SOCIAL NETWORKS FOR LEARNING: WIKIS, BLOGS ... - CiteSeerX

SOCIAL NETWORKS FOR LEARNING: WIKIS, BLOGS AND TAGGING IN EDUCATION M. Antonia Huertas, Carlos Casado, César Córcoles, Enric Mor, Ana-Elena Guerrero-Roldán Universitat Oberta de Catalunya Barcelona, Spain {mhuertass, ccasadom,ccorcoles,emor,aguerreror}@uoc.edu

1. Introduction Fast developments in information and communications technologies and changes in the behaviour of learners demand educational institutions to continuously evaluate their pedagogical approaches to the learning and teaching process, both in face-to-face and virtual classrooms. Especially higher education institutions are challenged by great changes caused by multiple external factors such as the increasing difference among relative costs and benefits of the physical versus the virtual environment or the impressive shifts in the characteristics of students and the way they affect their curriculum (McGovern et al., 2005). On the other hand, during the last two decades we have been able to witness the appearance of a new kind of students, thank to their continuous exposure to digital technologies. These students think and process information differently from the ones whose interaction with these tools not “innate”. These new learners inhabit a social, cultural and technological environment where their learning is constructed as a much more social process. A social constructivist view of learning considers that students learn best when they construct their interpretations on a subject and communicate their recently acquired knowledge to others (Gay et al., 2001). Within this context the next generation technologies known under the “web 2.0” name are considered as an opportunity for innovation in teaching and learning (Alexander, 2006). The addition of both those pedagogical and technological new contexts is known as e-learning 2.0 or education 2.0. 1.1 Technological context The talk about ‘web 2.0’ began in 2004, when the O'Reilly editorial group organized a technical conference called Web 2.0. At that moment in time the combination of diverse points, among which we have to cite the widespread adoption of broadband internet access to the homes, led to renewed interest on world wide web technologies. Since then we speak of “web 2.0 technologies” when talking about a set of relatively new ways of doing things on the web. As the internet has become a medium for most activities, this “web 2.0” has had its effect on almost all of them, and now we talk, for example of business 2.0 and enterprise 2.0... and also of education 2.0. It is important, so, to know what 'web 2.0' is. Although there is not a consensus definition of the term, maybe the best document on the subject is What is Web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2005). Essentially, we may speak about 'web 2.0' when: • we consider the web as a platform where software applications, rather than documents, live; • these software applications are designed to take profit from “collective intelligence” and effectively move from a developer-centric point of view to a user-centred one; • according to that user-centred model, the user's data is the most important element in every transaction, and developers allow users total or almost total control of their assets; • as applications live on a web server, and not on a desktop, the meaning of software releases and versions is lost, because there is no need to deploy a new release of any application to have it working for every single user.

One of the reasons behind the success of web 2.0 is the use of some technologies, such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), RIAs (Rich Internet Applications), RSS (for content syndication) or “folksonomies”, which had been around since the late 1990's but only attained generalized use around 2004. Let's explain very briefly what they are. • AJAX is a series of web development tools and technologies that allow web pages to behave as applications exchanging data almost autonomously with a remote web server. AJAX allows to close the gap between web based applications and their desktop equivalents. • RIAs represent one step beyond AJAX. Through the use of virtual machines (mainly Adobe Flash, but most recently also Microsoft's WPF/E technology) web applications attain an even higher level of user interaction. • RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a technology that allows an easy flow of information between data sources and users. “RSS readers” allow users to obtain information from multiple sources using just one application, with no need to travel to the different web sites which originated the content. • Folksonomy is a new form of metadata gathering. Users tag content with their own labels, and applications aggregate those tags and share them between users. Later on, when one user searchs for, say, “education”, the application will return content which has been tagged with that word, thus building a social index to the web. One very meaningful cause/effect of web 2.0 is the extreme lowering of the cost of access to very sophisticated resources to have a strong presence on the web. The advent of lightweight content management software, from personal blogging tools to corporate portal management systems allows any average web user or organization to publish quality information in a comfortable and efficient way. For educators this means that publishing content and using a new set of tools to communicate and work on a new medium has become possible. But the availability of these new tools presents new challenges: when should an educator use one of them? Which is better for each finality? 1.2 Pedagogical context Briefly reviewing the theories of the pedagogical models behind traditional learning systems in chronological order, an evolutionary path can be established, that would lead us to the next stage: elearning 2.0, starting with behaviorism, going through cognitivism and constructivism and leading to social constructivism (Downes, 2005). These theories, however, were developed before learning was impacted by ICT technologies. For the present situation Siemens et al. (2005) propose a new theory, “Connectivism”, intended to explain both individual and social learning processes, going beyond the social constructivism approach. Its starting point is that knowledge exists by itself and “individuals are supposed to realize that knowledge by connecting the nodes where it's located; being that nodes other individuals, organizations, different clusters weakly tied. It is changing the know-how and know-what for know-where the knowledge is”. Some of connectivism key principles are: ƒ ƒ ƒ ƒ

