Online Learning in the News: Social Software and Recommended Resources

Social Software and Online Education:

Teaching Social Software with Social Software - Examines how social software enables students to participate in distributed research, an approach to learning in which knowledge is collectively constructed and shared.

Uses and Potentials of Wikis in the Classroom - Argues that wikis are one possible tool to help bridge the gap between teachers and students.

Safety and Social Software:

Online Persona Undermines a Resume - Can MySpace prevent you from landing your dream job?

The Pandora's Box of Social Networking - Talking about online safety is important!

Recommended Resources to Get You Started:

Blogger - Provides free, automated blog publishing tool that allows you to create and customize blogs. The Distance Learning Library Services blog runs on Blogger.

del.icio.us - Share bookmarks and add tags to describe a link. Here is an example of an educator's account.

Facebook - Social networking for College and University students.

Instructional Video Resources - A portal to sites that will help you to create and share online videos.

Flickr - Store and share photos online. One Art History class used Flickr to encourage students to comment on paintings.

MediaWiki - A free software package originally written for wikipedia. The Biz Wiki is a good example of a site that runs on MediaWiki.

MySpace - Ubiquitous social networking site. See the University Libraries' Myspace for an example of an educational utilization.