Should you use Social Networking Tools?

In looking at my thesis research I wanted to really look at Social Networking and what were the quantifiable benefits of the tool. I was given the opportunity to work with a distance education class, which I think is perfect for the SNS community building we want to see, but I had to look a bit deeper. What in essence is the point of education? Of taking classes? What are the outcomes that we try so desperately to quantify with projects and tests? And could I look at that without examining projects and tests :)

I felt that discussion boards were the key to not only online learning, but also this creation of community. That without discussions and interactions, you may as well be a correspondence course. The more I read, the more I came to value how important peer-to-peer interactions were, and how SNS can support these so well. I felt that interviews and surveys could give me a good idea of how students felt about using a SNS, but I really wanted to look at their discussion data and see what story it told.

So I came across the work of Gunawardena, Lowe, & Anderson, (1997), (see list of references) which looks at phases of knowledge construction (IAM) in a discussion board forum. So much of what I found was, "I agree" or "You are so right," and if I looked at that as an "interaction it would count, but it really wasn't substantial. It didn't mean anything. With the IAM coding scheme I was able to really see when discussions were fruitful and meaningful. Now the initial drawback to this is that there wasn't a large difference between SNS and traditional courses, except once.


You see Week 8 was an anomaly, but not just because of the phase variation, but also because it was the ONLY discussion started by a student. Authentic discourse occurred, because students bought into the issue. Then I realized what they key to using a SNS is - it is student-centered and they can have control over their learning.

As instructors we can't teach the same way with new tools. In order to take advantage of SNS usefulness, we need to shift our thinking about what a discussion board is and what it should be. We also have to shift our students expectations of what a discussion board is and how it can be used in a online class.

Just because you use a technology doesn't mean you are utilizing it.

My first SITE Conference

Last week I attended my first all "research conference" SITE in Charleston, SC. Now one of my favorite things to do is present - its one of the things I'm actually good at, but I was SOOOO nervous about SITE. See, I live this weird world of limbo at my university. I work with professors all day long, but I am not "one of them." I'm support staff, and I'm perfectly happy with that designation. However, I'm also in graduate school (trying to officially qualify for my job - don't worry I was hired mid-way through my grad program and promised to stay in school so it "counts") and that makes things like this a bit weird and scary and therefore makes me nervous.

This was the first time I have presented on my research and as I'm working on my thesis - I just find so many holes (committee, please disregard that sentence for my defense on Monday). I was worried everyone would see my big gaping flaws and shoot me down in front of everyone.

Luckily, my session was sparsely attended (I was in that other building that no one could ever find), but those there were very nice and provided some great feedback. I got a chance to do a few bits of networking with others interested in my topic and felt like I was really headed in the right direction with my ideas and research. In fact, someone had done a very similar study with students in Facebook vs. mine in Ning and we reached the same conclusion.

If I pass on Monday - I'll write more about that :) But in the meantime, here is my PP. It doesn't make too much sense without my voice over - hope to add that soon.

The Walled Garden approach to Social Networking with Ning

View more presentations from bethanyvsmith.

Facebook: The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly

I've been "against" Facebook for awhile now. Some of this is due to privacy issues, as illustrated at http://www.albumoftheday.com/facebook/, some is due to this issues our pre-service teachers have had with how public they are on Facebook, and it has a bit to do with the fact my brother (who was just starting university) said I should try it and I told him it looked, well, useless (and I can't allow my brother to be correct now can I ;). However, my research is on Social Networking and I do quite a bit of it outside of Facebook, so why not take the plunge! The original idea was to keep Facebook my "personal" space and keep using this blog and my twitter as my "professional" space. But as we all well know, world's collide and I have just as many "professional" friends on facebook as ever. But I believe I will still try and keep my world's a bit seperate. I'm pretty sure my friends from high school don't want to know the latest on PLNs :) But so far, my thoughts on Facebook can be summarized as:

The Good
The interface is nice and clean. It's easy to find friends and groups. A good deal of the Social Networking System (SNS) research notes that most users connect to people they already know. In fact one of the first SNSs was classmates.com - so I'm not surprised to see alumni groups so popular in Facebook. It was great to connect with old school mates and distant family members. The photo sharing capabilities are top notch - with tagging people the most useful (and potentially harmful see The Ugly).

The Bad
It has been difficult to determine whom to friend and whom not to friend. How much do I share with my professional life of my private. There are also some very chain letterish things such as "gifting" to others, etc. The good news is that with a host of FB privacy settings, you can keep your info almost completely private.

