Social Web/Preface

Preface

This book/class is supposed to give a hands-on experience related to the social web. Different aspects will be looked at, new forms of teaching (maybe not new to others, but new to me) will be tested and students participation is essential. Most likely this book will be outdated as soon as it is finished, but for a little while it may serve as an entrance to the world of the social web.

The idea behind this class project came from a colleague who suggested that most class projects produce really nice results, but usually disappear in some instructors' drawers. After reading on the possibility of using Wikibooks for class projects, we just had to give it a try.

Getting Started

If you are new to Wikibooks, you might first want to look at Using Wikibooks. Details for creating a class project can be found at Class_Project_Guidelines. If you are completely new to Wikipedia, the Wikipedia tutorial maybe helpful to you. If you like to upload images to wikipedia, use the File Upload Wizard. However, only upload images if you created them and you own the copyright!

Other Wikibooks

There are also other wikibooks on subjects related that are quite useful:

• Computers_&_Society
• Social_Media
• Introduction_to_Sociology

Not related to the subject, but helping me to get the editing right:

• Game_Creation_with_XNA

Other Class Projects

Inspiration from successful class projects can be drawn here, which by themselves are also quite interesting and maybe helpful for this project:

• Basic Writing
• Handbook for Doctoral Students in Education

Experience from the First Iteration

The first iteration of this course just finished this July 2012. From my perspective it was definitely a success. From the students perspective, it seems a bit mixed, when looking at the evaluations given online. For me, most interesting were the blogs, also called 'learning journals'. They all started of a little weak, but after three or four weeks, some turned into real gems, full of wit, information and compassion. Important here was, I think, that students had to comment on blogs of their colleagues. Twitter was totally useless, but this is more of my fault then that of Twitter, same for Moodle. Facebook also turned out to be quite useful, but much less than what I hoped for. As for YouTube, I guess there was just a handful of students watching the videos, and considering the effort that goes into producing them, it is not worth while. From my part most disappointing was the Wikibook: Since I had positive experience with a wikibook previously (Game_Creation_with_XNA), I was really looking forward to it. Instead, I found some passages just copied and pasted, poor referencing, and overall a rather minimalistic effort. Although in some cases I was very pleasently surprised. But, as mentioned before, the blogs more than made up for it. In the fall there will be second iteration, with a very different group of students (distance learners), let's see how this turns out.

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