SocialWire: Social Software for Informal Learning
M. E. Sousa-Vieira, J. C. López-Ardao, M. Rodríguez-Pérez and M. Fernández-Veiga
Department of Telematics Engineering, University of Vigo, Vigo, Spain
Abstract. Despite the fact that online social networks (OSN) are widely rec-
ognized as a powerful vector for adding a new social dimension to the learning
management systems (LMS), OSNs do not fully integrate the specific features of
the learning process yet. In this paper, we report the design and implementation
of a software platform that leverages on the basic capabilities of an OSN and ex-
tends the functionality toward its use in education. It does so by the embedding
of a variety of collaborative activities of informal nature, jointly with tailored as-
sessment procedures and an associated reputation system for the users. The latter
is essential in order to foster the students’ engagement and improve their learning
performance. This software system, though still work in progress, has been in use
for two years in different subject areas. The outcomes and the feedback provided
both by teachers and students are encouraging.
1 Introduction
It is with some delay compared to how other fields in the society and the economy
have adapted, but it finally seems that the profound changes driven by the information
technologies are reshaping the education system, even higher education. The move is
universal, only its pace varies, and it is motivated from both the supply and the demand
sides. The new cohorts of university freshmen comprise students who consume and pro-
duce digital contents as habits of their lives. Similarly, the learning materials they are
exposed to are increasingly based on audiovisual contents, or on the intensive use of
computer simulations for studying more easily many complex systems in every imagin-
able academic discipline. In the end, the Internet has substantially lowered any barriers,
either physical, economic or social, against the open access to quality education. The
popularity of many online LMSs (e.g., Moodle), used as tools for organizing courses
and students, and the recent surge of MoOCs (Massive online Open Courses) supported
by the best universities in the world are two signs of this trend (see the Coursera or
edX initiatives [1, 2]). The majority of the software tools developed to aid in these on-
line learning processes exploited the nearly limitless possibilities that web technologies
offer to link distributed documents, transfer them efficiently to the users, and display
the information through a graphical interface consistent across devices. However, those
tools assume that the underlying learning process remains unaltered, namely it is still a
student-based effort, rigorously constrained by the instructors’ decisions. Consequently,
several works have pointed out that the efficacy with such approach depends mostly on
the (prior) existence of strong willingness to learn in the students.
So, if the social dimension is not incorporated into the learning platforms, it is likely
E. Sousa-Vieira M., C. López Ardao J., Rodríguez-Pérez M. and Fernández-Veiga M..
SocialWire: Social Software for Informal Learning.
DOI: 10.5220/0004602601330145
In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Interaction Design in Educational Environments (IDEE-2013), pages 133-145
ISBN: 978-989-8565-65-5
Copyright
c
2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
that online education will be relegated to reach students in remote areas, to be narrow-
focused toward highly specialized fields or to be useful only to self-motivated persons.
Pertaining to a cohesive group (in the real world or in a virtual environment) not only
reinforces the experience of learning, but also turns out to be a key factor for the activa-
tion of informal learning processes [3–5]. These happen when the goal is to assimilate
the non-explicit knowledge that spontaneously flows among the group members, re-
lated to the skills and command of a given subject. For instance, the typical approaches
in problem-solving, the de facto professional practices, and so on. In summary, an ef-
fective social network speeds up the task of learning those contextual skills, by means
of behavioral emulation or by mutual recommendation, where recommendation applies
equally to people or to items of content [6].
OSNs over Internet form a powerful environment to add a desirable social dimen-
sion to more traditional online learning systems. But, since the design of typical LMSs
does not have a clean interface with OSNs, integrating the capabilities of a OSN into a
learning platform is not entirely trivial. In this work, we describe the architecture and
development of a software system [7] that extends the basic functionality in ELGG [8]
—a popular, open source software engine for building OSNs— and enables the use of
informal learning processes mentioned above. This enriched hybrid of OSN-LMS may
also be useful for enhancing the generic skills of the students, for instance their criticism
or leadership skills [9]. Nonetheless, that is not the primary benefit, in our view. Rather,
we envision the system as an enabler to design and execute informal learning activities.
These informal activities are of wide scope, but share some common features: i) they
are specific activities, not necessarily formal, like answer a question, seek more infor-
mation about a topic, participate in a challenge, etc.; ii) informal learning activities are
measurable, in that every task of this kind must produce a deliverable (a piece of text,
a report, a list of information resources, a computer program,...); iii) informal learning
activities are open, in other words, there is possibly more than one valid response or
deliverable object to them. In contrast, one should keep in mind that formal contents
already have well-defined assessment procedures in current LMSs.
Preliminary tests of SocialWire in a real environment are being carried in our col-
lege, among undergraduate students in subjects of the Communications Engineering
curriculum. Nonetheless, aside from our personal focus on engineering education, the
design of the tool is neutral and generic and it might be useful in any other field. As a
previous step, we have presented it to a group of e-learning experts to get their opin-
ion. The feedback obtained encouraged us to enhance the initial functionality presented
in [10] and develop new modules.
