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It’s time to wrap up this discussion on the question of ‘How does social media educate?’ I would like to thank everyone who contributed to it, even by lurking! As the moderator, the one responsible for reading everything and trying to engage all opinions, I am thankful because I probably benefited the most from these exchanges. At the same time, I want to apologize if I somehow failed to fulfill my duties responsibly.

Below I offer a summary of some of the main themes I took away from the discussion.

What is social about social media?

The conversation started by questioning the term ’social media’ itself, and wondering what the word ’social’ is supposed to be telling us if all media is, by definition, already a social construct. Perhaps the redundancy is a good reminder that the assumptions behind the word ’social’ are precisely what we should be dissecting. As Latour says in his book Reassembling the social, those who treat the social as a black box “have simply confused what they should explain with the explanation. They begin with society or other social aggregates, whereas one should end with them” (p. 8). In other words, one should not take the word ’social’ as something no longer in need of explanation. When looking at various instances of the application of sociable web media in education, we need to take these social aggregates as points of departure, as what needs to be explained in the first place.

The goal, then, is to trace the interactions of humans and technologies as they go about redefining the social, inventing new forms of sociality. Just as the concept of ‘virtual reality’ (with its own set of assumptions, contradictions and delusions) helped us to question what was real, ’social media’ should help us question what is social, how the social is being put together in the world of education.

The politics of networked participation

Interpreting the meaning of new social assemblages is not a neutral exercise that can be accomplished by means of scientific inquiry exclusively. We rely on ideologies and metanarratives to explain the impact of new media on society. Throughout this discussion, there was much debate about which framework is best suited to explain new social assemblages. There was even some arguing over which assemblages (corporate, independent, etc.) are more worthy of analysis!

One side seems to espouse a Lyotard-influenced framework that sees the increasing role that digital media play in our societies as solidifying the spread of a capitalist culture that commodifies *knowledge* by transforming it into *information* that can be easily exchanged and consumed. To us, the educational applications of sociable web media should not be analyzed without considering the ethical implications of capitalism and a market economy. This is not to say that the architectures of participation that social media engenders cannot present an authentic challenge to the dynamics of the market, even right in the middle of corporate-controlled platforms. But to fail to acknowledge the context from which these technologies emerge can only result in incomplete analyses.

Learning 2.0 – Opportunities and challenges

Depending on how it is applied, social media can be a site for a liberatory or an oppressive education. As educators and learners, we need to be aware of our own practices, simultaneously teaching and learning ‘with’ and ‘against’ social media. Simply embracing new technologies or taking for granted the pedagogical assumptions behind the new ‘Youniversity’ is not enough. The fact is that we live in a world where education is not a ‘good’ distributed equitably or always for the benefit of the learner, and some applications of social media will continue this trend. Increasingly, the ‘public’ education system is being used to separate the unproductive members of society (the ones that need to be ‘managed’ by the growing private incarceration business) from the productive ones (the ones who demonstrate compliance and aptitude for jobs in the service industry). The kinds of social media applications the latter are more likely to see will probably be in alignment with the needs of a control society:

“In disciplinary societies you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in control societies you never finish anything… school is replaced by continuing education and exams by continuous assessment. It’s the surest way of turning education into a business.” (Deleuze (1995), Negotiations, p. 179)

This definitely puts a sinister spin on ‘life-long’ learning. The ‘constant student’ is not one who engages in an ongoing perfection of the self, but one who is constantly assessed according to the performance standards of a service economy. Social media can be used to ensure that education for the constant student becomes something that can be delivered anytime and anywhere, and which –more importantly– can be used to monitor performance throughout the ‘learning’ life of the individual.

Daily Kos: They Hate us for Our Freedom (the Assessment Movement in Higher Ed)

Social media literacy

For a long time, educational technologists have put their faith in technology as a way to change education, and even the world. Access to the technology is seen as the magical solution that will end disparity:

Web 2.0 can benefit the world’s poor – SciDev.Net

Unfortunately, for the reasons discussed above and during this whole month, access is not enough, and narratives of bridging the ‘digital divide’ do not help us better understand how digital technologies such as sociable web media contribute to the commodification of education.

The work of a new generation of educators and learners shows us that social media can be used to promote positive change in the world. This work demonstrates that the issue is not universal access, but rather the strategies through which those who benefit from access to social media are able to transform those benefits into benefits for the greater society, extending the value of social media beyond the privileged minorities that have access to it.

And so I end by recapitulating some of the skills I mentioned earlier in the discussion that I think we need to develop as part of a critical literacy of social media:

• The ability to articulate the difference between open (FLOSS) and proprietary social media platforms (including how to tell when the former mutates into the latter, and what to do about it).
• The ability to determine when it’s appropriate to use open (FLOSS) or proprietary social media platforms to promote social change with maximum effect.
• The ability to understand the social agency of code of a particular technology, i.e., how the program promotes, constricts or redefines social functions through its affordances.
• The ability to identify the benefits of contributing to a social media environment that operates as a gift economy versus a market economy (including the ability to identify social media environments that operate as both simultaneously).
• The ability to articulate in personal terms how networked participation is changing the relationship with one’s local environment, and be able to calculate tradeoffs and assume responsibility for one’s choices.

I hope you can help us continue to refine these, within or outside of the iDC forum.

-Ulises

The September 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine (contents not online, unfortunately) has a piece titled Grand Theft Education: Literacy in the Age of Video Games. It is a conversation between Jane Avrich (author and English teacher), Steven Johnson (author of Everything Bad is Good for You), Raph Koster (video-game designer, including Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies), Thomas De Zengotlta (author, teacher) and moderator Bill Wasik (senior editor of Harper’s).

The participants were asked to discuss how video games could be used to teach literacy. The guys (Jane is allowed to interject here and there) immediately get to the task, envisioning various kinds of possible games for this purpose, including a zombie game where you have to type a word correctly in order to off a Z. But the conversation does include more interesting nuggets. For instance, the group wonders about the changing definition of literacy, and what current technologies are doing to our literacy practices:

KOSTER: …To me, there’s a question hanging over our conversation, which is: What kind of writing do we hope to teach? We might like to teach kids to write like Proust, but no one writes like Proust anymore. Appropriation and annotation are becoming our new forms of literacy. Think of blogs, for example: most blog posts are reblogs, they’re parasitic on things other people have written. It’s a democratized writing, a democratized literacy. (p.39)

Not sure I see the connection between democracy and literacy as appropriation. If anything, it reminds me of certain critiques of technology (such as Rivers’) which argue that our current technosocial systems stamp out individuality and are responsible for the erasure of the individual by the mass. One could argue that appropriation and annotation are the natural forms of a mass literacy, operationalized through the extreme individualism of the blogosphere (masses are not collectives as much as they are homogenous collections of isolated individuals). That resulting kind of democracy, therefore, is one which blocks authentic difference and makes the masses more susceptible to control. And speaking of control, the Harper’s group briefly touches upon the issue of authority:

WASIK: But you’re suggesting that increasingly it’s the social network itself, through reputation systems or what have you, that is acting as the authority?

JOHNSON: This is especially true in the online network games, too, which are really the most influential games in the world right now. Raph, actually, helped to create some of the biggest ones. With Ultima Online and other online games, we’ve had the rise of guild structures, these distributed systems for collaborating. A player who wants to slay a particular dragon will need to get twelve people together, and put one in charge of this, another in charge of at. (p. 37)

The kind of authority described here, however, is very simplistic. It is more interesting to explore the question of how in social media (and networked games) the masses are not susceptible to a central form of authority, but to a distributed form of control emanating from the mass itself, from what are considered to be ‘objective’ rules and values. It’s rationalism all over again, with logical thinking as the only valid method for interpreting the world. At one point, the Harper’s group confronts this problem:

ZENGOTITA: … But when the players go out into the real world, I think there’s a real danger—and I see signs of this in my students, and young people in general—of failing to understand not just the complexity of the real world but also its mystery. I’m using “mystery” as opposed to “problem” on purpose: problems have solutions, mysteries don’t. People are profoundly mysterious entities, I think, and understanding them in the real world involves understanding that you’re never going to entirely understand them.

