An online social community such as Elgg can provide your students with various possibilities for working together: profiles, activities, notifications, groups, blogs, media and files upload, …
Screenshot of Elgg's activity page (Source www.elgg.org)
With using online social communities in your course you mimic how students enjoy interacting in their free time. Collaboration via social communities can make learning more fun.Visit Elgg at www.elgg.org
6 comments:
This is new for me, thanks! I will look into this..
Petra
Hey Carolin,
I think it is indeed a nice program to build up a social community at faculty/school/course level. I do agree about your statement that "collaboration via social communities can make learning more fun". It is also usefull to have a 'social' part included, while you will learn to know your fellowstudents better, and build on a 'social-commitment'.
But at the other side: I do also know a lot of people who spends hours on their personal profile (using hyves, facebook, etc). What if the students got occupied with this activity, and 'forget' to do the real activity? How are you able to manage this as a teacher? What's your opinion about that?
Hi Niels,
True. This is of course the downside with a lot of web 2.0 technologies. They can be very time consuming...
But what I do not agree is that students will forget the "real activity". I think it's kind of the same way with face-to-face group work. Of course you can chitchat the whole time and don't work on your project, but usually the groups succeed in a good mixture between the social and the learning/working part.
Hey Carolin,
Nice analogy that you got about 'face-to-face' group work. I do agree that most of the time such a group will succeed. However, in your analogy the members will meet each other at the same time, and are able to see the progress of the other and give feedback right away. In an online environment, the students are able to work in their own time. They may have an appointment to meet each other on the internet, or they have not :-p. Don't you think this could end up in a less group-pressure? (I'm just thinking aloud, not saying it is wrong or something - just new... ;-) )
Hey Carolin,
It's a really nice example and I see a lot of opportunities, but I was wondering if something like this would be suitable for use in a single course. I think it will take a lot of time to build up an active social community. And when a course ends, people will end their active participation in the community too. Is it worth building such a netwerk for only one course?
See you next week!
Bye,
Marlous
Hi Marlous,
Of course, setting up a social community just for one course would be a waste of time. Maybe we should think more in terms study or class communities...
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