At the LAMS European conference I gave a talk in which I explored what we know about learning, and what I've deduced about social media. My conclusion was that we develop tools to represent the complexity of learning (such as LAMS), but that the social media/web 2.0 approach takes a different angle and instead of trying to represent complexity in the tool, creates simple tools and lets the network create the complexity.

I had 6 principles of social media which are:
1.     <embed> is the universal acid of the web – we should build around it.
2.    Simple with reach trumps complex with small audience.
3.    Sharing is a motivation to participation - so make it easy and rewarding to do.
4.    Start simple and let others build on top
5.    Providing limitations frames input (Cf twitter, 12seconds, etc)
6.    Complexity resides in the network not the application

If these are true, then number 6 in particular strikes me as having profound implications for what we do as educational technologists.

 

 

Martin Weller is Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University in the UK. He chaired the OU's first major elearning course with 15,000 students, and has been the Director for the VLE project and the social networking project at the OU. His research interests are in new technologies, digital scholarship and learning environments. He blogs at edtechie.net