the challenges of social collaboration on the internet dr sara de freitas university of oxford: 23rd march 2007

background  based at the london knowledge lab  lsrc fellowship  l4all research project  manager  consultant to the jisc innovation strand (technology enhanced learning environments)  serious games research  innovatech llp

summary  self-organised criticality  social networks  web 2.0  implications for education  what are the challenges for social collaboration on the internet?  conclusions

1: self-organised criticality  per bak (1987)  what is soc?  ‘established solely because of dynamical interactions among individual elements of the system’ (per bak, 1996:1-2)  soc is so ‘far the only known general mechanism to generate complexity’ (per bak, 1996:1-2)  tendency of large complex systems to be susceptible to ‘avalanches’/events of all sizes – no external factors

Source: University of Michigan, 2004 Yeast proteins: Sergei Maslov and Kim Sneppen, Specificity and stability in topology of protein networks, Science 296, (2002).Specificity and stability in topology of protein networks High school dating: Data drawn from Peter S. Bearman, James Moody, and Katherine Stovel, Chains of affection: The structure of adolescent romantic and sexual networks, American Journal of Sociology 110, (2004). Chains of affection: The structure of adolescent romantic and sexual networks

bill cheswick, lumeta corp (2004)

2: growth of social networks  rapid growth of online social networks – for social and business needs (e.g. friendster, friends reunited, linkedin)  wider opportunities for social collaboration (e.g. collaborative book/article writing)  larger and more distributed social groups emerging (e.g. myspace/live chat)

self-organised communications and tools  blogs  wikis (wikipedia)  tagging and social book marking (del.icio.us)  multimedia sharing (youtube, flickr, bit torrent)  audio blogging and podcasting (odeo)  rss and syndication  mmorpgs (fanzine communities)

significant change agents  globalisation  global vs local  control strategies vs open access  the internet  fast access to information  increasing amounts of data (161 billion gigabytes in 2006)  mass user generated content - quarter of all data is original - IDC estimates that 70% of content by 2010 will be user generated  user participation (1 billion in 2006)  social interactions  distributed social networks

3: what is web 2.0? link to:

4: what now for learning? what implications…  for learning, assessment, accreditation?  for the universities? need for better alignment between:  policy development  institutional processes  empowering the learner? new learning/new learner?  exploratory learning  game-based learning  social interactive learning

future learning  visions of future learning:  towards what end?  towards what skills?  personalised learning environments?  immersive learning environments?

personalised learning environments (wilson et al., 2006)

immersive learning environments  exploratory learning  interactivity  immersion  game-based learning  alternate reality gaming  mobile gaming  simulations  ‘gamesims’

5: what are the challenges for social collaboration on the internet?  plagiarism debate  ‘cut and paste’ generation  description over analysis  different forms of assessment  self-organised criticality  highly complex systems (e.g. social networks) are vulnerable to small ‘events’  changing skills  multimodality  different relationship to one another and to information

6: conclusions  considerable challenges of social collaboration  for education  for society  need for a new vision for learning  immersive learning environments  need for greater alignment  policy, institutional practice and the learner  new opportunities for learning  user generated content

links  learning in immersive worlds report:  lsrc report out soon any feedback/comments to sara de freitas: