Objects of Interest

I had the pleasure of guest authoring a blog post recently, and the topic I chose was orientations that can help you choose technology for community use. Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, and John D. Smith, authors of Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities, identified 9 orientations: meetings, open-ended conversations, projects, content, access to expertise, relationships, individual participation, community cultivation, and serving a context, which I find useful as a product educator. My experience has been that convincing people to try new technologies often works best when you can present a use case people can relate to from their own perspective. 

As a member of the Product Education team for Learning Objects, I often work with people on ways they can integrate technology into teaching and learning. Our social software platform is designed for course uses, individual use (personal learning spaces) and for communities. With a central space for the group and the ability to create content, team members can collaborate on work, build and publish knowledgebases, and document events. Academic departments can collaborate on curriculum and research. Clubs, teams, and groups have a place where they can coordinate activities and administrative or academic departments can easily share information with a broad audience.

Meetings, one of the specific orientations identified in Digital Habitats, are a use case that I present in my trainings. My perspective is academia, but I think that the cases I use can certainly translate to business use, too. Web 2.0 tools, wikis especially, are an excellent way to aggregate meeting information and cut down on a significant amount of email traffic among meeting attendees. Committees can also benefit from the use of collaborative workspaces. Wikis can replace paper documents and blogs are a great tool to keep committee members informed of important updates because they can be subscribed to via RSS. Rating, Voting and Ranking features can be used to categorize content, vote on key items, and add interactivity to courses and group events. 

In courses and in the workplace, a significant amount of the work done is projects; which often produce content. Web 2.0 tools enable groups of people, and individuals, to collaborate together on work, restrict certain workspaces or documents to people through roles or permissions, share content with people who may not have direct access to systems, and take advantage of features such as page histories, which track different versions of a project and can be reverted back to if necessary. Individually, every user can benefit from an online space to share their work and co-curricular interests with classmates and colleagues, both inside and outside the campus community. Using Web 2.0-based tools, users can work on scholarly research, publish interactive academic presentations, and showcase personal interests and achievements.

Learning happens when students collaborate, communicate and cooperate and it is about creating an environment that enables those activities. Social Software can transform learning into a dynamic experience. learners become contributors, not passive recipients of information. Whether participating in a blog site, collaborating on a wiki assignment, or commenting on a podcast, users are actively engaged in content creation, community cultivation, and discussion moderation.