to keep in touch. Facebook allows you to do that very easily. I understand how someone could burn a lot of time on the site, but like anything else that takes up your time you just have to be responsible. Similar to Google there are concerns about private information and how Facebook uses it, but again its up to the user to protect them self. As the people who use sites like Facebook are starting from ever-younger ages it might be a good idea to begin educating children specifically about how to safely use the internet in grade school, before they accidentally compromise their or their parents information.
Great posts everyone, glad to see that you see pros and cons, and what should be done (policy, communication, collaboration, etc.), and focusing on goals and outcomes before tools. Great points about the importance of educating or guiding people on proper use and the importance of an organization or leadership making this clear - what they want to accomplish and won't accept with buy-ins.
I will be focusing on LinkedIn because I've heard about it. I also made a promise to my brother that I will not be succumbing to social media, because we are kind of like hipsters. To be honest I am not a real fan of social network because from what I’ve observed from other people who use it; it seems like a waste of time. Most people my age don’t really use for business purposes more for gossip and such. I’ve had experience using MySpace in the space in retrospect I honestly wasted my time when I could just pick up the phone. I cannot see myself designing anything involved with social network because I do not consider myself a social person, so I would not be the correct person to try to design one. I think it would be best to find some way to implement social network with school and workplace. Since it is a popular mechanic at this period, Workplaces can use it to advertise their products to other parts of the world. Hollywood also use FaceBook to promote their movies. Having Sweepstakes and fan pages, fans get to interact socially by using word of mouth (Text-to-text) to promote movies. Schools implementing social networking would be beneficial but hard to do. Since most students already have a short attention span they might go of course if a teacher tried to use FaceBook or something. It can be done though as we can see from the video Mr. Yoon showed.
I focused on Wiggio this week. I think it's a great, useful tool to use in the classroom. One of the greatest tool I see is using "polls." Polls are essentially just questions that students can answer. A lot of times, when the teacher asks the class a question, no one answers. This is true even if it's a yes or no question. With polls, students don't have to speak up in class if they don't want to. Instead, polls give them an option to still participate. All of the other tools, such as calendar for due dates, mass messaging, and to-do lists are also very useful in a school setting. I think this is a actually great tool teachers can actually use.
I focused on Wiggio this week. I think this program would be very useful if you are working in a group. In the future if I have to do a big group project I will recommend to use Wiggio. I think people in the workplace would use it. It would be great for meetings so everyone is on the same page of what’s going on or even where a meeting is held. Wiggio seems like it would be more effective then trying to send out a mass email to everyone. Teachers could use this to do group projects and keep track of due dates. I think it would be a very useful tool.
I focused on LinkedIn and i used it for information learning and business. I believe social media is a very helpful tool but it can be used in the wrong ways that can destroy a persons life. if i was to design one i would design a social media page that you find healthy information and how to do proper excrises and also meet people who work out at there gyms so they can find a workout buddy. I believe both the school and work place should use social media to see what people are looking at. i would take in to account that everyone uses social media and that we need to be able to allow people to me make mistakes and recover from what they did.
In this week, I focused on a new tool called Wiggio. Wiggio is absolutely an easy way to collaborate with a group. the way they’re put together make them very easy to work with.
I discovered that Wiggio contains useful features any group needs to plan projects, organize events, or to even run a online business. The platform includes tools for group text messaging, a Wiggio group calendar and to-do list, an online poll taker, a space for uploading and sharing documents, and the ability to hold virtual video and audio conferences and chatrooms.
I kind of focused on combining what people had already gathered about Facebook.
Social networks are fine, really, as long as you don’t allow them to control your life. If they take up too much of your time, there could be a problem, but they are useful. They are not actually needed for school situations, though, nor are they needed for workplaces, and you cannot, or should not, force people to join such pages. You can encourage it, in which case you could make information easily available on the page. People may be more apt to join if it made information easier to come by as well as if it allowed them to talk with others and contribute to what is going on.
