WebedtecH

Slashdot | Most Business-Launched Virtual Worlds Fail

What’s surprising to me is that this should be remotely surprising to anyone.  Talk about playing where your core competency isn’t.

The Journal has a detailed article about some of the things you can do to get your administrations to buy-in to the concepts and benefits of social networking. Here’s some highlights:

So just to get started, you’ll need to find ways to broach the subject without scaring off stakeholders. That means focusing on the form of social media right for your school; tying a social media program into learning objectives; and finding the right ways to break the ice with administrators, IT/technology directors, and other teachers.

Identifying the social tools that fit with your school’s goals and objectives can go a long way to smoothing the adoption curve. Start with what the students will learn using the tools without identifying the focus on learning the tools themselves.

Just as businesses looking to implement social media solutions need to tie their programs to core  business objectives, classroom teachers, curriculum planners, and administrators looking to implement some type of social media solution need to tie their program to a learning objective. Is there a specific expected schoolwide learning objective that you’re trying to meet? Remember, you can’t effectively tie a social media program to a technology-based learning objective.The goal of a social media program is in simple terms to foster and enhance communication between people and to socialize learning; the technology skills needed by students and staff to execute a program of this nature need already to be in place, and if they’re not, then technology objectives (Netiquette, e-mail literacy, search literacy, basic multimedia literacy, password creation, keyboarding, mousing) need to be completed first.

I couldn’t agree with this more. Before you put the time, effort, and “political capital” into an educational network solution (much more palatable than social network) make sure the people who will be using it have the prerequisite skills necessary to make it work.

David Warlick was kind enough to tweet the following from a conference he was attending:

Deneen Frazier just said that the one and only measure of a community’s health is dropout rate.

Through an interesting set of 140 character miscommunications with some other followers of David it turns out that this is referring to an actual physical community. The misunderstanding came from me thinking it was referring to a “virtual” community. Here’s why:

The concept of a virtual community follows many of the norms and standards we assign to physical or “real life” communities. There are acceptable behaviors, methods of participation and contribution, as well as interactions with other members. However when the community starts to fail the member from the standpoint of the member “getting something out of” the community they often “drop out” and unsubscribe.

Now when we compare that to our educational system there are numerous parallels. When the student feels the system is failing them, they don’t see opportunities, or the real world is preventing/enticing them to leave school they “unsubscribe” from the school. The question is…how are they making that determination? What are the factors leading them to the decision to leave the community?

I pose we as educators look more closely at the interactions students have with virtual communities as an opportunity to understand their drivers in what keeps them in a community and what prompts them to “drop out.”

Video: Twitter in Plain English | Common Craft – Explanations In Plain English

Question – does this explain how you can use Twitter to build your personal learning network or does that need to be a sequel?

Techdirt: Is An Online Study Group Cheating?

Vincent Clement writes in to let us know that that a student at Ryerson University in Toronto is facing expulsion for setting up an online study group for his chemistry class using Facebook. The school is saying it wasn’t so much a study group as it was a place for 146 students to cheat and share answers (though, it’s only blaming the student who ran the group). Students at the university are reasonably up in arms over the matter, as they don’t see how it’s any different than a traditional study group. Of course, the whole thing seems a little bit silly. As we discussed almost exactly a year ago, people working together to collaborate is an important skill in the real world, and what some people consider “cheating” these days seems a lot like the type of collaboration that kids are quite used to doing online, and which should serve them well later in life.

We can view this quite easily.  The school doesn’t have a clue.  I look for this action to be retracted rather quickly.  If not, then anyone who knows chemistry should join his study group and give these guys a hand.