…

KOSTER: To bring solely a gamist perspective to the world is a really big mistake. But of course this perspective predates video games. It harkens back to behaviorist psychology, and a variety of unsavory political movements as well.

ZENGOTITA: It’s systems-based thinking, model-based thinking. I can’t claim that Donald Rumsfeld or Robert McNamara were products of video-game education. But they show all the symptoms of it. (p. 35)

Zengotita sets up a dichotomy between problems that have solutions and mysteries that don’t, and points out how the gamist perspective inculcates problem-solving skills but not the skills required to live with the ambiguity of complex ‘mysteries.’ The thing with rationalism is that it inverts the problem-solution relation in such a way that only problems that have solutions it can handle are made relevant. Problems, in other words, are subordinated to solutions. This makes, ultimately, for a very impoverished relationship with reality. As DeLanda (2004) warns: “The crucial task is to avoid the subordination of problems to solutions brought about by the search for simple linear behaviour” (2004, p. 171).

Interestingly, while this threat was identified early in the Harper’s piece, the participants quickly move on to describe more ways in which games can teach literacy. It is as if we are required to surrender our agency in a technocracy, and while we can make observations, we are beyond questioning the progress of technology. So what if video-games produce more Rummi’s?

(Disclaimer: I own a Gameboy)

I’d love to hear from the literacy and gaming people what they think about the Harper’s piece or my reading of it.

References:

De Landa, M. (2002). Intensive science and virtual philosophy. London; New York: Continuum.

Creative Commons photo credit: gregoryperez

Another reader, pedagogic (apprentice), referred me to an earlier (pre-blogs, or at least before the time when blogs were mainstream) article that corroborates some of the things I suggested were broken, and that social software could help fix (if the will was there). The article is Education Should Consider Alternative Formats for the Dissertation (Duke and Beck, 1999).

These authors begin by establishing what we expect the dissertation to be:

…the prevailing view of the dissertation has alternated between that of the dissertation as a “training instrument” and that of the dissertation as an “original and significant contribution to knowledge” (Berelson, 1960, p. 173). Presently, the consensus seems to be that the dissertation should be both of these things. (Duke & Beck, 1999, p. 31)

One could add another goal, fostering scholarly communication, to that list. It is in relation to this goal that Duke and Beck identify two major shortcomings of the dissertation: limited audience and dissemination, and lack of generalizability.

They begin by pointing out (as I did in relation to the lit review), that the audience for a dissertation is extremely small:

Theoretically, the dissertation is a public document, usually available from a University library to anyone who requests it. But in fact, the readership of this “public” document is small in number and intimate in character. In most cases, the only readers of a dissertation are the three or four members of the writer’s committee… Even if technological advances in the future facilitate more rapid retrieval of dissertations, there is no guarantee that the documents will have a significantly larger audience… In order for dissertation material to be received by a wider audience, it must be reworked and altered from its original dissertation form. (Duke & Beck, 1999, p. 32)

They also point out the failure of many dissertations to result in published work:

Indeed, many dissertations in our field, as in others, are never published, in the sense of being distributed widely in a public forum. We do not have current statistics as to the number for which this is the case, but as of 1973 from one quarter to one half of dissertations across fields never resulted in a published paper. (ibid)

As I suggested in my earlier post, blogs (and other social software) could foster scholarly communication by facilitating the dissemination of dissertation materials.

The second obstacles relates to the lack of generalizability of the dissertation writing process: “except for the very rare case of someone who has multiple doctorates, one writes (at most) one dissertation in one’s life. (Duke & Beck, 1999, p. 32, emphasis in original)”

Why not, Duke and Beck suggest, write something in a manner or format similar to how the scholar will conduct her research in the future?

With an ungeneralizable genre comes a missed opportunity for transfer of knowledge and skills that will actually be of benefit to students in the long a term. Indeed, for some time, many scholars (particularly those in the sciences) have argued that the dissertation provides poor training for future academic writing. (Duke & Beck, 1999, p. 33)

To the extent that research will increasingly happen within an open/distributed framework, and be distributed online, I think it makes sense to recognize blogging as a potential environment for writing and sharing a dissertation.

Duke and Beck ask those who would evaluate the format and content of a dissertation to consider two questions:

• Will the format of this dissertation make it possible to disseminate the work to a wide audience?
• Will writing a dissertation in this format help prepare candidates for the type of writing they will be expected to do throughout their career? (Duke & Beck, 1999, p. 33).

Accordingly, one possible alternative for the traditional dissertation is the one that Krathwohl (1994) suggests:

write the dissertation as an article (or series or set of such articles) ready for publication, [using] appendices for any additional information the committee may desire for pedagogical and examination purposes” (p. 31).

Are we that far from blogging when considering such approaches? Couldn’t blogging serve as the preparation process for generating those articles that will (hopefully) be accepted for publication, that final step of vetting and validation?

But scholarly blogging has the potential to be more than just a publishing process. Like Latour suggests, “textual accounts are the social scientist’s laboratory” (2005, p. 127). My blog is my lab, in a sense, where developing my arguments is an iterative and open process. Yes, it’s embarrassing when some experiments (some arguments) fail miserably, but overall I think the benefits of conducting research in the open outweigh the risks.

I would like to think that this discussion of blogging and dissertations is merely one of form v. content, but somehow in the back of my head I can’t help but hear Lyotard’s questions: “who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what is to be decided?” (1984, p. 9).

David ends his comments by posing a set of questions to me, which I turn would like to pose to you:

• What additional design features would a blog have to incorporate for it
  to become truly scholarly communication?
• How can you design it to
  encourage selectivity of sources and warranting of selections?
• How can
  you encourage blog authors to move beyond providing mere summaries of
  the literature they discuss?
• How do you design to encourage critical
  synthesis?
• How you design to encourage robust, critical discussion of
  scholarly and practical significance? Or are these even things that you
  can design? Or are they beyond your control?

I’m sure some of you out there have interesting ideas about this. Please share them with us!

References:

Boote, D. N. & Beile, P. (2005) Scholars Before Researchers: On the
Centrality of the Dissertation Literature Review in Research
Preparation. Educational Researcher 34(6), p. 3-15.

Duke, N. K. & Beck, S. W. (1999). Education Should Consider Alternative Formats for the Dissertation. Educational Researcher, v. 28, no.3 (Apr., 1999), p. 31-36.

Krathwohl, D. (1994). A slice of advice. Educational Researcher, 23(1), pp. 29-32, 42.

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Lyotard, J. F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Tags:

literature.review
dissertation
blogs
technology
education

First, a quick search for materials on evaluating wikis in educational
settings produced only two substantive resources:

• Wiki Pedagogy, Dossiers technopédagogiques
• Wiki Brainstorming and Problems with Wiki Based Collaboration (I’m having some problems retrieving the PDF linked to in this page)

Do you know of any
others?

What I really want to do is to put together an instrument that learners
can respond to quickly and that will generate some useful data on how
the wiki was used in the classroom (without concern for the subject
matter of the class).

