Blogging Computers and Writing 2008: Building Social Networking from the Inside Out

Collin thinks that someone should live blog Computers & Writing, so here goes. Maybe I can send the conference promoters an invoice retroactively if they decide to adopt his reimbursement plan. :)

Panel chair Mike Palmquist of Colorado State started things off by introducing Writing Studio, a writing-based web portal hosted by CSU. According to Palmquist’s history, Writing Studio began as a hypercard-like program with multimedia features, but it migrated to the web in the late 1990s.

Recently, the site switched from supporting classes to supporting student writers. Jill Salahub, also of CSU, explained how the site had been modified to provide this support. After presenting some results from an internal study of the online Writing Studio—according to Salahub, an instructor’s teaching experience and prior use of CMS was related to adoption of the site, and students tended to copy the responses of their teachers towards the technology; if the instructor was enthusiastic of the technology, students tended to be enthusiastic as well—she described how students eventually became interested in using Writing Studio as a networking tool. To that end, the site’s managers have added user profile pages and places where students can find other people in their classes.

Lynda Haas of UC-Irvine, Carolyn Handa of the University of Alabama, and Will Hochman of Southern Connecticut State each discussed their use of Writing Studio at their home institutions. Haas repeated Salahub’s finding that prior experience with writing technology tended to lead to more positive adoption experiences by instructors, while Handa detailed her grad students’ use of Writing Studio as a shared knowledge depository. Finally, Hochman showed how he used his students’ responses to the classroom communication tools provided by Writing Studio as learning experiences

Haas also pointed out this hilarious Facebook group, which encourages students to write “THIS IS SPARTA!” somewhere on their AP Exam. The meme has caught on: it appears that people have been repeatedly vandalizing the Wikipedia AP Exam page with the phrase. I am usually involved in grading AP exams, but I had to skip this year; now I’m a little disappointed that I’m going to miss out on seeing how often this meme actually showed up on the tests.

I found Writing Studio to be a really interesting project because the researchers are coding the site themselves. It reminds me of some of the early work in the CWRL, when Fred Kemp and his colleagues were creating Daedalus. Now that the lab primarily uses open-source, off-the-shelf tools, it’s good to see that writing researchers are still creating software. However, I wonder about the worth of these programming projects. Like Daedalus, Writing Studio seems to be innovative, providing some interesting tools for networking and connectivity. However, its innovative features seem to have been eclipsed by sites like Facebook. This, I think, introduces the primary response to Writing Studio: why build a writing-specific social network when social networks that can support (or be tweaked to support) writing activities already exist?

Palmquist responded to this question by saying it was a metaphor issue: Facebook was created for socializing, while Blackboard and WebCT are created to support lecture classes. He argues that Writing Studio is specifically designed to support writing classes. Another attendee supported this claim, arguing that the Writing Studio created a protected space for students to share their writing.

I think these are fine arguments, but I remain unconvinced. To give an example from one social networking site, even though Facebook was created for socializing, there are emerging movements to adapt the site for business and productivity ends. I don’t see why this can’t be done for writing as well. Further, Facebook can be as protected as anyone wants it to be; one just has to learn how to change the privacy settings.

In short, while I think that Writing Studio is a great project—particularly because I believe writing researchers should be involved in programming—I doubt that the future of writing studies will be in creating writing-based versions of free tools like Facebook. Why can’t our innovation go in a new direction?

44 Blackboard patent claims invalidated

I’m currently putting the finishing touches on a presentation for the upcoming CCCC Convention in New Orleans on using Facebook for course communication and online course management, so this report jumped out at me.

Blackboard, the company that dominates the market for university courseware and distance-learning software, had 44 of their patent claims rejected by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Apparently, this isn’t the final word on the topic; Desire2Learn, which recently lost a patent infringement suit to Blackboard, is reporting on their patent information website (no permalink) that the judgment is subject to appeal. It seems, though, that this will be some good news if it can help loosen Blackboard’s dominant position in this space.

via Kairosnews

Review: Holland, ed. Remote Relationships in a Small World (2007)

I ran across Remote Relationships in a Small World a month or so ago in a publisher’s catalog, and I thought it looked pretty promising, seeing as my work is gravitating towards studies of social networks and mobile communication. The collection of essays are intended, according to editor Samantha Holland, to provide new research on social relationships conducted online. This, I assume, is the source of the title, which suggests that the digital age has both made the world smaller by allowing for instant communication across time and space, but at the same time that time and space is real and has a real effect on the relationships conducted online.

The three chapters that jumped out at me were Holland’s chapter (with Julie Harpin) on the use of MySpace by British teenagers, Janet Finlay and Lynette Willoughby’s study of the use of WebCT forums and blogs in online learning, and Simeon J. Yates and Eleanor Lockley’s study of male and female cell phone use. (The complete TOC can be found here.)

Holland and Harpin presented the results of a pilot study of teenage British MySpace users, following the usage habits of 12 teenagers. Their results seemed to confirm the work of boyd and Ellision (2007) in that the teenagers they studied tended to use MySpace to communicate with people they already knew socially. Additionally, the authors found that, unlike the typical stereotype of the digital loner, the social network was a “hive of sociability.”