The Ugly
There are still some things you can't control. If someone tags you in a picture and their FB page is public - so is that photo of you. If you don't want that picture up there, they have to take it down. I also have issues with the advertising. Now some of the side advertising is pretty harmless, but I have issues with the advertising that is made to look as though it is apart of the group page. There were sevral times I clicked on somethig thinking it was FB related, when it went to a completely different site. I can accept that they need advertising to run, but don't try to trick me into it.

All in all I have to say that my FB expereince has been overwhelmingly positive. I've enjoyed connecting with old friends, and am glad to have a place that is similar to twitter, but for the more personal side of me :)

Creating a Ning - What I have learned so far

Technorati Tags: ning socialnetwork

I created a Ning for the College of Education at NC State about 6 months ago. We officially unveiled it at the begining of the semester, and so far have over 150 members. I've run into some "stumbling blocks" that I'd like to share with others that are interested in starting a Ning themselves.

1) Public vs. Private
This has been a big issue with us, should our Ning be open or not? In the end (and after getting feedback from the faculty), we decided to leave the main Ning open, to allow users to dictate the transparency of their pages (private, only friends, etc.). Then groups can be closed as need be. This has allowed us to have poublic and private areas of the site - and so far is working quite well

2) Private Groups
The biggest issue with Private Groups is managing membership. For example, if you want to invite someone to join a group this is the process:
-They recieve invitation
-They join Ning
-They then have to request invitation to private group
-Group admin has to approve (even if you sent them the original invite)
-Then they have to confirm the invitation before they are added
This has added several days in the group process and in between the last two steps they seem to virtaully disappear from the management tabs.

3)Photos
Right now I've decided to manually confirm each photograph. This is a tricky area for me, normally we would request everyone submit a Photo Release form, but since these are all "Adults" posting photos themselves (not me posting them) it gets a bit well murky.

4)Group Page
I have issues with the design of the group page and I can't appear to change it without changing the apperance on the main page - this is annoying to me and others that want to customize their group pages.

5) Changing Text
You can actually change the Welcome Messages, etc. in Ning in the LANGUAGE TAB. This made no sense to me at first and took me awhile to figure out.

6)Premium Services
They are worth it. If you are dealing with kids, you can get the ads removed for free, but in our case we didn't qualify. But I don't have a problem paying $19.95/month to get them taken off. I wish I had actually gotten the custom URL in the beginning (its a bit late now I think) but otherwise the premium services are a good way to get "credibility" for a non-educational service like Ning. (When I say non-educational I mean that they are not JUST education - they have tons of sites associated with Ning - some not appropriate)

7) Purpose
Be upfront about the purpose of the Ning. In my case, this is not a replacement of a CMS. This is a supplementary area for classes and groups within the college. Ideally it is for those that share interests, but don't know each other, to be able to meet virtually. I think this becomes even more important with our influx of Distance Ed courses.

8)Keep tabs on your Ning
The best way for me to do this is through the latest activity RSS feed. This way I'm not getting a billion e-mails, but I still feel like there is a level of oversight for the website. One of the things people (and when I say people I mean faculty) have concerns about is the ability for anyone to put anything on the site. Keeping on top of the site (which by the way has had no issues so far - cross your fingers).

I've used Steve Hargadon as my guide through the world of Ning, and went to one of his sessions at NECC, but it really took getting into it before I understood what I wanted and what it could do.

Creepy Treehouse vs. Walled Garden

Technorati Tags: ning elgg socialnetwork

One of the great things about the ed tech industry is their ability to coin phrases. I had never heard of these before until I went to NECC, and although they look on the surface to be completely unrelated, they are intimately acquainted.

The "Creepy Treehouse effect" which has been discussed in-depth by Chris Lott and Jared Stein is used to describe what happens when teachers join student social areas - such as Facebook or MySpace. Based on the information session I had with our college students last semester it was obvious how much they did not want us (and I define us as any authority figures) in their space. What they are they most afraid of is the "cyber-stalking" that they expect from their peers, but repel from their parents.

Most of us have experienced this "Creepy Treehouse Effect," maybe not as a student, but as someone with a presence on the Internet. The first time someone you don't know walks up to you and asks if you are feeling better because they read your Twit about it earlier that week - you will freak out just a bit.

