Our demonstration of social networking yesterday was nothing less than amazing. Even Brenda was impressed when I showed her what happened to that wiki page in just the first 10 minutes. The presentation on social networking in the afternoon, at the MEGA meeting, was over in 45 minutes (something of a real effort for me). Then I headed out for Winston Salem for the NC School Library Media Association conference.
This morning, I noticed a comment on yesterday’s blog from my friend Bethany Smith, who was in the audience. She said:
..I’ve been mulling over the concept of social networks for awhile and trying to decide where education fits in it. In your presentation you discussed how teachers (and others I’m sure) cobble together tools such as aggregators, twitter, del.icio.us, etc. to be our social network – while our students use MySpace and Facebook. So where do the two meet? Is asking our teachers to use facebook a way to reach the existing pool of students? Or do we try to create a separate (and relatively safer) social network? I’m investigating the use of ELGG, but wonder if our students would want to have 2 social networks or not?..
Bethany asks some important questions here, about Social Networks. ELGG is certainly a valuable option. I know that the Science Leadership Academy is making extensive use of this tool.
In my opinion, Social Networking is a concept, not a Facebook or MySpace. I don’t think that kids call their Facebook a social network. I’ve never even heard my children use the term. I could be entirely wrong here. If so, I’m sure someone will tell me. Tom Hoffman strongly encouraged the use of Danah Boyd’s definition, which seemed to refer to Social Networking as a single site.
That said, I’m not sure that the best use of social networking is a single networking tool, but a use of what ever tools or combination of tools are available to facilitate learning as a social and conversational endeavor, one that respects the perspective of the learner community and its ability to accomplish its own learning with guidance from participating teachers (master learners).
2¢ Worth!
I have been looking at this lately – I had a teacher who wanted to use a virtual world site to help some students communicate and the site has too much very adult content. I wish there was something similar out there that a school could use “in house” with some security built in!
Here’s the thing: if you define “social networking” too generally, it won’t really mean anything. You not only end up including not only IM, email and BBS’s, but the Kiwanis Club, football team, people who sit with you at lunch in the cafeteria, family, etc. Social networking writ large is central to the human experience and always has been. The study of this stuff is certainly worthwhile, but it has a name already: sociology.
What is new here? What has changed to bring “social networking” to the fore as a subject for discussion (and investment)? What is new is that people, kids especially, have technology and social practices to explicitly create and publish an individual statement of their social network — their friends. We didn’t do that before. The closest we’d get is the invitation list to a birthday party or who we gave Valentine’s Day cards to. That innovation (with a few tweaks for easy group formation and adding things that aren’t people to your social network) is central to the popularity of MySpace and Facebook.
That is what has changed and why people are talking about “social networks.” If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand the phenomenon.
I get what you are saying, Tom. But I don’t get the value added. Is this better? Why is it better? Are their opportunities for us, or is it just a matter of teaching better by moving into their realm?
I suspect that the value added that although it isn’t signaled in the title, the social networking we are talking about transends most of the boundaries that use to limit our social connections. I was limited, in my network, when I was growing up, to only the kids who were in the same neighborhood, played the same sports, were in the same classes and scout troop, attended the same church. I was limited by the geography and a narrow range of interests.
With the social networking phenomena that we’re talking about, those limits do not exist. Students (and teachers) are open to a digital universe of people and opportunities and the network happens as a result of common interests and concern, not the geography.
Dave, my larger point would be that “social networking software” narrowly defined isn’t particularly important for schools. It probably shouldn’t be excluded from schools, will certainly overlap with school life, maybe you want to educate kids about how it works outside of school, but it ultimately doesn’t have much of a “value add.”
That is to say, blogging is powerful in a number of ways. Creating other kinds of web pages to publish content, also inherently valuable. Adding a list of my friends to the above, not so much.
Hm… that last paragraph in my previous comment should probably be amended to indicate that the social networking aspects aren’t powerful to a school. Not powerful enough to say as a teacher, “Gee, this weblog you’re writing is quite nice, but it would be better if you spent more time explicitly listing on the side who your friends are.” I just can’t see doing that, as a teacher. If the kid wants to, fine, whatever, maybe, but there are downsides to having kids do this kind of explicit “friending” (e.g., social drama).