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

GENERAL

• wiki type (use Wiki Tipster taxonomy)
• number and type of users

QUANTITATIVE

• Volume:
  1. how many pages were created?
  2. how many edits were made?
  3. how was the creation of pages and edits distributed throughout the semester (number of new pages and edits created per week)?
• Page Activity:
  1. which pages were edited the most?
  2. which pages were edited the least?
  3. what was the average number of times a page was edited?
• Collaboration Index:
  1. what was the average number of users that edited a page?
  2. which pages were edited by the most/least number of users?
• Participation Index:
  • how
    many edits and new pages are attributable to n segment of
    the class?
• Additional questions (Likert-scale questions):
  1. I have used wikis before.
  2. I feel I was an active contributor to the wiki.
  3. I feel that all members of the class contributed to the wiki proportionately.

QUALITATIVE:

• what pages or sections of the wiki did you find most valuable? why?
• what pages or sections of the wiki did you find least valuable? why?
• what obstacles did you encounter during your participation in this wiki? were those obstacles overcome?
• do you feel the wiki contributed to the learning experience? how so?

Sample data

The above would allow us to tell a story along these lines:

“The wiki in question can be classified as a Group – Terminal – Organize/Classify wiki. There were 30 users (25 students, 2 faculty and 3 TAs). In total, there were 67 pages created and 1,763 edits made (see attached chart for breakdown of page creation and edits by week). The most edited page was FinalAssignment . The least edited page was Pizza. Pages in this wiki were edited an average of 3.2 times. Each page was edited by an average of 0.86 users. The page edited by the most number of users was Pasta, edited by 15 users. The page edited by the least number of users was Pizza, edited by 2 users. Ten percent (10%) of the class was responsible for 60% of the edits
and 40% of the new pages. Only 5% of users said they had used wikis before. Eighty percent (80%) of users feel they were active contributors, but only 20% feel the class contributed to the wiki proportionately.” [a summary of the qualitative data could then follow]

Certainly, this would not be the whole story behind the use of a wiki, but it would provide a snapshot of the experience–specially when comparing different wikis across different courses. In other words, the purpose of the survey is to serve as the launching pad for more detailed research.

Here are my questions:

• what other questions would you ask? (keeping in mind that we want the least number of questions but the most valuable data)
• how easy or hard would it be to mine the quantitative data from the wiki’s logs?
• has anybody else done similar things that I can look at?

Thanks.

UPDATE

This is what I’ve found in terms of tools to mine data in MediaWiki:

Other Resources

• Wikipedia User Edit Counter
• AKA’s wikipedia tools: look at RCHistStat (displays statistical overview of the recent changes in the selected Wikipedia)
• List of Wikipedians by number of edits : includes Python script
• Interiot/Tool

(many of the above can be found in Wikimedia’s Toolserver)

• MediaWiki special pages: see Statistics page, Newpages, Popularpages
• Wikimedia statistics
• Wikimedia wikistats

Also, see Jonah’s comment below.

This post discusses some of the lessons learned during a graduate course I taught at Teachers College, Columbia University. Social Software Affordances was offered during the Fall of 2005, and 13 graduate students from the Communication, Computing and Technology in Education (CCTE) program at TC enrolled in the course. The main goal of the course was for students to acquire proficiency in the use of blogs, wikis, RSS feeds and distributed classification systems while engaging in a critical analysis of the affordances of social software (what the software makes possible and what it impedes). The class also asked students to apply their newly acquired social software skills and knowledge to promote a social cause or project of their choosing. The dynamics and outcomes of the course are discussed below.

Important Links

• Course Blog: includes links to all individual student blogs
• Syllabus for the course: specifies readings, schedule, course environments, etc.
• Design Patterns of Social Computing Wiki: one of the final projects that the class authored collaboratively
• del.icio.us ccte feed: students shared research by tagging links in del.icio.us with the keyword ‘ccte’ (for Communication, Computing and Technology in Education, the name of the academic program at Teachers College)

Structure of the course

The syllabus identifies the following three objectives for the course:

1. The class will develop competency in the use of blogs, wikis, distributed classification systems, and RSS feeds.
2. The class will perform a state-of-the-art review of social software tools, applications, and theory, focusing on a critical assessment of the affordances of social software.
3. Class members will conduct an individual exercise on the potential of social software to effect change at a personal and social level.

The class functioned as a distributed research community. There were some classroom sessions, but most of the work happened online. Students were responsible for collecting information about social software, sharing it with their peers, organizing it, and analyzing it individually and collectively:

• A distributed classification system was used to aggregate and organize information.
• RSS feeds were used to share that information with everyone in the class.
• Individual blogs (each with its own RSS feed) were used to analyze and comment on the research and readings.
• The class as a whole edited a wiki project that was collectively defined. [I believe that a similar structure could be applied to a course on any subject matter, by the way.]

Together, the class addressed questions such as: What is ’social’ about social software? How is the notion of community being redefined by social software? How is social agency shared between humans and code in social software? What are the social repercussions of unequal access to social software? Additionally, each student undertook a project which tackled the question of whether social software can be an effective tool for individual and social change.

Although all the class activities and tools functioned in conjunction, in the interest of organization I will discuss each one separately.

Distributed Research: The Power of Many

The distributed classification system referred to above consisted of using del.icio.us to bookmark items related to social software with the tag ‘ccte.’ The resulting (and ongoing) collection can be seen at http://del.icio.us/tag/ccte/ (add this RSS link to your aggregator to subscribe to the feed). All students were expected to contribute items throughout the semester. Students were also expected to subscribe to the RSS feed generated by del.icio.us as a way to keep track of all contributions. Class members then explored the items they were interested in and discussed them in their individual blogs, often in the context of the books assigned as course readings (listed in the syllabus).

One student remarked on the significant impact that distributed classification and aggregation had on his daily online activities:

During the course of the semester, I have come to realize that aggregators have changed my social interaction with computers a great deal… I am pleased to report that I am spending much more time constructing information by writing emails and making web pages than I have been in the past. This is largely due to the fact that I spend much less time surfing for information. (link)

But beyond the benefits of better information management, the real purpose of this exercise was to turn students into contributors, not mere recipients, of knowledge about social software. Each student became a researcher who could add something to our study of the topic (while at the same time build their own collection of resources tagged according to their individual classification schemes). Of course this required that I, as the instructor, be willing to give up the role of being the sole source of information. But in fact this was beneficial for me as well, as I became exposed to more research, resources and ideas than I could identify on my own. My interest and knowledge of the topic, in other words, was augmented by the contributions of my students.

Blogging: Finding an Individual Voice

Contributing to a pool of resources was one thing, but a detailed examination of social software required a more individualized space for reflection, which is why everyone in the class was asked to maintain a blog throughout the course (only two students in the class already had blogs). Of course, this activity was also intended to expose students to issues of identity, voice, posting frequency, community formation, etc. that accompany the use of blogs. In his individual self-evaluation at the end of the course, one student summarized the experience of being introduced to this new form of communication:

For the first time, I really delved into the world of blogging, examining blogs of many types, reading ‘blogs of note’ and award winners. I really enjoyed the convoluted paths wound from one blog to the next by clicking on blog rolls. Eventually I started to get a feeling for how things worked. I explored the possibilities for add-ons for my blog. I added Sitemeter to measure traffic, included syndicated feeds from del.icio.us and feed digest, and customized the templates from each to match the look of my site… I started to get anonymous hits and comments on my blog. Even though there were not many, it was very exciting. I began to see the addictive nature of blogging, and the excitement of participating in a large, distributed conversation.

The blog also served as a journal of each student’s engagement with the readings. Instead of a fixed reading schedule, I experimented with letting students read and report on readings in the order that interested or made sense to them. My hope was that by reading a review of a book or chapter posted by one of their peers, students would be motivated to read that section as well (if it matched with their individual research interests at the moment). The motivation would be different than in the case of me telling students what to read, when. This strategy worked fairly well, although based on student feedback, I might supplement it with a ‘map’ of readings and topics to let students better determine what they should read if they are interested in a particular topic. I might also create wiki spaces in which to collect reviews and comments of the different readings, to provide a sense of synchronicity and continuity.

