One Year or Less: Social Networking

Social Networking

Time-to-adoption Horizon: One Year or Less

The expectation that a website will remember the user is well established. Social networking takes this several steps further; the website knows who the user’s friends are, and may also know people that the user would like to meet or things the user would like to do. Even beyond that, social networking sites facilitate introduction and communication by providing a space for people to connect around a topic of common interest. These sites are fundamentally about community—communities of practice as well as social communities.

Overview

Undoubtedly the most pervasive aspect of Web 2.0, social networking is all about making connections and bringing people together. Conversations that take place in social networking contexts are inherently social, and often revolve around shared activities and interests. The heart of social networking is fostering the kinds of deep connections that occur when common pursuits are shared and discussed.

Students are tremendously interested in social networking sites because of the community, the content, and the activities they can do there. They can share information about themselves, find out what their peers think about topics of interest to them, share music and playlists, and exchange messages with their friends. Two of the best-known examples, MySpace and Facebook, have thousands of members who connect daily or hourly. Social networking services like RateMyProfessors—which allows young people to find out about professors from a student’s perspective before they take a class—attract students by giving them a place to share their opinions and see what others have to say. These sites are frequently customizable and user- controlled; when you create a page on MySpace, you have complete control over what to show and who will see it, and how the page will look to you and to others.

Researchers note that online spaces like Myspace and Facebook give students a safe place to gather, in much the same way that young people of previous generations hung out at the burger joint, the roller rink, or the mall. Not all social networking sites are aimed at students, of course. LinkedIn is designed for professionals, and Flickr is used by people of all ages, to name just two examples. Sites like these, though popular, are not the driving force behind the adoption of social networking in education, however. It is the intense interest shown by students that is bringing social networking into academia.

Social networking is already second nature to many students; our challenge is to apply it to education. Social networking sites not only attract people but also hold their attention, impel them to contribute, and bring them back time and again—all desirable qualities for educational materials.

Relevance for Teaching, Learning, and Creative Expression

Because of students’ tremendous interest in social networking, colleges and universities are increasingly going to be seeking ways to employ the same strategies that make social networking sites so effective. Although there are not yet many institutional examples of social networking, there are easily dozens of examples that are familiar to students and used by them on a daily basis; institutional uses will emerge very quickly because these approaches clearly appeal to students.

Indications are clear that universities are turning their attention to this phenomenon. Centers like the Social Computing Lab at the Rochester Institute of Technology are beginning to examine the effects of social networking in education (see social.it.rit.edu). This and similar organizations are investigating the ways social networking is being used, evaluating existing tools, and even developing new ones.

Research and use of these systems are occurring in tandem, and both will contribute to the integration of social networking and education.

Another factor that will facilitate rapid adoption is the toolset. The selection of available tools is broad, with many open-source options readily available. It is increasingly easy to build social networking functions into any website; think of the Google home page, which allows users to include personal calendars, news, Flickr collections, and other modules simply by selecting them from a list. Educational tools are already being developed, including single-purpose tools like CollegeRuled (www.collegeruled.com), where students can quickly create class schedules and share them with friends, and bundled tools like Elgg (www.elgg.org), an open-source system that lets each user set up a blog, a web profile, an RSS reader, and a file repository with podcasting capabilities. Systems like Elgg offer an easy way to provide social networking options without a huge amount of work by providing hosted accounts or even entire private hosted communities. Such open-source systems can also be downloaded and installed on campus, providing a secure internal community site.

Social networking sites are among the fastest- growing, most-used sites on the Internet, and the features that make them so compelling are features that we need to understand and incorporate into higher education websites. The fact that so many students want these interactions and seek them out is a strong indication that we need to be very interested in them as well. The way these sites bring people together makes them powerful and exciting. This is the next step after portals: to harness the power of social networking to build rich, interactive, robust learning communities.

A sampling of social networking applications across disciplines includes the following:

• Encourage community and self-expression. Campus-based social networking sites offer a safe, convenient space for students to build ties with community members and experiment with developing a public self. The University of Pennsylvania offers membership in Pennster, its social networking site, to incoming freshmen so that they can begin to get to know their classmates before arriving on campus.
• Offer immersion in a foreign language environment. Students learning another language can join a community in that language, where they will be exposed to conversational and colloquial reading and writing, learn about daily life, and establish friendships with native speakers. The Mixxer is a site devoted to helping language students find conversational partners and connecting them using voice-over- IP software.
• Extend the impact and life span of conferences and workshops. Topical social networking sites can be used before, during, and long after an in-person conference. Attendees can begin to network before they even get to the hallways, and the group’s wisdom can be collected and preserved, increasing the effect of the conference and prolonging its usefulness.

Examples of Social Networking

The following links provide examples of user-created content applications.

• Allegheny College on MySpace
  At Allegheny College, it’s not just the students who do social networking—the college itself has a MySpace page.
• Big Blue Brainstorm
  IBM hosted an online Innovation Jam in September2006thatusedsocialnetworkingtools as a way to connect participants worldwide.
• Know before You Go (RateMyProfessors & Pick-A-Prof)
  These two services give students an idea of what to expect of a class based on information provided by other students. Students share and seek opinions about 770,000 professors from 6,000 schools at RateMyProfessors. Pick-A-Prof connects with Facebook to integrate students’ friends lists with professor ratings.
• Many2Many
  This group-authored blog discusses social software, social networking, and their implications for education. Authors include Clay Shirky, Liz Lawley, Ross Mayfield, Sébastien Paquet, David Weinberger, and danah boyd.
• stu.dicio.us
  Stu.dicio.us is a notetaking tool that lets students take and share notes, quickly link to Wikipedia and Google entries for keywords, keep track of assignments, and manage their studies.

For Further Reading

The following articles and resources are recommended for those who wish to learn more about social networking.

• How university administrators should approach the Facebook: Ten rules (Fred Stutzman, Unit Structures, January 23, 2006) This blog entry describes current trends around Facebook and recommends measures for university administrators.
• Mashable! (Pete Cashmore, retrieved November 15, 2006) Mashable! is a blog focused exclusively on social networks—a meta-collection of social networking sites, with commentary.
• The MySpace Effect (Christopher Heun, SchoolCIO, retrieved December 19, 2006) This article discusses how to balance the benefits of social networking spaces with concerns for student privacy and safety.
• Social Networking: Five Sites You Need to Know (Fred Stutzman, Unit Structures, June 14, 2006) This blog entry gives an overview of five lesser known social networking sites and describes three emerging trends related to the use of such sites.
• Social Network Sites: My Definition (danah boyd, Many2Many, November 12, 2006) This article describes social networking and offers examples.
• Social Software in Academia (Todd Bryant, EDUCAUSE Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 2, 2006) This article describes a variety of types of social software and lists examples of educational use.
• del.icio.us: social Networking (Horizon Project Advisory Board and Friends, 2006) Follow this link to find resources tagged for this topic and this edition of the Horizon Report, including the ones listed here. To add to this list, simply tag resources with “hz07” and “social-networking” when you save them to del.icio.us.