Social software includes many
communication media
software
interactive
interconnected
bottom-up and communitarian
Four Vignettes
Everyone participates to create a living,
breathing mediascape
Mr. Seigenthaler responded by trying to
force a restructuring of the wiki tool--rather than simply fixing the
error by editing the page (and publicizing that change, bringing the
community editing force to bear), Mr. Seigenthaler attempted an appeal
to authority. He attempted to track down the source of the misinformation, and then to push wikipedia to cease allowing anonymous edits. He
moved to lock down editing, rather than participate in the editing.
While this response was perhaps understandable, it reflected an
estimation of the new tool, wikipedia, as the equivalent of the old
tool, the encyclopedia or newspaper almanac. Mr.
Seigenthaler's "solution" to the problem of false information actually
avoided all the advantages of the new tool, and enforced its
disadvantages. I will return to this theme below.
John
Seigenthaler Sr., a retired journalist, found that the wikipedia entry
referring to him contained a false, and insidious, piece of
misinformation
Flickr,
as an image-sharing site, is also an example of social software, which
uses "folksonomy," rather than a taxonomy, to categorize and reference
the items in its database. As
the term implies, a folksonomy is a taxonomy which is created and
maintained by users, organically, rather than one which is imposed
externally and a priori. Flickr is one example of this type of system, and works similarly to other folksonomy-driven social softwares, like del.icio.us, furl, and technorati. In
all of these, when users post photos (in the case of flickr) or
bookmarked websites (in the case of del.icio.us and furl) or weblogs
(in the case of technorati), they do not post the content into
predetermined categories (Michelangelo, Hajia Sofia, David, Napoleon),
they post the content first, and then add the tags (as many as they
want) which seem appropriate to them. And later viewers, creating their own search paths and sets of content, can add new tags, new slices through the datasphere.
Serendipitous
searching, stumbling on connections, can produce new views of the
material (the human in the artwork, the experiential perspective
, and
connections that were not easily seen before. The
Hajia Sofia or Michelangelo's David become not only "architecture" or
"Renaissance" but also "vacation" or "gaffe." Seeing how others have
categorized and linked and cross-referenced material provides a
reconsideration of one's own categories, and leads to an encounter with
new material that wasn't even on the radar before.
In
preparing this very essay, I used furl (which allows online storage of
a "favorite" or bookmarks list), to keep the sites I found useful. And
because my links, and others, are publicly available, I was able to see
that someone who had "furled" a site I wanted to use had also "furled"
other sites with which I was not familiar, but which were relevant and
helpful.
Of
course, this type of evaluation has always been possible in
newsletters, or letters to school officials or paper evaluation cards,
but the difference when these responses move online is significant. In
online reviews, users can make their ratings and comments—and respond
to one another's ratings or comments—with complete anonymity, and with
extremely wide circulation and availability.
The last new tool I want to discuss is user reviews.
A user called in with a question about a set
of wireless headphones. Laporte,
on the air, tells the caller that he is really not sure about the
answer, "but let's check the user reviews on Amazon.com. I
think these days," he says, "more than the journalists (and I'm a
journalist myself), it's real people who really know how things work."
What Can We Do with These New Tools?
I think the best
approach is not to try to force it into a mold which does not fit
(teaching online is not the same as teaching face-to-face, wikipedia is
not Britannica). The best approach is not to reject the new tool as being unable to serve the same function as the old tool. A
hacksaw is not a hammer. So when you try to pound a nail with one, and
it doesn't work very well, it makes little sense to blame the hacksaw. What
I am suggesting here is not ways to hold the saw while hammering, or
alter the shape of the nail, but ways to use the hacksaw as a
hacksaw--or the new tools as new tools.
All of these tools are, by their nature, user-friendly.
First,
students can, as a class activity, actually use the tools
when a student's work is published, in a forum which is
open and has the potential to attract acclaim and attention (whether
positive or negative), the responsibility for the quality, efficacy and
accuracy of that work is deepened.
Another way to use these tools is to have students evaluate them—and challenge them
The third practical use of these tools is one that I have been exemplifying
in this essay with the vignettes I provided at the beginning. Students
need to know, and must internalize, the difference, for example,
between an article in a medical journal and the opinion of a member of
an online community
(reviews
come from people who are very pleased, or very displeased—the middle is
often excluded
work in the classroom setting to promote and reward a
feature of learning which is too often absent in the classroom.
Serendipity
The
new online tools lack the sensual element of those library searches
But these tools provide more fluid and multi-faceted connections than physical browsing ever can.
serendipitous discovery
easier to achieve, and easier to incorporate into classes and
assignments. The
trail of breadcrumbs which might have been necessary in physical space
is automatically constructed in cyberspace, so the joyful surprise can
be rediscovered by others, or analyzed for later re-creation.
The title of this essay, "Three Stars
and a Chili Pepper" of course refers to a possible rating at
ratemyprofessor.com—the place where not only the quality, but also the
"easiness" and the "hotness" (that's the chili pepper) of a professor
can be revealed. In
thinking about these new tools, the tools of social software, reviews,
and folksonomy, we need to be sure to think about how we are judging,
and what we are doing with, the material that is judging us, and that
we and our students will continue to use.

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