As far as other suggestions for improvements in the area of blogs, Alex Halavais suggested that students should tag their blog posts as well. I think this would help students recognize the connection between their own blog posts and emerging folksonomies, and I hope to implement this strategy in the next offering of the course.

Wikis: Synthesis and Collaboration

While individual reflection was encouraged through blogging, I thought it was also important for students to synthesize their knowledge in a wiki project that they could author collectively. After some debate, students agreed to start a wiki to collect social software design patterns. Jonah Bossewitch, a student in the course, proposed that our efforts be combined with those of the Annenberg Center’s Social Software in the Academy Workshop. The resulting Design Patterns of Social Computing Wiki attempts to capture the essence of various problems in social software and illustrate best practices and good designs that have been employed to tackle them. We consider this a work in progress, and hope that other interested parties become involved in this ongoing project, which could be a useful resource for the research community.

Issue Entrepreneurship: Putting the ’social’ in social software

I wanted the course to be more than just a review of social software and a theoretical discussion of its affordances. In my own work (c.f. Mejias, 2005, A Nomad’s Guide to Learning and Social Software), I argue that the true potential of social software lies in helping us figure out how to integrate our online and offline social experiences. Thus, social software must live up to its name by relating to the individual’s everyday social practices, and inculcate a desire to connect to the world as a whole, not just the parts that exist online. Furthermore, in order for software to be truly ’social,’ it must help develop in the minority who has access to the technology a responsibility for converting its benefits into benefits for a larger part of society.

With this goal in mind, the class was asked to address the question of whether social software can be an effective tool for individual and social change. Each learner undertook an ‘issue entrepreneurship’ assignment (c.f. Agre, 2004, The Practical Republic), which involved identifying a social cause the student was interested in and using social software tools to attempt to make a meaningful contribution to the cause at three different levels: the personal, the local, and the global. Learners used their individual blogs to post updates on their progress, inviting comments from their peers. This was by far the most difficult project of the course, but perhaps in the long term the most rewarding as well. Students were informed that they would not be graded on whether they succeeded or failed in making a meaningful contribution to their cause, as long as they documented their experience and could discuss how social software contributed to their success or failure.

Projects ranged widely in nature and scope. Here’s a brief summary (I’ve included links only to the projects that are further along in terms of progress; more information can be found on each student’s blog, listed in the Course Blog):

• An information clearinghouse and online community for science educators in the developing world
• An initiative to promote podcasting as an educational technology at Teachers College
• An online community space for the Youth Venture Media Network (link)
• A proposal for an online network of exchange student alumni to promote global citizenship among teens and college-aged students
• A group blog and information feed for raising awareness about bilingual education in New York City (link)
• A wiki/knowledgebase for West Siders for Responsible Development, Inc., a group protesting plans to build two towering buildings on Broadway between 99th and 100th streets (link)
• A proposal for a community wiki for people interested in Israel and various aspects of Jewish life
• A blog and a wiki to promote awareness of accessibility and assistive technology issues at Seton Hall University (link)
• A proposal for a Distributed Community Bookshelf system to encourage the sharing of knowledge and resources in a community-minded and environmentally-friendly way (link)

The goal of the project was to get students to think about using social software to promote social change. It was expected that students would find major obstacles in the way, as meaningful social change is hard work. In fact, many projects failed in their first iteration, and students had to re-conceptualize their proposals. I tried to make these frustrations part of the learning experience, as well as the realization that there is only so much that the technology can do (part of our discussion of the affordances of social software). As the following testimonials attest, students consider their projects far from over, but at the same time they are willing to continue to work on them after the semester is over because it is something they feel passionate about (to paraphrase the rhetorical question posed by one student: ‘Why do we need a class to get us involved in this type of activism?’):

I am proud of my efforts thus far to introduce West Siders to the potential benefits of social software. At the same time, the process of change has been slower and more frustrating than I anticipated. If a primary goal of this project was to learn firsthand how hard it is to build networks and foster change using social software, that goal was certainly achieved. (link)

Another student remarked:

Even though it’s the end of the semester, I feel it’s just the beginning of my issue entrepreneurship project. It makes sense (to me), though that only after putting some time and thought into studying how social software works, that I would be ready to use it effectively to pursue my issue. (link)

One student had this to say about the process of re-conceptualizing his proposal:

So I started my ambitious (albeit empty) Science Demystified Wiki and sent out e-mail notices to persons I felt [would be willing to] join the forum. I was however quickly humbled after receiving a few responses, most of which were surprisingly discouraging. However, after reading some literature – especially Barabasi’s book: Linked – and being enlightened on how sustainable networks are created and maintained, I realized why creating such a forum from scratch was going to be virtually an impossible task. The best option for me then was to join an already established network, participate actively and meaningfully so as to gain credibility, and possibly move towards carving a niche out of that network which will then ultimately grow to become a formidable resource as earlier envisaged. (link)

One advantage of blogging about their projects as they unfolded (as opposed to waiting until the end of the class to present them) was that students recognized that they were not the only ones encountering problems, and they were able to support and critique one another. One idea for improving this project is to include, as part of the readings for the course, a text on managing change (something like The Tipping Point, perhaps).

Conclusions

As the diversity of the work produced and the depth of student’s observations indicates, I think the course was successful in what it set out to achieve: to provide students with hands on experience of social software, to get them to think critically about its affordances, and to allow them to experiment with using it to direct social change. As way of conclusion, I would like to quote from various final observations that students made (some of them are in haiku form, an alternative option I offered students to summarize their thinking):

How is the notion of community being redefined by social software?
With social software
Closeness is not about space
But shared needs and goals (link)

Can social software be an effective tool for individual and social change?
Certainly. Apart from broadening individual perspectives and as such leading to attitudinal and behavioral change, social software is also being extensively used to organize pressure groups whose collective voice often result in societal change. (link)

What aspects of our humanity stand to gain or suffer as a result of our use of and reliance on social software?
It is the construction of ourselves in relation to our new concepts of communities that will be most affected by our reliance on social software. (link)

What are the social repercussions of unequal access to social software?
access isn’t enough,
’cause the curve is steep and linked
Mister Long-Tail Man. (link)

How is social agency shared between humans and code in social software?
Social agency is shared between the individual and the software by splitting the task of establishing and maintaining bonds between individuals. (link)

One student summarized her progress thus:

Today I can call myself a reflective social software user. I’m able to decide which social software tool (or combination of tools) is better in a specific situation based on the pros and cons of each one of them. However, I cannot say that I’m a specialist in this field: only now I understand that I have more questions than answers. (link)

I am looking forward to teaching this course again, after making some improvements based on student’s feedback.

The author wishes to thank the members of SSA05 for making this a great learning experience.

Tags: social.software
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social.change

There has been much talk in recent years about the use of simulations
and gaming in education, both for children and adults. The best
educational simulations and games —we are told— embody ‘active
learning’ (learning by doing, or the formation of knowledge through the
subjective cognitive experiences of the learner as opposed to the
passive consumption of information or facts). They also provide a safe
environment for testing problem-solving techniques without the risks
that we encounter in the ‘real’ world.

