Has the recent buzz in “social software” destined it to the hype graveyard? No. Educators have long understood the role of social communities in learning and life. And while their early efforts building online communities did presage today’s social software ambitions, something *is* different this time around. With the “right tool for the job” finally in hand, educators will be able to realize their learning theories in ways never before possible. In doing so, they will rescue social software from the hype graveyard, and make it a mainstay of all learning communities.

From mainstream news-sites to the blogsphere, social software is all the buzz. It seems that since the Internet has successfully nailed online publishing and e-commerce, it’s time to get back to what early net pioneers saw as the web’s greatest potential: connecting people.

Of course, if you’re an educator, you’re probably wondering what all the fuss is about. After all, the the prominent role of community in learning is well known by any master teacher and has been a central element of many learning theorists. Indeed, the tradition goes back thousands of years. Dee Dickson’s “Learning Society of the Future: Questions to Consider” explains how the Greeks used the term “paedeia ” to describe a learning community wherein “everyone was a learner and everyone was a teacher, and the whole community was responsible for the learning of its people.”

More recently, at the turn of the 20th century John Dewey explained the the equivalency of learning and living. Said Dewey:

not only does social life demand teaching and learning for its own permanence, but the very process of living together educates. It enlarges and enlightens experience; it stimulates and enriches imagination; it creates responsibility for accuracy and vividness of statement and thought.

Thus, for Dewey, classrooms are not artificially created places where one person (the teacher) transfers knowledge to others (the students), but rather, are mirrors of the democratic world wherein a community of individuals live, interact, and grow. Indeed, because Dewey insightfully recognized how learning operates in the “real world,” he sought to craft the same environment in the classroom. As a result, Dewey gave us a view of education whereby a community of learners ask questions, compare ideas, and imagine alternatives, all while actively engaged in and exploring real world problems.

The idea that all learning is socially mediated was further explored by Lev Vygotsky, whose “zones of proximal development” described how learning takes place when naive learners interact with others who are more experienced, then imitate their actions:

We propose that an essential feature of learning is that it creates the zone of proximal development; that is, learning awakens a variety of internal developmental processes that are able to operate only when the child is interacting with people in his environment and in cooperation with his peers. Once these processes are internalized, they become part of the child’s independent developmental achievement.

To Vygotsky, learning is a “necessary and universal aspect of the process of developing culturally organized, specifically human, psychological functions.” Thus, for learning to occur, people must be connected.

But if the Greeks, Dewey, and Vytgosky (along with a host of others) were the first to describe the importance of community in learning, then surely the more recent pioneers behind the “social software” movement have been the first to recognize how networked technologies can connect people into true learning communites?

Well, not quite. In fact, nearly 10 years ago, researchers John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid published a seminal paper entitled “Universities in the Digital Age,” that described Universities as an environment that provides students access to a community of scholars, and enables those students to gain experience participating in those communities. Thus, when thinking about how technology could and should be used to further the University’s mission, Seely Brown and Duguid saw technology not as a means for giving online students better access to information, but rather, as a means for connecting people (the academic equivalent of acculturating novices within what Lave and Wenger call communities of practice). Establishing these connections, says Seely Brown and Duguid, requires that we think of education as supporting a “conversational paradigm.” And it is in this area where they saw the potential for what today many are calling “social software:”

The centrality of conversation helps to explain why the Internet is such a significant phenomenon. Previous communications technologies-books, film, radio, television, telephones-have all supported distance. But they allowed primarily either monologues or one-to-one conversations. Communities, however, thrive on many-to-many conversations, which, even in the technologically rich twentieth century, have for the most part only been possible in face-to-face situations. So the campus and the workplace, which bring people together, have long been crucial sites for learning. Technology in general and the Net in particular now offer low cost ways to hold many-to-many conversations among people who are no longer in the same place.

