Social Networking Sites as Silos

Learn Buttons

I previously blogged about the distinction between open-to-all learning communities and restricted access communities. Beyond limits on participation, most software-based communities have a problem with the free flow of information between communities.

One of the popular tools for helping to prevent online communities from being information silos has been content syndication. The first “feed reader” that I used was Bloglines. Many social networking sites allow participants to aggregate feeds and share those aggregates with other participants. One of these that I recently started experimenting with is Tumblr. There now exists a confusing collection of makeshift solutions to the problem of sharing information and social contacts between online communities. Can there be widely-adopted open standards for social networking?

One attempt to create such standards is the DiSo project. Look at the slogans for the DiSo (dee soh) project (“creation of open, non-proprietary and interoperable building blocks for the decentralized social web”):

Open, Distributed, Social.

Silo free living.

Information, Identity, and Interaction.

I hope that a coherent set of software tools will become available for helping us organize our online social networking. There seems to be a large gap between the needs of online learners and the desire of internet social networking companies to make a profit. Even non-profit organizations that are dedicated to online education struggle to facilitate the social aspects of learning. It will be interesting to see how online social learning networks continue to develop. I suppose things were just as confused when the first bricks-and-mortar schools were created. Most building were used for other things besides facilitating learning. With time, people figured out how to make specialized buildings that were well-suited for learning. At this time, most social networking sites are very much oriented around entertainment and commerce.

If we are going to have efficient social networking tools for learning we need more than “like” buttons. In particular, I want something along the lines of a “I don’t understand X” button. That would be the foundation for for getting help for navigating a learning path through a collection of linked online communities.

Online social networks for learners

Learn by doing.

In my last blog post I used a few of the major social networking websites as examples for the “state of the art” in social networking. In this post, I want to review some examples of social networking tools that have been used specifically for education.

The major social networking websites are for-profit and in my experience they are heavily slanted towards entertainment and advertising. Elgg social networking software is open source and has been used by educators to create social networks for learners. For example, Eduspaces is a learning-oriented social network powered by the Elgg software and one of the content sharing features is blogging by members of the social network.

An online learning-oriented community that I have personally experimented with is Wikiversity. Wikiversity is powered by the open source MediaWiki software platform that powers Wikipedia. The basic content format is the wiki page, a webpage that can be edited by anyone.

Wikiversity traffic.

Based on Alexa statistics (see the graph, above), Wikiversity gets a significant amount of traffic because of its association with Wikipedia. Many online educational sites are niche communities and seldom grow beyond a limited size. Like Wikipedia, Wikiversity aims to be comprehensive in its approach to providing online learning resources. Unlike Wikipedia which is oriented towards providing printed documents to readers, Wikiversity aims to functioning as an online destination for learners where they can participate in a community where “learn by doing” (mostly “learn by webpage editing”) projects provide “hands on” learning opportunities.

Many computer-facilitated learning communities are closed and intended to serve one particular bricks and mortar educational institution. It remains to be seen to what extent Asimov’s dream of making all the world’s knowledge available via computer-mediated access can become a reality. Will our cultural momentum keep bricks and mortar educational institutions in control of some types of educational resources or will a new ethic come to dominate by which everything will be freely available by way of the internet to every learning of the world?

Image. Learning by Doing by Brian C. Smith