Following Stephen Downe’s lead, I post below the draft chapter that I was asked to produce for the forthcoming STRIDE handbook for The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU). See related handbooks here.
Social Networking in Education
Terry Anderson
Social networking is a term in common use only since 2003. The term has been defined by many and generally viewed as referring to networked tools that allow people to meet, interact and share ideas, artifacts and interests with each other. Social networking applications have been phenomenally popular with sites such as Facebook, MySpace, SecondLife and LinkedIn counting their user numbers in the tens of millions. Social networking to date has found applications primarily in the contexts of informal learning and entertainment however there is growing interest in its use in formal education in face-to-face, distance and blended modes. I have refined the definition of social networking and especially that used in distance education as networked tools that support and encourage learning through face-to-face and online interactions while retaining individual control over time, space, presence, activity and identity (Anderson, 2006). Key to understanding both the power and the disruptive affordances of social networking is what Dalsgaard (2008) refers to as transparency – making visible and retrievable the activities, ideas, communications, artifacts and interests of others.Read More