The value of the Net doesn’t simply lie in the way it allows groups of people to talk with one another. It also comes from the way that, unlike telephones or video links, the Net can provide common objects for participants to observe, manipulate, and discuss. It’s not, then, simply a medium for conversation, nor is it just a delivery mechanism. It combines both, providing a medium for conversation and for circulating digital objects. Furthermore, it also allows participants to turn the ongoing conversation itself into another object of conversation for further reflection. Usually, educational technology tries to do one or another of these things. Ideally, it should combine all three.

So it would seem that the foundational pillars of social software — community and enabling networked technologies — are not new to educators. Indeed, at a panel held at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association in 1997, Linda Harasim, while presenting on the history of networked learning, commented: “the history of computer networking, while a technological marvel, is nonetheless far more a social phenomenon, and arguably the first pioneers to systematically engage in socializing the network into early communities were the educators.” (emphasis mine)

A quick look at education projects in the sciences (the field I know best) supports Harasim’s claim. For example, the Learning through Collaborative Visualization Project (CoVis) administered out of Northwestern University’s Learning Sciences Program was a multi-year effort to explore the use of networking technologies to enable high school students to work in collaboration with remote students, teachers, and scientists. The project embedded a learn-by-doing (i.e., constructivist) framework within an extended collaborative network to enable students to practice authentic science within a living community of peers and experts. Importantly, the community made extensive use of communication tools such as E-Mail, discussion boards, shared notebooks and collaboratively authored project web sites.

Similarly, the LabNet effort, run by the the science, mathematics, and technology education research center TERC, had amongst its three primary goals two which today we would place firmly in today’s “social software” bulls-eye. Specifically, LabNet sought to “build a professional community of practice among high school science teachers, and exploit the potential of today’s new technologies — connecting teachers via telecommunication, and equipping students with powerful research tools in the form of sensors connected to microcomputers.” Indeed, in reflecting on the project, consider this excerpt from a participating LabNet project investigator:

(LabNet) certainly demonstrates the ability of (these) students to design and conduct a complicated class project requiring clarity, accuracy, and cooperation. It also demonstrates the ways in which their numerous conversations shaped their thinking. Central to their investigation were their conversations with one another, with their teacher, with me, and with their network colleagues. These conversations helped students shape and sharpen their study, initially in their class discussions about the logistics of the study and later in their ability to engage me and other adults and students in the content of their findings. (From Labnet–Toward a Community of Practice, Richard Ruopp, editor, 1994)

A common strand running through both the CoVis and LabNet projects, and others like them, is the use of networked communication tools to support shared conversations and social interactions.

But if social software is all about supporting shared conversations and social interactions, is today’s latest wave of “social software” merely an old idea dressed up in new clothing?

The answer is both yes and no.

As just described, clearly the theoretical foundations of social software (the role of community in life and learning) and the use of networked technologies to enable community have been with us for some time. What is different this time around, however, is what Clay Shirky describes simply as a “timing” issue. Jack Schoefield, writing in the Guardian, described Shirky’s assessment of “why now” this way:

One reason is that there is a web-based platform emerging, based on weblogs, Wikis (web pages that any user can edit), and RSS feeds (either Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication – a way of sending messages when a site’s contents are updated). Another is ease of use: “ridiculously easy group-forming is really new,” says Shirky. A third is ubiquity. In some cases, he argues, all the people in a group will have web access, so they can take its use for granted.

In other words, the world has changed. In the early days of online communications, the online and offline worlds were like two Hula Hoops that may have had little or no connection with one another. Users typically had groups of friends online, with whom they did online things such as chat and share files, and groups of friends offline, with whom they went to the pub, or whatever. Today, the Hula Hoops overlap, and offline groups will naturally develop online components.

And this is what makes today’s social-software phenomenon so interesting. Indeed, given their socio-constructivist theory base and many early efforts in building connected communities of practice, educators will be the first to adopt and successfully use the “new” social software tools. Reinvigorated with these new tools, it shouldn’t be long before the educational community begins turning the social-software hype into sound, yet revolutionary practice.

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