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Affordances of Social Software
Running head: AFFORDANCES OF SOCIAL SOFTWARE
Affordances of Social Software for Learning Online
Richard A. Reo
George Mason University
The Affordances of Social Software for Learning Online
Introduction to Social Software
The past several years has witnessed the emergence of a variety of personal information management web services that have at their core toolsets developed with the express purpose of establishing, building, and maintaining social interactions. The focus of these socially-oriented software tools is less on the technology and more about sociology: establishing group identity and personal reputations, building social contexts of knowledge, erecting recommendation and folk knowledge systems, group learning, and social networking. The convergence of web technologies and sociological processes in online environments is being called Social Computing or Social Software.
The New Media Consortium (2004) sponsored an online conference on Social Computing in November 2004 and provides a broad level definition of this phenomenon on their website:
Social Computing is the application of technology as a mediator of social interaction and collaboration, and could have significant application for teaching and learning, especially at a distance. What makes Social Computing interesting as an approach is that these technology-enabled interactions are based on a set of intuitive strategies that foster high-quality and efficient communication. A variety of simple but easily accessible tools make these interactions possible over a wide variety of modalities. The result is more effective knowledge generation, knowledge sharing, collaboration, learning, and collective decision-making, and is especially applicable to distributed learning, research, and work settings.
The entry for social computing in the community-written Wikipedia (2005a) states, “Social computing refers to the use of social software tools…that support social interaction and communication.” Wikipedia (2005b), has a much more extensive entry for Social Software: “…. Social software connects people together intellectually and makes it possible to share and evolve ideas. Social software is not bound just by what features the tool provides, but also by social conventions and etiquette on how to use it appropriately.”…. This latter definition includes software that ranges from one-to-many tools like email, Usenet/NNTP, chat, and instant messaging to more emerging many-to-many tools like blogs, wikis, *folksonomy, and virtual online communities. However, it is the many-to-many interactions aspect of these emerging tools that are not only changing how people communicate, but also how they collaborate and form groups.
*NOTE: The word "folksonomy" is a spin on the word "taxonomy" and refers to the form of classification that emerges when users freely choose their own keywords or tags for information they collect.
Thus, social computing or social software are similar terms used to refer to a wide range of software tools that have as their defining characteristic a capability to enable web-based social interaction (Allen, 2004). As will be discussed, these terms are a modernization with important changes of terms like Groupware or Computer Supported Cooperative (or Collaborative) Work (CSCW). Social software tools contain features that overlap with a broad range of Personal Knowledge Management, Content Management, or ePortfolio tools (Siemens, 2004). I will use the term social software which has become more commonplace in academic circles and is the one preferred by EDUCAUSE, an association focused on higher education teaching and learning issues.
The general definition of social software as “any software that enables people to interact with one another” is quite broad, and so it is no surprise that an official list of applications that are contained under the rubric of social software does not exist. Therefore, I will take as my point of departure the classification offered in an online discussion by Obasanjo (2004, para.2), who sees five broad classes of social software; “there is software that enables”:
1. Communication (IM, Email, SMS, etc.)
- Experience Sharing (Blogs, Photo albums, shared link libraries such as del.icio.us)
- Discovery of Old and New Contacts (Classmates.com, online personals such as Match.com, social networking sites such as Friendster, etc.)
- Relationship Management (Orkut, Friendster, etc.)
- Collaborative or Competitive Gaming (MMORPGs, online versions of traditional games such as Chess & Checkers, team-based or free-for-all First Person Shooters, etc.)
