Scott Leslie and his colleague Bruce Langdon have crafted an excellent review of the promise and practice of social software use in both formal and informal learning. The 27 page report is titled Social Software for Learning: What is it,
why use it? and is published by the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education.
The report makes a quite compelling pedagogical case for the use of social software and then details common genre of social tools and their applications in mostly formal education. Given the sponsorship by the Observatory, it is perhaps no surprise that the report focuses considerable attention on adoption and use of these technologies in formal higher education contexts. I especially liked the attention to the institutional issues such as Should we develop our own social software applications or use freely available, commercial and very popular alternatives such as Facebook? If we do build our own apps, should they be behind institutional firewalls and passwords or exposed to the Open Net? And most importantly will students use these services if we build them? While not providing definitive answers to these questions, the report nicely overviews the advantages and disadvantages and provides references and links to some interesting examples.
This report nicely complements and updates the earlier FutureLab’s 2006 report Social Software and Learning . Both reports provide definitions of social software and describe, with examples, the major genre (blogs, wikis, tag apps, etc.) but the Futurelab report focuses more on social software’s impact on informal and lifelong learning, while Leslie and Langdon address the tension and challenges of this potentially disruptive technology to formal educational institutions.
The only major problem with the report is its access restrictions. I realize that some person or organization usually has to pay for any quality production, but guarding this report behind a password, will insure that its readership and impact is very significantly reduced. Fortunately, my University is one of only 5 Canadian universities to subscribe to the UK based Observatory. Thus, I was able to request a password and access the report, but I had to click away my right to copy, email or otherwise open the document to others. A shame…..
If nothing else, do read the free abstract of the report and wait a few months and the report may yet appear in some Googleizable cranny of the Net. Or perhaps wrangle an institutional subscription to the Observatory for this and a number of other interesting reports.
Thanks for the report. I’m interested in the earlier report (from FutureLab) you mention, but your link to it seems to be incorrect, leading to an error message on your blog.
Thank you for the abstract Terry,
We are not subscribed to the Observatory and so do not get the report 🙂
It is interesting the emerging impact on educational institutions, which seems to me a sign of things to come for wherever learning happens. The next generation of learners are bringing with them (driven by social and broader trends) a new way of doing things.
Thanks again,
Eric
Sorry about the bad link to the Futurelab report Rick. I have corrected it above and list it here:
http://www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/documents/opening_education/Social_Software_report.pdf
Terry, first off, thanks for the kind words and write up. The link to the Futurelab report is apropos – I was well aware of its existence, as well as a number of other in depth pieces that had already covered the topic *extremely well*, which made writing this very difficult. I hope I did ultimately manage to add something to the overall dialogue and yet still keep it accessible – the OBHE guidelines state that their audience are high level managers and executives and hence to not get too technical or detailed (hard too in a 15k word paper!)
Also, I 100% agree about the issue of it being behind a password/subscription. I did ask whether this could not be so when they asked me to write the paper. As much as getting paid to write something is helpful and indeed important for me as someone who has to do this outside of their regular job, this is the last time I will write something that gets locked away like this. Lesson learned – what benefit it might have is certainly diminished, and ultimately “open is as open does.” Anyways, thanks again for the feedback and writeup, cheers, Scott
Terry please can you take some time out to read this paper. Thanks.