Learning is a constant building of a network Capacity to learn more is more important than current knowledge Connections, not content, are the starting point of the learning process Knowledge can rest within the network, not only within individuals

The connection between these two facets or contexts of the same emergence process (connectivism and web 2.0) is the learning 2.0 paradigm. Some of its key principles are: ƒ Learner-centered design: the learner constructs her own knowledge ƒ From communities of practice to social networking: the learner shares her knowledge ƒ Teachers and learners as peers within a social network ƒ From traditional learning applications to open learning environments.

2. Some learning 2.0 projects and practices Many researchers in the area point out the educational use of the web, but still the majority of them show the use of the internet just as a repository of information. The 2.0 resources and rich applications

go further and offer the web as the platform where those resources can be used. Emily Chang’s eHub 1 list shows hundreds of web 2.0 projects, and Benzinger (2006) has a very extensive list of applications 2.0 suited to be used in education. 2.1 Blogging Blogging tools allow an author or group of authors to write and publish content on the Web, and readers to comment in turn. Contents are usually organized in chronological inverse order although other orders for subjects or categories are possible. The Educational Bloggers is a community of teachers and educators involved in blogging (Downes, 2004). The number of educational bloggers is growing daily. Farell (2003) identifies different major uses of blogs in education. On the one hand the instructor can use it to publish and to manage a repository of materials, to link to web content and exercises, both synchronously and asynchronously, to stimulate further reading on the discussed subjects , to organize in class discussions and collaborative works, building a scientific community in the process, or to organize class seminars. On the other hand, students may be asked to keep their own blogs as part of their course grade, to improve their writing competences, to share their work or to have distributed debates. As a consequence of the simplicity of use of the blog editing tools their use is expanding even in contexts of low technological penetration. This is one of the main reasons why its educational use is being generalized, since the resources that have to be invested for their handling are very low. The syndication of contents through RSS allows students and teachers to be informed about the updating of contents of the blogs to which they subscribe. The information does not have to be searched for: it now comes to you. This is another example of the change of paradigm when using the 2.0 applications. 2.2 Wiki The content manager tool named wiki allows the collaborative creation of contents on the web. It provides a simple environment for the edition of web pages and it maintains the history of the content modifications carried out and author information for every change. The best known example of their use is the creation of the Wikipedia, with the Mediawiki tool, although there are many other wiki applications (see a list in http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiEngines). Pedagogically wikis can be used on the one hand by the teacher to create and to maintain repositories of information for the use of students. But their most revolutionary use from the traditional point of view is that the students themselves create the repository (with or without the teacher’s help). Besides stimulating students to study, it promotes team work and sharing information search (Peña, 2006). Another interesting use of wikis is the use of the history of who has added new information to the system in order to assess the individual and the group learning processes. With the increase of teachers’ use of blogs and wikis, and students networking and using online tools, the demand for easier and more efficient ways of learning is on the rise (Alexander, 2006). 2.3 Social tagging Systems of social bookmarking were kick-started by the advent of del.icio.us, a service for storing, describing and sharing bookmarks. The social component comes from allowing subscription to other pages and to tags, or access to the aggregated behaviour of users. Following it, other bookmarking projects have appeared (Shadows or RawSugar) where users can also discuss instead of just tagging. However, there is not a magical formula so that social tagging tools work alone, for there are too many influential variables. What is evident is that a system of social tagging with non-specialized vocation 1

http://www.emilychang.com/go/eHub/

will not be effective enough if corrective mechanisms (or balancing) coming from the motivation and the style of the users are not applied (Cañadas, 2006). These systems have powerful pedagogical applications, such as information discovery and sharing, or social network building for workgroups. In an e-learning environment tagging can be used in two different ways: students can tag following instructions given by the teacher, or tag freely course-related content.

