Getting Social With Learning Content
I was reading another one of the many posts predicting what "The Year Ahead in IT" will be. This one was written by Lev S. Gonick on InsideHigherEd.com
His list, in brief, looks like this:
- Public Cloud Services Go Private
- The President’s Climate Commitment Meets the Campus Data Center
- Big Science meets Next Generation Cyber Infrastructure
- Time to Declare the PC Dead and Embrace the Mobile Platform
- The E-Book Reader Grows up and Goes to Campus
- Social Networking Finds its Niche at College
- Course Management Platform Alternatives Make Major Inroads
- Serious Gaming Gets Serious
- Mobile Security Hits the College Campus
- Open Content meets the Open University and the Vision of the Metaversity
A closer look at #6, "Social Networking Finds its Niche at College," reveals that what Gonick means is that the "next killer app for social networking in support of the traditional curriculum on campus will be student tagged, rated, reused, and remixed learning content." That's very different from saying that teachers will be using Twitter and Facebook in their courses.
If students are truly spending more time on social networks, than they do watching traditional television, talking on the phone, in the campus library or all their classes combined, then we do need to adopt some things from that world.
I don't think that building connections from your online campus to feed into popular social networking platforms is the answer. At PCCC, we have been using LibGuides for the past two years with great success. Users can share their LibGuides on delicious, Facebook, Digg, etc. and add a Facebook widget, but I don't know that any of our students use it. I installed it, tested it out and haven't used it since.
Some of this may be the "creepy treehouse" effect of treading carefully when mixing academics and popular social tools. For every features list that tells you that you can "meet your students where they are," there will be some some students saying Stay Out.
In the search for the Social Media Holy Grail, Gonick feels that the social network effect is strongest with video content that is already in and around the learning environment. There are plenty of players in that area: some have business models (publishers, campus media consortia, platform players), some are our students and faculty innovators repurposing and reusing video content for learning.
His list, in brief, looks like this:
- Public Cloud Services Go Private
- The President’s Climate Commitment Meets the Campus Data Center
- Big Science meets Next Generation Cyber Infrastructure
- Time to Declare the PC Dead and Embrace the Mobile Platform
- The E-Book Reader Grows up and Goes to Campus
- Social Networking Finds its Niche at College
- Course Management Platform Alternatives Make Major Inroads
- Serious Gaming Gets Serious
- Mobile Security Hits the College Campus
- Open Content meets the Open University and the Vision of the Metaversity
A closer look at #6, "Social Networking Finds its Niche at College," reveals that what Gonick means is that the "next killer app for social networking in support of the traditional curriculum on campus will be student tagged, rated, reused, and remixed learning content." That's very different from saying that teachers will be using Twitter and Facebook in their courses.
If students are truly spending more time on social networks, than they do watching traditional television, talking on the phone, in the campus library or all their classes combined, then we do need to adopt some things from that world.
I don't think that building connections from your online campus to feed into popular social networking platforms is the answer. At PCCC, we have been using LibGuides for the past two years with great success. Users can share their LibGuides on delicious, Facebook, Digg, etc. and add a Facebook widget, but I don't know that any of our students use it. I installed it, tested it out and haven't used it since.
Some of this may be the "creepy treehouse" effect of treading carefully when mixing academics and popular social tools. For every features list that tells you that you can "meet your students where they are," there will be some some students saying Stay Out.
In the search for the Social Media Holy Grail, Gonick feels that the social network effect is strongest with video content that is already in and around the learning environment. There are plenty of players in that area: some have business models (publishers, campus media consortia, platform players), some are our students and faculty innovators repurposing and reusing video content for learning.
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