Kyle's rough research summary

Ensure every user can extract value from social software

• value can be power, social prestige, knowledge, networking

Structure group interactions in such a way that the generated knowledge can be organized easily for reuse.

examples:

• online project management
• blogs
• wikis

Learning is a social activity, we learn best from/with peers

• create education social network so students can more quickly get to know one another and more easily form communities with like-minded peers.
• "forming study groups and letting [the students] socially construct their own understanding around a naturally occurring knowledge asset--the lecture--turns out to be an amazing powerful tool for
  learning." --pg. 18 "Growing up Digitally"
• "Looking at learning as a demand-driven, identity forming, social act, it's possible to see how learning binds people together. People with similar practices and similar resources develop identities--the identity of a technician, a chemist...or a cancer sufferer. These practices in common (for hobbies and illnesses are practice too) allow people to form social networks along which knowledge about that practice can both travel rapidly and be assimilated readily."
  --pg. 140-41 "The Social Life of Information"

Wisdom of crowds meme:

• implement social learning technologies to encourage collaboration and encourage aggregation of students knowledge
• "We realized that no one person was the expert; the real expertise resided in the community mind. If we could find a way to support and tap the collective minds of the reps, we'd have a whole new way to accelerate theri learning and structure the community's knowledge assets in the making." --pg: 17 of "Growing up Digitally"

Narration is vitally important

• how students form common understanding of themselves and problems they face. Difference between learning about something and learning to be something -- by telling/hearing stories ISys students, for example, learn to be ISys professionals
• Importance of Narration
  -- rather then trying to selectively quote parts of this excellent section from The Social Life of Information, I've chosen to quote it all.

Form learning ecologies bringing together networks of practice in university and surrounding community.

• "The Web helps build a rich fabric that combines the small efforts of the many with the large efforts of the few. By enriching the diversity of available information and expertise, it enables the culture and sensibilities of a region to evolve. It increases the intellectual density of cross-linkages. It allows anyone to lurk and to
  learn."
  --pg. 20 "Growing up Digitally

The web honors idea of multiple intelligences

• "The typewrite prized one particular kind of intelligence, but with the Web we suddenly have a medium that honors multiple forms of intelligence--abstract, textual, visual, musical, social, and kinesthetic. As educators, we now have a chance to construct a medium that enables all young people to become engaged in their ideal way of learning. The Web affords the match we need between a medium and how a particular person learns."
  --pg. 12 "Growing up Digitally"

Teaches the "new literacy"

• "The new literacy, beyond text and image, is one of information navigation.
  The real literacy of tomorrow entails the ability to be your own personal reference librarian--to know how to navigate through confusing, complex informations spaces and fell comfortable doing so. 'Navigation' may well be the the main form of information for the 21st century."
  --pg. 14 "Growing up Digitally"

Random quotes

• What is happening... "a shift between using technology to support the individual to using technology to support relationships between individuals"
  --pg. 20 "Growing up Digitally" -- incredibly prescient considering the article was written in 2000 -- anticipates whole web2.0 revolution
• "The Social Life of Information counters conventional wisdom by reminding us that information technology does not work unless supported by viable communities and institutions.
  --Bruce Kogut from "advanced praise" for the Social Life of Information
• "Information technology is very good at reach, it is less good at the sort of dense reciprocity needed to make and maintain such strong and informative informal links."
  --pg 169 "The Social Life of Information"
• "A highly 'targeted' view of learning can be equally narrow. We all need to learn things that we didn't set out to learn.
  'Distributions requirements' are the formal way that conventional education provides this for students and for society. But the collective experience of college and what the German sociologist Karl Jaspers described as the 'creative tension' generated by the mingling of people from different fields, different backgrounds, and different
  expectations makes a critical contribution. among other things, such experience helps provide not only knowledge and information that people don't know they need, but also the skill to judge the worthwhile from the worthless--an increasingly important skill in an age of ubiquitous and often unreliable information."
  --pg. 219 "The Social Life of Information"