I heart teh intarweb! I rly do.
I recently decided to re-explore the definition of social software. As such, I posted a question to the edublogosphere and received a handful of helpful responses. No, Howard Rheingold didn’t respond. I guess he must be busy or something….
So what have I discovered?
Well, lots of people have written about the definition of social software in much better ways than I possible can. What I’m hoping to do in this essay is to share a few nuggets in an attempt to refine our collective understanding of the term.
History of Social Software
For a top notch history of Social Software, a good place to start is Christopher Allen’s Life with Alacrity blog posting Tracing the Evolution of Social Software.
My first citing dates back to March 2003 in an online essay by Clay Shirky where he adopts a sociological perspective on the topic. Essentially, social software is/are programs that run on a computer that support communication and interaction among groups of people in a computer-mediated environment. Shirky suggests that social software is unique to the Internet. It supports both directed (e.g., task-oriented) and undirected (e.g., communal) communication, and is generally designed to be easily used by participants.
Although the term transactional distance is most commonly associated with distance education, it would seem social software bridges a fundamental transactional distance associated with computer-mediated communication. In other words, groups of people are able to communicate regardless of time and space, i.e., not everyone participating in a particular discussion must be at the same place at the same time in order for the discussion to take place. And as such, a new set of social patterns begin to emerge.
A new set of social patterns
Social software is about supporting group experience given a range of diverse personality types. From a design perspective, this can create a number of difficulties that calls for deeper examination.
Social software must be designed to support both the needs of the individual and the needs of the group. Thus, to a large extent, social software is political in nature. Like any environment where people interact, there is a set of unspoken or invisible social rules that govern behavior; consequently, the design of a particular piece of social software influences how people behave, forcing or requiring certain behaviors while excluding others.
Tom Coates and a host of well- and lesser-known scholars make several interesting observations about the nature of social software which I have attempted to encapsulate here for further reflection.
Social software is designed to augment social collaboration via structured mediation (this mediation may be distributed or centralized, top-down or bottom-up/emergent). So, depending on the goals of the group or the group leader, social software should offer a host of ways to organize people so that they may interact and/or work together. In this sense, social software is a tool, a device, an instrument that permits or mediates the accomplishment of an action (i.e., the proverbial finger pointing at the moon).
This brings us to an interesting place. Social software can be viewed in several important ways: as a medium or channel that supports an exchange, a tool for accomplishing particular tasks, or an ecology where people, practices, and values connect, interact, and evolve.
We also need to be careful in assuming what social software can and cannot provide. From an ecological perspective, social software can remove certain limitations and compensate for some human inadequacies, yet what is an advantage or strength in one setting can be a disadvantage or weakness in another.
Economies of Scope
The idea of social software being a tool can be argued to connote the notion of efficiency and productivity that, to some extent, reinforce the idea that efficiency and productivity are among the driving goals of our collective existence. (hmmmm….)
On the Zephoria blog, Mike T. suggests that social software offers an opportunity for a bottom-up share of the Web:
Can social software - which is built on a collaboration/sharing/synergy paradigm - thrive in an evironment that is chiefly reliant on the possession and protection of knowledge as a market good. In a limited view, this is mirrored in the neverending "opensource vs. prop. software" debate. In a larger context, social software - as it is an innovation in the Schumpeterian sense - is a challenge to all those economies and social orders, that are realiant [sic] on protecting individual rights to own information to the same degree that one can own houses or cars.
Social software is thus a mutation of traditional corp-to-market software, because it reverses the mechanism. Viewed from a technological standpoint, it forms a networked organisation on "market/consumer" level and grows in importance, so as to rival other software products. In a sociological sense, it enables grassroots coordination, therefore strengthening the influence of all the Joe Bloggs out there, thus putting into question the whole idea of a hierarchical society.