In the rest of the paper we describe the main components of the software system.
The functionality of the ELGG OSN engine is briefly reviewed in Section 2, for com-
pleteness. Section 3 gives the details of a number of software modules that, as plugins,
have been developed and tested to fulfill the requirements of social interactions in our
platform. In Section 4 we report some results obtained with the use of the system.
Lastly, Section 5 summarizes the main conclusions gathered after using the system.
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2 System Overview
SocialWire, our OSN-enriched learning platform, is based on ELGG, a widely used open
source OSN engine.
The core of elgg uses a unified data model to manage the different objects that
can exist in the ecosystem of an OSN (users, messages, posts, etc.). The basic and
more general attributes of any object are enclosed in the class ElggEntity, but the
extensibility and flexibility of elgg relies on three other classes for the purposes of
linking objects, tuning their attributes and define actions to execute on object instances.
Specifically, class ElggRelationship can connect virtually any two objects. The
connection entails a relationship between the two, it could be friendship, sharing in-
formation, membership to a common group or something alike. Particularization of the
attributes that describe an object is done via objects in Class ElggMetadata. The
semantics of the new attributes is not constrained, so most of the flexibility in elgg
comes precisely from this type of object. Finally, the actions that are to be executed
on a given object can be defined with class ElggAnnotation, giving the users the
privilege of modifying the objects’ behavior and add more actions.
Thus, by combining objects in those classes, elgg can be extended easily into an
online social environment oriented toward educational applications and informal learn-
ing. We did so, developing several software modules to support the outlined function-
ality. Each module is actually a plugin, a companion software piece to the elgg core
that handles the new classes an objects devised to convert the original platform in a
OSN-based learning product. The interaction between those plugins and the core takes
place through message-passing of events, actions (hooks and callbacks) and views. Ac-
tions and events are code scripts invoked as a result of the users’ actions in the interface.
Together, events drivethe internal state of the OSN, understood here as a finite state ma-
chine, whereas actions are the responses generated by a chain of events. In turn, views
define the way objects are exactly rendered or presented to the users. Thus, views are
essential to manipulate objects in a organized, systematic way.
A shortcoming in the elgg engine is its lack of support for subgroups, i.e., com-
munities of students undertaking the same tasks, assignments or with shared interests.
Thus, we extended elgg to allow the creation of arbitrary subgroups within a parent
group. Membership to a subgroup entails access to the same capabilities as in the larger
groups, only with a restricted audience, duration, etc.
The description of the several modules (plugins) that comprise SocialWire is the
matter of the next Section.
3 The Software Modules
3.1 Questions and Answers
This plugin’s functionality is fairly obvious: some user pose questions and other users
in his/her group may attempt a response. Answers are curated either by teachers or by
other group members.
The workflow of question creation is part in the design of this plugin. To be spe-
cific, both students or instructors can be authors of a question in a group. In the former
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case, the question ought to be approved by an instructor, who also assigns points to it
according to his/her judgement. When the question appears open, a period to provide
answers starts. That time period can be definite or indefinite, depending on parameters
used at the creation time. And the answers can be either individual or collective. While
open, any answer uploaded can be edited or corrected by its authors, unless the answer
has already received an evaluation by the instructors. In this case, the particular answer
is closed (it remains visible) and becomes inmutable.
Points awarded to a question or to an answer serve two purposes simultaneously.
First, to classify questions and answer, that is, using the points as a measure of rele-
vance/importance of that item. Indeed, the plugin can display a thread of answers not
by chronological order, but by relevance or ranking order. Second, points awarded to a
question or an answer are meant to be distributed among its authors, using rules defined
elsewhere. Consequently, this plugin interacts with a generic ranking plugin, one that
collects the points assigned to tasks in any other plugin, sorts the scores by user (or
subgroup) and, ultimately, builds a reputation for every user in the group.
Visibility of questions and answers is under direct control of the instructors, as a
primary mechanism to restrict inaccurate, vague or misleading threads of discussion.
As an illustration, Figure 1 shows the appearance of the questions and answers plugin.
3.2 Challenges
Challenges are in SocialWire synonymous of strategic games. More clearly, a challenge
is in our view any proposed activity asking for hints, ideas, full solutions or suggestions
to a complex problem, one with a nontrivial or non-unique answer. Without loss of gen-
erality, when we identify challenges with strategic games, we are taking the assumption
that challenges are always cooperation (and not competitive) games, i.e., the goal of
a challenge is to achieve collectively an approximate solution to a difficult question.
Hence, there are not incentives for confusing, misguide or take profit from other par-
ticipants.
