Social Software

We are all familiar with the common buzz words that create and drive the current technologies, but what about “Social Software”.
Social Software can be defined as the current technologies that enable users to create communities and resources to collaborate and build together.
In their book, Wikinomics, Tapscott and Williams site the fact that:

“Billions of connected individuals can now actively participate in innovation, wealth creation, and social development in ways we once only dreamed of. And when these masses of people collaborate, they collectively can advance the arts, culture, science, education, government, and the economy in surprising but ultimately profitable ways.”

Social Software is a broad term that basically supports multi-user interaction, the sharing of ideas, knowledge and feedback required to grow as a community.

With the advent and evolution of the Internet, we are now better able to communicate and collaborate with others. Some of these tools have evolved from chat rooms and now include: Wikis, Blogs, Instant messaging, Learning Management Systems, and Collaborative real-time editors (such as Google’s Notebook). One cannot overlook the gaming communities that allow the interaction of hundreds if not millions of users in a virtual environment.
For a more complete list of social software see “List of social software”

So how do we use these in education? Most of our students are already aware of or are using some of these tools, so why not use them in their education? Most, if not all of these tools are available for free and only require connectivity.
In my next post we will explore Wikis.