Teaching and Learning
In terms of social software’s impact on teaching and learning, Ulises Mejias suggests that social software’s
true potential lies in helping us figure out how to integrate our online and offline social experiences. Thus, social software must live up to its name by relating to the individual's everyday social practices, which include interacting with people online as well as people without access to these technologies…. [S]ocial software can positively impact pedagogy by inculcating a desire to reconnect to the world as a whole, not just the social parts that exist online.
Mejias’ definition of social software adds a nice twist: [it] allows people to interact and collaborate online or that aggregates the actions of networked users.
The notion of aggregation, of pulling together or clustering ideas or objects as well as people, is a nice refinement. Social software not only allows people (citizens/netizens) to collect, communicate, and collaborate, it allows data, information, and objects to be combined and consolidated, a place where both can converge.
Final thoughts
Bill Fitzpatrick offers a way to think about social software that is quite tempting. Building on the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on social software, his definition reads:
social software allows people to rendezvous, connect, and collaborate; the collaboration permitted by social software can lead to expanded communities of people sharing common interests. It's less about a computer-mediated space, and more about common ground.
Bill’s definition captures a comfortable middle ground that underlies a general consensus among a host of writers, researchers, and philosophers.
In terms of addressing the bottom-up/top down considerations of social software in a teaching and learning environment, Clarence Fisher offers another thoughtful perspective:
As computer-literate as we often think kids are, one thing I have learned about working with technology and middle school students is that their experience with software such as this is often limited. They need to be taught to see the value of technologies such as these. My students have blogs, we have made vlogs and podcasts, we have a class Suprglu page, a wiki, and they each have a Bloglines account. Certinaly all of the kids do not derive equal value from each of these tools, and they do not use each equally. This is where the concept of choice comes in. The kids need to be introduced to each of the tools and technically learn how to use them; but once this is finished, my kids often have a choice about which they will use. Kids need to learn how reap the added value of a technologically connected, possibly internationally based, learning network. It is certainly work for them, and it changes our work as teachers, but it is vital that they are given experiences that allow them to see this.
So what have I learned from all of this?
The Internet provides me an opportunity, or more precisely, an ecology to connect, collaborate, and aggregate numerous ideas and contributions of others which permits me to further my understanding and share it with others. In this sense, social software like this blog contributes to my ability to co-create knowledge that I will continue to draw from, reflect upon, and further refine. I hope you find it useful too.
Et tu?
Photo credit:
No. 7 by Mark Rothko, 1960, located here.
Keywords: aggregation, behavior, Coates, collaboration, communication, computer-mediated communication, convergance, definitions, design, ecologies, emergence, mediation, Mejias, Rheingold, Shirky, social software, tools, transactional distance
Comments
I think social software adds a whole dimension to learning in the classroom that has not heretofore been available to students -- that of collaborating and working with others around the world.
It is not that the tools that we use now aren't so very useful, they are. There are many things that work very well in the classroom. Social software lets us harness, for lack of a better word, "peer pressure" in the learning process. I'd rather use the term "peer presence."
It is like the comic in the classroom. The easiest way to handle the class comedian is to remove the audience. When children have an audience they do things they wouldn't otherwise. Likewise, when students blog, they become very motivated by the comments of other. When students work together on a wiki, they become motivated to post good information so that it will be viewed as correct by others in their group. This "peer presence" which is at the back of anyone's mind who is working on a blog or wiki, serves to motivate and make students more engaged, I think.
Partial reinforcement is a powerful tool. I think social software is a missing piece of the puzzle. A very useful one at that!
Et tu, Christopher, et tu!
Vicki,
Your notion of peer presence is one that I would like to explore in more detail as it relates to social software affordances. I think you're on to something substantial that has not been covered in the literature that I am aware of. Thank you for sharing this.
Chris
I wanted to add more depth to term transactional distance. I think it's particularly useful to have some theory to look to in all this, and that of transactional distance serves this purpose nicely
http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/Articles/transactdist/index.htm