Similarly, Finlay and Willoughby’s chatper didn’t break any new ground. They found that a minority of the (mostly male) students using their course forum and individual blogs would post offensive messages, and that this behavior tended to alienate other users. After their mostly textual case study, the authors concluded that for an online learning space to be a real community of practice there needed to be scaffolded interactions with the community so that users could become socialized to it, a feat which was not possible in their 12-week course.

Finally, Yates and Lockley examined the use of cell phones by men and women in a number of different contexts: at home, on the train, and in other public places like restaurants and coffee shops. They found that the men in their study tended to send shorter messages than the women, and that the longest messages were sent in conversations between two women. Like Holland and Harpin, the authors found that the participants in their study tended to not use their phones to contact or converse with strangers, but rather to keep in touch with people who were close to them, both physically (neighbors) and emotionally (friends and relatives).

I found this collection to be a bit of a mixed bag. While the studies I mentioned here were interesting, and had interesting conclusions, I found myself wishing they were a bit more rigorous. This was particularly the case with the Holland and Harpin and Finlay and Wiloughby chapters. While each was interesting, neither broke new ground, and both seemed to merely share the overall theme of the online texts they collected. Admittedly the Holland and Harpin study was a preliminary one, but, that being the case, I wonder why it was included in this collection.

The Yates and Lockley chapter suffered from the opposite problem. The authors used a large number of measures—surveys, observation, diary studies, focus groups—but the analysis and discussion of these measures seemed abrupt to me. I would have liked to have seen them choose some of the data to focus on with more depth and detail, rather than have them present this cornucopia of data.

That said, I found the book to be useful, not the least for the support, however tentative, that the studies included in it lend to the thesis that social communication is used more to keep in contact with people in existing social networks, rather than create new contacts. Somewhat ironically, these studies seem to suggest that our online relationships aren’t so “remote” after all.

Facebook as courseware update

CourseFeed has added a new Facebook app that, in addition to regular Facebook course-app features like discussion walls and notes, allows students to connect to their school’s Blackboard installation. I haven’t been able to fully test out the app because it isn’t compatible with The University of Texas’s Blackboard installation yet. It does seem pretty promising, though.

One of the drawbacks to using Blackboard is that you have to go to a new website, log in, and then navigate the site’s hierarchy, which can be unnecessarily complex. For example, to send an email to my class via Blackboard, I have to log into the system and go through four steps to access the email page. CourseFeed would simplify class communication for users who use Facebook and save them the extra step of having to log into a new system for class information.

In short, for schools that use Blackboard, CourseFeed seems like a decent method for managing the site’s clunky interface.

Related: Using Facebook for course management pt. 1 and pt. 2

Using Facebook for course management, pt. 2

Introduction

In my last post, I discussed some reasons why instructors would want to use Facebook to manage their course communication, as well as the potential drawbacks of this move. In this post, I will cover how to set up Facebook for this purpose, giving an overview of relevant apps that are necessary for making Facebook a courseware package.

Courseware basics

A good courseware system should provide at minimum 1) a central location for course communication such as announcements and 2) file sharing. A basic courseware system of this type can be had on Facebook by adding just a few apps.

Course apps
When Facebook introduced the Facebook Platform, they eliminated their own course application, allowing users to take over this feature. I have had a good experience with two course apps: Michael Staton et al.’s Courses and Colin Schmidt and Jonathan Chapman’s Courses

• Staton et al.’s Courses allows users to find a course at their school by the department and course number or create a course themselves. Users can then invite their classmates on Facebook to join the course. When logging into the app, users view a list of courses they have joined and can access tabs that let them browse for other courses, find their friends’ and classmates’ courses, rank their courses, and adjust the app’s settings. Individual course pages have links to study groups and display a course discussion board. Individual courses can also set up course chats using Vawkr (a third-party, Flash-based program which ominously announces that if you allow it to access your computer’s camera and microphone, you may be recorded).

• Schmidt and Chapman’s Courses app offers a similar set of features. Users can add new courses, but it doesn’t seem that the system has a very efficient way of browsing for courses that have already been created. It is possible to invite friends to your courses, as well as view your schedule. Individual course pages are designed like a Facebook user page, with panes for adding course notes, a course discussion board, and a course wall. While this app has more spaces for course communication collected on the course page, they all seem to be implementations of the same, discussion-board-type messaging system. Interestingly, there is also a pane entitled “Advice from Former Students”; however, it is not clear to me how helpful this feature would be. The app seems to be set up so that individual sections of the course have their own pages, and it is not clear if advice posted to one section would be aggregated on all sections.

Update: After futher use, it seems that while this app has useful tools for managing course information, it is very difficult to connect courses with other users. For that reason, it might be wise to use the Staton et al. app for now until the collaboration features of this app become better developed.

