Andrew Olson 565

When I was perusing the web logs listed in the links of the toolkit I remember thinking that the ones that were most interesting to read and usually had the most feedback were the ones that had images and links embedded in the posts.  I thought of my own web logging so far in this course and thought how I have not bothered to do that yet.   Then I thought, what a hypocrite I am!  I have blogging assignments in my own course that I expect students to have at least one web link and one embedded picture or video in each post in order to get full marks and yet here I am only producing text-based entries.  I realized that, like some of my own students, that perhaps I was just going through the motions to satisfy the assignment and not actually producing something interesting to read or view.  Therefore, I have decided to spice this entry up a bit!

This is an area that I have a lot of interest in in my professional career as so many students are using these sites as a tool in their personal lives that it would be beneficial to include them in an academic way.  For the sake of this post I decided to look at the following four social software sites: Delicious, Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.

After reading through each sites’ terms of use pages I found that there were many similarities and blanket statements that were made.  For instance, each of them made a statement about the terms of use and privacy statements being able to be changed at any time (some even recommended that users check back regularly!).  Both Facebook and Linkedin use and cite Truste online privacy seal and services in their policy while the other two did not.  Twitter made a specific mention that people’s information would be shared with the world as that is the purpose of their service (“You are what you tweet”) while the others mentioned the ability to hide information.

When considering whether these sites would be useful or appropriate to my students I have many thoughts.  When I polled the students at my school I found 98% of them used Facebook as their main social network.  Only 5% used Twitter and many did not know what it was.  0% used Linkedin, but some mentioned that their parents used it for business.  And despite seeing its value and introducing students to the Delicious bookmarking sites they seem to have very little interest in using it.  This left me with a decision to try and meet them in the place where they conduct business.  The problem with being on Facebook is the backlash from some staff about having to be a “friend” with students in order to interact with them on the site.  Of course, anyone who has ever used Facebook knows that the term “friend” does not mean the same thing on the site as it does in the real world.  This has led me to create the quote that: “those that are most against educators using Facebook have never used it themselves.”  It is amazing that often the same people who criticize this social network are also the ones that promote Twitter.  The problem with Twitter is that the whole purpose is that the world will see what you are writing.  What would make using Facebook any different?  Many would argue that it is the nature of the pictures and messages on walls that create the danger.  If this is the case then it is the way the student uses online sites that needs to be changed and educated not the site itself.  When I asked one student why they use Facebook rather than Twitter they responded: “Why would I use Twitter when I can only post a message of 150 characters when I can do the same thing on Facebook, but also have pictures, videos and all my friends in one spot with a chat?”

It was quite interesting to try out some new synchronous tools that I had only ever heard of but never used.  As I live and work at a boarding school there is an internal synchronous tool messaging system that most teachers tend to use and in my personal life I almost exclusively use the chat function on Facebook to communicate with friends and do tutorials with students.  The most recent synchronous tool I have used since beginning the MET course is the chat function that can now be found in Google Docs.

One of the difficulties that I faced and made some of the tools time consuming was the fact that my school’s network is behind a firewall and this made the configuration of each tool a bit tricky.  With the help of the IT guys at my school we were able to getting certain things to work and others remained difficult to use.  From a personal standpoint iChat and Skype worked the best and Skype has the added benefit of having visuals as well.  Wimba was a new one for me and I found it fairly straightforward and again had a video function which worked pretty well.  The biggest complaint I have with Wimba is that it needs flash and, therefore, rules out the use of an iPad.  Strangely enough the tool with the most difficulties was the WebCT Vista tool, which I have never been able to get to work properly through my firewall.

While I have used wikis for a long time to present work of my own and have worked collaboratively in other MET courses to add to and edit wikis, I don’t think I used the discussion tool quite as effectively than in this course.  For me, this solved one of the challenges that I have often faced with wikis, that is the problem of organization.  Too often I found that in the ideas gathering stage the wiki would get so confused and overlapped that it made it unmanageable.  However, using the discussion area helped sort that out.  Nonetheless, the organization of ideas on a wiki is still an important challenge that needs to be addressed by any group (especially larger groups like our class) to make sure the information is manageable.  Another challenge is being able to have synchronous communication while the editing is going on.  This is a feature that I find makes collaborative work in smaller groups quite successful.  Google Docs has this ability and it often speeds up the process.  Nonetheless, I am not sure if that would work with such a large group.  Finally, the last challenge I see with wikis is that of attribution.  While changes can be seen and tracked, I think it is important for people to use a common form of attribution for their contributions to the wiki.