Learning café – VENUS SUMMER SCHOOL – Szczecin, POLAND

Friday, 7^th September 2007

Notes on discussion

1. What is the added value of using social software in education?

- students will know the content matter better, deeper and ask detailed questions

- improves the efficiency of teaching but preparing materials takes more time

- learning activities are more attractive with more multimedia content involving students deeper

- practical examples, practical use of knowledge (Technical Universities)

- question is asked only once (then put to FAQ- saves time)

- risk of information overload which could lead to decreased efficiency of teaching

- more engaged students, greater involvement

- encourages shy students to ask questions (forums,

- become center of the students community, make students more involved into university’s life

- need incentives to start up, some compulsion at the beginning to make people use it, once it gathers critical mass of users it becomes alive and independent

- the extent of use depends mostly on human factor

2. What are the advantages and disadvantages ?

+ involves students into discussions 

+allows better organization of resources / knowledge management

+ making your own base of knowledge based on public sources from internet

- social software allows unwanted acquisition of sensitive personal data

- copying and pasting – plagiarism

- researchers: rely too much on secondary sources – stop doing research themselves

3. What role do linguistic and cultural issues play in social software? How can they affect learning? 

- special (diacritic) characters can not be used, that are specific to particular languages

- different, nation-specific activities, siesta, grace may disturb online discussion

- negative: frame of reference is different for different nations: different jokes, different way of seeing things, may offend people unwillingly 

- price of the internet service – lots of places when it is very expensive

- some social services are blocked by the government for political reasons, e.g. China, West Africa

4. What is the most effective way of introducing social software in education?

- example: Business School of Nowy Sącz – they widely cooperate with Google

- pressure from bottom up (from users to authorities /government), most effective way

- top down implementation process - group of managers trying to force the rest to use it, faster but less effective

- at first som compulsion is needed to make eg lecturers grow a habit of using the forum to communicate with students  

6. If everything is open to be shared (sharing = principle), what happens to the concepts of ownership, individuality, student's creativity? How can this be evaluated? How does assessment change under social software?

- students must include list of references in their papers

- copy rights, common license

- the authorities should provide digital right management

7. What does an institution that wants to use social software in its educational practices need to do? What implications would such an objective have?

- the software should be attractive and interesting

- must have a purpose, be meaningful, bring positive results,

- all users have good motivation,

- the software should in the long run decrease the work of teachers

- should user friendly

- increase the productivity and effectiveness of students/lecturers

- besides the system, members of the company have got some place for themselves, place to develop

- procedures for teachers, “carrot and stick” – to make them actually use the software system for working with students on regular basis  

- usability (user friendly interface...)

8. Does social software put too much pressure on students and teachers to perform? Will the workload increase?

- depends on the mode of implementation

- students should search, develop the topic

- teacher must be well paid, spend some time, visit the forum every day, answer questions

- teacher must stimulate students – tasks must be challenging, make them invent, create and not copy-paste

9. Does the success of social software depend on the subject/topic/field of study it is being used in? Does the type of the course matter? 

- better for difficult subjects like statistics or for very involved students

- impossible in fields like medicine - need of interaction and exercises is obvious – human senses are more important in learning eg surgeries than textual knowledge downloaded from the internet

10. What specific advantages and disadvantages will social software have for research at higher educational institutions?

+ saves time – you can begin research where someone else stopped

+ internet was developed for academic use

+ results of experiments could be easy validated and evaluated, resources spent more efficiently

+ is helps build teams of talented, devoted researchers,

- researchers must use it wisely, otherwise social software will make them “lazy”, uncreative

 published by Magda  on behalf of all  Szczecin  Venus SS participants