Talk about the use of simulations as a method of assessment is more
prevalent in the corporate training world than in K-12 education (see this example from Microsoft), but the application of simulations for testing seems to be an obvious one:

Simulations are expanding the computer-based testing horizon. They’re delivering benefits across the board that are ushering in the next generation of testing. Test-takers benefit from simulations because simulations assess skills, not just knowledge. Further, simulations provide a higher level of test security because the exam is not simply constructed with multiple-choice questions that may be memorized and exposed. (Wenck, 2005: Simulations: The Next Generation of Testing)

I would like to explore some of the implications of using simulations
as a means of assessment. While simulations are often presented as the
antithesis of old methods of evaluation, I would like to warn against
uses of simulations that merely replicate, with some modifications, the
norms of traditional testing. Specifically, I want to examine the way
in which both traditional testing and simulations shape the learning
process by normalizing values and creating expectations of how things
ought to work outside of the learning environment.

Any type of learning or assessment activity conditions in some way our understanding of the world. In other words, tests and simulations predispose us in a particular way towards reality. Testing that asks students to select a ‘best option’ (whether simple multiple choice quizzes or sophisticated computer simulations) can be seen as the last step in confirming that the learner has assimilated the worldviews suggested by the options in the test itself, and that she implicitly accepts the test as the only viable method for evaluating knowledge in that instance (from this perspective, it is inconsequential whether the student fails or passes the test, as long as she is exposed to the kinds of expectations that the test creates). I want to question what role technology plays in this process, specially in regards to simulations. But before doing that, I want to explore the notion that tests come with an attached worldview a bit further.

Testing as indoctrination

Testing normalizes attitudes towards the world. This is perhaps most visible in problem-based learning, where a situation from the ‘real’ world is used to measure skills learned in class. I am suggesting that the function of testing is not only skill evaluation, but the standardization of a worldview embedded in the test, making the situation represented in the problem seem natural. Consider the following example: Mahmood Mamdani (2004) relates how in the 1980’s and 1990’s the University of Nebraska, with a $50 million grant from USAID (a federal agency), developed textbooks for children in Afghanistan. Some of the test questions in thiese textbooks are worth looking at:

A third-grade mathematics textbook asks: “One group of maujahidin [guerrillas backed by the U.S., later to become the Taliban] attack 50 Russians soldiers. In that attack 20 Russians are killed. How many Russians fled?” A fourth-grade textbook ups the ante: “The speed of a Kalashnikov [a machine gun] bullet is 800 meters per second. If a Russian is at a distance of 3200 meters from a mujahid, and that mujahid aims at the Russian’s head, calculate how many seconds it will take for the bullet to strike the Russian in the forehead” (p. 137, my notes in brackets).

This example, I assume, is shocking to most of us because it is such a transparent attempt at indoctrination (although it might be less or more shocking depending on one’s knowledge of U.S. foreign policy). But what about the tests our students take everyday? What kind of indoctrination is going on there? The process might be too transparent for even the test designers to notice, but this does not mean our tests don’t have a worldview to push.

What do tests really measure?

Testing not only normalizes attitudes but, like I said earlier, it requires the implicit acceptance from the learner (and society) that the test is the most reliable method to measure how well knowledge can be applied in that instance. There is only one worse thing than flunking the test, and that is to refuse to take the test at all, as there are often no alternatives to certification. But are tests really an accurate indicator of competency?

There is currently a lot of debate over this point. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act (which, as with many policies of the current administration, does exactly the opposite of what its name suggests) has placed great importance on standardized testing as a way of determining the success rate of students, teachers, and schools. However, what administrators think the tests measure and what they actually measure (referred to as the validity of a test) might be two very different things. Unfortunately for students, this discrepancy is resulting in many of them being precisely ‘left behind.’

The measurement validity of a test is an extremely important concept. Measurement validity simply means whether a test provides useful information for a particular purpose. Said another way: Will the test accurately measure the test taker’s knowledge in the content area being tested? … If tests are going to be used to determine which students will advance and what subjects schools will teach, it is imperative that we understand how best to measure student learning and how the use of high-stakes testing will affect student drop-out rates, graduation rates, course content, levels of student anxiety, and teaching practices. (Appropriate Use of High-Stakes Testing in Our Nation’s Schools)

Of course, measurement validity is something that needs to be assessed for every test. But at the macro level, the issue is not only whether individual tests are valid or invalid, but also how the increasing emphasis on testing (an emerging culture of testing, so to speak) is creating an environment in which testing itself determines what students should learn. As W. James Popham (2001) describes:

Because today’s educators are under such intense pressure to raise their students’ scores on high-stakes tests [tests which determine whether a student advances to the next year, for example], we are witnessing a nationwide diminishment of curricular attention toward any subject that isn’t included on a high-stake test. As many beleaguered educators will comment, “If our job is to raise test scores, why waste time teaching content that’s not even tested?” (p. 19; my notes in brackets)

Enter the Simulation

This situation, which is bad enough as it is, may not be necessarily corrected by the use of simulations for assessment purposes, even while educators may think that by using simulations they are breaking from the shackles of traditional testing. This is because simulations are, after all, a form of testing. Simple simulations provide a limited number of options from which the user must choose. More advanced simulations provide more options, but all simulations —even those in which options are generated through some sort of AI algorithm— have a limited universe of options. Some of those options lead to outcomes that are more favorable than others. The goal of the person going through the simulation is to find which combination of choices, in response to the variables presented by the simulation, lead to the desired outcome.

Furthermore, simulations replicate the less obvious characteristics of traditional tests I have outlined so far:

• Simulations normalize attitudes. Even the most sophisticated simulations limit the number of possible responses, and in thus doing shape a view of the world in which the application of knowledge is limited to those responses.
• Simulations demand implicit acceptance as valid instruments. Whether a simulation meets the requirements of measurement validity or not is a moot point once it is being used as the main or only method of certification.
• Simulations determine curriculum and teaching practices. Instead of teaching to the test, teachers may begin teaching to the simulation.

There is another important aspect to this issue: teachers (most often) don’t design simulations, software companies do. Take, for instance, the following list of evaluation criteria for tests that Popham (2001) prescribes:

• Curricular Congruence. Would a student’s response to this item, along with others, contribute to a valid determination of whether the student has mastered the specific content standard the item is supposed to be measuring?
• Instructional Sensitivity. If a teacher is, with reasonable effectiveness, attempting to promote students’ mastery of the content standard that this item is supposed to measure, is it likely that most of the teacher’s students will be able to answer the item correctly?
• Out-of-School Factors. Is the item essentially free of content that would make a student’s socioeconomic status or inherited academic aptitudes the dominant influence on how the student will respond?
• Bias. Is the item free of content that might offend or unfairly penalize students because of personal characteristics such as race, gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status? (p. 94)

What opportunities might teachers have to make corrections to address these issues in simulations that they themselves have not created, and have no opportunity, copyright or skills to modify?

Rules of Reality: The tester’s mindset

If testing normalizes attitudes, why might this be a bad thing? My argument is that simulations perpetuate the mechanistic, reductionist and linear (cause-effect) thinking that traditional testing institutes. Problem solving (assessed through tests or simulations), requires the kind of mindset that Peter Bentley (2003, The meaning of code [PDF], in Ars Electronica 2003) associates with the skill of writing computer code: “Code is so literal, so unambiguous, that it takes a while to train a mind to think in the same way,” states Bentley, and I would argue that in fact this type of testing is part of the preparation for developing these particular skills:

You become used to breaking down problems into smaller, easier parts. It becomes natural to think in this way, whether working out how to build a robot, or how to climb down from a tree. Good programmers are natural problem-solvers, for this is how we write code. But code can also dehumanise a person. There is no subtlety, no humour, no scope for emotion in code. (Bentley, 2003)

Put simply, testing is a way to ‘leave behind’ those who cannot think like problem-solvers, or at least a particular kind of dehumanized problem solver. Can it really be that those meant to succeed in our educational systems are those that manage to unlearn subtlety, humor and emotion?

