Let’s Get Going!

We’ll start our journey by getting to know online communities. Let’s examine first the Ning platform. Any teacher can support their work by starting an online community. The community may consist of the students and function as a course platform such as Moodle and Pedanet. It can also be built for communication between the professionals in a specified field.

The advantage of services such as Ning is that, for a small fee or completely free-of-charge, the teacher has the usage of many tools on the same platform. The discussion forum, blog, chat and rss-feeds are right at your fingertips. It is also possible to create various groups within the community that cater to your own tasks and interests. The creation of a community is easy – even a beginner can do it. And all the elements are there, ready to use.

This Is Easy – Give It a Try!

The first thing to do when starting a community is to create your own profile: you give the required information and add a photograph. On Ning, everyone has their own page – My Page – which shows your own messages on the forum and the blog posts next to your personal information. In other words, your own page offers easy access to all the materials you’ve produced.

You’ll get to your blog by clicking the Blogs link on the bar at the top of the page. The view that opens up has a list of all blog posts and a menu which allows you to move to your own blog and modify it. You can start a new post by clicking the Add blog post link, which opens an easy-to-use text editor. The keywords or tags will help you to find the texts dealing with the same topics.

Content Trumps Technique

Content, participation and interaction with others are priorities in an online community. Openly sharing interesting content takes a little effort and attitude. Discussion of online communities often raises the issues of crowdsourcing and collective intelligence. Problems can be solved collectively on the forums, and the other members of the community can offer assistance. In practice, the results of crowdsourcing depend on how committed people are to working together.

Then again, participation is affected by the atmosphere, which is why it is recommended to pay particular attention to the tone of your messages. In speech, the tones are expressed in multiple ways, but in writing the dialogue easily becomes monotonous. The tone of your answers gets better if you have the patience to read what others have said a few times over. Allusions to the texts the others have written adds to the conversational feel.

Are You Familiar Yet with Sometu?

Sometu is a Finnish online community which promotes the usage of social media in learning. Operating on the Ning platform, it is a network which has over 3 599 teaching professionals. There are as many as 81 discussion groups for the developers of work communities, IT trainers, library people, those interested in wikis and so on.

There are plenty of Ning groups based on the Sometu idea: for example, the Swedish Dela!, Norwegian d&b and the English language The Future of Education.

Next to Ning, there are many other services which offer platforms for online communities – for example, Elgg and Grou.ps. All of them offer plenty of material to familiarize yourself with the service either on their own web pages or on YouTube. These become helpful when you’re creating your own community.

17A blog is a wonderful aid for learning. The teacher can use the blog as a course home page: you can publish the learning materials, tasks and notifications and have conversations about them on the blog. The learners on the other hand, can start their own blogs in which they can carry out the tasks and monitor their learning. The blogs can be either private or public.

It Only Takes a Minute

There are plenty of free blogging services available and starting a blog, as well as using it, is extremely simple. The services can be compared based on their features, usability and permanence. Google’s Blogger is fairly familiar and an easy choice because it allows you to select your preferred language, including Finnish. The multilingual WordPress offers a ready-made blog as well as open-source blog software for downloading. Edublogs offers diaries specifically meant for teaching, but the only language option is English. If the language you use in the course is, for example, Swedish or Finnish, I absolutely recommend selecting a platform which comes in that language.

Creating a blog is easy by following a few guided steps. The blog services offer many simplepresentations and videos which will give you extra information. The real work starts when you get to the content production.

Blog to Build Your Home Base, to Share Material, for Extra Flavour

If you make the blog into a home base for your course, the way to begin is to plan the general plot for it, the number of blog posts and content. The planning progresses the same way it normally does for an online course. Face-to-face teaching can also be supplemented with online material.

The teacher can also write the learning material for the course on the blog and publish it bit by bit during the course. In an expert blog, the course’s themes are dealt with more freely and it functions as additional reading material. At its best, the teacher’s blog will become a widely read bestseller like Steven Wheeler’s Learning with ‘e’s.

The teaching can also be spiced up with a video or a picture blog, and the treatment doesn’t have to be too serious either. I have often used my Kielikuvia mobile blog, which takes a playful look at publicly made language mistakes.

