Social Networking in Education

The speaker, Andy Carvin, is the Senior social media person at NPR. He spoke at Computers in Libraries in 2006 and it will be interesting to see what is different.

Establishing what social media is

Interactive Web – well established. He says 1.0, non-interactive, is almost gone, especially in professional space.

Three types of Networks

• personas
  • Facebook
  • MySpace
• discusssions
  • Facebook Groups - I Heart NPR
• blogs
  • Facebook “news feeds”
  • Flickr
  • YouTube

Discusssions

He featured Facebook

There is already a group of users that may be creating a group about your organization.

NPR fans created one before NPR did.

Blogs

Facebook’s news feed is roughly a blog

Some people use social networks as their blog platform - www.digitaldivide.net/blog/acarvin

Explained RSS for those not familiar- allows for content to be disaggregated and sent all throughout the web. DDN subscribes to Andy’s blog.

Great history of Social Networks! They have been around, especially in education, since the 1970’s

Recent developments - Friendster (2002), MySpace(2003), Facebook(2004), Bebo(2005)

But - USENET has been around since the 1970’s as a text-only, topic-centered discussion board.  Teachers were using it to have discussions outside of class. (list names in the U’s)

Email Discussion Lists

Listserv is a software created in 1986 that automates email discussion. (Kleenex effect)

Good examples

TakingITGlobal

• students around the World that discuss global policy
• have a relationship with the UN

Tapped In

• text based platform like Second Life
• One professor created a space that was so well done that it was accepted for CEU’s

New Tools

• YouTube 101
• TeachJeffSpanish.com
• Facebook Apps
• Facebook Groups
• Twitter
• Ning
  • specific closed online networks

On his comfort level with the technologies based on his age:

“Between being digital native and an immigrant, I was born on the boat coming over”

Needs of a medical researcher

Although this PhD candidate’s blog post has some points about the functionality of PubMed, her resistance towards using a medical librarian is one we should take note of.  I am sure that she is not alone in thinking that databases should be tailored to her needs.  She is a student at Harvard Medical School and observing the library web site, I see no liaison librarians.  Perhaps if she did have some, she would be more comfortable using them and they could educate her about the vast amounts of data that are accomodated in PubMed. It is true that PubMed could be more intuitive, but she needs to realize that the providing for access and retrieval of information is a profession in itself. 

 How can we educate scientists better?

Institutional Repository Content Worldwide and US

There are several reasons that an institution would have an IR.  Some focus on preservation and guaranteed access to their intellectual works.  Others create them to provide an alternative and some economic relief from the current scholarly work publishing model, and still others do it to increase the prestige of their institution.  Examining the types of materials actually contained in these IR’s can help reveal whether these reasons are working and what other uses may be developing.

Again the OpenDOAR project allows access to these charts:

Worldwide

 United States

 One of the statistics that strikes me is that multimedia items are the third most frequent type of item in US Repositories.  They are growing well beyond the intial purpose of holding text-based materials.  Is the software that is available up to this task?

Institutional Repository Software Use Worldwide and US

This chart displays how many repositories are using a particular software throughout the World.  It was generated from OpenDOAR:

Comparing this to the US specifically:

Fedora is also a prominent software within the literature but it does not appear here.  Perhaps some of the unkonwn ones are Fedora?

Encyclopedia of Life

Its finally live!  The Encyclopedia of Life has been sitting dormant for two years as it builds support and infrastructure.  Two days ago, I checked it and noticed that it is now operational with 25 sample species pages.  This site is really exciting because it could be the most comprehensive biological encyclopedia yet with the cooperation of the world’s largest and most reputable biological organizations like the American Museum of Natural History, the Biodiversiy Heritage Library and the Smithsonian Institution.  Photos, taxonomy display and a sliding bar that changes the complexity of the information are all compelling features of each of the species pages.   

 Its underlying digital structure is supported by Fedora, which allows flexible digital storage and can reflect semantic relationships between digital objects.

Alive and Skyping

This evening marks the beginning of videochat with Skype.  Thanks to Gary Price’s talk at the Maryland SLA Technology Day, I was able to remember that wize.com is a good place to compare different types of webcams in the marketplace.   I chose Logitech’s QuickCam Deluxe for Notebooks for its price and good reviews regarding its video and audio quality.  In addition to Skyping it will be useful to record audio and video for screencasts.