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Jane Hart's
Articles & Presentations
Building a social learning environment - for free or at low cost
Part 1: Using free, public social media tools
Inside Learning Technologies Magazine, October
2009
Jane Hart is a Social Learning Consultant
 In this series of 3 articles I will be looking at three
ways to build a social learning environment for free or at low cost.
What is a social learning environment (SLE) and how is
it different from a learning management system (LMS)?
Most traditional LMS provide the functionality to upload
course content, deliver it to learners and track and monitor usage. They
generally have very little, if any social functionality, and where it is
present, it only supports social learning within a formal, course
context. A SLE, on the other hand is a place where individuals and
groups of individuals can come together and co-create content, share
knowledge and experiences, and learn from one another to improve their
personal and professional productivity; and is also a place that can be
used both to extend formal content-based e-learning to provide social
interaction with the learners and tutors, as well as to underpin
informal learning and working in the organisation. In other words a SLE
doesn’t manage, control and track users but rather provides an open
environment for them to work and learn collaboratively.
What does a SLE look like?
A SLE comprises a number of social elements, notably
-
Social networking
– this lies at the heart of a SLE, and provides the ability to
establish and building online relationships with others
-
Tagging content –
this allows related content to be bound together
-
Social bookmarking
– this provides the functionality for individuals to store and share
links to web resources
-
File-sharing –
this supports the creation, storage and/or sharing of files in all
formats: pictures, videos, presentations, documents, screencasts,
etc
-
Communicating with
others – this allows users to contact one another both in real
time via e.g. instant messaging, chat and in live web meetings as
well as asynchronously via e.g. email and in discussion forums
-
Collaborating with
others – this enables users to work and learn together both
synchronously or asynchronously to co-create documents,
presentations, mindmaps, etc
-
Blogging – this
supports the reading, commenting or writing of chronological blog
posts. Blogs can be used for information sharing or within a formal
context for keeping learners on track with what they need to be
working on. Reading blogs, either internally or externally created,
can also provide a regular “dripfeed” of news, information and
instruction.
-
Podcasting – this
supports the creation and sharing of audio (MP3) and video (MP4)
files. Just like blogs, podcasts can be used for information sharing
or instruction.
-
RSS feeds – this
allows users to subscribe to blog, web, news, podcast and other
feeds to keep up to date with new content.
-
Micro-blogging –
this enables users to send, receive and reply to short messages to
keep up to date with others in their network.
Is a SLE the same as a
social network?
A SLE is much more than just
a social network since it provides a wide range of social functionality,
which can be used whenever required. But more than this it supports the
integration of the tools such that they are easily available to users.
This might be via a personal dashboard or through an integrated suite of
tools within a platform.
In the three editions of
Learning Technologies magazine I am going to take a look at three
different ways to build a social learning environment as well as the
pros and cons of each. In this edition I am going to start with how you
might create a social learning environment using best-of-breed, free,
public social media tools
How can you build a social
learning environment using best-of-breed, free, public, social media
tools?
In this approach to building
a social learning environment, I am going to suggest a set of
best-of-breed tools that could be used to provide all the social
functionality mentioned above. There are a huge number of social media
tools available, but those I am mentioning are ones that have been
considered valuable by over 200 learning professionals worldwide. The
tools I refer to have rated highly on the
Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009 list, which has been compiled from
over 200 contributions from learning professionals worldwide. Note that
the majority of these tools are not “dedicated” learning tools, but are
a general tools with wide applicability for working and learning.
Note too, that I have avoided
Google tools in this list, since they will be the focus of the next
approach I will be describing in Part 2, but they could easily be
swapped in, in place of the ones I mention below.
-
Social networking:
Although social networking systems like
Facebook
and LinkedIn
have all the functionality for profiling and relationship building,
as well as the establishment of groups, the public nature of these
sites is not viewed as appropriate by many for organisational use.
The Ning platform,
on the other hand, means that you can create a social network which
only invited members can join, and thereby provide a more private
space for networking.
-
Tagging content:
Most, if not all the tools mentioned here support the tagging of
content. Although content can’t easily be bound together across the
different tools, if the same tag(s) are used within the different
systems, it would make it easier for users to find related content.
-
Social bookmarking:
Delicious is
the most popular place to store and share bookmarks to online;
although tools like
Diigo provide extra functionality like annotation and
highlighting of content
-
File-sharing:
There are many sites available for storage of existing content as
well as for creating content online, e.g.
Storing files on sites
like this means there are bandwidth advantages since you are not
serving out the media from your own servers, and you can simply link
directly to the resource or even embed the resources into web pages
or blog postings.
-
Communicating with
others: Some useful tools in this area include
-
Skype - for instant
messaging and voice chat
-
Dimdim - to hold web
meetings, and
-
YahooMail
– to provide a webmailing system
-
Collaborating with
others: As there are a number of different collaborative
activities, there are many tools that can support these., e.g.
