Further comments on Anderson's paper

As promised, here are the rest of my thoughts on Terry Anderson's article from the last post:

He describes a long list of characteristics of ESS that he believes are necessary. I will highlight those that I found interesting or thought provoking. The first is the idea of "Presence tools" (p. 228). He believes that the user needs the ability to be able to decide whether or not to announce his presence on the site--i.e. the ability to be on but hidden so that nobody tries to strike up a conversation. I never thought about it, so I checked to see if WebTycho had this ability and it does! You can choose "I am away" or "Do not disturb me." That was interesting to see.
In the seciton about referring, he laid out a word that I did not know: stigmergic. I found a post by a guy in Australia that has clearly given a lot of thought to this term. I am still not sure that I totally understand it, but basically it seems that in group work, there is a mutual stimulation that occurs and this is the essence of stigmergy.

On p. 232, he asserts that "ESS will force us to develop competency-type examintations that build upon and exploit social learning, rather than attempting to eliminate it." I recently read an article about a teacher in Australia that let his students use a cell phone to "phone-a-friend" on their exams. I believe that he was a writing teacher. His basic assertion was that he wasn't worried about them getting basic facts memorized, but he was more interested in how they presented the information. I will have to see if I can track that article down.

Overall, it is an interesting paper that gives a good (and pretty recent) overview of the use of social software in DE. His experiences allow him to be a credible source of information on the topic and this chapter should be an excellent basis to work from.

Terry Anderson on social software

Anderson, T. (2008). Social Software to Support Distance Education Learners. In T. Anderson. T. (Ed.), Theory and practice of online learning (pp. 221-241). Retrieved June 5, 2009, from: http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120146

This paper provides an interesting and up-to-date overview of the use of social software in educational settings. There were a number of terms in it that were new to me. I will endeavor to include those here. The first is Educational Social Software (ESS).
I found it interesting that he mentions that DE that is set up as cohorts is not cost effective compared to programs that are self-paced (p. 222). He does go on to say that this is based on comparing the DE classes to FTF classes. I am not sure that I buy the argument that cohort based DE is not cost effective, or everybody doing it would be out of business. Even if DE does cost more, that may be OK. If an institution is only running DE courses to save money, they are probably not doing it for the right reasons anyway and I can't imagine that the quality would be very high. The high cost is associated with instructor interaction, compared to a basically self-guided course of study. Again, you are comparing apples to oranges here.

He discusses the term "social software" a bit (pp. 225-228). The basic idea he presents is that it is hard to precisely define what social software is, but you know if when you see it (kind of like pornography I guess). He presents Stutzman's distinction between object-centric and ego-centric social software suites ( p. 226). Object-centric sites being those that only share objects such as pictures or videos and ego-centric being those that allow personal interaction. I think that many sites, such as Facebook, are becoming a hybrid of these two models. Even photo and video sharing sites allow for user commenting and somewhat of a community to develop.
He finally defines Educational Social Software (ESS) "as networked tools that support and encourage individuals to learn together while retaining individual control over their time, space, presence, activity, identity, and relationship." (p. 227). Wow--I am glad that we have that settled. Stay tuned for the next post when we will finish this article...

Web 2.0

Welcome to what hopes to be a series of comments and thoughts on various articles pertaining to Web 2.0. Who knew we were in web 1.0 when we were there? Back in the old days when it was all about usenet, Gopher and using Archie to access ftp servers, was that 1.0? It seems like 0.5 to me. I will have to look around and see when 1.0 started. To me the internet became the Internet when the first GUI browsers such as Mosaic became available.
Well intrepid followers, it's off to the articles...

First Post

Noting really to say here yet. This is my blog for OMDE 603 at UMUC.