We-Learning: Social Software and E-Learning
By Eva Kaplan-Leiserson

Early e-learning traded technology for human interaction. Now, the personal element is being added back in. New social software tools borrowed from business and the younger generations combine tech and touch for the best of all possible worlds (including virtual ones).

In their rush to jump on the e-learning bandwagon, many companies created what is derogatively termed by some as shovelware: text-heavy content dumped online without much thought given to its usability or interactivity. Fortunately, that’s changing slowly. More companies are using real-time learning events, virtual classrooms, and interactive simulations to reintroduce the human (or almost human) element into learning technology.

Those intermediary steps are paving the way for innovations being introduced into the e-learning arena from the business world and the younger generations. Like synchronous learning technologies, these new tools, which can be classified loosely as social software, connect people not only to knowledge but also to other people. And they do it in exciting new ways.

Social software: A definition

In Darwin magazine, futurist Stowe Boyd writes that social software encompasses one or more (not necessarily all) of these elements:

Support for conversational interaction between people or groups. That includes real time conversations like instant messaging and what Boyd calls “slow time” conversations that occur in collaborative virtual spaces.

Support for social feedback. Reputation and trust are crucial in online interactions, as demonstrated by the importance eBay places on a seller’s rating and reputation.

Support for social networks. Many social software applications create a digital layout of a person’s social network and facilitate adding new connections.

One could argue that social software has been around as long as the Internet has. Boyd allows that some people consider email or message boards to be social software, but he makes an important distinction. Traditional software forms people into groups with a top-down approach, assigning membership. Social software takes a bottom-up approach, Boyd says, and enables people to organize themselves into a network based on their preferences.

The sudden popularity of social technologies Boyd attributes to the increase in low-cost tools and the critical mass of millions of people who are now connected to the Internet. Others, the authors of “It’s Not What You Know, It’s Who You Know” in Internet journal First Monday, say that because of the swift pace of organizational change, workers are relying less on traditional company structures and more on their own personal social networks. A third theory, described by the founders of online interaction consultancy Headshift, is that people are searching for a feeling of community that’s been lost as many “third places” (not work, not home, but a third place where people congregate and interact) have closed down.

Some social software tools are just around the corner—they’re being used already in the work world and are starting to be adopted for e-learning. Others are further in the distance—they’re being used by the younger generations but it’s rare to find them yet at businesses or in formal learning environments. In this two-part series, we’ll look at tools in both categories, projecting some possible uses for the technologies and keeping in mind, in all cases, that there are still quite a few kinks to be worked out before these applications become mainstream.

Just around the corner

Instant messaging. The granddaddy of social software, IM has been used by teenagers for years. Increasing acceptance of the tool as a business application is paving the way for it to be taken seriously in e-learning and e-knowledge sharing. And it’s showing up in traditional classrooms as well.

First, the traditional classroom: A recent New York Times article
discussed a lecture series at the University of Maryland in which students set up back-channel communication through instant messaging. Rather than ignoring the lecture and talking about their plans for the weekend, many students who hopped on IM discussed their opinions of what was being said and passed around links to Websites that either supported or refuted the speaker’s points. While instructors may view this type of activity as a distraction for learners, the article says it will probably become a matter of course for the generations who’ve grown up used to multi-tasking online.

As for virtual classrooms, many offer a public chat feature that enables learners to respond to the instructor and communicate with each other, as well as a way for learners to ask private questions of the instructor, but few allow private conversations among learners. However, some students use IM software independently, as distance learning instructor Morris Cooze and Ph.D. student Michael Barbour found in their research. In “Usage of Instant Messaging as a Means of Community Building in E-Learning Environments,” Cooze and Barbour report that half of the 41 students they surveyed from Canada’s Centre for Distance Learning and Innovation used IM software to augment their vClass virtual classroom.

The students cited such reasons as socializing with other students, communicating their feelings about the course, discussing coursework, and gaining feedback about their standing in the course. Interestingly, the communication was largely limited to students: Eighty-three percent said they didn’t use IM to communicate with the instructor. (Perhaps because they already had the ability to send private messages to him or her?)

