I've been working on a social learning site based on Drupal for the past two years as a student at Brigham Young University and am now working towards readying it for its maiden release into the world as a full-fledged Drupal install profile.
My goal with Eduglu is to:
a) Provide a superb out-of-the-box social learning engine to help departments, clubs, classrooms, and other campus groups communicate, collaborate, and learn with one another.
I've been reading and thinking a lot lately about how to drive more adoption of the social learning platform I'm building here at BYU, https://island.byu.edu, and wanted to summarize some of the highlights of what I've learned. All of the patterns come directly from Ross Mayfield and Michael Idinopulos's writings so a big shout out to the great work they're doing at Socialtext.
I've started reading "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" by Marshall McLuhan and am greatly enjoying it. It's an incredibly dense read but so far, my efforts have been richly rewarded.
This is the second part of a (most likely) three-part series of posts I'm harvesting from a journal article Tim Olsen and I wrote earlier this year. You might want to read the first post for context, Organizing University Learning: Moving Beyond the Course to Micro-labs, before continuing here.
University learning is centered on the course. A pattern for learning familiar to any current or past student. Students and teacher meet 1-3 times per week for 8-12 weeks. There's lectures, readings, papers, projects, quizzes, and tests.
This, by and large, is an adequate pattern for many learning purposes. But no rational person would suggest this is the only workable solution or even what's best, or adequate, for all purposes.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the power of transparent learning or learning in the open. With blogs, twitter, wikis, and other social media tools, our ability to share what we're learning with others has increased dramatically. The shift from learning in private to learning in public is dramatic and chaotic, much like swimming from the edge of a river into the fast flowing current. All of a sudden you're being pushed and tumbled along much faster than before.
I recently (re)read a great post on Coding Horror which pointed me towards an article by Jason Kottke who noted that many successful web2.0 projects are a result of taking "something that everyone does with their friends and make it public and permanent. (Permanent as in permalinked.)"
Some examples:
Michael Idinopolus wrote an intriguing post over on his excellent blog yesterday titled "Enterprise 2.0: Skip the Pilot."
I thought I'd repeat some of his arguments because it agrees nicely with an argument I've been formulating lately regarding deployment strategy for social learning software within higher education.
But first to his article:
Wow, what a great conference. And talk about intimidation. I had a mild to strong case at different times of Chris Lott's imposter syndrome. So many brilliant thinkers. But I'm definitely glad I made the effort to go as I learned a great deal. Many of my assumptions were confirmed and many gaps in my understanding were exposed. So an excellent time of growth and learning.
The following is a few of the thoughts I had during the conference.