Reality Rules: Alternative use of simulations

I am not trying to suggest that there is no room in learning for computer simulations. Instead, I have so far warned against the use of simulations for testing purposes only. Now, I would like to take my argument a step further and suggest how I think simulations should be used in learning.

In essence, I believe that learners should be builders, not consumers of simulations. Students using simulation authoring software (like STELLA) may not be able to produce simulations as sophisticated as those sold by software companies, but the learning that happens in the process might be more meaningful. In fact, the point of having students build their own imperfect simulations is precisely that the simulations should fail. Why? Because simulations are approximations of reality, and in realizing how they fail to capture the complexity of reality, we arrive at a more meaningful understanding of it. Breaking down a problem into parts that can be simulated can indeed be a useful learning activity, but the learning process should not stop there. An assessment of how any collection of variables fails to approximate reality, and a discussion of why and how that is, should be the final and most important part of a simulation or game design activity.

[I would like to insert another comment about the perceived benefits of off-the-shelf simulations. These are often said to provide a 'safe environment' in which the learner can experiment with making decisions without costly consequences. This seems to me to be an expensive waste of time. What we should be teaching students is how to communicate better to create that 'safe environment' in real life. We are all asked to make difficult and important decisions that no amount of simulations can prepare us for. Instead of thinking of ourselves as individual actors making those decisions in isolation (just like we do in simulations), we should prepare individuals for participating in collaborative processes that difuse the danger of individualist decision making.]

Where to go from here? (technology and school change)

Most public schools are currently dealing with the problems of standardized high-stakes testing, and the use of simulations for testing is not yet an imminent threat. Corporate training and higher ed is probably where evaluative simulations are being used the most, but even there the cost of producing them has prevented widespread use. So why am I making such a big fuss?

I see evaluative simulations as a logical next step in the history of educational technology and testing. Part of the reason standardized testing has taken off the way it has is because technology greatly facilitates the administration and grading of tests, and the tabulation and aggregation of scores. An important consequence of this (as I hinted above) is that, as schools are made to do more with less resources, technology has been put at the service of testing, and assessment decisions have been taken out of teacher’s hands. Consequently, as we have seen, curricular decisions are made based on what the test covers. With simulations, decisions about teaching practices could be equally constrained (not just what should be taught, but how). Is it that hard to imagine a future where teachers of failing schools, as determined by the NCLB act, are stripped more and more of teaching responsibilities and become mere monitors of students sitting in front of government-approved simulations (developed by the same companies that now develop standardized tests)? Given the current emphasis on standardized testing, cost-savings and efficiency, I am afraid this is not such an outlandish scenario.

Unfortunately, our fascination with technology may sometimes divert from our efforts to improve learning and change things at schools. To talk about computer simulations and video games in education is trendy. But all the talk of ‘everything bad is good for you’ seems to focus attention on the role of students as consumers, not producers. People in education who want to seem cutting edge feel obliged to make a nod to computer games and the increasing technological savvy of students. Indeed, there is much that is good about the new technologies, but this should not lead us to adopt an uncritical stance when it comes to incorporating technology into the learning process.

In a recent interview, Deneen Frazier Bowen talked about the results of a research project she undertook at Bell South:

Our report showed that although teachers increased their technology skills and technology integration in the curriculum, students saw no changes. For students, using more technology made no difference; the difference they sought was at the design and access levels. Teachers still designed the learning task and only provided access to those technologies with which they were comfortable. Students seek a change in process, not just the automation of a traditional one. (Morrison & Frazier Bowen, 2005, Taking a Journey with Today’s Digital Kids: An Interview with Deneen Frazier Bowen)

Simulations are not going to motivate students if all they do is replace traditional testing. Learning activities that involve building simulations or computer games can be a way to involve students in curricular design, but this type of activity needs to be contextualized by an analysis of how the simulations or games we create fail to approximate the complexity of reality. Only if this is achieved will we be preparing students for a more meaningful engagement with the world.

Offline References (all others hyperlinked within the text):

Mamdani, M. (2004). Good muslim, bad muslim: America, the cold war, and the roots of terror (1st ed.). New York: Pantheon Books.

Popham, W. J. (2001). The truth about testing: An educator’s call to action. Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Further Reading

MIT OpenCourseWare: Computer Games and Simulations for Investigation and Education

Centre for Advanced Learning Technologies: Simulation & Games for Education

See also my del.icio.us bookmarks on games and simulations.

Technorati Tags

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testing
NCLB
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Back from Barcelona, where we had a wonderful time! Currently swamped with work and life, so the summary of the congress is going to have to wait a bit. However, I wanted to share the link to an article I just wrote for Knowledge Tree. The following is from their abstract:

Innovations in educational technology are often seen as
opportunities to transform learning, and social software (blogs, wikis,
social bookmarking, etc.) is no exception. But are the tensions between
pedagogies and social software the result of attempts to make the
latter conform to traditional teaching practices, or are they signs of
real opportunities for rethinking learning processes?

In this article, Ulises explores the role that social software can play in new models of learning and participating in society. While social software can connect learners to new resources and to each other in new ways, he argues that its true potential lies in helping us figure out how to integrate our online and offline social experiences. Thus, social software must live up to its name by relating to the individual’s everyday social practices, which include interacting with people online as well as people without access to these technologies. He concludes that social software can positively impact pedagogy by inculcating a desire to reconnect to the world as a whole, not just the social parts that exist online.

Additionally, there’s also going to be a live panel with me and the other authors of this edition of the journal tomorrow, November 2. Unfortunately, since the main location is in Australia, the time is at midnight US EST. Perhaps a bit too late for most of you (and me!).

Abstract

Innovations in educational technology are often seen as opportunities to transform learning, and social software (blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, etc.) is no exception. But are the tensions between pedagogies and social software the result of attempts to make the latter conform to traditional teaching practices, or are they signs of real opportunities for rethinking learning processes? In this article, I explore the role that social software can play in new models of learning and participating in society. While social software can connect learners to new resources and to each other in new ways, I argue that its true potential lies in helping us figure out how to integrate our online and offline social experiences. Thus, social software must live up to its name by relating to the individual’s everyday social practices, which include interacting with people online as well as people without access to these technologies. I conclude that social software can positively impact pedagogy by inculcating a desire to reconnect to the world as a whole, not just the social parts that exist online.

Introduction

Information technology is often said to be revolutionary… but the actual practice of computing is anything but. Indeed the purpose of computing in actual organizational practices is often to conserve and even to rigidify existing institutional patterns (Agre 2004:para. 22).

In seeking to do things in new ways with a computer, it is useful to clarify how we do them now and how we came to do them that way and not otherwise
(Mahoney 2004:para 53).

Each new wave of technological innovation promises to revolutionize education, as we know it. In the past couple of decades, we’ve heard about the potential of multimedia and e-learning to transform the way we learn. Despite isolated achievements, the success record is on the whole not very encouraging, and there is no reason to assume that the outcome will be any different in the case of the latest craze in educational technology: social software (software that allows people to interact and collaborate online or that aggregates the actions of networked users). The reason for this has little to do with the technologies themselves. It is relatively easy to incorporate new technologies into the learning process if the goal is to merely replicate the traditional ways of doing things without significantly disturbing institutional values. But what is more difficult, and for this very reason perhaps a more worthy exercise, is to introduce new technologies while we step back and question the pedagogical principles that inform our educational models.

It is in this sense that I think an exploration of the tensions between pedagogy and technology should be undertaken: not so much from the traditional perspective of how technology can or cannot support certain pedagogical principles, but rather from the perspective of a re-evaluation of teaching practices in light of the possibilities that new technologies may introduce. In other words, if pedagogy is concerned with the purposeful application of learning strategies, and educational technology is concerned with the creation of new tools and systems for learning, the traditional way of framing the tensions in the convergence of pedagogy and technology has been to see how we can make a new technology ‘fit’ the established pedagogical principles endorsed by our institutions. What is required at the moment, however, is that we examine the tensions created when new technologies question and even subvert traditional pedagogical principles. This is, admittedly, dangerous ground because ultimately it means questioning the goals of our educational institutions, facing the choice of whether to evolve or become obsolete in the process.

