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Social Capital in Virtual Learning Communities and Distributed Communities of Practice - 0 views

www.cjlt.ca/...cjlt29-3_art7.html anthropology bourdieu capital socialcapital
shared by Adam Bohannon on 19 May 08 - Cached
  • Researchers in the social sciences and humanities consider social ties to be a social resource. Such a resource is referred to as social capital.
  • Narayan and Pritchett (1997) suggested that communities with high social capital have frequent interaction, which in turn cultivates norms of reciprocity through which learners become more willing to help one another, and which improve coordination and dissemination of information and knowledge sharing. Social capital has been used as a framework for understanding a wide range of social issues in temporal communities. It has been used for the investigation of issues such as trust, participation, and cooperation.
  • In one of the earliest definitions of social capital, Hanifan (1916) stated that social capital included "those intangible substances [that] count for most in the daily lives of people - namely goodwill, fellowship, sympathy and social intercourse among the individuals and families who make up a social unit." Many years later, Coleman (1988) followed a similar line of thinking when he suggested that social capital refers to supportive relationships among adults and children that promote the sharing of norms and values.
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  • Woolcock (1998) argues that social capital `encompasses the norms and networks facilitating collective action for mutual benefit.'
  • Fountain (1998) defines social capital as the institutional effectiveness of inter-organizational relationships and cooperation—horizontally among similar firms in associations, vertically in supply chains, and multidirectional links to sources of technical knowledge, human resources, and public agencies.
  • Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998) defined social capital as the sum of actual and potential resources embedded within, available through and derived from the network of relationships possessed by an individual or social unit.
  • And Fukuyama (1999) included informal norms that promote cooperation between two or more individuals. The norms that constitute social capital can range from a norm of reciprocity between two friends, all the way up to complex and elaborately articulated doctrines like Christianity, Islamism or Confucianism. And so by definition, trust, networks, civil society, and the like which have been associated with social capital are all epiphenomenal, arising as a result of social capital but not constituting social capital itself.
  • A meta-societal definition of social capital was offered by the World Bank (1999), which referred to the institutions, relationships, and norms that shape the quality and quantity of a society's social interactions. In this view, social capital is seen not merely as the sum of the institutions that underpin a society _ it is the glue that holds them together.
  • Cohen and Prusak (2001) extend Putnam's definition to define social capital as a stock of active connections among people, which covers the trust, mutual understanding, and shared values and behaviours that bind people as members of human networks and communities.
  • As a working definition, we define social capital in virtual learning communities as . common social resource that facilitates information exchange, knowledge sharing, and knowledge construction through continuous interaction, built on trust and maintained through shared understanding.
  • Adam Bohannon on 19 May 08
     
    Social capital has recently emerged as an important interdisciplinary research area. It is frequently used as a framework for understanding various social issues in temporal communities, neighbourhoods and groups. In particular, researchers in the social sciences and the humanities have used social capital to understand trust, shared understanding, reciprocal relationships, social network structures, common norms and cooperation, and the roles these entities play in various aspects of temporal communities. Despite proliferation of research in this area, little work has been done to extend this effort to technology-driven learning communities (also known as virtual learning communities). This paper surveys key interdisciplinary research areas in social capital. It also explores how the notions of social capital and trust can be extended to virtual communities, including virtual learning communities and distributed communities of practice. Research issues surrounding social capital and trust as they relate to technology-driven learning communities are identified.
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Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody - 0 views

www.shirky.com/...looking-for-the-mouse.html clayshirky sociology technology
shared by Adam Bohannon on 03 May 08 - Cached
  • Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.
  • And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.
  • So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
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  • And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."
  • It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.
  • At least they're doing something. Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.
  • But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.
  • One per cent of that  is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
  • I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you? Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was essentially, "Isn't this all just a fad?" You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It's fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, "This isn't as good as doing what I was doing before," and settle down. And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn't the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.
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SLumming » Almost a Year: Education (in SL) - 0 views

durandus.org/...almost-a-year-education education elearning secondlife
shared by Adam Bohannon on 03 May 08 - Cached
  • I believe that any college or university which accepts US federal dollars and requires students to use second life as a classroom space is in violation of regulation 508 because SL is not accessible to individuals who are blind.
  • The creation of an inaccessible school is a de facto violation of US laws governing accessibility including IDEA, and regulations 504 and 508.
  • The much bruited installation of “voice chat” as accessibility option is merely an indication of how very little the educational establishment actually understands the issue of accessibility.
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  • Second, the main instantiation of educational activity in SL seems to be the recreation of the classroom in virtual space.
  • Third, efforts to introduce games and problem-based instruction as educational strategies have focused on adding a “game layer” on top of the SL environment rather than using the environment itself as a game.
  • I’ll be anxious to see how long it takes the educational community to realize that SL affords capabilities that transcend and exceed the capabilities of the classroom.
  • Fourth, my sense is that educators are generally tourists — outsiders looking in, just visiting — in the environment.
  • Few hold jobs. Comparatively few even “get off the island.” This is especially true of those educators who participate through the auspices of a private island. They’re very busy controlling the environment to suit their own purposes without really taking the time to understand the culture and environment. It’s no wonder they’re unable to recognized the inherent value of the space.
  • Fifth, everybody is interested in the space as an educational environment and almost nobody is looking at it as a learning environment.
  • They still think that there’s a direct correlation between teaching and learning in RL as well. That bias has been brought in world.
  • Conclusion: Teachers want to use the space. Most of them want to use it for the wrong reasons. Many don’t have a clue what it means to be “in the world” in any real sense, instead focusing on imposing RL constraints on SL constructs — even when those constraints are irrelevant.
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The Next Big Thing: Twitter and Microblogging - Business benefits to Twitter - 0 views

www.pcworld.ca/...pg0.htm advertising microblogging social media twitter
shared by Adam Bohannon on 02 May 08 - Cached
  • Business are also using Twitter for direct outreach to customers: Dell offers discounts on Twitter, and @Freshbooks is an example of a great small business using Twitter to connect directly with customers and prospects.
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twistori - 0 views

twistori.com experiment mashup twistori twitter
shared by Adam Bohannon on 29 Apr 08 - Cached
  • Adam Bohannon on 29 Apr 08
     
    this is the first step in an ongoing social experiment, based on twitter. inspired by wefeelfine and drawing data from summize, hand-crafted by amy hoy and thomas fuchs.
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