-
Bubble.us – for
collaborative mindmapping
-
Wetpaint – for
collaborative document authoring
-
Etherpad – for
real-time collaborative authoring
-
Udutu
– for collaborative course authoring
-
Blogging: Blogging
has almost become a mainstream activity, with bloggers providing
news, opinion and/or commentary on every topic under the sun. You
can easily keep up to speed with what others in your field are
writing, e.g. here is my selection of
100
Featured Learning Professionals who write blogs about
(e-)learning:
For those who want to blog there are many blogging tools available,
but Wordpress is a particular
favourite, and can be used for both individual and multi-author
blogging.
-
Podcasting: Just
like blogging, there are now plenty of places to listen to podcasts,
but iTunes is
probably a good place to start. Download the software to organise,
browse and play your media, and then access the iTunes Store where
you can find both audio and video podcasts in many different
categories. Selecting iTunesU will also give you access to some free
open courseware.
If you want to create podcasts of your own, then
Audacity
is a useful little tool to record audio and (with the extra LAME
encoder) convert it into an MP3 file for podcasting.
-
RSS feeds – To
keep up to date with blog and podcasts and receive new content when
available, you can subscribe to the feeds, and the content comes to
you. Bloglines is an online
feed reader that will help you manage your blog, website, wiki,
social networking and other feeds, whereas within iTunes you can
easily subscribe to audio and video podcasts.
-
Micro-blogging –
Keeping up to date with what your colleagues and contacts are doing
is very easy by signing up to a service like
twitter . Simply by following
them, you will then receive their tweets, i.e. short updates of
maximum 140 characters. And anyone who follows you, will receive
yours.
You can also use Twitter to follow others in your field, e.g. my
selection of
100
Featured Learning Professionals also gives details of their
Twitter accounts, or you can go to a
TweepML page where you can follow them all (or selected
individuals) with one click!
How can these tools be
integrated?
The tools mentioned above
will provide you with the essential social technologies to build a
social learning environment. However, one thing that is also required is
a way of “gluing” them together in one place. This might be done in one
of two ways, (a) by individuals setting up their own private dashboard
using a tool like Netvibes
which lets you display widgets with recent content and access to tools
on a web page, or (b) via organisational integration, perhaps using
Netvibes Universes (i.e. customised public startpages) or even
Netvibes for Enterprises,
which provides a personalized face to the front of any enterprise
system.
What are the advantages
and disadvantages of this approach?
But finally, we need to
consider the advantages and disadvantages of building a social learning
environment in this way. First the advantages:
-
There is a huge range of
tools available to choose from.
-
Users can either
individually select their own tools to create a personal social
learning environment or an organisation can decide which ones it
will promote and support.
-
The tools are relatively
easy to set up and use.
-
They don't require any
internal IT support
Now for the disadvantages:
-
If a large number of
different tools are in use, this could prove rather overwhelming for
someone who is not very social media savvy, since many of the tools
have very sophisticated functionality – some of which might be
overkill, and they will certainly all have different interfaces.
-
There is likely to be
some duplication of functionality across the different tools, for
example many are incorporating social networking functionality, so a
user could end up with different profiles on many different systems.
-
There is no (or very
little) interoperability between these tools; and there’s no
single-sign on, so users will need to have different logins to the
different tools.
-
There may also be
concerns about the privacy and security of personal and
organisational data which is now scattered over the Internet in
multiple sites.
-
The tools may have
limited backup facilities, so if they crash important data may be
lost, and there is also a concern with the viability of provision by
free providers; some services have been known to close down with
immediate effect leaving their users high and dry.
-
There may also be worries
about how individuals make use of these tools, since their personal,
professional and organisational personae on the tools might well
overlap, which could result in what the organisation might consider
“inappropriate” behaviour.
Bearing all the disadvantages
in mind, I therefore think that this approach is best used by
individuals to build their own personal or professional social learning
environment outside the organisation - which is the way that I use
public social media tools - to share and collaborate with colleagues
worldwide.
As for organisational use, in
the next edition of this magazine, I will look at how to build a SLE
using Google applications, which I will show goes part way to resolving
some of the disadvantages above, and in the conference edition of this
magazine, I will look at the free, open source, social engine, Elgg,
that can be used to create a fully integrated and customised social
learning environment, which addresses many more of the issues raised..
Meanwhile if you’d like to
find out more about social technologies and social environments, and in
particular how to get started yourself, take a look at my
Social Learning Sessions. Remember, that
social media is something you do rather than something you just talk
about!
>>
Building a social learning environment: Part 2 -
Using Google Apps
>>
Building a social learning environment: Part 3 -
Using Elgg
>>
Chart Comparison of 3 different ways |
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