Abstract

With the rise of Web 2.0 social media has exploded on the internet. It permeates almost every aspect of your internet experience. The biggest question here is how can we utilize social media to enhance our online and offline lives? I have always been interested in how social media can help teachers and students achieve more value and enjoy a greater, more interactive learning experience. Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed are just a few of the most popular social sites out there. The need for collaboration in the classroom and, indeed the real world work environment is and has been increasing at an exponential rate. In looking at the wide range of uses for these and other sites, two questions come to mind. Are we able to use these applications as tools for learning? What is the future of social media in an educational environment? For the sake of brevity, we will focus on three distinct applications of web 2.0, Delicious, Twitter and the new Google Wave. These will be used as an outline to show how social media can and is being used in the classroom.

Web 2.0 and Social Media in the Classroom

“The term “Web 2.0″ is commonly associated with web applications which facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Examples of Web 2.0 include web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and folksonomies. A Web 2.0 site allows its users to interact with other users or to change website content, in contrast to non-interactive websites where users are limited to the passive viewing of information that is provided to them.

The term is closely associated with Tim O’Reilly because of the O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but rather to cumulative changes in the ways software developers and end-users use the Web. Whether Web 2.0 is qualitatively different from prior web technologies has been challenged by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee who called the term a “piece of jargon”.”¹

The preceding paragraphs give an accurate description of what Web 2.0 technically is. It has been pasted directly out of Wikipedea.com for the express purpose of demonstrating the wrong way that Web 2.0 has been used. While it does convey the idea, it does not show any real learning or comprehension on the part of the writer. Plagiarism of Web 2.0 sites has become a huge problem in classrooms involving the work handed in by students. Notoriously, information gained through Wikipedia has been a bit dodgy and at many times unverifiable. Recently though, Wikipedia has taken steps to vet their information through the use of editors².

That being said, educators have recently been looking for a way to see their curriculum “come to life as an “organism” within the “ecosystem” of Web 2.0 services that can nourish teaching and learning.”³ Delicious is a social bookmark sharing website. Twitter is arguably the most popular social media application/website on the internet right now. Google Wave is a real time, collaborative application still in the testing (beta) phase. These three platforms will be reviewed herein.

Delicious

Delicious is web 2.0 at its base. Launched in 2004 by founder and creator, Joshua Schachter, this web service became the premier and definitive form of bookmark sharing. Tagging items got its start here as a revolutionary form of organizing and sharing your bookmarks.⁴ In late 2005 Yahoo, recognizing the value of this site made and won a bid for delicious.⁵

Social Bookmarking is one of the earliest and still most popular forms of Web 2.0 applications. Most people in just about any field who use a computer on at least a semi-regular basis use social bookmarking in some shape or form. Bookmarking and sharing, from a hive mentality point-of-view, allows us to more greatly utilize the web as a group to search for and gain the information needed.⁶

The question remains, is this tool applicable for the classroom? In an educational setting, this is an excellent way for students to gain and share information on collaborative projects and indeed other singular projects. Access to this information can be maintained as students move from computer to computer. Students will also find bookmarking one of the easiest ways to quickly access links and sites integral to the project at hand.⁷ The educational blog, Educational Resources Online, says this about Delicious “The power of Delicious lies not only in making your bookmarks accessible to you, but in making everyone else’s bookmarks available also. By ‘tagging’ your websites with brief one or two word descriptors, you enable a search to be conducted across the entire site for bookmarks others have labeled similarly. Therefore if you have a particular interest in say ‘algebra’, and you do a search across Delicious, you will pull up all of the sites that have been tagged ‘algebra’ by everyone else also. This may lead to the discovery of some amazing sites that you had never stumbled upon.”⁸

The beginnings of Social Media in the classroom are right here in bookmarking. Getting students to first earmark a site for later possibilities and second, to share what they have found with their teammates and even the entire class or school is exactly where to begin. This type of sharing can only foster the collective, collaborative mindset needed to really implement Web 2.0 into the modern classroom.

Twitter

Twitter had its beginnings in San Francisco in March of 2006. In three and a half years Twitter has become the leading Social Media site accounting for 14 million users in just the US, as reported by Mashable.com.⁹

Twitter is where my personal involvement in social media is rooted. Having started in IT school with minimal computer skills, I was introduce to Twitter as a possible way to help grow and expand my technical knowledge through forming relationships with likeminded people across what is referred to as the “twitterverse”.¹⁰ My involvement with Twitter as a tool for my education has taken me to numerous and highly interesting areas of the real and virtual world. Aside from making international connections, I have made connections in various communities like web design, Scrum/Agile technologies, and programming. These contacts aside from being casual acquaintances have been, at times, tutors and mentors during my travels in technological academia.