(My apologies if this is double post, the first one did not seem to go through)
Thanks for the presentation yesterday at MEGA. It was great to finally hear you speak after reading your blog for the past year or so.
A comment from the session after yours with Linda Perlstein got me thinking about something that relates to this post as well. Someone asked if the schools she observed used technology and if there was any connection between the tech at home and school. Her answers were not much tech at school and no real connection between home and school.
Why can’t there be that connection? How many students regularly use Word and Powerpoint outside of school? Not many I’m guessing. Where are they? Like you mentioned yesterday, they are in the social networks – in whatever form they may be. I think we focus too much of our time on these office tools (as well as using the computer as an electronic workbook).
The good old Venn Diagram has been rolling around in my head. Currently, I see two circles – one for tech use at home and one for tech use at school. There is little or no intersection of the two. I believe that should change. Create more overlap by creating a social network site for your class on Ning, have virtual office hours on IM (or, better yet, those virtual whiteboards that I have yet to really try out), create a class blog, look for photos of your unit of study on Flickr (of course, Flickr is blocked at my school, but that’s another issue)…the list goes on. These are the tools students are using in their daily lives, they should also be tools we use in the classroom. Bring those circles closer together!
Most importantly, however, students need to be taught how to evaluate all of the information they find from the pieces of their Tinkertoys.
The ELGG site says:
Your users have the freedom to incorporate all their favorite tools within one environment and showcase their content with as many or as few people as they choose, all within a social networking site that you control.
I am contemplating the notion of control. Why should I control the interaction of my students or the environment in which they interact? The actual and virtual worlds offer numerous means of interaction (networking), too many to be controlled. My students find all sorts of ways around network restrictions in my school from google.ca to vtunnel. Rather than policing them I try to teach responsibility and allow them to interact in the forums that suit their needs. My classes have gmail accounts, we use blogspot and share writing and research through google.docs. They have multiple forums of their own for interaction and their academic inquiry filters into those forums as well – whether or not I am not a part of them.
In a word, we need control for the sake of “safety.” In another word, we need control for the sake of “fear.”
I think that the real question, though, is why do we tolerate a world that is so dangerous. Why do we insist, at the highest levels, on combating hatred with more hatred and fear with more fear.
Why isn’t it our solution to cure hatred by ridding ourselves of hatred, rather than fearing and ridding our selves of those who hate.
Hatred and fear are real and potent motivators of lots of people’s opinions and behavior. Unless we recognize those forces for what they are – and teach our students to do so – fear and hatred grow (sometimes exponentially). I would rather that I, my children and my students see fear and hatred and learn to recognize it, than avoid or hide from it. Otherwise we are susceptible to those negative forces. In a political sense, I am controlled by the fear and hatred of leaders I didn’t help elect. In an professional sense, I am controlled (and confined) by administration that is afraid of change. The autonomy I have is borne out of these recognitions and how I choose to respond to what motivates these people.
Interesting conversation.
Another thought, a few years ago I began reading and discussing Tim Tyson’s Blood Done Sign My Name with my U.S. history classes. The book is the product of Tyson coming to terms with an event of his childhood: the murder of a black man in his town that was motivated by racial hatred. Although the murder took place in public, in broad daylight, the guilty were not convicted. Tyson’s research and interviews are extensive – including a conversation with one of the acquitted. At any rate, early in the book Tyson recalls his father taking him and his sister to a KKK rally so they could “see what hatred looks like.” My students struggle with that passage – they literally understand the words, but they work to understand what motivated Tyson’s father. More food for thought.
Actually, we aren’t using elgg anymore because, while it’s great for really independent learning, we found it was too hard to admin, and it didn’t have a lot of the tools we wanted to make it a great school tool.
Drupal, in my opinion, is a much better tool for schools than Elgg.
When I looked at Drupal – or DrupalEd they looked to be closer to Moodle than ELGG. Did you find the same? Are you using it primarily as a Course Management System or a Networking System?