The Psychology of Facebook

Dr. BJ Fogg & Daniel Berdichevsky at Stanford University are gathering articles from various authors into a nice book around the psychology of Facebook.

You can read more about it on their blog.

How to Let Users Share Your Content?

With the Semantic Web it becomes easier to share content, data is portable, easily linkable…

Here are two services that makes it easy to allow your viewers share your content in popular sites like Facebook, StumbleUpon and Digg. They auto-generate a widget that contains buttons that link to those services and trigger them once your viewers click them:

 

AddThis

ShareThis

Microblogging and Learning

I am sitting at the “140 Characters or Less: Microblogging in Learning” session at DevLearn 08. Discussing the use of Twitter and I started to dig up some websites… If you just google “twitter” or “microblogging + learning” you will find tons of info out there…

Of course Twitter is the first one that comes to everyone’s mind. And there is a VAST (I mean: VAST!) array of third party applications for Twitter users (many resources listed here by category). More Twitter apps.

But there are several others trying to focus on different niches such as k12 Education (Edmodo), corporate and other environments (Presently, Yammer, SocialCast, etc.)…

Many advocate that Twitter is a great way to get to know others, to express oneself in a brief manner (140 characters limit), to find news before they are even broadcast on TV, etc.  But o course, how do we use Twitter in learning contexts? Here is a list of blogs about the use of Twitter for learning:

http://adifference.blogspot.com/2007/07/twitter-ephemeral-learning-tool.html

http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2008/09/twitter-learning-professionals.html

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/marcia-conner/learn-all-levels/latest-learning-fast-edu-twittering

http://melaniemcbride.net/2008/02/10/classroom20-twitter-delicious-and-participatory-learning/

Using Twitter in education.

Using Twitter in corporate.

Lessons museums can learn from Twitter.

If you are like me, you don’t want to post your Facebook status and then do the SAME thing on Twitter. You also prefer to post status updates on Facebook via the Facebook iPhone app, not the other way around… well, here is a solution that works from Facebook to Twitter: fb2twitter.

Directory of learning professionals on Twitter: http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/socialmedia/edutwitter.html

Brandon Hall articles tagged with “twitter“

And, of course, there are the self-hosted clones that you can run behind your firewall… a short list here.

Just for fun: TwittEarth

Twistory – turn your tweets into a diary…

Facebook is the Fastest-Growing Social Network

Very interesting post on TechCrunch based on Comscore data that show the growth rate of Facebook and other social networks. Facebook being the winner in this race.

What about Learning? If we want to reach learners where they are we need to, of course, know where they are and also start developing to these platforms.  Real learning in social media goes beyond delivering learning content on Facebook, it is about promoting user-generated content and sharing. Interaction amongst learners is a key factor in how learning takes place and these social networks offer great tools to mediate this interaction and make it easy. Netgeners or “Millenials” grow used to this type of technology (although I think the research on Millenials is debatable because I think the characteristics attributed have to do more with attitude and opportunity of exposure to technology than a matter of age and the year an individual is born) I do think we need to consider a shift in eLearning based on the new expectations people have regarding receiving, processing, creating and sharing content. Social networks offer a great insight into how people expect to interact with one another, providing a great approach to Constructivist learning…

 

Zembly – Facebook App Creator

[still a draft]

As time goes by, things always become easier to create and use, especially in social media things happen fast.

No coding, WYSISWYG is the future of things, making it easier for user-generated content to be, yes, generated.

We see a vast array of WYSIWYG applications out there and many of them are migrating to the Webtop side of things. 

We can now easily build applications for Facebook with Zembly, for example. What impact does this have in learning? This means we are able to deliver learning just-in-time, where the learners are: social media websites. Zembly is a great example of that.