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He Said She Said

(This is a text summary of the He Said She Said podcast from January 17, 2006. This is a weekly podcast that deals with a wide range of topic on Education and Educational Technology. The show’s host is Rob Reynolds and he is joined by Susan Smith Nash. The He Said She Said podcast is available every Tuesday evening on Xplana Radio.)

The topic of this podcast is the use of social networking tools to enhance online communities in distributed education. It’s an icy night outside and tonight Susan and Rob begin by talking about the importance of Communities of Interest and how these can provide a meaningful and contextualized learning experience for students. They propose introducing a variety of tools such as topic tagging into existing utilities such as discussion boards and journals in order to shift online communities towards becoming real Communities of Interest. Susan addresses the needs of active instructor mentoring in these cases because, in some instances, individual tagging can lead to false associations and matches. Rob sees this as a real plus because it forces the instructor to assume a more meaningful role in the community process, going beneath the convenient surface to a place where learning becomes truly contextualized to individual student interests and where instructors have are able to modify content into narrowcast pieces tailored for personal application. Both Susan and Rob agree that the time is right for some integrated tools along these lines. Specifically, they recommend:

• Adding user tagging capabilities to discussion boards and journals in existing LMS platforms;
• Providing monitoring tools for observing and analyzing dynamic Communities of Interest that form using the proposed tagging tools;
• Allowing instructors to modify and contextualize content easily to map accurately to evolving student interests

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