So how do we use the power of Social Networks without the creepiness? We create a "walled garden," a place that utilizes the tools of a social network, but in a more controled environment. There are a few tool out there to do this, but Ning & ELGG are by far the most popular. Ning is the choice of most communities, mostly because it is free - while ELGG is a server based open source system. I've written about Ning & ELGG a bit, and IMHO ELGG just wasn't at the place I needed it to be - it just had its 1.0 release. So we went with Ning & so far the results have been fantastic. The students appear to appreciate having a social network that is seperate from their personal life - while the instructors are learning more about how their students interact.

So far so good....

Moodle and Social Networking

Technorati Tags: moodle moodlemoot conference sanfrancisco socialnetworking
Since the focus of my research lately has been Social Networking - I was intrigued to see a presentation on how Moodle & Social Networking could be brought together. Now I believe Social Networking is bigger than just one tool (i.e. Facebook) and I align it more with the PLN (Personal Learning network - see great post by Jeff Utech) way of thinking and I was happy to see that this session took that same viewpoint.

One of things I worry about is "throwing" too many tools at my faculty. It takes so long for them to overcome some of the hurdles of tool acquisition, that I would rather use an existing tool to do some things. However, forcing a tool to do something it is not intended to do does not always work out.

So Stuart Mealor (whom as I mentioned previously was my favorite speaker from the conference) decided to use Moodle as an aggregator of sorts (reminds me a bit of something like pageflakes or iGoogle to a certain degree). He uses a Moodle Course to "house" all of his social networking or PLN info. Since I am constantly looking for a way to encourage our students to create a web presence for themselves (and not necessarily only through html coding) I really like this idea - but how did he do it?

• He created a new role for students as a very restricted teacher and called this "owner" (I like this idea, because in the past (like with the Student Portfolio Project) I have created another instance of Moodle and stripped out some of the tools to acomplish this)
• Each student gets their own course to use as a homepage

The following blocks or add-ins are used:

• Shared bookmarks add-in (like del.icio.us)
• Polls
• Multi-movie
• Quick Mail
• iFrames (displays a site inside of Moodle - just an html trick)
• Flash
  
• Lightbox Gallery
• Explode (2.0 update - feed aggregation library)
  

Here is his example course - you will need to view it with Guest Access http://www.elearning.org.nz/course/view.php?id=19

Why am I fighting for Social Networking?

Technorati Tags: moodle socialnetwork education ning

For the past 6 months, or possibly more, I have been fighting and advocating for a Social Network. We looked at all the avenues - open source, internally hosted, externally hosted, etc. etc. We tried them every which way - yet none were perfect. Yet I keep advocating for them. Finally someone asked me - Why? Why do we want to spend effort on this? What does this do that Moodle can't do?

So I had to take a step back. Was I doing this - just to do it? Was I seduced by the "latest and greatest" in technology? I mean The Office even made a jab at having a "social network" for paper buying!

So I looked at our current situation and what a Social Network could add. Currently we use primarily BlackBoard Vista and have a Moodle Server. All of the BB Vista courses are actual courses. They are all locked down by classroom participant and discussions are instructor driven. One of the issues I have always had with online classes is the lack of personal connectedness between classmates. I miss the after class discussions on the wall outside of class. BB Vista & Moodle are so "course" oriented" it is hard to "force" them to be something else - possible, but hard.

So what can a Social Network add or change? I think the main thing is that it is user centered - not course centered. You are a Student who belongs to several different groups, rather than having a Course you happen to be a student in.

The goal of this is to stimulate discussion and sharing OUTSIDE of the classroom. If we are truly going to create an online environment as close to a face-to-face class then we are missing out on the "water cooler" conversations. I think that is what a social network can add over a discussion baord or file sharing in Moodle.

I am even willing to bet my thesis on it - can you say topic change!

Open Forum on Social Networking

Technorati Tags: ning socialnetworking

A few weeks back I hosted an Open Forum on Social Networking for the College of Ed. My group has been running around to try and find a social networking tool that could compete with FaceBook - yet be separate. I wanted to get a good idea of where our students and faculty were as well as where they wanted the College to be. This is what I found out:

1) Students use Facebook to communicate with friends back home (OK - knew that) However, most of them also used it to connect as seniors with other future NC State students.
2) Students don't want us in Facebook. They like that Facebook is a place for them. In fact most of them plan on getting rid of their facebook page when they graduate and will be teaching themselves.
3) Faculty (mostly) don't "get" Facebook, but they do get that their students are using it.
4) Faculty don't want an official representation in Facebook, especially in light of advertising endorsements, etc.
4) We have faculty members in NINGS!!!! Yea!!!