What can traditional or online instructors do about the possible distraction of instant messaging for learners? Maybe just keep an open mind and consider how the tool can aid learning. Students using private IM during a course may stay more engaged and not be tempted to surf the Internet. Conversations between learners could generate new insights that could then be raised “out loud,” whether in a traditional or virtual classroom. And adding another human element to the technology of virtual classrooms may keep learners from dropping out. The students Cooze and Barbour studied said being able to talk with other students on IM made them feel more comfortable in the online class.

Courseware isn’t the only use for instant messaging technology in learning. Learning technology researcher Sam Adkins writes in his T+D article “The Brave New World of Learning” that stand-alone courseware will eventually be replaced completely with workflow tools that integrate knowledge-sharing applications directly into them. That will include instant messaging, which is already being used as instant performance support technology for when just-in-time is too late, Adkins says. Many of the enterprise application suites—Adkins gives PeopleSoft and Hyperwave as examples—have integrated “find an expert” features. (More on finding experts later.)

Collaborative workspaces. Technology that helps geographically dispersed people work together is gaining popularity in the business world, especially after 9/11. Shared workspaces help dispersed workers communicate and collaborate, enabling them to share and co-edit documents and calendars, view multimedia presentations, navigate Webpages together, use chat or send instant messages, and more. There are too many products to list here, but Network World Fusion put together this buyer’s guide with some of the offerings. (If the descriptions seem glowing, it’s because they were written by the suppliers.)

Although at first glance many of these tools may not seem much different from virtual classrooms, the best of them offer unique features and a degree of flexibility not seen with one-size-fits-all classroom technology. One tool that’s getting a lot of notice is Groove, which enables peer-to-peer collaboration through firewalls and without requiring Internet access. It not only enables users to customize each workspace they establish from a wide selection of tools, but also to create new proprietary tools for the needs of the organization.

This large variety of features and flexibility has caused at least one instructor to replace virtual classroom technology with Groove. Dr. Rick Lillie of the California State University at San Bernardino uses the software for all of his online instruction. Groove “goes to you,” he says, “rather than you having to go to Groove.”

But even if collaborative workspaces aren’t being used as virtual classroom tools, they still have direct applications to learning. Used for collaboration and communication, they fit into Adkins’s expanded definition of learning tools as performance support. As he describes in “Brave New World,” “learning is experienced as a by-product of real-time collaboration with people and machines in the context of workflow.”

Blogs. A blog, short for Weblog, is a Webpage made up of regular entries in reverse chronological order, containing commentary by the blog’s creator and links to other Webpages of note. Search for blog in Google and you’ll get more than 5 million links. That’s a clear indication that the blog has officially entered our cultural consciousness.

Blogs didn’t exist before the Internet, so they’re a completely new and unique form of communication and, dare we say it, learning. Although many blogs are very personal, bloggers who focus on specific topics become subject matter experts not only in their own minds, but in the minds of their loyal readers. And readers who use the comments feature available in most blogs to talk back turn the monologue into a useful dialogue, furthering the learning of all. That creates a collective intelligence, says an article in the Columbia Journalism Review.

Part journal, part journalism, part learning tool, blogs have contributed, according to the CJR, personality, eyewitness testimony, editorial filtering, and uncounted gigabytes of new knowledge.” Headshift founder Lee Bryant writes about the high degree of interconnection between bloggers (a standard feature of a Weblog is a list of other Weblogs that the person reads), which spreads ideas and discoveries rapidly. Bryant says that blogging has shown that free software can “succeed where million-dollar software has often failed--to engage people in collaboration, knowledge sharing, and debate.”

Blogs are starting to get some acceptance as business tools, which is why they’re included here in the “Just around the corner” section. Network World Fusion says that business blogs can “increase employee communication and knowledge, save time and resources, and build reputation and confidence.” Learning Circuits has offered a group blog for nearly two years, and T+D will be launching one in January.