But the framing of the tensions between pedagogy and technology cannot be approached exclusively from a pedagogical-technological perspective. These tensions are ultimately tensions within the social, frictions between society’s view of how to form ideal citizens and the values that inform the design and distribution of technologies. These complex tensions include, among other things, issues of access and knowledge diffusion: what factors determine who has access to the technology, and what mechanisms are in place to facilitate or obstruct the diffusion of knowledge from technologized to non-technologized realms of social life.

Because societies are in a constant state of flux, there is no permanent resolution to these tensions. Thus, the present article is a guide not in the sense of contributing step-by-step instructions for applying social software to learning, but in the sense of providing one possible framework for understanding these tensions. The framework is partly influenced by the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995). Although my engagement of his work here is extremely superficial, I do borrow from him the concepts of becoming (in opposition to a static definition of being), nomad thought (as the constant re-orientation of knowledge that facilitates becoming), and the virtual (not as a separate form of reality, but as the Whole behind the actualization of all things). My use of these concepts will become clear in the course of this article.

The latest ‘social turn’

What is really going on is a major shift in the way that we are able to communicate, collaborate and share things with each other using online technologies. The key to this is not the technology itself—there is remarkably little that we can do now that wasn’t possible 5 years ago—but rather the critical mass of connectivity between people that we are finally reaching… The real story is about ease of use, availability, culture change and most importantly network effects… (Bryant 2005:para. 4).

… if you look at the kinds of problems we are trying to solve now … it seems pretty clear that the key issues relate to people and the way they communicate and organize themselves… (Pincus 2005:para. 1).

To some, recent developments on the Internet signify an important social turn, a new concern with the social lives of users (or at least with what software developers think the social lives of users should look like). To others, the Internet has always been a social space, and what we are currently seeing is simply an increased awareness of the possibilities that this entails. In this sense, Internet software has always been ‘social software’ of sorts.

As with all labels, there is some ambiguity and controversy over what kinds of things are supposed to be included under the ‘social software’ label, or how it differs from previous labels such as ‘collaborative software,’ ‘groupware,’ etc. Without necessarily wanting to enter into that debate, I will only say that to me the label has come to define both a particular wave of applications and a historical moment in which these applications have gained mass popularity. After all, in order for a network to function, its number of members needs to reach a critical mass. While the percentage of people in the world with access to the Internet is still relatively small (15%, according to the 2005 Internet World Stats), it is large enough to be said to constitute a critical mass.

While by no means conclusive or definitive, this is a list of the kinds of applications that I associate with social software:

• multiplayer gaming environments: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs), Massively-Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), etc.
• discourse facilitation systems: synchronous: instant messaging (IM), chat; or asynchronous: e-mail, bulletin boards, discussion boards, moderated commenting systems (e.g. Slashdot, Plastic, K5)
• content management systems: blogs, wikis, document management (e.g. Plone), web annotation utilities
• product development systems: especially for Open Source software, e.g. Sourceforge
• peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing systems: e.g. Napster, Gnutella, BitTorrent
• selling/purchasing management systems: e.g. eBay
• learning management systems (LMSs): e.g. Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle
• relationship management systems: e.g. Friendster, Orkut
• syndication systems: list-servs, RSS aggregators
• distributed classification systems: e.g. Flickr, del.icio.us.

Each one of these categories is constantly evolving, introducing new features in existing products or introducing new products altogether. The difference, for instance, between a discourse facilitation system such as a bulletin board and a moderated system like Slashdot is enormous, and the management of social transactions much more sophisticated. The above general classification also does not do justice to the nuances between technologies, as is evident by the fact that things like blogs and wikis are listed under the same category. But the intention is to arrange technologies according to the kind of social function they seek to manage (learning, selling, classifying, defining communities, etc.). In practice, of course, most social software products incorporate functions from more than one category, depending on the needs of a particular audience.

Improvements in social software are usually motivated by one of two things: the challenges of handling larger networks of users in ways that allow the individual to still derive some meaningful social value from the experience or, on the other hand, the challenges of providing more ‘intimate’ or ‘authentic’ (closer to everyday life) social experiences. The former goal requires, as I explore in an upcoming paper, that users relegate more of their social agency to the code. The latter requires that users are given tools for enacting social agency in new ways (ways which simulate or enhance older forms of social agency).

With respect to social software for learning, it is interesting to note that learning management systems have been slow to incorporate many of the improvements made in other types of social software (recall earlier point about institutional resistance to questioning pedagogical principles). However, we should not make the assumption that learning management systems are the only type of social software capable of facilitating learning. Other types of social software are providing more interesting innovations. It is the possibilities for learning that we have glimpsed somewhere in the convergence of these other kinds of social software (e.g. gaming + relationship management; classification + file sharing + discourse management, etc.) that are potentially more pedagogically subversive.

Learning as (endless) becoming

Do the challenges posed by social software to traditional educational models go further than the challenges posed by previous forms of e-learning? I believe that, potentially, they do. Satisfying the supposed requirement for learning anytime and anywhere has meant a prioritization of the individual over the social; it is the individual’s time, goals and interests that are catered to. While this is liberating in many accounts, it sometimes comes as a detriment to the social aspects of learning. The benefits of a socialized learning experience can outweigh the benefits of an individualized learning experience, because it forces the learner to apply knowledge through interaction with the world. What social software can do is to reintroduce the social back into the learning equation, while preserving some of the advantages in personalization that e-learning and flexible learning have introduced.

At a more fundamental level, models of learning based on social software can facilitate the shift from what Brown and Duguid (2000) call learning about to learning to be, or to give a more Deleuzian connotation, to learning as becoming. Learning about implies a passive consumption of knowledge in the form of facts. Learning to be implies the application of knowledge in the development of skills that allows us to fulfill a particular (professional or non-professional) role in society. But to highlight the fact that being is not static, I’m using learning as becoming to signify an ongoing process. Learning, as constant becoming, is the work of nomads, to use another Deleuzian image explained below by Semetsky (2004):

Nomads must continuously readapt themselves to the open-ended world in which even the line of horizon may be affected by the changing conditions of wind, shifting sands or storms so that no single rule of knowing that [learning about] would ever assist nomads in their navigations, perhaps only knowing how [learning to be, or learning as becoming] would (Semetsky 2004:447, italics in original; my additions in brackets).

Semetsky continues by quoting Casey. ‘The local operations of relay must be oriented by the discovery (and often continual rediscovery) of direction (Casey 1997:306)’. Becoming, as this continual rediscovery of direction, takes place in relation to the world and to others. What social software can do is to help us re-situate learning in an open-ended social context, providing opportunities for moving beyond the mere accessing of content (learning about) to the social application of knowledge in a constant process of re-orientation (learning as becoming). Of course, non-technologically enhanced forms of social learning (i.e., the traditional classroom) can, and should, achieve this as well. After all, it is the people who make learning happen, not the technology. But the difference between online and offline social learning lies in the types of networks that social software grants access to; networks which provide social opportunities beyond the local. At the same time, this does not mean that social software ‘virtualizes’ the application of knowledge (makes it somewhat less real) by situating it in cyberspace, beyond the local. In fact, it is the opportunities that social software affords for transferring knowledge between online and offline realms of reality, between the local and the global, that make learning as becoming possible.

