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.