Really, if you plan to implement this kind of thing in a class, you have to keep in mind that you really should not force people to join a group on a social network in order to participate or to succeed. It needs to be optional.
Three people picked Wiggio. Very helpful and easy to use features for teachers (Haley), group work (Chelsea and Hasinah) were captured well. Two picked LinkedIn (Eric and Omoruyi). I love what you said Eric – providing and managing proper uses and encouraging trials and errors, absolutely essential. Your post on going deeper to address design is excellent too! Jake’s posting is good and interesting as well. Not just to him, but to everyone, just to play a devil’s advocate, what if leadership and you believe, use of social media/network is most important part of changing digital literacy? Or what if it is the exploding area your target customer is purchasing and using your products and service, thus you are considering mandating its use, but are afraid of possible resistance for good reasons like Jake posted?
The social/personal network I focused on this week was Ning, and I used it for informal learning purposes. My thought on social/personal networks is that they can be compared to that of double edged swords. On one side, they are powerful tools that are able to spread valuable knowledge to a wide variety of people quickly. However, that other side acts in a similar manner, but it instead spreads useless/hurtful information. The internet is full of interesting, need to know information, but it’s also filled with false information as well, and social/personal networks capture both types of information and displays it for the public to view. I believe the ability to successfully determine useful information from trash comes from many trial and error runs, and although it would be nice if social/personal networks did a better job of filtering, it is ultimately up to the end user to know what to click and what not to click. It is something that is not going away, because its communication and network abilities are far too valuable to our generation in today’s society. If I am asked to design one, I would make it similar to that of Facebook. Facebook is so popular today because of how well users are able to interact with its interface, and find exactly what they’re looking for. The most popular news, gossip, etc. is right on the side panel under “#Trending”, and just clicking that links you to a variety of sources and peoples’ varying opinions. I’d simply have learners participate by utilizing that sort of tool to find valuable information on a particular topic that they can use in a class discussion. I believe that a lot of school districts/universities and workplaces already utilize such tools. If you search Facebook for any type of thing you can think of, then you can usually find a page about it. Facebook pages best serve different environments due to how easy it is to reach out to workers/students with the most important news, such as: events, due dates, meetings, etc. The only thing I would consider when adopting/implementing social/personal networks, is how I would use them. I would only use them to communicate and build networks, because, as I stated, it is in fact a double edged sword.
This week the group I am a part of chose Adobe Communities. I really like this as a social network. Through the Adobe page there is access to each individual programs forum. I feel this is a great resource, in particular, I really like the photoshop forum, being a Graphic Design minor I found this forum quite useful and active. I have witnessed questions answered in as little as 4 minutes, that is just today. So depending on the question or the particular problem you can type your question, or submit a screenshot to try to provide as much information as possible to the other forum members. Both of these features allow you to not only solve your own problem, but provide a resource for others to access who may have the exact same problem.
The social network the group focused on this week was adobe community. Adobe community provides the most accurate and high quality resources to answer questions. its also a great place to share and discuss knowledge and expertise with others designers or developers and give feedback or suggest improvements to existing content as well. Social /personal network are places that people can share their knowledge and thoughts , and they might affect the people who might be seeing it and the way they think about it . I think school should use personal/social network actively because it allows students to interact and learn a few ideas from one another that add to their self-knowledge.
The site that we decided to focus on was Ning. I think that social and personal networks are good for sharing information and opinions with others and communicating about different topics. They can be used for both academic and personal use which is both a good and bad thing. I think they can be good to get a group together to study but should not be an essential part of teaching/learning.
My group choose Google+ to focus on. This is basically Googles take on Facebook. I feel that social networks have good and bad qualities. The good qualities are many but to name the most evident on is ease of access to connect to people from anywhere around the world and accomplish this quickly. One of the down sides is the “garage” that is put on the sites. If I were asked to facilitate a social networking site, I would make sure that the information is relevant to the topic we are discussing. I think it could be useful to incorporate these things into the workplace or a school, but it might take a long time to set things up an account that can be used in an educational way. You should consider the appropriateness of the social site and how to keep it on task for what you need.