3. Some experiences and projects at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia) is an exclusively online university. The UOC educational model places the student as an active agent at the centre of her learning process. During this process, the student is assisted by a team of teachers and is also helped by her partners in the virtual classroom, which is located inside the virtual campus (a highly developed intranet which satisfies all academic necessities, including registering and technical assistance). In these virtual spaces, the student can find a complete course syllabus, the course learning materials and other resources (as the digital library or academic software). Next we will explain some learning 2.0 experiences carried out at the Multimedia Graduate degree and newly designed experiences for the Computer Science degree. 3.1. Past learning 2.0 experiences In the final project of the Multimedia Graduate degree, students must carry out a multimedia application that causes them to find numerous problems. In these cases the help of the instructor and classmates is very valuable. Hence, a student with an especially complicated final project was advised to maintain a public blog where she could explain the project to be completed and the work already done. The blog involved two objectives: •

On the one hand, it obliged the student to keep a record of all the steps that she kept carrying out, which would help her to write the final report to be delivered at the end of the course. • On the other hand, it provided a place where the student exposed her doubts so that she was helped by other colleagues or, even external people to the university. The experience was positive although it could be improved. The student was very active at the beginning of the blog; and she received more responses from people outside the university that from her colleagues. However, after some time she only wrote when she had important problems. Even then, the work carried out in the blog was useful for her to be able to find some solutions to the encountered problems. In most of the subjects of the Multimedia Graduate degree, the teacher usually provides students with links to complementary contents. Although many of those links point towards current articles with an expiry date, there are also links that can be kept from semester to semester since the provided information does not expire. To be able to use the projects carried out in a semester in the next one, and also to allow collaborative work of the students collecting new content and links for the subject, in some of the subjects (such as Interface Design, Networking or Virtual Reality) wikis were created to collect all that work. Those wikis have proved themselves to be very useful tools for teachers to create repositories of commented links. We have found, though, that students use of those wikis varies widely from subject to subject, and intend to study the causes of that variation. 3.2 Designing a new learning 2.0 experience The final project of the thematic area of human computer interaction (HCI) shows some characteristics that make it interesting for a pilot test of web 2.0 tools: ƒ The subject matter is broad and multidisciplinary, including many different themes, such as user centred design, usability, accessibility, user testing, interface design, information architecture and interaction design.

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There are not ad-hoc materials for the final project, but students can use the more generic ones from other related subjects. Also, there is a lot of good documentation about the concrete subjects on the web. The instructors provide links and resources at the beginning of the project. Students have to search more concrete resources according to the subject matter of their project. Those resources are evaluated by the teacher and students. Knowledge is built during the project by finding resources and commenting on them. Currently this documentation and knowledge get lost unless the teacher keeps it in a text document, since it remains distributed between the forum and personal messages

A tool allowing the labelling of resources and providing continuance among semesters would be necessary. It would be convenient if that tool or a complementary one would allow comments and assessments of the resources. In order to find and use that web 2.0 tool a learning 2.0 experience has been designed. Project students should use a social bookmarking tool to tag the found resources (del.icio.us or an open source tool, such as de.lirio.us). That 2.0 tool will allow to collaborative construct the tags and also to share them. Then, another complementary tool will be necessary to allow comments about the different tagged resources, their evaluation and their use. This second tool would be a Wiki or similar. The search of some tool (open source preferable) that allows tagging and comments simultaneously and to maintain the shared information in a revisable repository and syndication would be interesting. If founded that tool would be preferable to the use of two different ones. The objectives of that pilot test of using tagging and wiki-kind tools are, firstly, to analyze the different available tools for the task and choose the one best fitting the requirements and, secondly, to use if with the following purpose: ƒ To work collaboratively to find good resources for the different subjects in the HCI area. ƒ To construct collaboratively a network of knowledge in the area, which will be usable and easily maintained in the next semesters.

4. Conclusions The world wide web, as all other technologies, has been used as an educational tool since its conception. It is, then, logic to expect changes related to the web to affect its educational use. We would like to highlight as concluding remarks the key points explaining the emergence of new projects like the ones presented in this paper: ƒ ƒ

we are entering an evolutionary stage where the web is becoming a social environment. That fact impacts every social activity without exception, and in particular education. new theoretical models for dealing with that change would allow integrating technology with the social and educational issues at hand.

At this point many different social networking projects applied to e-learning and case studies for future work should be developed in the context of the so called learning 2.0 paradigm.

Acknowledgements: This work has been partially supported by Spanish government grant under the project PERSONAL (ref. TIN2006-15107-C02-01).

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