Faculty Views on Social Networking and Web 2.0

Today, Thomson Publishing, an academic publishing company, released the results of a survey they conducted using more than 600 college professors. The findings showed that majority of professors don’t use social networking sites and Web 2.0 tools for instructional purposes, although they are familiar with some of these sites. More results are at the following website but unfortunately they didn’t publish complete results.

http://www.thomson.com/content/pr/tl/tl_high_ed/New_Media_Tools_Faculty_Survey

One thing I found interesting was number of faculty members who have their own blogs (10 percent) are not that different from general population (US) who have blogs (8 percent).

Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?

This is the title of an article by Bryan Alexander:

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0621.pdf

He does a good job in explaining the relationship between social software and web 2.0 but of course neither directly refers to the open source.

Here is another good read on the same topic:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/e-learning_20.php

Elgg on EduSpaces

Elgg is definitely one of best open social software designed for educators in mind.

http://eduspaces.net

First Master’s Program in Social Computing

The University of Michigan will be starting first master’s program in ’social computing’ focusing on open software. Hopefully more will follow.

http://www.si.umich.edu/msi/sc.htm

Distance Education and Social Software

Anderson discusses social software in relation to distance education (pdf):

www.unisa.edu.au/odlaaconference/PPDF2s/13%20odlaa%20-%20Anderson.pdf