Twitter’s concept started out as “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less.¹¹ It seemed at first to smack of brilliance. People out there were connecting over “tweets” as seemingly mundane as, “I think it’s time for another cup of coffee!”¹² Though there still is that simple aspect of “What are you doing?” on Twitter, it has evolved at a very fast pace that now encompasses links to sites of value, chatter about everything from the latest news to in-depth conversations about someone’s problem with a certain coding project, and of course spam of every kind. So, where does this environment fit into the classroom? The biggest drawback to Twitter in this environment is the possibility of the student (if this is a precollege setting) gaining unwanted attention, not necessarily from pedophiles but other unwanted influences. For this reason it must be stated emphatically, that for the educator, Twitter, or other social media applications, is not a babysitter.¹³ On the other hand, Twitter offers a grouping setup or lists as Twitter calls them. Liz Pullen, writing for Mashable.com stated, “One nice aspect of Twitter Lists is that you can follow other people’s lists without following each individual on it. In effect, you adopt it as a list of your own without having to duplicate its content. Another plus is that unlike following people, which is limited in proportion to the number of people following you, there doesn’t appear to be any limit to the number of lists you can follow.

One great element about following other people’s lists is that it exposes you to worthwhile content and to people you don’t know but who might have similar interests to yours or live in your geographic area. You can also go to another person’s list page and add individuals directly from their list to one of yours. This can quickly speed up the process of creating and expanding your lists.”¹⁴

To really make this happen as a group the teacher must first connect the classroom. Getting all the students involved and digitally connected will start the collective attitude. Make sure to connect yourself and your students with other teachers that teach the same subjects. After familiarizing the students with how Twitter works and how to stay safe on Twitter, students should be encouraged to seek out their own sources and experts on the subjects on which they are working. “The feedback to this kind of “homework” comes not in the form of red ink on paper but in comments appearing on the students’ blogs from around the world.”¹⁵ This level of interaction from both inside the classroom and externally can only serve to add to the value of real-world education. The versatility of Twitter in this instance will greatly increase the speed with which information is shared and will return a more passionate student ready take charge of his or her own learning.

Google Wave

“Google Wave is a platform, product, and protocol for creating live, social communication documents that can be edited by multiple users in near real-time.”¹⁶ Presently open only to developers; Wave will be open-sourced and fully released late 2009 or early 2010.  This is the hard sell: how does Google Wave get promoted into classrooms while still in the testing phase? Already we see Wave being used quite heavily in Role-playing Games. “Google Wave provides an excellent environment for collaboration on gaming projects, especially at the design and brainstorming stages. There is a strong community of game developers, with a public wave devoted to discussing game development issues.”¹⁷ The point of Web 2.0 in the classroom is empowering students to claim ownership of their learning experience. Google Wave is already being scrutinized for that specific task. Allowing for a wiki-like editing interface and the ability to review the entire thread, a user is able to see how the group’s concept has and is evolving in real time.¹⁸ Possibilities for this application are at the moment, endless. One aspect could be as a collaborative note-taking tool, although, there are debates as to how to implement it, as such.¹⁹ Google Wave offers ‘Bots’ that can be implemented to flatten out the classroom. One such plug-in allows for automatic translation of foreign languages. Another still, called “Canvas” allows all involved to draw on a virtual canvas.

In my experience, Google wave works like this; a wave is a thread or a collective thought, or project. Each reply is called a blip. You can blip content anywhere in the wave that you have viable content to be added. Viable content can be text based, video can be embedded, pictures can be added in from the net or from saved files, or the bots like the ones discussed earlier can all be used to enrich the thread or wave. Contacts are added to waves by anyone involved in that particular wave. Any contact can add any content to an existing wave regardless of who started the wave. An entire wave can be reviewed chronologically on a blip by blip basis. Lastly, anyone can start a wave and add in any contacts that he or she wishes to be able to add content to the wave.

Some Waves are public meaning that anyone can join in the conversation. One such wave titled “Wave in Class” was created by Ben Gurion University graduate student, Lauren Baum, and Sam Boland, a politics student from Occidental College. The intent of this particular Wave was to discuss concepts such as taking notes in a collaborative setting and using Wave as a platform for debate. This particular collaboration has grows to over 100 contributors including IT professionals, educators, doctoral students, and even high school students.²⁰ Samuel Boland wrote that “there appears to be a consensus that this [Google Wave] will work as a note-taking tool, the only disagreement is over how to implement it.”

Once the notes are complete, you can deepen the content in a number of ways. The playback option offers a time-line replay of how the conversation has been blipped. The teacher will be able to access the waves and contribute or guide everywhere necessary.¹⁸ Waves will be able to be downloaded into document form to be used either for review or parts of a wave to be used in a report.

Wave offers us a fascinating educational platform providing a centralized location for gathering information from diverse sources. Wave gives us the opportunity for real time critique for projects or disciplines that can and do benefit from peer review. Through the use of embedded components Wave can be used by nontechnical students. Using the playback function, educators can review the Wave blip-by-blip to see the evolution for the group mindset.²¹ I would seem that the applications to education that Wave could hold is only limed to imagination.

