Creating a Culture of Collaboration

Online Communities

Online Communities: Different things to different people

• Also known as Social Software• A Google search on February 5, 2007,

returned 709 entries on the keywords “definition of social software”.

• Clay Shirky defined it simply as “software that supports group interaction”

• Current terms also include Web 2.0, Social Network/ing Sites, Social Web Applications, Social Media

Wikipedia definition

• Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities

The Social in Social Software

danah boyd identifies 3 elements• Profile• Traversable, publicly articulated social

network. • Semi-persistent public comments

Examples

By General Purpose:• MySpace, Friendster, Bebo, Facebook,

Orkut

By Modalities• YouTube, Flickr, LastFM, del.icio.us

By Special Purpose:• Tadalist, event.org, technorati

• Wikis (collaborative “white board”)• Blogs (0nline journal)• Tags (free taxonomy/categories)

Two-way and Read/Write Tools

Interest in Social Software

Popularity among the youth

“The Pew American and Internet Life Project research suggested that 12 to 17-year-olds look to web tools to share what they think and do online.” BBC report (2005)

Case studies (in the academic setting)• Friendster testimonial feature in creating frames in

Web Design class• Blogging and comment features for collaborative

idea generation in a Creativity/Innovation class• Dedicated Social Network site (ning.com) to

manage class discussions in Systems simulation class

• Dedicated Social Network site (elggspaces.com) to manage student e-portfolio in Strategic Management course

Strategic Management (1 of 3)

Tools: Functionalities of elggspaces.com• File uploads• Community creation• Activity tracking• Tagging/Labelling• Rss, Aggregation/Publication• Profile

Strategic Management (2 of 3)

Tools: Functionalities of elggspaces.com• Group creation (fine tuning the sub-community

building)• Friends One-way /Two-Way• Network• Dashboard for personalized learning

enhancements or widgets

Strategic Management (3 of 3)

Tools: Functionalities of elggspaces.com• Configurable Theme (Look and feel)• Personal/Community Blogs (Levels of

privacy/public profile)• Rich Text Editing via buttons (e.g. image/link

insertions, boldface/italics) • HTML editing • Objectionable/Interesting item Flagging

What those tools imply

“[participants] stop being mirrors, and instead become amplifiers.  Their job is not merely to reflect what they encounter, but to add value to it.  Content and skills are no longer the end product, but they become raw materials, with which [participants] learn to work and play and share.  Information is captured by the [community member], processed, added to, remixed, and then shared back, to be captured by another [participant] and reprocessed. D. Warlick (2007) 

2D2C of Online Communities

Disclose

Discover

Connect

Co-create

A broad framework

• Can be found at: http://www.mind42.com/pub/mindmap?mid=0e70e9aa-8f2b-4c4f-8d58-7e60563ac480

• To participate/co-create, please register at http://pinoys4education.elggspaces.com

• Then look for Joel Yuvienco and “connect” to him

Salamat po!

• yuviencoj@canlubang.dlsu.edu.ph• http://joelogs.blogspot.com