Although there are plenty of blogs about learning, and though blogs certainly contribute to learning, we haven’t yet seen examples of blogs being used deliberately as e-learning or even blended learning tools. That doesn’t mean they’re not, though, or that they won’t be soon. Collaborative blogs could easily replace asynchronous message boards; instructor and learners in a synchronous course could co-navigate to a blog as a learning aid and use it as a launch pad for a writing assignment or group project; learners could be asked to create their own blogs as an assignment for an online or even a traditional course. The possibilities are almost infinite.

And what about blogs as workflow tools? Because they have limited application to business processes (even performance support), most likely they would first be integrated into another type of software. Blogs could easily become part of expert management software (see below) or online collaboration tools and make their way into workflow secondarily.

Expert management software. If you’re working on a business project and have a question, it’s often difficult to find the right person in your company to ask. You may spend more time tracking down that person than it takes him or her to answer your question. A new breed of software is attempting to change that. Expert management software automates the process of finding the people in the know and the documents that they’ve already generated that might answer your question.

Unlike knowledge management systems, which store information and put the onus on users to find what they need, this new breed of software uses sophisticated technology to automatically sort through documents and email already stored and point people to the content that will be most useful. It often rates the information according to frequency of use, timeliness, helpfulness to past users, and other factors, and points questioners to the people who can help them further.

Those experts can be contacted by instant messaging, by email, over the phone, or in person. Written responses from those people (and, coming soon in some systems, voice/audio responses) can then become part of the content base. Dave Pollard, author of the white paper “The Future of Knowledge Management,” suggests that the software he calls “expertise finders” can also point users to an expert’s blog if the expert is unavailable.

AskMe software also enables users to highlight a term in any Webpage or Office document that they need to know more about and get a definition from the software as well as documents containing more information and people to contact. Another tool, ActiveNet from Tacit, enables hotlists that continuously search for information a user is interested in and notifies him or her when new documents or answers on the topic are generated.

These tools aren’t courseware, but they are certainly electronic learning aids. Some types of expert management software can also be accessed through mobile devices, which makes this technology ideal for just-in-time learning. A sales representative out in the field with a difficult question from a potential customer could access the software wirelessly and find the answer quickly, as well as find the person to contact if the information isn’t available online.

Expert management software also has great potential to be integrated with other workflow tools. Imagine a shared collaborative workspace linked to the software so that, as users work together on projects and generate questions, they can immediately find the answer or the person who can give it to them, contact that person, and then all see the answer appear on the screen. No more misunderstandings from one person bringing back incorrect or unclear information to the group. Such integration is beginning to happen with the enterprise application suites Adkins describes. ActiveNet also provides the ability to integrate collaborative workspaces, although the space is launched from within the expert management software and not the other way around.

The age of connection

Some people may fear that social software will go the way of knowledge management software: much hype, then a slow death. But knowledge management was hijacked by software vendors, says Lee Bryant, who created IT infrastructure that was “woefully divorced from anything approaching normal human behavior.” In contrast, Bryant says, social software tries to remove obstacles in the path of interaction to let people communicate and collaborate more effectively. In other words, to let people do what they do naturally, but in a better way.

Knowledge management was the darling of the Information Age. But social networks are the focus of a new age, the Age of Connection. In this age, workers are “empowered only if they are successful at creating and maintaining personal social networks,” say the authors of “It’s Not What You Know.” They call that the “necessary background labor smart workers take on” to perform their jobs effectively.

In the second half of this article (look for it in January), we’ll take a look at some challenges in using social software as well as additional tools that will help workers and learners create and maintain their networks and communicate and collaborate within them. These tools are further in the distance—being used currently by few in the business world and very few in learning. Where do these innovations—stage-two collaboration tools, social network mapping applications, proximity tools, and virtual worlds—come from? Primarily the younger generations, who are leading the charge in the Age of Connection and allowing the rest of the world to follow along.

Published: December 15, 2003