Currently the Staton et al. app has over 32,000 users while the Schmidt and Chapman app has only 7,000. While there would normally be an incentive to go with the app with the most users in order to take advantage of the greater network effects available to that app, in the case of course communication, instructors will not necessarily be interested in those effects and can just pick the app that has the features they want and invite students to join.

Document sharing apps
• Scribd allows users to post and share documents through their Facebook accounts. Presumably the files can be in almost any format: the app’s homepage says it supports the .pdf, .doc, .ppt, .xls, and .txt formats as well “etc.” Users don’t have to create accounts with the system, and permissions can be set so that documents can be seen by everyone, friends, or only the user.

• ThinkFree Docs is an app created by the online MS Office alternative, ThinkFree Office. The app requires users to create an account at ThinkFree.com. Users can then upload documents (in the .pdf, .rtf, .dot, .pot, .pps, .xlt, .csv, .txt, .hwp formats) through Facebook, share documents, and view documents shared by other users.

There are some difficulties with this app. When I added a document, my name was not listed as the user name. Instead, the user was listed as “twha”; it seemed that this might be the default user name for documents added on Facebook. For this reason, it doesn’t seem that users can manage privacy settings: documents are either published or not. Despite these drawbacks, if instructors decide to require their students to use an online office suite and settle on ThinkFree, this app could prove useful.

• Finally, instructors can also use the Share Files app by FilesAnywhere. This app is the most robust of the three, and it requires users to create an account with the website. This account comes with 1GB of free storage and allows users to upload, download, and receive files through their Facebook profile. Users can then set up password-protected folders that they can use to transfer files with others in their class. If instructors want to do any complicated file sharing as part of a Facebook-based class, Share Files is probably the best option, for both volume and security reasons.

Additional apps
Depending on the emphasis of the course, instructors can also choose applications for blogging, videos, or practically any other new media format that is currently available.

Notify course participants
The final step in setting up a Facebook course is for instructors to notify their users of the apps they need to install to their Facebook accounts. Typically, instructors will want to add a common course app, a file-sharing app, and then any other apps that are necessary for the particular course.

Conclusion

Facebook is not yet as robust a courseware medium as Blackboard or Google Groups. It does, however, offer a simple solution that should be enough for most classroom applications. Since the Facebook Platform will continue to improve and add more apps, it is likely that Facebook courseware will become a much more robust, and widely adopted, solution in the future.

Using Facebook for course management, pt. 1

Introduction

Course management systems
The use of course management systems, or courseware, like Blackboard has become widespread in U.S. colleges and universities. With the merger of Blackboard and WebCT, however, the courseware available to most instructors and students has become monolithic, a situation which is not relieved by Blackboard’s patents. While there are a number of free courseware solutions, it may not have occurred to most people that with the introduction of the Facebook Platform, the social networking site can be used for course management.

Why use Facebook for course management?
One obvious reason for using Facebook as an alternative to Blackboard is that most students already use Facebook or are at least familiar with it to some degree. If an instructor chose to use a free system like Moodle, all of his or her students would have to create accounts at the site and learn how to navigate it and its features. With Facebook, most students will already have accounts and know how to navigate the site already, so there will be fewer barriers to their adoption and use of a Facebook-based courseware system.

Another reason that Facebook makes an attractive alternative both to proprietary sites like Blackboard and open source sites like Moodle is the popularity of the site. This popularity, combined with the functionality of the Facebook Platform, encourages developers to add more features to the site—which would happen much more slowly in the form of version releases with a proprietary system like Blackboard or less frequently with less popular sites like Moodle. The Platform was introduced in the summer of 2007, and before fall it has already introduced course tracking, document sharing, blogging, and podcasting applications. It seems likely that at this pace of development, Facebook users will keep adding applications to take advantage of new technologies, a fact which will likely keep those applications on pace with educational developments as well.

Issues to consider before adopting Facebook

Secure communication
Before deciding to use Facebook to manage course communication, instructors should carefully consider how they will use the system. One chief drawback to using Facebook for course communication is that it currently does not have many controls for securely communicating with individual students. For that reason, it should not be used to send students graded work or other sensitive information.

Instructor-student relationships
Instructors should also consider how using Facebook for official class communication will affect his or her relationship with students. Traditional courseware like Blackboard automatically grant an instructor a different status in the system, giving her or him a different level of permissions when interacting with it. This is not the case with Facebook. If you decide to use Facebook as courseware, be aware that you will have no special privileges in the system, unless individual apps allow you set those privileges. Additionally, since most students will use Facebook for purposes outside of class, instructors may find that students try to contact them through the system in ways that might be unprofessional. These issues should be thought through before instructors make a decision to move to Facebook-based courseware.

Conclusion

To sum up, Facebook has a lot of promise as courseware, allowing instructors to interact with students in an environment that they feel comfortable in. There are some risks and drawbacks to using Facebook for course applications, but if instructors weigh these risks and set appropriate boundaries with students, there should be significant benefits to using the system to enhance course communication.

In my next post, I’ll suggest some Facebook Apps that can be used in a courseware system and show how they can be assembled together to make Facebook-based courseware.

Update: Using Facebook for course management, pt. 2