Social Software

Walking to work this morning I listened to the introductory audio to the course I am taking with George Siemens "Social Technologies Part 1". One of the things that stuck with me (partly because I've used this line as well) was the statement that these tools have been around for quite some time, but it's only now that some are taking off because they are so simple to use. George used the example of email not becoming widespread until an 'average person off the street' could use it. When I've talked about blogs with teachers one of the key points is the ease of creation and updating the pages compared to using FrontPage or DreamWeaver, formatting them, checking them and uploading the pages and so on and so on...

I guess I'm going into the course with my 'big' questions of 'how I can assist teaching staff to adopt and use social software tools?' and 'what value does this add to the learning process?'

Adina Levin, of SocialText, via Christopher Allen:
"Many of the attributes of social software - hyperlinks for naming and reference, weblog conversation discovery, standards-based aggregation - build on older forms. But the difference in scale, standardization, simplicity, and social incentives provided by web access turn a difference in degree to a difference in kind.

These forms grew without any forced discussion "how to incent participation". People are compelled to write blogs and journals to show off and to share, to contribute to wikipedia and open source software projects for the joy of building things with other people. There are some lessons about social patterns and social affordances that this generation of social software communities and tools get right, are worth understanding and building on."