Questions to continue exploring

• What are the benefits and drawbacks for students and instructors?
• What are the possible applications of this software for learning in general? for specific-disciplines?

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Campus Conversation Starters

Berg, J., Berquam, L, & Christoph, K. (March/April 2007).  Social Network Technologies: A "Poke" for Campus Services.  Educause Review, 32-44.

• How can we distinguish fad from future?
• Face-to-face is better when...
• What is the "Shelf-life" of an idea?
• How and when students procrastinate?
• What are students' expectations and staff members' assumptions?
• What are the proprietary rights of social technologies?
• What do we need to take into consideration for student culture, adviser culture, IT culture?
• What about issues of privacy, standards, and saftey?
• What about convenience, simplicity, and presentation?

Key Questions to Ask

Sreenby, O. (2007).  Digital Rendezvou: Social Software in Higher Education.  Educause Center for Applied Research Research Bulletin, Vol. 2007(2).

• What types of social applications are most important for our institution?
• Should the focus of social software be for institutional communication, research, administration, or all of these functions?
• Will these applications be used only by faculty, students, and staff, or will the ability to host users from the larger community, including other higher education institutions be needed?
• What is the interaction between this social software and other institutional systems, including identity management, authentication and authorizatoin, data warehouses,  and course management systems?
• How will the data from the social software applications be saved and backed up? How long will it be retained?
• Are these applications mission critical for the institution, requiring 24-hour monitoring and reliability (with its attendant costs), or is it adequate to have best-effort reliability?
• How will the institution measure the value of any investment in deploying social software?