The purpose of my research is to identify, define, and describe as a distinct class of social software Obasanjo’s class #2 -- Experience Sharing. I would extend this class to include the digital materials and meta-data that are being collected, tagged, and shared, and therefore broaden the designation of this class to be called Experience/Resource Sharing tools: such programs as, Weblogs, wikis, feed aggregators, social link managers, and photo sharing tools. Individual tools found in this class are comprised of a growing number of mostly free digital tools or technologies that are accessible for everyday users on the Web or desktop in a variety of modalities and that are designed to personalize searching, collecting, managing, and sharing of “experiences” and “digital resources”. Each of the tools in this class has features that enable social interaction through various strategies for expressing individual identity, gaining awareness of the presence of others, engaging in conversations, establishing relationships, forming groups and reputations, and sharing experiences and resources publicly (Butterfield, 2003; Sessum, 2006). These social mechanisms have affordances for sustaining informal learning communities that are supported at the system level by mechanisms, such as collaborative filtering/ recommendation systems and at the group level by folksonomic systems.
The core of my research purpose is to evaluate the extent to which these Experience/ Resource Sharing social software tools have strong potential for “mediating” formal and informal learning experiences, particularly in online contexts. That is, aspects of these tools scaffold learning by augmenting particular features of communication, social interaction, and collaboration that have been difficult to do online in the past or encounter human and social barriers offline. The affordances of these social software tools for learning in an academic context has been examined by Mejias (2005) and for online learning specifically by Anderson (2005), Farmer (2005), Downes (2004) and others. I will also explore the special network dynamics related to large numbers under which these tools are said to have more profound affects on learners, learning communities, and learning practices.
To support my core premise that Experience/Resource Sharing social software tools foster learning I will show how this class of tools that is designed to support group interaction and knowledge building on the Web are explained by social constructivist principles. Social software-based tool-sets comprised of various telecommunication technologies and combined into various web services are transforming the Web into a global learning platform that suggest the ultimate instance of a constructivist learning environment. At dense levels of social interaction, a type of “open-ended” learning environment called “online self-organizing social systems” (OSOSSs) by Wiley, D. & Edwards, E. (2004), or what Farmer (2005) calls “personalized collaborative learning networks” that is similar to “distributed learning communities” (Dede, 1996), or “communities of practice” (Wenger, 1998) appear. With the help of a few key network technologies, most notably, RSS, the result is a completely integrated or highly structured personal collaboration space around which one could build constructivist learning environments of the kind Shank (2004) and others have called for. A goal of this paper, then, is to understand the extent to which Experience/Resource Sharing social software individually, and combined into what might be called social software-based learning environments (SSLE), can facilitate online learning in a way that is consonant with constructivist learning theory.
Review of Literature and Theoretical Background
The research literature on the usability and pedagogy of social software is exceptionally thin or nonexistent. Therefore, I will clarify a definition by tracing the underpinnings of social software through a few key historical treatments.
Definitions
Coates (2003, para. 2) provided an early rough working definition of social software in
his Weblog that has not been surpassed in its breadth of coverage:
Social software is a particular sub-class of software-prosthesis that concerns itself with the augmentation of human social and / or collaborative abilities through structured mediation (this mediation may be distributed or centalised [sic], top-down or bottom-up/emergent). He adds that social software augments these abilities by: 1) removing the real-world limitations placed on social and / or collaborative behaviour (language, geography, financial status, etc), 2) compensating for human inadequacies in processing, maintaining or developing social and / or collaborative mechanisms, and 3) creating environments or distributed tool-sets that pull useful end results out of human social and / or collaborative behaviour - for example, generating software that facilitates human creative processes in groups, structuring the process (or having the process emerge through apparently unrelated interactions) so as to have a distinct and productive end result.
Howard Rheingold, who posts a comment to the same thread as Coates above, contributes that social software is not entirely new but owes some part of its existence to the years of “virtual community building” that occurred in the formative years of the Web. As I will show, the ubiquity, efficiency, and speed of computer networks along with a host of new technologies for moving data and communication bring online social interaction more effectively in synch with offline activity.
Mejias (2005, p.1), who writes about the potential to integrate online and offline social experiences, defines social software in an educational technology context as: “software that allows people to interact and collaborate online or “that aggregates the actions of networked users”. This latter aspect points to a powerful dynamic that distinguishes social software from other group collaboration tools, and as a potent new learning technology. Capabilities for content and behavior aggregation and redistribution present some of the more important potentials of this media.