This week our group looked at the Google+ social network. While this network has a lot of users, I get the feeling that many people use this more as a collaborative work tool than as a way to keep up on friends and family. Google + allows users to incorporate the other parts of the Google suite, like Google Docs and Google Drive, as they communicate with contacts. It's an effective tool for getting work done while communicating through the internet.
I think that what we think of as a social network gets dominated by Facebook, though, because people use it so much more frequently than any other network. A lot of other networks feel less like communities and more like tools you use when you need them. I don't use Google + unless I really need it for working remotely with people or to back up a document quickly. And while I know some people who used Indeed during job searches, they only looked at it and updated it until they had a job. Then, they might check it again when they're tired of that job. In between they'd just forget about it.
I think that's a hurdle that people have to get over if social networks are going to see more use as a learning tool. Because I think of cat pictures and all the empty information that gets put up on Facebook, when some one says "social network" and "education" in the same sentence, it doesn't sound like a good idea. I think that maybe that attitude could be changed by a network someone uses as often as they use as Facebook.
This week our group focused in Adobe Communities, as a social network I liked because you can build your community profile by showing your social network links and what you are interested in. Also you can follow friends or leaders in your community to keep updated on their activities. I think that a school/workplace should use this tool because it allows students/employees to interact with each other by sharing their ideas or questions that they might have.
This week our group worked on Google+. I personally found this tool interesting and I think I will use it in and outside of class. It reminded me of a couple different tools such as Facebook and Twitter as the news feed lets you view what you are most interested in and stay connected with people. I think Google+ could be very beneficial in an educational standpoint but that is still a little down the road as it is still an up and coming tool. If it were used more in education, teachers and educators could use it effectively in many ways such as keeping track of students work and setting up online lectures. I found this tool fun to work with and look forward to learning more about it.
My group worked on Ning this week. In my opinion on social and personal networks is that they have a lot of untapped potential. They can be used either effectively, or negatively. It really depends on how much experience the teacher has with them and how they're going to utilize them as well as the student learner.
The tool we focused on this week was Google+. What I like most about this tool is that there are several different ways to connect with people, whether it be by hangouts or communities or simply following someone. You can share a lot of different content, such as photos, videos, links, text, events, and polls. One way google+ could be used for education is with Communities. Communities allows you to choose whether it is public or private. By setting a private community you could connect with the entire class and share ideas and information. By making it private, only the people you allow to join can post or comment on posts. If you wanted to expand your audience and get opinions from other individuals outside of the class, you could make it public and allow others to learn from the community.
My group focus on Google Plus social network. Google has many ways for people to network such as hangouts. Hangouts lets you video chat easily with any person in your google plus circles. It could be useful for corporations that have sites spread out. I think that social networks are need to an extent. We are social creatures and need to communicate with others and social networks let you connect with people that have your same interests. I believe that schools or workplaces should use social networking programs. It can help them communicate with employees or classmates/students. Updates on projects and upcoming events can be posted online for the people that could not make it to the place of work or school can read it and still be in the loop.
Great points about quality, relevance, and Speed about communities like Adobe's user community (Asmaa, Lucia, and Kenny).
Social network sites can indeed be a double-edged sword (Courtney and Melissa). For academic use, I will seek strong support from top leadership and colleagues including creating policy and protocols. Its untapped potentials is an interesting and very powerful fact (Jordan).
Having a dedicated person for monitoring appropriate use and relevance is also a key (Kathryn).
Google plus, compared to Facebook, seems to be used more for collaboration and dedicated sharing (Jim), with potentials and challenges of picking up user bases (Garrett). Its rich features that include doc sharing, conferencing, and more control over privacy and user management are important part of digital literacy and core skills expected of the future (Joe and Sabrina).
Great analysis and take away everyone!
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