Implementing Social Networks….

Live blogged, so please excuse typos and awkward wordkings.

David Gratton, of Danat, is doing a session now called, Implementing Social Networks for Efficient Capture and Generation of Knowledge.  His company built TOOD, which was a pre iTunes media delivery system.  Gratton is talking about himself and what he’s accomplished.  He says, “This is important to you today,” or “This is not important to you.”  I think he’s leading up to talking about profiles.

Gratton, has just quoted Stephen Downes,

         “How you use content is much more important than how you describe content.”

He’s talking about building social networks around repositories of content.  The repositories capture people who capture content — for better knowledge sharing. Capture fo the communitis IP.  The content may be conversations, or it may be something we want to share.

Anywone heard of Web 2.0? 😉    You really need to be about Web 2.0.  The Internet has be about community all along, Usenet, forums, chat rooms, geocities Home page and webring and e-mail.  To say that things have changed is wrong.  What’s changed is that the barriers are gone.  What’s changed is the syndication process — RSS.  I understand what he’s saying.

We shouldnt be talking about the features of social networks.  They’re all different.  But they’re about:

• Identity,
• Presence,
• Relationships,
• Conversations,
• Groups,
• Reputation, and
• Sharing, [diagram] ((Smith, Gene. “Social Software Building Blocks.” [Weblog nForm] 4 Apr 2007. nForm User Experience. 23 Apr 2008 http://nform.ca/publications/social-software-building-block.))

Linked in is about Identity.  Wither, Bebo are about presence.  Relationships are in many of the tools and conversations — Twitter is entirly about conversations.  Groups is a major part of Facebook and Basecamp.  Reputation comes out of forums.  The number of posts, replies and ranking.  Crowdtrust is a new one out of Vancouver.

So how do you apply this stuff?

Gratton is now describing the social network that his company built.  It appears to be an interface for conversation, that is designed to automatically generate metadata about the content, so that the back and forth is not just for the sake of the immediate problem, but it is generating, organizing, and storing content.

Hmmm! what might this look like as a tool for capturing content through the conversations of teaching and learning.  Students and teachers ask questions and give directions, other students and teachers respond.  The whole thing turns into content.  turning discussion into content.