The usage of blogs is of course most effective when the students themselves write it either alone or in groups. A blog combines the benefits of writing and publishing. Blogging becomes better motivated if private blogs are opened to the entire group and they receive comments. In the best scenario, the learning diary will grow into an expert blog in time.

One part of blogging is following other blogs – or the blogosphere. Good tips on the useful blogs to follow can be found on blog lists and blogs recommended by experts. It really pays to get to know, for instance, well-known edubloggers.

A wiki is an incomparable tool for social learning! It is at its best in collaborative writing, but it also works well as information storage, as a discussion board, or in internal communication.

A wiki is often automatically associated with Wikipedia, but it really is a piece of software that can be used in any type of content production. It’s easiest for the teacher to use the services where you can open your own wiki in a matter of minutes, as easily as a blog. It doesn’t tax your technical skills to simply click on the Edit and Save buttons. WikiSpaces and WikiDot, among others, offer free wikis.

For teaching, however, I can also warmly recommend the public wiki projects. The students are normally excited about taking part in international projects, and open publication is motivational.

Wikipedia offers suitable source material and can be supplemented with new articles: also, the existing articles are easy to edit and new ones can be created by translating Wikipedia entries from other languages. Wikipedia articles are good for teaching critical reading skills – is the treatment trustworthy, unbiased and comprehensive? What literature has been used as source material? Have the sources been correctly cited?

Wikibooks is an exciting place to produce textbooks together with students. The best policy is probably to start with existing books by complementing them and using them as course material. Books written in other languages can be translated and added to the English library. In one of my courses, health care students compiled a guide in Wikibooks for writing medical texts.

Wiktionary is a handy source, and in language teaching it functions as a living workbook. There are plenty of interesting things the students can do with the words – such as finding and adding translations, inflections, synonyms and antonyms.

Wikimedia Commons gives you the chance to download free images and media clips for study assignments and teaching material.

The most natural use for a wiki is group work. The best way to do this is by splitting the class in small groups of 3–5 people, so that the responsibility is more evenly shared than in a bigger group. Working becomes more efficient if you assign each member of the group their respective roles. The benefit of a wiki in group work is that the interaction is tightly wound round the content.

In teacher-student interaction, a wiki enables precise feedback. It is useful for the learner to receive a concrete suggestion on how to make their own piece of work better, instead of general commentary. At its best, a wiki helps create the relationship of a master and apprentice, in which an expert can show how he would proceed in the task.

What Is a Wiki is a good guide for using the wiki. You will get the real idea of working with wikis by participating in the writing of wikibooks or by supplementing the articles from your own field on Wikipedia. Give it a shot and be inspired!

Originated in the American college world, Facebook had its beginnings in student communication on campus. This background perhaps explains why Facebook is used for recreation more than the other social media tools.

The benefit of Facebook is its prevalence. It is overwhelmingly the most popular networking service. Facebook has an estimated 100 million monthly users, MySpace has about 55 million while the networking service for professionals, LinkedIn, has 11 million. Naturally teaching ought to be taken where the people are likely to congregate anyway. It is also a common phenomenon that the course participants’ conversation is self-ignited on Facebook, and not on the discussion board set up in the course environment.

Share, Interact, Inform

A private or open group or page can be opened for the course. Both are primarily used for interaction, but the conversation can be triggered by publishing links, images and videos. A good idea is to encourage participation by keeping the treatment of the topics fairly light. The nature of the service should be taken into account in the tone of the messages.

A Facebook group can be started for interaction between people who share common interests. The group page is good for transmitting information about what is happening in the field and it offers the participants the opportunity to discuss the newest publications. eLearning professionals shows an example of a Facebook page in this kind of use. The student groups work on the same principle.

Like groups, an open Facebook page can also work as a community for informal learning. It is a good place to gather the different offshoots from face-to-face teaching and various types of additional material. This is how I use my Kielipoliisi page.

Marketing for seminars and conferences and engaging the participants works well on Facebook, for example Online Educa Berlin. But you have to remember to keep it interactive: one-way communication does not suit social media.

A Walled Garden

Facebook is essentially a kind of an online discussion board with some extra features. The usage and the content define how beneficial it is, therefore the perspective of negative news coverage is often too narrow. The problem of Facebook from the users’ viewpoint has been the closed-off nature of the service and the privacy settings that are notoriously difficult to manage. These issues have to be considered when planning the usage, but the entire service doesn’t have to be rejected because of it. Nevertheless, Facebook continues to have many opponents, and its usage in education has been criticized.

