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Social Networking Integration at Univ of Pennsylvania
A few of use at ELC attended a free webinar this afternoon to hear how wonderful the social networking is at U. of Pennsylvania. For those not familiar (and the presenters reminded us) Penn is a top rated Ivy League school founded by non other than Benjamin Franklin himself.
The presentation entitled Moving Beyond the Course to the Virtual Campus: Perspectives on the Evolution of Social Web Modalities in Education told the story of Penn's evolution beyond the LMS. They have worked with a hosted solution company GoingOn Networks to deploy a landing-like social network. Their platform uses open source tools and seems to provide very little beyond what is available on the Landing except a better notification service. By that I mean that users can direct action notifications to email, text, Twitter or Facebook. I got the impression that this was only one-way notification. I did see a product demonstrated at my talk last weekend in Philadelphia, ConnectYard, that provided two-way interaction between these various tools and integrated these with Blackboard and Moodle.
The rationale for employing this additional platform, was the usual need to add informal spaces and communities so that the on line students were able to participate in and feel the "Penn experience'. Unlike the Landing, it seemed permissions to create groups was restricted to certain faculty/staff, but they noted the capacity to add sports and other staff and extra-curricular 'communities" to the site.
My coverall impression was that the rationale for having a "more than LMS" digital infrastructure is strong and being recognized by more and more institutions. I was also pleased to see that our home-grown elgg install seems to be at least in the same ball park as a hosted commercial service. Interesting as well to hear that GoingOn Networks has upgraded their system 4 times in the last 3 months - indicating that this type of rapid evolution that we have been dealing with on elgg, is normal in the web 2.0 world - and a challenge to slower management systems.
For those interested, the webinar sponsors (Chronicle of Higehr Education) promised a link to the recording, which I will add to this post when it arrives.
Terry Anderson
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Some thoughts on this.
A phrase I heard recently "Present events make future trends" comes to mind. The case they make for what they are doing is so compellilng it's hard to imagine that things wouldn't continue to evolve in this direction, and this for an institution with only a small online offering (summer school, basically). If let's say most universities have social networking embedded into their pedagogy say in 5 years, where will those that don't have it be, especially online universities?Won't it seem odd?
We are depending primarily on the student-content interaction in your theory Terry. But you may have to update the theory, since for example "curated content" is an interaction with content but mediated by another (either faculty or student). (Probably you already have...)
One of the rationales I heard clearly this time is that students really want different platforms for different purposes - and who doesn't? And then of course the pedagogy of engagement. Personally I don't go to static sites (i.e. without comments) much more to learn what I want to learn about in my personal space any more. Comments from other readers really have become a handy (not to say reliable) barometer about the worth of the content, adequate for the speed of surfing. That's just how it is.
So it seems the Landing is really on the right track. But that is preaching to the choir....
HI All,
My name is Jon Corshen and I am the CEO and Founder of GoingOn. First, I want to appluad you the work you have done in developing your platform. I am sure that when you started you heard many of the skepticisms that we encountered such as, "We are going to do it in Facebook" or "We are going to wait for our LMS to add social features". Like you, we pushed on in the face of this uncertainty. I think the market continues to validate the strategy that Elgg, Epsilon (now NYTimes) and GoingOn have taken is an essential one. After spending 15+ years putting courses online, we think it is time to move beyond the course to find new ways to connect students and faculty with the most intelligent people and resources, including each other.
My name is Jon Corshen and I am the CEO and Founder of GoingOn. First, I want to applaud you the work you have done in developing your Landing platform. I am sure that when you started you were confronted with many of the same skepticisms that we encountered such as, "We are going to do it in Facebook" or "We are going to wait for our LMS to add social features". Today, I believe the market has validated the strategy that Elgg, Epsilon (now NYTimes) and GoingOn have taken. After 15+ years putting courses online, we need provides students and faculty with more effective tools for connecting, sharing information, and collaborating. AS we all know, students (and faculty are more successful when they are fully engaged in all aspects of their academic life. Clearly, legacy portals and course-centric LMSs are not going to get us there.
On behalf of the GoingOn team, please permit me to make a few small corrections regarding the capabilities of the GoingOn platform. Please excuse the bullet point format, but I wanted to spare you my voluminous marketing prose:
Let’s all keep working to move beyond the course and to embrace all aspects of academic life in the age fo the social web.
- Jon Corshen