Online Casting

Social Networking: Philosophy and Pedagogy

by Leonard Low - Thursday, 29 June 2006, 10:37 AM
With just a couple of days left for this topic, I thought I'd mention a related conversation that I had with Alex Hayes, earlier this month. Following the temporary interruption to service at http://www.alexanderhayes.com, we spoke about the issues relating to the potential impermanence of social web interactions.

What happens if Blogger goes bust and shuts down their service? How can we maintain a record of students' activities in a course? What happens if a course is audited, and we can't present evidence of student activity because it all went missing from social software we have no control over?

I don't think that there's a complete solution to this issue yet... but I don't think we're far from one. It seems to me that we need to leverage on existing technologies to build a better mousetrap, as it were: an archiving RSS aggregator, capable of collating student work from various Web 2.0 services, together with video, photo, or audio attachments, and "backing them up" centrally. This is already technically possible using the element of RSS feeds.

I envisage that such a system would work online, in a LCMS like WebCT or Moodle; students would enter the RSS addresses of the social web tools they chose, which would also constitute legal consent for the recording of their material; and teachers would then have a central point for perusing students' work and distributing the links to other students if desired (to help establish the social network). The latest RSS updates could even appear within the LCMS "home base" for the course itself (already possible using javascript syndicators like Feed2JS).

Integrating social web tools with our existing ones in this way would be a real enabler for teaching and learning approaches utilising these tools, and would also improve the relevance of current LCMS environments.

posted by Michael @ 10:32 PM