Facebook is very useful in teaching languages. You can choose to use the English version of the page, but it is possible to select the language you are teaching. It’s easy to offer hints about interesting groups and pages in various languages, and networking evolves naturally. The ease of participation has often been regarded as one of the reasons why Facebook is so successful: a thumb-up is a much more effortless way to voice your opinion than supportive statements.

Twitter is what is called a micro blog. A micro blog consists of short 140 character updates. Micro blog may not be a very successful name, because the exchange of information on Twitter is more reminiscent of chatting and instant messaging than actual blogging. Twitter is the most popular of the micro blogs, but Qaiku and Yammer among others are very similar.

On Twitter, you first have to register to use the service, open an account and start sending messages. Some tweeters clearly have their favourite subjects – e.g. news, learning, social media – which they comment or share links to. Others use Twitter as a discussion board, where they exchange thoughts on everyday topics. Communities are often happy to stick to discussing only their own activities, but this kind of one-way communication is frowned upon in the Twitter community.

It’s All About Whom You Follow and Who Follows You

A Twitter page is public, but your messages will primarily be read by the people who follow you: that is, those who have clicked the Follow-button under your profile. Similarly, your own page (after the registration) will show messages from those people you’ve decided to follow. I personally have a couple of accounts: the Rsuominen username is mostly for following experts in online teaching and communication. The people I follow here are primarily from outside Finland, so the language I use on this page is English. My firm, Yksityinen kielitoimisto, has another username – Kielipoliisi– which only follows Finns, and I only use Finnish to discuss issues concerning that language and communication. If you own more than one account on Twitter, it’s handy to follow them by using theTweetDeck or HootSuite utility programs.

It’s easy to learn how to use Twitter by trying the service yourself or by watching a video. There’s a message box at the top of the page, where you can write messages the same way as on Facebook. The message can be your own, or you can retweet somebody else’s message: click the Retweet link or copy the message and write RT (=retweet) next to the username of the original sender, for example RT@Rsuominen.

You can give your message keywords in accordance with your topic by writing them as hashtags – for example, #online learning, or #schools. Both the hashtags and nicknames will automatically become links and if you click on them you will find all the messages marked with the same word. The hashtags make the messages look awkward, but they help you follow the messaging concerning some particular topic or conference. Twitter is also good for communicating information quickly and networking.

By following the stream of messages, you will quickly find the interesting experts and will be able to comment on their thoughts. It’s a lot of fun to get an answer from a respected guru from across the world. However, the messaging doesn’t have to be global – the service works just as well in the internal conversation of a course and its teaching. The messages concerning your own course or community (for example #lrnchat) are easy to find with the help of the hashtags.

SlideShare is a service which allows the users to upload their own slide shows. The presentation can be shared with all users free-of-charge or with a private group by using the paid version. Similar services online are SlideBoom and SlideServe.

As a user of the service, you can utilize the slide shows that others have openly shared – an unparalleled aid for a teacher. Similarly, by uploading your own slide show to the service, you can reach a wider audience than just your own students. Using this service to share content is also wise in the sense that the students do not need PowerPoint software to see them – a browser is enough to view the slides. The SlideShare presentations can also be embedded in your blog or on a Facebook page.

It’s easy to learn to use the service through the aid of a guide or video.

The purpose of SlideShare – as with other online sharing services – is to increase not only the free distribution of content, but interaction between the users as well. The service makes it possible to recommend the slide shows you feel are useful, and it offers great statistical information on recommendations, comments, hits and embedding.

In principle, the service functions the same way as blogs and video-sharing do. The more you produce content yourself and comment on other people’s material, the more interesting the activity becomes. The thinking behind all social media services is to increase interactivity. It is therefore important to figure out for yourself – and make it clear to your students too – what the correct ways to converse online are and how the conversation differs from face-to-face situations. The most crucial difference is that the conversation occurs mostly in writing online. Next week, we’ll start the second leg of the journey by looking into what it means to write online.

SlideShare has plenty of interesting slide shows available on the topic of social media. I suggest you look at these three, but the service helps you find whatever is most important to you.

• What is Social Media?
• Social Media & Web 2.0 for Learning