Boise State University's EdTech program uses Moodle as a social networking site in all of its classes. It allows students to share work and to comment on each others' work.
Nancy Kaplan and Ananda Gunawardena write about the use of Classroom Salon, a social media network designed for collaboration in the higher education setting. They found that Classroom Salon was not effective in helping students in the chemistry class, but was in the biology class.
Jeff Jarvis, a professor at City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, gathered a conference that discussed the use of alternative media for reporting news. Blogs with comment sections seemed to be the main technology of course for the conference participants.
http://truthy.indiana.edu/ is a project that analyzes tweets to understand how information diffuses on Twitter. A collaboration between professors and students that uses Twitter to uncover the spread of information and disinformation about public issues.
Rey Junco, a faculty associate now at Harvard conducted a class that taught college students how to use Twitter. It was successful in showing that Twitter can aid in education.
The Stanford University Facebook page is a place that Stanford uses to share information about research projects that are occurring among their students and faculty. There are hundreds of entries including one about She++, a group promoting programming among women and another post about great white sharks.
http://arxiv.org/ is a social networking site that is hosted by Cornell University Library. It is used to share working papers and to actually publish academic papers. It is widely used in the quantitative sciences and is beginning to displace actual journals.
Mark Frydenberg, a lecturer at Bentley University, has a project were students collaborate on doing a presentation with other students in Romania. They use Facebook and Twitter to connect and YouTube to post videos that they create for the project.
Purdue University has used an application called Hotseat which piggybacks off of existing social networks in two classes. Students can send messages to Hotseat via Facebook or Twitter. Students used this tool to comment to each other and the professor during class.
This article considers the connections between connectivism and chaos theory. It makes the observation that they do share similar features in the basic theory.
Rolin Moe discusses whether connectivism is truly a new and singularly applicable theory of learning, or if it is merely an appendage to earlier theories such as constructivism.
This paper considers the case of one mid-sized international company and how it built a community of practice. It looks at different strategies and their effects on communities of practice and on global distribution of knowledge and then suggest areas to look at for further study. One such area for further research is to look into seeing how to link multiple communities of practice so that sharing can be more global.
This paper looks at the patterns that emerge in the use of Personal Learning Networks. It tries to define language that is useful in considering these patterns.
This is a website dedicated to blogging on connectivism. Apparently no one cares about it anymore because the last post to it was over a year ago. However, it has quite a bit of content from 2005 to 2012 about connectivistic topics such as MOOCs and sensemaking.
This reports the results of a survey of students about using instant messaging in an asynchronous distance learning course in library science. The students came to believe that instant messaging was not appropriate for class related learning, but it was shown to have developed relationships between classmates and to have successfully simulated the types of informal relationships that occur in brick and mortar classrooms. These type of relationship can help build PLNs.
This paper argues that using Personal Learning Environments (PLE-these are functionally equivalent to PLNs) self regulation is important. Because the use of PLEs are based on individual goals and actions the use of behavior which proves effective at reaching goals is important. They then suggest a framework for self regulated learning when using PLEs.
This book discusses emerging technologies in distance learning. One of the keys points covered in this book is the roll of social networking in distributing knowledge. This covers Moodle, wikis, and web 2.0 tools such as Facebook and twitter. This book is mainly theoretical in nature.
Stephen Downes's paper on knowledge contains insights about many topics, including the types of knowledge, emergence (the idea that some knowledge comes through connections between events, actors, or things), and knowledge distribution. Downes flagrantly displays his cognitive bias in his offhand dismissal of political conspiracies when discussing physicality, but makes many interesting and thought provoking points.
This is a paper that considers how connectivity has changed the cycle and nature of learning. It proposes that a new reality caused by computer networks has caused the creation and lifespan of knowledge to speed up and made knowledge creation a much more distributed activity. It is now even less expert driven and more driven by connections between learners.