Conclusion

In looking at these three aspects of social media, there can be no doubt that there is intrinsic value to web 2.0 involvement in the classroom. I believe that the transition will not be an easy on though. In the workforce, projects done collaboratively are commonplace. In the classroom though, it seems to be perceived by teachers that collaboration is equal to cheating. We first need to make our cases to the educational system and then to the students themselves. The processes of learning can be much more interesting and more able to involve all students in a way that will increase productivity and in turn, the bell curve. Social Media Classroom sums it up like this, “The power of social media in education and elsewhere derives from their affordances for forms of communication and social behavior that were previously prohibitively difficult or expensive for more than a tiny elite to benefit. Forums afford many-to-many, multimedia, asynchronous discussions among small or large groups, regardless of distance, over extended periods; blogging affords the expression of individual voice, the emergence of a market for intelligent information-filtering and knowledge-dissemination, and public interactions in the form of comments; wikis enable collaborative document and knowledge creation as well as web-building as a learning method; social bookmarking makes possible simple, bottom-up, collective knowledge-gathering; microblogging and chat add synchronous online text channels that can be tuned and cultivated for specific purposes.”²²

If only to keep our children competitive, we must start incorporating Web 2.0 tool into everyday learning. In closing, two quotes come to mind.

The result of the educative process is capacity for further education.

John Dewey (1859-1952), U.S. philosopher and educator.

The mark of a well educated person is not necessarily in knowing all the answers, but in knowing where to find them.

Douglass Everett (1905-1996), American Olympic Hockey Player

This last quote speaks volumes about the direction we need to take our educational system, and indeed the direction we need to take our children and their futures.

Footnotes

¹ Wikipedia, Web 2.0, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 (Page created February 2005)

² Michelle Myers, Wikipedia to add Editors for the Living, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/08/25/tech/cnettechnews/main5264985.shtml (August 2009)

³ Dr. Thomas Ho, CIT@IUPUI.edu, http://blog.cit499.info/post/72927712/welcome-to-the-cit-iupui-edu-tumblelog (January 2009)

⁴ Michael Arrington. Profile: Delicious, Techcrunch, (June 16 2005)

⁵ Yahoo Acquires Del.icio.us : FlickrYahoolicious!, Search Engine Journal (December, 2005)

⁶ http://teachingtoday.glencoe.com/howtoarticles/social-bookmarking, Teaching Today, The McGraw-Hill Companies (2007)

⁷ http://teachingtoday.glencoe.com/howtoarticles/social-bookmarking, Teaching Today, The McGraw-Hill Companies (2007)

⁸ Educational Resources Online!, http://kayc28.wordpress.com/2007/04/28/delicious-education-links/, (April 2007)

⁹ http://mashable.com/2009/04/28/twitter-active-users/, How many People Actually Use Twitter?, (April 2009)

¹⁰ Brian Benjamin Carter, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=twitterverse, Urban Dictionary (April 2008)

¹¹ http://twitter.com/about#about, Twitter’s About Page (2006)

¹² Remergence (RemBeatZ), http://twitter.com/RemBeatZ/status/5482941549, (November 2009)

¹³ Seven Steps to Flatten Your Classroom, Atomic Learning, http://atomiclearning.com, (2009)

¹⁴ Liz Pullen, Twitter Lists: Frequently Asked Questions and Strategies, http://mashable.com/2009/11/03/twitter-lists-faq/, (November 2009)

¹⁵ Fingal, Diana. “Not your grandmother’s education.” Learning & Leading with Technology 36.6

(2009): 39. Computer Database. Web. (November 2009)

¹⁶ Marziah Karch, http://google.about.com/od/wx/g/Google_Wave_definition.htm, Google Wave, (November 2009)

¹⁷ Surfing Google Wave, http://surfinggooglewave.com/2009/10/gaming-on-the-wave/, Gaming on the Wave (October 2009)

¹⁸ Doug Belshaw, http://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2009/10/12/3-ways-google-wave-could-be-used-in-the-classroom/, 3 ways Google Wave could be used in the classroom, (October 2009)

¹⁹ Richard MacManus, http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_wave_use_cases_education.php, Google Wave Use Cases: Education, (October 2009)

²⁰ So You Want to Teach, Google Wave Will Revolutionize Online Classroom Instruction, http://www.soyouwanttoteach.com/google-wave-will-revolutionize-online-classroom-instruction/,

(September 2009)

²¹ Educause, 7 Things You Should Know About Google Wave, http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7055.pdf, (November 2009)

²² Social Media Classroom, Why the Classroom?, http://socialmediaclassroom.com/index.php/why-the-classroom, (June 2008)

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