If Your Product is Not a Social Object, Why Are You in Education?
So, I just finished reading about social objects. I think this subject is quite interesting. I particularly liked learning about how you can build a service around a social object using the five principles below:
1. You should be able to define the social object your service is built around.
2. Define your verbs that your users perform on the objects. For instance, eBay has buy and sell buttons. It’s clear what the site is for.
3. How can people share the objects?
4. Turn invitations into gifts.
5. Charge the publishers, not the spectators. He learned this from Joi Ito. There will be a day when people don’t pay to download or consume music but the opportunity to publish their playlists online.
Yes, that’s the explanation of how to build a service around a social object. The next question is how does this work in education? First of all, I will say that educational content can definitely be social objects because they can easily be used to get conversations started. Of course I don’t feel like we have advanced as far in education, as we have in business with social objects. This statement goes along with my blog title, where I have replaced the word “business” with “education.” I also feel that assessments and assignments can be and are currently used as social objects as well. Who doesn’t go home to their roommates or spouse and talk about the test they just completed at the Testing Center? In this case, the Testing Center could also act as a social object, along with the assessments and assignments. The key here is just having a sharing object.
Now lets move on to the idea of compatibility of learning management systems with social objects. I think they are not very compatible. LMS are very confining and seem restricted in many ways, whereas learning objects are open, more social, easily shared, and just seem more exciting.
What is my metaphor for social objects? Lets go with a piano today. One piano wherever everyone can come together and press on different keys, making different sounds, melodies, harmonies, and even some wrong notes (and maybe they are not wrong to the person who pressed on those keys).
On a fun note, when I started looking for other links about social objects, several of our classmates made the first page of results on Google with their blogs on social objects! Way to go class! I also liked this little presentation on 10 Principles for Social Object Design. The author brings up many of the same points that were addressed in our reading.
Here are the 10 principles:
