IEHA Releases New Book: Clean and Healthy Schools for Dummies

My Software And Your Software Make a Great Couple (Social Software)

Image by Looking For Fish Tacos At ELI 2006
Key questions

* What is Social Software? Is an answer to that question useful to us?
* How are these tools different than email or discussion boards?
* What compenents can be added to weblogs to enhance their appeal and effectiveness? Do these raise special challenges?

Tom Coates (PlasticBag, Yahoo) definition of Social Software is Social software is a particular sub-class of software-prosthesis that concerns itself with the augmentation of human social and / or collaborative abilities through structured mediation (this mediation may be distributed or centalised, top-down or bottom-up/emergent).

Then again, there’s Clay Shirky’s definition: "Social software is stuff that gets spammed."

Jon Udell (InfoWord) writes about The Social Enterprise. We are social animals for whom networked software is creating a new kind of habitat. Social software can be defined as whatever supports our actual human interaction as we colonize the virtual realm. The category includes familiar things such as groupware and knowledge management, and extends to the new breed of relationship power tools that have brought the venture capitalists out of hibernation.

The buzzword of "Web 2.0" caught on in 2005 as an attempt to describe a shift from the Web (1.0) as a system where the web was used primarily to "read" (consume) largelt statiuc content (web pages). The next digit is what some are calling the "Read/Write" web where there are now web-based tools for not just reading/consuming content, but ones where mere mortals can create content.

Fortunately Others Are Keeping Track…
* Complete List of Web 2.0 Applications (Virtual Karma)
* Tom O’Reilly’s What is Web 2.0?

There are way to many examples to list in one place. We take just a weak slice at the pile below. But what is interesting is how many of these are designed to be able to share their contentn elsewhere (RSS syndication), provide tools so their content can be published to weblogs (via weblog APIs), and use the concept of user-based loose categorization, or tagging, as both an individual roganizing scheme, and a way of organziing common content across numerous individuals.

Media Containers/Collections
Sites where people can store and share images, music, video.
* Images: Using blog like features (chronological organization, comments) flickr, fotolog, BuzzNet
* Video: Ourmedia, ClipShack

Shared Writing Environments
Wikis spring to mind as a profiund social software, places on the web where anyone can be an author.

Wiki Pedagogy Usurping official authorizing practices in the public domain poses fundamental – if not radical – questions for both academic theory and pedagogical practice… The particular pedagogical challenge is one of control: wikis work most effectively when students can assert meaningful autonomy over the process. This involves not just adjusting the technical configuration and delivery; it involves challenging the social norms and practices of the course as well (Lamb, 2004).

* Wide Open Spaces: Wikis Ready or Not – Brian’s EDUCAUSE Review article.
* Using Wikis to Empower Student Learning – don’t miss this ELI session by Steve Greenlaw and his students on an outstanding application of this form.
* Vicki Davis is using WikiSpaces with high school students to great effect.
* 3rd and 4th Graders using wikis
* Using Wikis In Education
* Course Advisor Wiki "the course review catalog that anyone can edit!"

Maybe it is Web 2.5 but new variants have emerged that are less wiki-like and more like an online Word Processer. For an overview of some of these online "office suites", see Innerphaze’s Ajax Office Review.
* Writely

Social Bookmarks
Online collections of individually bookmarked (and annotated) web sites. Combined with user based classification (tagging) new patterns and ways of discovering content emerge by looking at what a larger number of people are marking as important on the web.

* 7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking – from the helpful folks at EDUCAUSE.
* weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/delicious.html – excellent screencast on the nitty gritty of folksonomies by Jon Udell.

Information Organizers
* List makers Remember the Milk
* Goal Setting: 43 Things
* Project Planning: Backpack, Basecamp

Our Blogged Bits…
* Alan blogs Me 2.0, Web Decimal Conundrum, and Zeldman Snorts Ajax and Hits Web 3.0

See more examples and resources in the network tag stream.

Image Credits: Mock-up of SciFi book cover created by Alan Levine, derived from Creative Commons licensed flickr blue robot image by "jspad"

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