By Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.
Using social networking to develop, deploy, and share content could be a powerful way to build a knowledge community of students and educators, and to overcome the content limitations and passive learning problems often associated with some online learning activities such as quizzes, powerpoints, and videos.
According to educational psychologists, the problem with some of the learning activities associated with online courses is that they do not encourage active learning. Although you might not think so, it applies to online multiple choice, true-false, and word-match quizzes. To complicate things, some test-makers focus on trick questions and they fail to cover all the instructional content. Thus, badly constructed learning activities do not really assess the knowledge they claim to be measuring.
If we reconceptualize that way that we use instructional content, there is a new, powerful paradigm just waiting to be applied to content. If you're thinking that this might be referring to the collaborative approach that would be found in a wiki, you would be close. What we're really talking about is the paradigm of social networking which would employ the techniques found in MySpace, LiveJournal, webrings, blogs, iTunes, etc. Basically, we're talking about anything syndicated with an RSS or Atom feed.
While there are repositories of learning materials and even online courses that include supplemental material, even those as extensive as MERLOT (http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm), they tend to be instructor or instructional designer-centric, and do not really include the entire learning community (especially students). Repositories can be pretty static, and do not employ the power of social networking, which includes syndication and the use of user-driven taxonomies (tag clouds or social bookmarks as used in del.icio.us).
This could change, however, as bloggers and social networkers (MySpace, LiveJournal) use their space to create, collaborate, and share content. The bloggers could be students, faculty, instructional designers, instructional technologists, librarians, and administrators.
There are many benefits for those who choose to participate in the construction of a knowledge community and a social network for quizzes (and other learning objects and instructional material).
For Faculty: Learn to write better tests.
--Incorporate Bloom's Taxonomy (recall, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation).
For Students: Better selection of learning activities.
--Recalling memorized information.
--Construction of schemata.
--Enrichment through audio, graphics, video, or diagram.
For Faculty and Administration:
--Encourage students to set up social networks and to feel connected.
--Increase familiarity with the course content
Instructional designers:
--Edit, revise, and share content and learning objects.
--Share best format for downloadable e-book chapters.
--Make available downloadable audio review.
The idea of using social networks to share instructional activities and content is exciting. It reflects a commitment to developing programs that acknowledge the behaviors that people really have, rather than trying to impose an alien or awkward one on them. In the end, having dynamic knowledge communities is extremely motivating and affirming to everyone who is involved.
[Listen to the companion podcast at:
http://community.elearners.com/blogs/inside_elearning/attachment/1917.ashx - 3.0 MB]