So what does this mean? Well, it gives me hope that I can create a network where students, future students, past students, faculty, etc., etc., etc. can meet and it might actually get some legs.

So here is the CED Ning site....a work in progress... but aren't all social networks :)
http://cedncsu.ning.com/

Which tool fits the job?

Technorati Tags: elgg eportfolio moodle warlick socialnetworking web2.0 website professionaldevelopment

I've been investigating e-portfolios and Social Networks and CMS and and and and.........

There seems to be a never ending pool of tools, free and expensive that are all geared towards what I am trying to accomplish - facilitating teaching. I have been lost in the sea of, "Do we use one tool?" "Do we try to integrate separate tools?" "Do we try to take what we already have and force it to work?" "Do we try to go where our students are already located?"

Luckily, I am not alone in this frustration and these blogs have helped me along the way. Jeff Utecht's post on his tech plan summarizes how and why we are looking for different products to support one another. The irony is that at a large university like I am we have sometime more constraints on this process, because certain aspects of this plan are already available to our students. Duplicating resources is not only confusing - it is against policy. Jeff discusses 2 major components of what I am looking at - a Social Network & a CMS. We have had a CMS on campus for almost a decade, but I'm interested in leveraging a CMS (specifically a Moodle) for other purposes.

Then, last Fall David Warlick came to speak at a MEGA event and spoke about Social Networks - right when my brain was churning with them. I had been heavily looking into ELGG, Drupal, & Mahara as answers to my social networking debate. I have been coming back to the notion - "Do we got to where our students are?" or "Do we ask them to come to us?" I still haven't found an answer to that, and to complicate matters our campus has restricted the use of any offsite teaching portal for FERPA & ADA reasons. All of the products I mentioned above are open source and can be installed on a server. Yet Ning comes into my life and I fall in love with its ease of use. So now I'm trying to get a local install of Ning and see how I can get that to work on a virtual server.

Then I get trapped in the world of e-portfolios. How do you define an eportfolio? Is it summative or formative? Who needs the data? What is the purpose behind an e-portfolio? We used Taskstream in the past, which allowed for both user created portfolios that illustrate their best work, as well as a formative portfolio that serves as an example for an accrediting body, such as NCATE & NCDPI. But with Taskstream gone, we are creating our own a accreditation portfolio system (to track "signature" artifacts"). Yet, where does this leave our "Student Teaching Portfolio" - an example of our students best work? We go back to web page based portfolio, and discover that our students know NOTHING about webpage design or FTP, etc. (Which is an issue all in itself that I am coming to terms with technology as an elective). This becomes a bear and a burden and even with the best intentions is not working out well.

So I look for a solution - is it a Social Network? Is it Google Pages? or is it a CMS? Possibly a Moodle?

But in the end - the crux of the issue is "What do we need?" and "What is this technology trying to help with?" and eventually "Can this scale up well?" I have come to these conclusions....

Moodle can work for us in three ways
1) It can illustrate to our students how to teach with a CMS
2) It can allow non-university students to join in (All of our Backboard Vista classes are driven by Registration & Records - this does not help with Professional Development needs)
3) What about using Moodle for our portfolios

This last bullet I have been pondering for awhile. It would allow our students to keep their accounts longer that the University dictates, it would be on our severs, and it is Browser driven (no html or ftp confusion). But How......

Low & behold I come across what Georgetown is doing http://www.georgetownprofessor.net/gportfolio/

Now if I can just convince everyone that I may have actually found a tool to fit our needs, we might be in business.

Building Professional Learning Communities

Back in November I had answered a call from EdWeek about Professional Learning Communities and any questions I would like to pose in a chat. So I sent one in and I just found out that my question had been asked in the chat!

Question from Bethany Smith, Asst. Director of Learning Tech, NC State University College of Education: Have you investigated using any social network technologies (such as ELGG or ning) to facilitate a learning community?

Anne Jolly: You, know, Bethany, I'm actually doing something along that line now! I'm working with the Center for Teaching Quality and technology guru Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach to establish Virtual Learning Communities in a number of schools. I'm learning a lot about social networking, and it's the most exciting thing I've done in awhile. I constantly look forward to it. Right now I haven't jumped into ning, but if you're doing so, I hope you'll share your work far and wide!

Anne Jolly (according to her bio) is a former middle school science teacher and Alabama's Teacher of the Year in 1994, is the author of A Facilitator's Guide to Professional Learning Teams. She is currently the project director for professional learning teams at the SERVE Center at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

I actually had a meeting with the Director of CTQ last semester about this very idea.

