Monday, September 29, 2008

Makin' Whuffie

Social Capital


Tara Hunt has a book all about creating online social capital: The Whuffie Factor. Until it comes out, you can read articles by her on her blog - I like this one: You Can't Eat Whuffie, But It's Getting Harder to Eat Without It.

Once explained briefly, we all recognize what "Whuffie" is. We know when we are gaining it, we know when we don't have it, and we know when we do. It's basically your reputation, which is all you have online, since "on the internet, no one knows you're a dog"!

Members of an online community gain social capital by making thoughtful or helpful contributions. This can be made tangible by a rating system - some forums have thumbs up or down or voting systems for forum posts. For example, Amazon.com has the "was this post helpful" vote. Contributors with more helpful votes (and more posts), gain social capital and their posts tend to be more heavily weighted by other members of the community. I've seen numerous forums where the number of posts you had made showed up in your profile on each post, and crossing certain thresholds changed your status (e.g., 1-50 posts = "new kid," 50-100 posts = "been around the block," 100-200 posts = "old hand," etc). Once contributors notice these stats, they strive to get positive votes and higher status - it's just human nature!

Social capital is a natural and logical consequence/reward of a student's (or anyone's) online behavior and contributions, and as such, it is a powerful tool for educators to include in their online courses to ensure student engagement and retention.

Online Community


A sense of community is created where people have a common goal, such as a project, or can benefit from working together. One of those benefits is social capital, as mentioned above. Another is increased learning. If you want to truly learn something, there is nothing like teaching it, so allowing, in fact encouraging, students to help one another solve problems, to teach each other, increases learning for both the helper and the helped.

A group can gain social capital by being proud of what it creates and getting positive feedback from other groups. A chance for students, whether working as individuals or in collaborative groups, to give feedback to each other is a valuable tool for creating a greater sense of community and engagement toward common goals.

Educator Tools and Links for Creating Community

(and opportunities for students to develop social capital):

Bookmarking, Sharing, Highlighting, and Annotating Online Resources:

Diigo is a great tool for Educators, because you can form a group, and share bookmarks, which each member can highlight and comment on. Diigo is a fantastic tool for sharing resources and collaborating. Now, they have come out with Diigo for Educators, to make it even better!

Your Own Networks:

Moodle.org is a great online community as well. At first, Moodle may seem clunky to use compared to other online forums, but Moodle is much more than just a forum - it's an open source Course Management System with many, many ways to customize it for your own classroom. And it's free! If you've taken other online courses with Blackboard or WebCT, you might realize that Moodle is pretty darn great. The Moodle website also has great resources for educators and an active, passionate, community. Here is the Moodle Pedagogical Philosophy, which makes for inspiring reading!

Ning for Educators is another great resource for creating your own, private online community - now ad free, too! In the Ning, students can each have their own pages, leave comments for others, create blogs, have discussions, post photos, videos and more. I am a member of Nerdfighters, which is on a Ning network, and find the format very fun and easy to use!

Video:

YouTube, or TeacherTube for those worried about the (tons of) inappropriate content on YouTube (ie, K-12 teachers).

Some YouTube resources I enjoy are Lee Lefever's Explanations in Plain English which may be helpful to explain social bookmarking, blogging, wikis, Twitter, and much more to your students should you want to start using those in your online classes.

Also on YouTube is my favorite video from professor Mike Wesch, explaining just what Web 2.0 is, and the power of the network: The Machine is US/ing Us. He has an interesting video presentation on "An anthropological introduction to YouTube" on his home page!

Twitter:

Using Twitter as an Educational Tool shows how microblogging can be used in the online classroom to help create community, and perhaps better than that article is one it links to, Twitter for Academia by AcademHack, another useful site.

Creating Your Own Social Network of Educators

If you are on Diigo, or another Social Bookmarking site, you can follow lots of other educators who are on there and learn from them, or at least learn from the same sources they are learning from - Kathy Schrock is one who comes to mind for K-12 educators.

Twitter also has communities - I sort of follow the web design community, the birdwatcher/naturalist/hiker community, and the liberal community on there, but it's all about who you follow. Here is a list of 100+ Learning Professionals on Twitter for some ideas.