Boyd’s (2004, p.1-2) definition identifies three key network-based mechanisms for social interaction. For him, social software is software that contains at least one, but often all of the following characteristics:
· “Support for conversational interaction between individuals or groups”
This points to communication features that support the ability for conversations to take place and grow. He includes real-time, one-to-many communication tools such as IM, VoIP, chat to delayed time, many-to-many communication tools like discussions, groupware collaboration, listserv, and email. Blogs foster this conversational feature. Some link managers and feed aggregators embed blogs and other communication tools in their services. The Email-A-Friend feature is a particularly easy way to spread the word and invite others into your space.
· “Support for Social Feedback”
Boyd’s (p. 1) finds important the capability that allows “a group to rate the contributions
of others, if only implicitly, leading to the creation of a digital reputation”. The system
may also rate or rank a person contributions by counting the number of hits on an item
leading to a higher popularity in classification systems. Recommendation systems work
this way. Feedback from others can also be achieved explicitly by commenting features
built in to Weblogs and other tools. Social software tools also permit members to self-
rate or rank items in their archives.
· “Support for Social Networks”
Digital relationships are enabled by some kind of digital expression of ones personal identity, reputation, persona, or social relationships. Some of the Internet technologies that help members to reveal their personality, interests, relationships online to others and to manage this digital persona across systems are: Weblog authoring, user profiles, Friend of a Friend (FOAF) profiles, presence indicators (Who’s online?), buddy lists etc.
Two meanings stand out in these initial definitions: in the first sense, social software is an augmentation of human social interaction and collaborative abilities in terms of overcoming natural limitations and inadequacies; the second meaning involves the way the end results can loop back and alter the original social practices and processes themselves, and implies a mechanism or dynamism for producing self-organizing behavior. Both senses are subsumed in constructivist learning theory by the concept of mediation and will be addressed later in this section.
Brief History of Social Software
Allen (2004), who defines the term social software as simply “software that supports group interactions”, traces the core ideas of this concept back through Computer Supported Cooperative or Collaborative Work (CSCW) in the 1990s, Groupware in the 1970s and 80s, to Englebart’s “augmentation” (1960s) and Bush’s “Memex” (1940s). Although he identifies a “lifecycle” to this terminology that appears to reemerge each decade in a different form, this does not necessarily mean that social software is simply old wine in new bottles. Allen claims the terminology develops adaptively but may or may not succeed. He provides but a snapshot of the terms evolution, and leaves it an open question whether this term will be widely adopted as definitive of the amorphous network phenomena that emerges when netizens, individually, and more importantly, as groups, begin to intentionally employ the power of internetworking technology for social interactions (not to mention business purposes).
Allen distinguishes social software from several familiar terms, such as, groupware, Computer Supported Cooperative or Collaborative Work, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) / CSILE), Computer-Mediated Communication, and Virtual community. He holds that CSCW is a term that grew out of the academic community and refers more to the field of study that examines group interaction and the enabling technologies. The term “social computing” is associated with this historical branch. Groupware emerged in the 1980s and the author prefers the definition: “intentional group processes plus software to support them.” (Allen, 2004, sec.1980s). The article makes an important distinction between social software and the most prominent term groupware: in the latter, “people placed in groups and defined organizationally vs. [former] people desire to be pulled into affiliation based on personal goals and interests.” (sec.1980s). The emphasis on Web interactivity goes back to Tim Berners-Lee and group practices and social innovations trace back to online communities like Usenet and Slashdot.
Allen finds small traces of the term social software during the late 1980s -90s confined to uses in specialized communities and publications, but it isn’t until late 2002 that he sees the term come into common usage. Clay Shirkey appears to have popularized the term in an attempt to include under one rubric an emerging variety of software for online and offline play, advice giving, relationships etc. along with group software associated with the online communities and CSCW camps. For Shirkey, computer-mediated communication was too inclusive as a term for the specific kinds of group interaction he had in mind, and Groupware was too “polluted by enterprise groupware work”. The term social computing was also rejected as a cover term for this domain.