Tres cool....

The Economist Debate

I just recently came across The Economist Debates about Education, thanks to Ewan McIntosh's blog - he is a "formal debater" for one of the articles. I am a big fan of The Economist and am impressed with this venture into combining online polls, fact-finding, and blogging in a familiar term of "Debate."

One of the previously debated questions catches my eye,

The house REJECTED the proposition that "The continuing introduction of new technologies and new media adds little to the quality of most education."

Proposition: 46%
Opposition: 54%

First and foremost the "Harvard Model Congress (Class of '94, '95) Member" in me - gets all excited about the debate format. But Secondly, I am impressed with the way the question is phrased. They do not question technology itself, but new technology. The use of technology for its own sake is ill advised, but the concept of new technology being automatically bad disturbs me. I would also be concerned about the term of new technology in education. What is New to me may be Old to someone else. Considering the budgetary cycle of education, implementing new technology is not as "lightening fast" as it may be made out to be. Overall, I am pleased that the proposition was opposed, but it is still by a close margin.

Point of Personal Privilege (I used to love yelling out that one!)

The Current Proposition is: Social Networking: does it bring positive change to education?

Ewan McIntosh heads the Proposition and I agree with him in that Social Networking is not just MySpace, it is not Facebook - it is the online network we create for ourselves. The concept of Personal Learning Networks is growing, and how you may not realize you have a social network - but the blogs you check, the IMs you send and the e-mails you recieve all create a social network and connection of friends that you may have never met in real life.

The concept that Social Networking is bringing a positive Change strikes me as odd. Social Networking exists and is being brought into education by our students. Are cell phones negative in the classroom? Some would say Yes. Are laptops negative? Is the Internet? The answer to these questions all depends on the context and the way it is used in the classroom. Social Networks, in whatever form they take - are only positive when facilitated correctly.

I am looking forward to the debate....

David Warlick @ MEGA

Davis is discussing current internet usage based on data from the PEW foundation.

PEW - Internet & American LifeResearch on how Americans are using the internet.
Parent & Teen Use in PEW

How do adults "social network?" vs. the way students social network via. MySpace & Facebook

Educators are using Tinkertoys - little tools to help us do our job.

As "adults" (or non-myspacers) we are putting together several tools to facilitate our learning. I embody this idea in my use of Blogger, Twitter, del.icio.us, Google Reader, etc. But I struggle with the idea of 1) Presenting all these tools to my teachers and 2)Should we be using Facebook - since that is where our students live - or will a separate social network work (like a nin). I also worry that throwing too many options - and not scaffolding correctly will bring everything down to the ground.

I really, REALLY want to get a College of Ed Social network of the ground, but how do you get people to come? MySpace in particular has the most horrid webdesign usage- it breaks every usability rule - yet people love it, because of the people. Can we design a great interface and get people to use it? I don't know...

Side Note:

David did mention a new book - that I think I need to read.
Small Things loosely Joined - book on Web 2.0

Internet Safety Paradigm Shift

via Educational Technology & Life

Multi-faceted Refractions
" If people were to Google you, what conclusions would they make?

From observing your on-line communication, what kind of person would they believe you are? What type of thinker are you? What skills do they think that you have?

From looking at your digital self, would people think that you are full of creativity or are you a copy-cat, mimicking the works of others without any new original thought?

What do you do if your work is being misappropriated? What if you discover that there are images of you on other’s sites which are unflattering or potentially damaging?"

This reminds me of being in a workshop with David Warlick about copyright and the Internet. We discussed the concept of ownership and how if students felt they owned their work, they would not want someone to take ownership from them. How sometimes it is perspective changing that makes all the difference.

This gives me a great idea for a new way to discuss Internet Safety. Now how safe will it be to demo this and google myself in front of everyone :)

Social Networking

Wesley Fryer has an interesting post about Myspace and virtually meeting your college room mate. It amazes me how much personal information people are willing to post about themselves on the web. As Fryer writes,

"EVERYONE needs to be monitoring the pulse of their web-based personna.

What do websites “out there” on the Internet say about you, your children, your students, and people you/they know? Sometimes surprises can be good, but in many cases, if we can avoid a surprise through some proactive conversations and explorations, that can be a good thing!"

I can still remember being afraid to drink and be seen by student's parents in town at a restaurant. I can't imagine posting that image of me on a website!