The tensions between social software and everyday social practices

Let’s step back and build technology that will make sense in the everyday lives of those who use it, that will empower them to use their evolved brain in a meaningful way (boyd 2004;para. 38).

Eventually, living in a world of continuous computing will be like wearing eyeglasses: the rims are always visible, but the wearer forgets she has them on—even though they’re the only things making the world clear (Roush, 2005:para.36).

We spoke to 6,000 people and found that young males are embracing new technologies much faster than women and the over-45s…(BBC News, 2005:para.7).

These quotes subtly tell the story of the tensions between new technologies (such as social software) and their application. As the first quote suggests, we want these technologies to relate to our everyday practices, to make sense in terms of our daily needs, and easily integrate into our lives. However, as the second quote predicts, it is clear that as these technologies evolve, they will increasingly provide an altered—supposedly ‘enhanced’—view of our social lives, to the extent that discontinuing their use will be like removing a pair of badly needed glasses. The question then arises of the widening gap between the everyday social practices of those with access to social software and those without, the ones who can afford glasses (or are more adept at using them) and the ones who cannot. To speak of access is in many ways to speak of privilege, resource availability and—as the last quote reminds us—of the social biases (in this case, gender and age) that come into play in the development of a technology.

The traditional way to approach the intrinsic disparities in the distribution of technology has been to establish the goal of guaranteeing universal access to technology, so that one day everyone will be able to benefit from it in the same way. I’m generally an optimist, but I believe that this is not going to happen anytime soon, for reasons that are well beyond the scope of this article to examine. Faced with this reality, the challenge is then to frame the problem not in terms of future possibilities, but present responsibilities. In that light, I would like to suggest that the issue is not universal access, but rather the way in which those who benefit from access to the technology are able to transform those benefits into benefits for the greater society, extending the value of social software beyond the privileged social spheres that have access to it.

In other words, it is not necessary to universalize access to social software in order to make its benefits available to society as a whole. It is social software’s potential for fomenting dialogue, forming solidarities, coordinating action, distributing information and increasing understanding that make it an important tool for those invested in social equality. But this doesn’t mean that users of social software constitute some sort of elite group supposed to act on behalf of humanity. Looking at the world through glasses is only one of many ways to perceive the world, and even the blind can contribute new insights into reality. Thus, the challenge for social software users is to contribute to a social cause in a way that enhances and aligns with—not disrupts or fragmentizes—other forms of activism.

Ensuring that the benefits of social software reach all circles of society will require that we focus not on the virtuality of social interactions, but on their reality. For a long time we have lived with the misconception that what we do online is virtual, and that since virtuality is a lesser form of reality (or a higher form, depending on who you ask), the consequences of our actions there have little to do with the ‘real’ world. But by adopting a Deleuzian view of virtuality as a Whole from which everything is actualized, we are able to interpret all phenomena, whether online or offline, as actual rather than virtual (c.f. Horwitz, 2003). This is a process I explore in my ongoing work on the pedagogy of nearness (c.f. Mejias 2004, 2005), a philosophy of learning that seeks to simultaneously reduce the irrelevancy of the Near (the devaluation of our immediate surroundings) and the transcendence of the Far (the view that ‘virtual’ space and time is irreal). In other words, Nearness, in the sense I am using it, does not refer to spatial and temporal distance, but to immanence: the desire for connection and understanding, the nomad’s learning as becoming.

Social software and new pedagogies: An (upcoming) case study

I am interested in exploring how the desire for Nearness can be actualized through social software. Thus, I have put together a course that I am teaching this Fall (2005) on Social Software Affordances (See Useful Links for course syllabus). I will end this article by briefly discussing the structural aspects of the course in relation to some of the issues raised so far.

The goal of the course is to explore, through hands-on experimentation, how various social software tools can be used in conjunction with one another to facilitate learning. The class basically functions as a dynamic research community, iteratively collecting information, sharing it with peers, organizing it, and analyzing it individually and collectively. A distributed classification system is used to collect and organize information, RSS feeds are used to share that information with one another, blogs are used to analyze and comment on research, and the class as a whole edits a wiki that synthesizes all the work. Together, the class is addressing questions such as: What is ’social’ about social software? How is the notion of community being redefined by social software? How is social agency shared between humans and code in social software? What are the social repercussions of unequal access to social software?

Additionally, the class is also tackling the question of whether social software can be an effective tool for individual and social change. Each learner is undertaking an ‘issue entrepreneurship’ assignment (c.f. Agre, 2004) which involves identifying a social cause they are interested in and using social software tools to attempt to make a meaningful contribution to the cause at three different levels: personal, local, and global. Learners use their individual blogs to post updates on their progress, inviting comments from their peers. They are not graded on whether they succeed or fail in making a meaningful contribution, as long as they document their experience and can discuss how social software contributed to their success or failure. My hope is that through this assignment and the rest of the class, we inculcate in each other a responsibility for converting the benefits of social software into benefits for a larger part of society.

I don’t see how we can call it ‘social’ software otherwise.

Useful Links

Social Software Affordances course syllabus

References

Agre, P. E. 2004, ‘The practical republic: Social skills and the progress of citizenship’ in Community in the digital age: Philosophy and practice, eds. A. Feenberg & M. Bakardjieva, pp. 201-223, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD.

Agre, P.E. 2004 Internet Research: For and Against’ in Internet Research Annual Volume 1: Selected Papers from the Association of Internet Researchers Conferences 2000-2002, eds. M. Consalvo, N. Baym, J. Hunsinger, K. Bruhn Jensen, J. Logie, M. Murero & L. Regan Shade, Peter Lang, New York.
Retrieved September 6, 2005 from http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/research.html

BBC News, 2005, ‘Why technology misses the masses’. Retrieved September 6, 2005 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/4208658.stm

boyd, d. 2004, ‘Autistic Social Software’, unedited version of presentation to Supernova Conference. Retrieved September 6, 2005 from http://www.danah.org/papers/Supernova2004.html

Brown, J. S. & Duguid, P. 2000, The social life of information, Harvard Business School Press, Boston.

Bryant L. 2005 ‘Blogs are not the only fruit’ in Headshift. Retrieved 6 September, 2005 from http://www.headshift.com/archives/002270.cfm

Consalvo, M. Baym, N. Hunsinger, J. Bruhn Jensen, K. Logie, J. Murero, M. & Regan Shade, L.(eds.) 2004, Internet Research Annual, Volume 1: Selected Papers from the Association of Internet Researchers Conferences 2000-2002, Peter Lang, New York.

Horwitz, N. 2003, The reality of the virtual: Continental philosophy and the digital age. Unpublished Dissertation, Loyola University, Chicago, Illinois.

Mahoney, M. 2004 ‘The Histories of Computing(s)’ in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews vol. 30, no. 2, 2005, pp. 119-135. Retrieved September 6, 2005 from http://www.princeton.edu/~mike/articles/histories/kingscch.htm

Mejias, U. 2004, ‘Movable distance: Technology, nearness and farness’. Retrieved April 24, 2005 from http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/2005/01/movable_distanc.html

Mejias, U. 2005, ‘Re-approaching nearness: Online communication and its place in praxis’, First Monday, vol. 10, no. 3. Retrieved April 28, 2005 from http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_3/mejias/index.html

Pincus, J. D. 2005, ‘Computer science is really a social science’. Retrieved September 6, 2005 from http://research.microsoft.com/users/jpincus/cs%20SocSci.html

Roush, W. 2005, ‘Social Machines’, reproduced from the print version of Technology Review August 2005 in Continuous Computing. Retrieved September 6, 2005 from http://www.continuousblog.net/2005/07/social_machines.html

Semetsky, I. 2004, ‘The role of intuition in thinking and learning: Deleuze and the pragmatic legacy’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 36, no.4, pp. 433-454.