Social Computing and Web Seminars Contributed by EDUCAUSE

Over the past decade, colleges and universities have increasingly turned to the web to increase student access, expand course offerings, and reach out to adult learners through online courses. The growth of distance and online education has been mirrored by a similar explosion in social software tools such as Facebook, Second Life, blogs, wikis, Flickr, and a host of Web 2.0 competitors that offer new ways for us to learn with and from each other. As our Web 2.0 toolbox grows, so do faculty and administrator concerns about control, privacy, assessment, and the effectiveness of these tools in the classroom.

In this seminar, Anderson will highlight an educational model for distance and online learning that leverages social software to help both learners and educators determine the most effective tool and granularity of application for their learning needs. He will also demonstrate a number of current and emerging tools and share practices that promise to help us learn from and with each other with an emphasis on social learning that includes groups, networks, and the collective.

Since the 1990s, we’ve been putting our Web courses in boxes, mastering enterprise course management systems, and striving for single sign-on seamless integration between all Web-enabled business and academic environments in each of our colleges and universities. Sometime around the turn of the century, however, explosive innovation on the open Web began to turn a “read only” environment into a “read/write” environment. With the development of RSS as a syndication platform, the read/write environment began to support and foster a very powerful, loosely coupled information architecture across the World Wide Web. In 2004, a group led by Tim O’Reilly gave this phenomenon a name: Web 2.0.

In this seminar, Campbell will explore the concepts behind Web 2.0, some of the individual tools and services (Flickr, Facebook, Second Life, del.icio.us) that are commonly listed under this rubric, and the implications of this phenomenon for teaching and learning, particularly in higher education. He will also present several ways in which he and his colleagues have used Web 2.0 tools and services, both as teachers and in their own learning, and comment on the good, the bad, and the ugly results. If time permits, he will also speak to the relationship between Web 2.0 and the open source software movement. Finally, he’ll offer some thoughts on what Web 3.0 might look like, and why educators should care.

Web 2.0 projects have rapidly expanded into a world of social media. From blogs to podcasts, millions of people have published and shared a growing amount of digital content. At the same time virtual worlds have grown in popularity, from massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft to metaverse projects like Second Life. How do these two movements apply to higher education? Where do Web 2.0 and the metaverse connect? What trends are emerging for the near future?

It's been said that if a campus wants to know what its students are doing, Facebook is the place to go. While some campuses have banned Facebook due to real or potential abuses, others are focusing on the positive and constructive promise of social networking not only for social life but also for institutional communications and teaching and learning missions. If you're starting a capital campaign at your institution, why not use social networking technologies for your alumni too, so they can create communities, post video and photos past and present, and "poke" old friends? In this session, Tracy Mitrano and Nicky Rho discuss the power, policies, and potential for social networking technologies, particularly Facebook.

New technologies are changing how we teach and learn in classrooms as well as informal learning spaces. Techniques such as blogging, podcasting, and videoblogging once used by tight-knit groups of techies have emerged as key strategies of established media corporations. Social software practices like tagging and intelligent searching are changing how we process information and can potentially change what happens in our formal and informal learning spaces.

Join us as we explore a cross section of emerging technologies and practices including gaming, mobile applications, social and collaborative applications, chat, and clickers. What are the potential implications of students equipped with these technologies? How might they disrupt our existing teaching and learning practices? Are there strategies to help incorporate new technologies into existing infrastructure? How can we ensure that new technologies promote deeper learning?

In this session, we will explore emerging technologies and their integration into campus environments and identify new and emerging technologies. Some of the questions we will ask include how a given technology supports learner-centered principles, how it meets the needs of different types of learners, how it fits with existing campus infrastructure and support systems, the fiscal implications of its widespread adoption, and the policy issues raised by its use.