Conclusion


Social engagement is a great way to motivate students, keep them engaged in active learning that feels meaningful and relevant to them. Giving chances for students to earn, and bestow, social capital, using practices to create a sense of community, and modeling life-long learning yourself will help your students, and you, succeed in the world of online teaching and learning!

9 comments:

Lynda Felder said...

Thank you Maggie for this wonderfully written and insightful post. I learn so much from you.

I hope you don't mind a comment on your writing style -- this is terrific because the tone is so casual, yet packed with pertinent information. Plus you organize and use subtitles.

I am so happy to have your excellent definitions of social capital, as it might relate to my students. We teachers always have to evaluate and grade participation. Gen Y students can rebel against the very thought of this evaluation. To place the participation in the context of social capital will I believe motivate students with a much better carrot that the "eat your vegetables, they are good for you" approach.

Devin and Maggie said...

Thank you! Yes, "Casual R Us" - ha. I agree with Kathy Sierra that "Conversational writing kicks formal writing's ass"! That is an excellent article on why our brains pay more attention when they think we are in a conversation, and it applies very well to online teaching and learning.

Maggie

T.M. Hillis said...

Wow. You have some great suggestions and links on your blog Maggie. I'd like to have some video with audio pieces with my online classes to balance all the written instruction and just provide a little variation. I will be checking out your links. Yes, there is something about Alaska. We were there in August of 2006, taking a cruise north from Vancouver and fell in love with the vastness, all the shades of green, water, whales, bears, ice, and on and on. My wife and I would like to go back, after the boys head off, and spend the summer sometime. Good job on your blog. I'll check back to make sure I got all the references and check out any updates you've done. Tim

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mark Flanders said...

I want to be able to absorb all of Maggie’s online knowledge without doing the work.

Please send me that pill or osmosis directions…

You obviously have much experience and I am appreciating that. But after spending a few hours on the computer, I’d just as soon be hammering a nail or watering plants.

Your comment about …truly learning through teaching… hit a note with me. When I first got a teaching gig and told a friend, his reply was, "You are going to learn so much!" He’s a smart guy and so right.

Gaining social capital through negative and positive reinforcement via thumbs up or down, or gaining posts is interesting. And then we have Howard Stern…

Thank you so much for the plethora of information and all the links. I want to incorporate a blog or something similar in my classes that meet, for additional support and information. As someone who has a difficult time studying and retaining information, I’m always looking for additional and better ways to facilitate learning.

Whuffie Factor… oh no! Just one more thing to be paranoid about.

--Mark F from class

M Therese Brown said...

Wow...you know what you are doing. Can I take the same osmosis pill as Mark? I must admit I haven't come across the term Whuffie yet but now I can see I have something else to worry about - my onine reputation!! Thanks for sharing all you wonderful insights!!

Jason said...

Great blog post, I like the way you referred to existing social media networks such as youtube and blogs as tools for social capital. I think it's great how Web 2.0 sites and blogs provide Social media meta tags connecting everything together to create a sense of community not just online but through out the world wide web.

Jason

teacherninja said...

Nerdfighters!

dftba...

Anonymous said...

Thanks for a thoughtful post! Enjoy reading it.

Diigo annotation on any webpage adds a new dimension to the Web, providing an extra layer on which users can leave their thoughts and survey the collective opinions of the community, and promoting dialogue, right on the surface of the Web.

Regarding your point on rating / award system, currently Diigo Group bookmarks already support "votes" by group members, on top of all other levels of commenting communication.

We will also be introducing more meaningful (ie. taken anti-spam into consideration) contribution attributes to further reward users' participation! So stay tuned as Diigo continues to evolve :-)

Best,

Maggie Tsai
co-founder
Diigo

Dr. Smirnova said...

Thank you Maggie!

After I have read the post I felt as if I have written it myself. I feel the same way about learning and teaching in current Information-based, new Information-packed era. I have been teaching online courses for about 7 years and have been integrating the Web 2.0 tools in the courses all these years and see benefits in doing so! I can attest that all the mentioned tools & services: Moodle, wikis, blogging, podcasting, forums, digital story-telling, etc. provide the conditions for creating collective intelligence, that Maggie calls "social capital," allows BLOOMing the spirit of learning community.

Thanks again, Maggie for the insightful post!
Ludmilla