We don't doubt that "social learning" tools are either going to prove useful and popular or the equivalent functionality will eventually just be built into a student or a faculty member's tool kit for teaching and learning.

This article in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Marc Parry and Jeffrey R. Young discusses the concept, one early failure, and then takes a look at four of what the authors consider to be the most interesting new tools available for use: FinalsClub, OpenStudy, GradeGuru, and Mixable.

The comments below the article are interesting, if predictable:

I agree with drfunz. Students are being co-opted by companies/sites like Facebook that claim to link them globally in an instant--like a party all the time. The reality is that many of these sites depend on dollars from advertisers who depend on number of hits. Eventually, it all falls down. Look at Wikipedia who has its founder pictured above the entry, flogging for money to support a "social research" site. That comes now after years of teachers saying that Wikipedia is nothing more than a superficial knowledge site for those who don't know ANYTHING about the topic and banning it as a real source of research.

Teachers who immediately run to social network sites because that is where the students go are often only doing two things: wanting to show the students they are hip and cool, and therefore worthy of respect, OR letting the tail wag the dog--letting student habits dictate pedagogy. "Just in time" is a phrase that applies to shipments of goods, not learning. Students who learn "just in time" by looking it up, carrying PowerPoint sheets into tests, and only doing online research will forget that information very quickly--often before the test or paper due the next day. It's basic psychology: short term memory can only hold 7 items +/- 2 for 30 seconds. The only way to get it into longterm memory is to practice, restate, review--none of the processes that are part of the "click click" computer generation.

A major portion of what planners do is communication. We think this article from EDUCAUSE Review is a nice summary of where we see information streams going in the very near future. It's worth your time to look it over, if for no other reason than that it will provide useful perspective: "For the longest time, we have focused on sites of information as a destination; we have viewed accessing information as a process and producing information as a task. What happens when all of this changes?"

Note the use of "alignment" in the following quote:

If we consider what it means to be "in flow" in an information landscape defined by networked media, we will see where Web 2.0 is taking us. The goal is not to be a passive consumer of information or to simply tune in when the time is right, but rather to be attentive in a world where information is everywhere. To be peripherally aware of information as it flows by, grabbing it at the right moment when it is most relevant, valuable, entertaining, or insightful. To be living with, in, and around information. Most of that information is social information, but some of it is entertainment information or news information or productive information. Being "in flow" with information differs from Csikszentmihalyi's sense of reaching a state of flow, since the former is not about perfect attention but is instead about a sense of alignment, of being attentively aligned with information.

What future role does analytics play in assisting planners to keep constituents' information streams appropriately aligned with an active plan, or planning process?

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

Here's your SCUP Link to "A Self-Appointed Teacher Runs a One-Man 'Academy'"

Salman Khan is a 33-year-old who makes lecture videos in his hole studio/closet. His lecture on "Cancer" is embedded in this post, below.

Mr. Khan calls his collection of videos "Khan Academy," and he lists himself as founder and faculty. That means he teaches every subject, and he has produced 1,400 lectures since he started in 2006. Now he records one to five lectures per day.

The lo-fi videos seem to work for students, many of whom have written glowing testimonials or even donated a few bucks via a PayPal link. The free videos have drawn hundreds of thousands of views, making them more popular than the lectures by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, famous for making course materials free, or any other traditional institution online, according to the leaders of YouTube's education section.

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

Here's your SCUP Link to "Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare-Time Revolution"

Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink, authors, respectively, of the books - Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age - are interviewed for Wired magazine. The conversation was "about motivation and media, social networking, sitcoms, and why the hell people spend their free time editing Wikipedia." Free time you ask? Well, there are people who have some, especially those (like me) who watch no television. What Shirky and Pink talk about is how that time is now "put to use" instead of "used up." 

A thought-stimulating, brief interview:

Shirky: We’re still in the very early days. So far, it’s largely young people who are exploring the alternatives, but already they are having a huge impact. We can do a back-of-the-envelope calculation, for example, using Wikipedia, to see how far we still have to go. All the articles, edits, and arguments about articles and edits represent around 100 million hours of human labor. That’s a lot of time. But remember: Americans watch about 200 billion hours of TV every year.

Pink: Amazing. All the time that people devote to Wikipedia—which that guy considered weird and wasteful—is really a tiny portion of our worldwide cognitive surplus. It’s less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the total.

Shirky: And it represents a very different and very powerful type of motivation.

Pink: Exactly. Too many people hold a very narrow view of what motivates us. They believe that the only way to get us moving is with the jab of a stick or the promise of a carrot. But if you look at over 50 years of research on motivation, or simply scrutinize your own behavior, it’s pretty clear human beings are more complicated than that.