DevLearn 2011 Workshop Primer

This primer is meant to provide a running list of terms and definitions related to social media and social learning. Spend some time reviewing the terms; we’ll kick off our workshop with an activity showcasing your knowledge. 

What is Social Media?

Social media represent a group of Internet-based technologies that seek to improve communication between people. They are distinct from traditional mass media in that they are relatively cost-effective (many times free) and allow anyone to publish and access information. Changing trends in the use of Web technology have laid the foundation for the emergence of social media, and these trends are usually encapsulated in the often used buzz-term Web 2.0. Enhanced creativity, communication, secure information sharing, collaboration, and functionality of new Internet applications are all characteristics of Web 2.0 technologies (Wikipedia 2008a).  

In today’s corporate environments, social media are used in a variety of capacities. Whether it’s using wikis or Google documents to collaborate on team projects, or sharing instructional videos, many companies are exploring the potential of social media and leveraging them in ways that move them competitively forward.

Term	Definition
Always on	Continual connectivity to a network.
Ambient intimacy	The ability to keep in touch with your social network with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible.
Blog	A blog is typically a personal space maintained by an individual or team with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video (Wikipedia 2008).  Entries are usually displayed in reverse-chronological order with the most recent posts shown first.  Readers often comment on individual posts and blogs typically link to other related blogs.
Broadband social synapses	People have always been social creatures who have needed each other. Our brains evolved way ahead of others to enable rich complexities and nuances of attachments, empathy, and self-awareness. Humans have always been plugged in – connected to one another through our senses and minds and bodies.
Communities of practice	Communities of practice are commonly formed on social networking sites.  Communities of practice are forums in which professionals can gather to share best practices or work together to solve problems. The new capabilities provided by social networking tools are perfectly suited to support the creation and maintenance of communities of practice, both internal to organizations and across industries.
Content tagging	Content tagging refers to practice of associating a tag, or keyword, with a specific piece of content— thus describing the item, and enabling keyword-based classification and search of information.  Content tagging is an important feature of many Web 2.0 services, such as social bookmarking sites. Creating tags that have specific meaning to each individual is called folksonomy.
Focused sharing	Specialized social networks designed for users who prefer a more focused way to share content.
Geo-enabled social networking	A type of social networking in which geographic services and capabilities such as geocoding and geotagging are used to enable additional social dynamics. User-submitted location data can allow social networks to connect and coordinate users with local people or events that match their interests. (Wikipedia 2011)
Hyper-connected	Those who are always connected regardless of where they physically happen to be—at work, home, on vacation, in a restaurant, in bed or even in a house of worship. Increasingly their personal and business lives are blurring into a single extended conversation.
Hyper-real	The dimension we tend to uncritically embrace when simulation assumes more “reality” than the real.
Immediacy design	Over-the-air instant delivery of just-in-time learning content.
Intelligent learning companions (ILCs)	Virtual assistants (sociable robots) designed to provide meaningful responses based on your personal profile, interests, concerns. An ILC can be automated, such as feed aggregators, or manual, such as a smartphone or other connected device.
Key influencer	A person with a long reach, and whose opinions affect a large number of people. For instance, a person’s Twitter profile with thousands of followers has the potential to extend its reach multiple times over.
Mashups	In web development, a mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool.  An example is using Google Maps to display real-estate data, traffic or popular restaurants.  In the new Web 2.0 environment, with the use of flexible coding languages, mashups are increasingly common and easy to create.
Media sharing	Media sharing consists of online exchanges of various types of media, like photo, and video.  Websites like YouTube,  Flickr, and Facebook allow users to easily share such media.  Media sharing is the backbone of social networking based on Web 2.0 technology.
Microsharing	Social networking tools and systems that enable listening, awareness, communication and collaboration between people, through short bursts of text, links, and multimedia content. Microsharing, exemplified by tools such as Twitter and Yammer, is a surprisingly powerful way to connect people to one another for corporate benefit (Fitton, Conner 2008).
Podcasts	A podcast is a series of media, either audio or video, that is distributed on the web via syndicated download.  Originally created by combining the words “iPod” and “broadcast,”  the first podcasting scripts were created for Apple’s iPod, and oftentimes new podcast content is downloaded automatically once it is available and is transferred to a mobile device, such as an iPod.
Sentiment analysis	A limited form of analysis that can measure how people are feeling about your topic of interest. You can measure sentiment by listening to social media and monitoring key words. Sentiment analysis is limited because interpreting nuances such as sarcasm and slang is often up to the individual reader.
Social bookmarking	Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata, or tags.  Bookmarks are stored remotely on the Internet instead of locally in a browser.  Social bookmarking sites leverage a social network to find and share websites.
Social graph	The connections an individual maintains via social networking sites and other social software are referred to as the social graph.  The social graph represents the web of people connected to that individual, directly or indirectly.
Social learning	All learning that occurs with and from other people.
Social learning community	A social learning community exists when two or more people collaborate to share knowledge, experience and best practices either directly or through a system which they create. In a technology mediated environment, collaboration occurs with other people and with systems.
Social networking	Social networking is the act of participating on a website that allows users to construct a public or semi-public profile that they use to interact with others on the same website (boyd and Ellison 2007).  Social networking is a great way to stay in touch with friends and colleagues.
Social robots	Autonomous robots that interact and communicate with humans or other autonomous physical agents by following social behaviors and rules attached to its role.
Syndicated content	RSS stands for “Real Simple Syndication.”  RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated online-works (e.g., your favorite blog or news site). RSS feeds usually display full or summarized text and metadata like publishing dates and authorship information. RSS will bring the information to you in one location so you don’t have to visit multiple web sites to gather the news.
Tag clouds	Tag clouds are visual representations of all tags used by an individual or group.  Font size and boldness usually indicates how often the tag is used.
Virtual worlds	Virtual worlds are computer-based simulated environments intended for its users to inhabit and interact via avatars (Wikipedia 2008b).  Two of the most common virtual worlds are MUVEs and MMORPGs. MUVEs are Multi-User Virtual Environments like Second Life and is usually intended for collaboration and social interaction. MMORPGs are Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, a genre of role-playing game where a large number of players interact in a virtual world.  The most popular MMORPG is World of Warcraft, with more than 11 million monthly subscribers (Blizzard Entertainment 2008). Unlike MMORPGs, MUVEs are not considered games.
Wikis	A wiki is a page or collection of pages designed to allow multiple people to edit content using a simplified markup language.  Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites, such as Wikipedia, and to power community websites (Wikipedia 2008d).  Instructors are increasingly integrating wikis with their teaching strategies to take advantage of the power of collaborative editing, which is far superior to the effort of any single individual. Wikis are used for collaborative project plans and to increase team cohesion by creating a community space where employees can interact and share important information with other team members.