Session Title: The Group as First User, Designing Social Software for Effective Group Interactions
Presenter: Kyle Mathews, Research Assistant, Brigham Young University
Time & Date: 1:30 P.M. - 2:15 P.M., Thursday, August 13, 2009
Location: Rm. C150
Session Description: Social software offers many potential benefits to educational institutions. To realize these benefits, educational designers and technologists will need to shift their thinking from treating the individual as the main user to the group as the main user.
Current educational technology are designed for individual users. They treat the computer and user as an independent self-contained unit. Much of the current literature and practices of instructional design assumes that students will interact with educational technology in isolation.
Social software is “software that supports group interactions.” (Shirky, 2003) Social software seeks to optimize the group experience vs. the individual experience. This is a reiteration of the well-known cybernetics principle that “Optimizing each subsystem independently will not in general lead to a system optimum, or more strongly, improvement of a particular subsystem may actually worsen the overall system.” (Principles of Suboptimization)
The paper will cover the basic design principles behind designing for effective group interactions as well as share our experiences at BYU in designing a social learning platform for 500+ users in the Information Systems Department.
By leveraging open source technology and social software design principles, we believe highly effective group learning environments are within reach of many more schools and classrooms.
Shirky, Clay, “A Group is it’s Own Worse Enemy”, http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html, Accessed May 15, 2009
“Principles of Suboptimization”, http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/PRINCI_SUBOP.html, Accessed May 15, 2009
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I’m very much interested to read this paper. Is or will it be posted somewhere?
george
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