Social Computing

Time-to-Adoption: One Year or Less

The idea of social computing is not new to the Horizon Report; it has been on the horizon and moving closer over the past few years. Already in common use outside of the educational arena, social computing practices are cropping up on campuses with increasing frequency. The promise of social computing has been—and continues to be—more effective knowledge generation, knowledge sharing, collaboration, learning, and collective decision-making. This promise is beginning to be realized in the areas of distributed learning, research, and campus work settings.

Social computing itself is essentially the application of computer technology to facilitate collaboration and working in groups. The strategies and tools used in social computing enable rich, efficient communication at a distance, synchronously or asynchronously, opening up new possibilities for working together. The tools themselves are not the focus; the interactions supported by those tools are what is most interesting. The tools are influencing the trend, however. As social computing tools become increasingly easier to obtain and use, and as more and more people adopt them, social computing interactions are transferring from the world at large into the world of education. Students, already familiar with tools for working together and sharing knowledge and information (think of Flickr, an online community for sharing photographs; instant messenger, for getting quick answers to questions and arranging get-togethers; Skype, for inexpensive voice-over-IP conversations in realtime), are bringing these tools to campus and continuing to integrate them into their pattern of daily life and work.

Relevance for Teaching, Learning & Creative Expression

• allows faculty to engage in on-line discussions about pedagogical or research issues
• facilitates collaborative writing and research among students
• extends the discussion outside of the space and time of the physical classroom
• opens opportunities for creative presentation of research materials or points of debate

Examples

• A Swarthmore faculty posts his syllabus and receives comments and suggestions from peers: http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=87
• Radford University's Technology and Learning Center hosts a technology blog for faculty: https://php.radford.edu/~tlc/wordpress/
• Beth Harris, SUNy Art History Faculty, uses FLickr notes and comments feature to have students analyze paintings http://www.flickr.com/photos/ha112/901654/in/set-129006/
• Two faculty who used IM for office hours assess its success and utility in an online journal: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_11/roper/
• Wikipedia, the online, editable encyclopedia: http://www.wikipedia.org
• ELGG http://elgg.net/
• 43 Things http://www.43things.com/
• Remember the Milk http://www.rememberthemilk.com/

For Further Reading

RSS Feeds College Students' Diet for Research
(Anh Ly, USA Today, August 1, 2005.) Discusses how RSS is becoming more popular among college students to obtain research information from the web. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-08-01-rss-research_x.htm

Wiki Pedagogy
English and French versions available. Extensive on-line article by Renee Fountain describing wikis and laying out their pedagogical aspects. http://www.profetic.org:16080/dossiers/dossier_imprimer.php3?id_rubrique=110

Knowledge Sharing with Distributed Networking Tools
Leigh Blackall and Sean FitzGerald demonstrate some of the online tools that can be used to share knowledge - social software, web feeds, tagging and Creative Commons licensing - and discuss how they are part of the emerging networked learning paradigm. A presentaion in a wiki! http://networkedlearning.wikispaces.com/knowledge+sharing