Students in the sandbox - social scaffolding for education

Alan Cann

School of Biological Sciences

University of Leicester

Find me here:   bit.ly/AJCann

Students in the sandbox - social scaffolding for education

Personal Learning Environments

Facefeed?

Friendfeed

Engagement? 10 weeks, 134 students analyzed:

5,376 entries

8,151 comments

5,232 "likes”

199,853 words - average of 1,491 each, not including private messages

~15% of students continued to use the service more than one month after the end of assessment - considerable increase from other tools (<1%)

Females score higher marks than males (Wilcoxon rank sum test, p < 0.001). Although females make more contributions than males, males are strategically focused on assessment criteria.

gephi.org

"Authority"

• Active group (red)• Internalized group (purple)• Inactive group (blue)

“Communities"

Google Social?

Google can’t do social?

Google+ is different

• Familiarity• Integration

A work in progress

• Search not working (apart from people)

• No groups like Friendfeed Groups/Facebook pages - you can't join someone else's circle

• No tagging (yet)

www.slideshare.net/AJCann

Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring... It's when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen.

Clay Shirky, 2008.