At last – a list of Social Networking sites has made it onto Wikipedia! There are sixty examples listed at the moment – I’m sure more will be added to by the Wikipedia community. Each of the sites is listed with its focus, user count and registration details (ie open or invite only etc.) What is staggering are the numbers of users quoted for some of these environments – MySpace 86M, Friendster</a< 29M and Xanga 40M for example! Most of the user figures are backed up with a reference that you can check (no doubt these figures will date very quickly)

Amid all the hype and speculation about the use of social software in education Terry Freedman of ICT in Education fame has brought together the thoughts of 14 educators from the USA, Canada, Thailand and the UK in an edited volume titled Coming of Age which can be downloaded free as a 1.9Mb PDF file.

I’ve had a quick read of the volume and found it to be extremely useful – there’s heaps here to inform the genuinely interested, from the personal perspetives and case studies of the contributors, to a most useful glossary, excellent book reviews and introduction to the use of things like podcasting, blogs and video blogging etc in an educational setting. Well done Terry – and thanks!

Want to know a bit more about the places that our teens are visitng on the net – here’s a comment from an article I came across this morning on MediaPost that provides some insights:

We know that tweens and teens spend the majority of their free time (and even some of their class time) surfing the Internet. Where they’re spending that surf time, however, seems to be a big mystery. Well, wonder no more. Teens and tweens are drawn to Web sites that engage them on multiple interactive platforms, hold their ever-shrinking attention span, and give them a reason to come back.

Read the full list of sites and comments in the article titled Buzz Focus: Surf’s Up at These Hot Sites – A QUICK GUIDE TO WHERE teens and tweens are pointing and clicking

??In the participatory era, media will no longer be delivered one way from a media company to an audience…but by audience members to other audience members. The distinction between content creators and consuming audiences first gets blurry and then disappears completely…Instead of media being delivered as a sermon or lecture, it becomes a conversation among the people in the audience?? (quote from Andreas Kluth, Technology Correspondent of The Economist)

I’ve just read my way through two outstanding articles/papers that provide much clarity to the whole debate around social software and the way in which this is changing our approach to learning, communicating and living!.

The first is from the April 26 edition of “The Economist” magazine, in a feature section titled Among the Audience – a survey of new media The feature is actually a series of articles covering topics such as blogs wikis and podcasting, as well as those that explore the phenomena associated with the use of these tools, such as the dawn of interactive journalism, defining a media company in this new world, and an attempt to summarise the promise and pitfalls of these new environments and tools. (All of these artlcles area available online, along with a selection of audio interviews with some of the authors.)

This has to be one of the ‘must reads’ for anyone who is wanting to quickly come up to speed with what these new technologies are about and how they are or may impact on many of the ways we currently do business – including education!

The second paper is from George Seimens, and is titled Learning in Synch with Life – New Models, New Processes (downloadable PDF), which was prepared by George after he was asked by Google to submit a whitepaper at their recent training summit

In this paper George evaluates the diverse needs of learners today, and details the shortcomings of courses/content and LMSs in meeting those needs. He goes on to recast learning as a network formation process, occurring within the structure of organisational ecologies (which he refers to as connectivism) and then details some of his implementation concerns and challenges.

The paper is a work in progress – but appeals very much to my beliefs and understandings of what is emerging. The paper is illustrated with several useful diagrams that help explain some of the complex ideas being presented, inlcuding such things a a ‘Learning ecology’ and the relationship between an “adpative learning cycle” and a “Learning Development Cycle”

I’d recommend both of these!