Learning Technology

Social Tagging for Library Science

Our next Brain Gain session will investigate the use of social tagging technology for library science.  We briefly investigated social tagging in an earlier post on social software.  Popularized by sites such as del.icio.us, which offers users the ability to share their web bookmarks by labeling them with a personalized set of descriptor "tags", and Flickr, which allows users to share and find photos via tagging, this phenomenon is part of a larger "social software" movement that empowers users to organize information via a bottom-up "folksonomy".  That's fine for bookmarks and photos, but could this type of social tagging allow users to organize library content?  And if so, why would libraries sanction such a system?

Social Annotation

Our next "Brain Gain" meeting of the Harvard Business School IT Group's Educational Technology & Multimedia team will focus on exploring Social Annotation and the trends and technologies surrounding it.  Our guest will be Robert Lucas.  I've cited many items on this blog from Rob in the past -- Rob is a Harvard University graduate and current master's student in the Technology, Innovation, and Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where he has received a Reynolds Fellowship in Social Entrepreneurship.  With interests lying at the interesection of education and social software, he has recently been researching social annotation and is working to start an online community for teacher collaboration.  You can view Rob's Teachers' Lounge blog for more info.

Columbia University's use of Wikis in the classroom

This week the Harvard Business School IT Group's Educational Technology & Multimedia team invites our peers at the Columbia University Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL) to show us the work they've been doing with Wiki technology in the classroom.  Educational Technologist Jonathan Hall and his teammates will give us an overview of their Wiki platform and discuss some of the projects they have that involve the use of Wikis.

Toyota & Linux: The Benefits of Collaborative Networks

This past summer an issue of Harvard Business Review contained an article entitled Collaboration Rules by Philip Evans and Bob Wolf (Senior Vice President and Manager, respectively, of the Boston office of the Boston Consulting Group). The article explores how businesses seeking innovation and growth should take note of how the Linux open-source software development community operates. I’d like to summarize some of the article here because it illuminates the convergence of a number of the topics covered here including collaboration trends and software development methodologies.

Wikis and Blogs at HBS

Larry Bouthillier, head of Educational Technologies at Harvard Business School, and Dave Streiff ,who heads up our R&D, are already evaluating blog and wiki software for use at HBS.  Unlike the issue of iPods at HBS, where the group struggled to find a killer application worthy of significant investment, we literally could employ wikis and blogs tomorrow.  The challenge will not be finding worthy applications for these technologies but rather ensuring that the processes surrounding their proper use are in place.

Co-worker Dave Lieberman sent this article on issues concerning faculty use of blogs, and Jon Defriese, Director of Software Development at HBS, sent this great article on ways that USC is using wikis for academic use.  The USC article is written by Jude Higdon, former TIE graduate and now project manager at USC's Center for Scholarly Technology.

Social Software exploration at ETMM

A group of us in the Educational Technology & Multimedia Group at Harvard Business School's IT Group have been meeting to discuss new technologies and try and brainstorm creative ways to explore them and integrate them, if appropriate, into our portfolio.

It's hard to consider how to incorporate bottom-up, "social software" technologies (software that supports group interaction) into a pedagogical framework that is historically hierarchical and top-down.  Here's an oversimplified view of just a few of the trends and thinking points for our group to chat about, hopefully allowing us to better devise ways to leverage them appropriately for educational use. As usual, lots of help on this list from my classmate Rob Lucas and from co-worker Dave Goodrich.

Social software, Web 2.0

With the help of Rob Lucas and my co-worker Dave Goodrich, I'm starting to investigate the myriad new technologies and products that fall under the umbrella of "social software".

Del.icio.us was the first one I explored, a social bookmarks site that allows you to create lists of favorite links (via a bookmarklet plug-in for your browser), categorize those links with tags, search your links or others' links, and subscribe to the lists of other users whom you find interesting.

Ning -- Building social applications

Rob Lucas directed me to check out Ning, an online service for creating social applications.  This looks like it could be really promising, mostly from a development perspective as it allows developers to clone and augment existing pieces of code to create their own flavors of various social apps.  Almost like an intentional playground for creating mash-up apps. Like Zimbra, Ning hopes to take in revenue by offering support.

Lesson Plan Collaboration Project

For my Educational Software Project Design class I'm pairing up with Rob Lucas to help him continue his work toward developing a kind of "Wikipedia for Lesson Plans".  The idea is to outline the features of an educator collaboration community that would allow teachers to share and augment lesson plan ideas.