1
As before, a challenge can receive answers during a definite or an indefinite
time period, as the authors decided. But, being intrinsically open, challenges are graded
differently than ordinary questions. Here, the answers do not receive points while the
challenge is open to new contributions. Instead, after the challenge has been closed,
two possibilities exist. One option is that the instructors distribute points between the
different answers, according to their quality, completeness or any sound criterion. Al-
ternatively, the answers (possibly curated of filtrated by the instructors) can enter a poll,
whereby the students themselves vote for the closest to solve the challenge. Then, points
are awarded proportionally to the votes collected by each answer. The context and topic
of the challenge determines which of the two options suits better.
Clearly, this plugin interacts closely with the ranking plugin, too. See Figure 2 for a
screenshot of an example challenge.
1
Pure competition, albeit not in the most general form, can be achieved with the questions
and answers plugin, simply closing the question as soon as the rst correct answer has been
provided.
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Fig.1. Questions Listing.
3.3 Quizzes and Exams
More traditional assessment and grading of the students is naturally included in Social-
Wire. This is exactly the task of the quizzes and exams plugin. Both quizzes and exams
are, basically, sets of questions that must be answered in limited timed in the most exact
and concise way. Maybe the main novelty in SocialWire comes from the fact that a quiz
or exam can be proposed to the entire group (or a subgroup of it). Grading of exams
and quizzes is automatically computed by the plugin, but the authors can distinguish
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Fig.2. View of the challenge module.
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between grading a qualification (with a weight, if this exam is part of a sequence, for
example), and rewarding the answers with points, like in other plugins. Though assign-
ing points to an exam may seem useless or counterintuitive —what incentive would
a student have to undertake it?—, one should keep in mind, first, that self-assessment
allows a student to compare his/her progress with that of other classmates. Relative per-
formance is usually a very strong feedback for the students, especially in the lowest and
highest extremes of the range. And secondly, SocialWire is designed to build a ranking
or reputation upon the users’ activity. Solving exams is a direct way to measure global
comprehension and particular abilities, if desired.
Regarding the interactions with other plugins, part of the design in this case is also
common to the questions and answers plugin, as expected. Due to the dual nature of
assessment (grades or points), the outcomes of this plugin are submitted to the ranking
plugin or to the gradebook plugin, as needed. For ease of use, the composition of an
exam relies on the existence of question pools (by topic and level of difficulty), which
are described next. To finish, Figure 3 displays the appearance of this plugin in a typical
example case.
Fig.3. View of the quizzes and exams module.
3.4 Question Pools
It is a tedious task to compose exams, which tend to be similar across years, once and
over. The plugin question pools allows the authors to store past questions (and their
answers) in a database, so that could be reused later for other purposes. A complex
database (e.g., relational) is not needed at all, hence the name “question pool”. Ques-
tions in the pool are internally organized by means of tags describing the question top-
ics and the difficulty level. Using these tags, a simple search engine can easily find and
classify subsets of questions in a given pool.
Only the instructors of a course can populate the pool of questions. Note that this
plugin is basically a supporting backend for other plugins, like the quizzes and exams
discussed above.
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3.5 Tasks
Tasks are the objects handled by the tasks plugin. Apart from tautological, this state-
ment intends to mean that, in SocialWire, a task is a supervised activity, i.e., an activity
that unfolds during a given timeframe and receives feedback from the instructors. The
feedback has the purpose of heading the students learning in the right direction, paving
the way so that they can acquire the knowledge by themselves. Therefore, tasks differ
from questions in that the former are inherently sequential over time, and more impor-
tantly, in that tasks may have partial deliverables: pieces or parts of work that deserve
examination prior to the complete fulfillment of the task. Simply stated, tasks have a
history of development that ordinary answers lack.
For the same reasons exposed in other plugins, tasks can be used either to grade the
students or to give them some share of (ranking) points. Correspondingly, this plugin
does not work isolated, but it interacts with the ranking plugin and the gradebook. In
addition, tasks can be incorporated to the e-portfolio of the student, as a demonstration
of its abilities, its performance and knowledge of a topic. See Figure 4 for a screenshot
of the current implementation of this plugin.
3.6 e-portfolios
The concept of a portfolio aims at gathering all the outputs produced by students, what-
ever their form, contents or support, in a single place. When evaluated as a joint effort,
they provide qualitative information about the personal learning paths followed. Thus,
a portfolio offers a double value. On one hand, teachers are able to identify the whole
learning process that the student unfolds, with its achievements and pitfalls. On the
other side, the student can demonstrate to others his personal achievements in the dis-
cipline, showing the results of every activity conducted within the curriculum (projects,
examinations, complementary work, self-study, etc.).
In SocialWire, an e-portfolio is a container object that stores evidences about the
work a student did along a given timeframe. The evidences collected in his/her e-
portfolio are not limited, of course, to the grades received as a result of his/her learning.
It includes all types of deliverables produced as a result of participation in any of the
plugins described up to this point: questions and answers, tasks, challenges, even its
position in the ranking system. E-portfolios are individual, per student, since the notion
of an e-portfolio for groups does not make sense in this context. We emphasize that
e-portfolios are simple containers, the implication being that e-portfolios do not bear
direct relationship to a specific assessment procedure. In other words, how to valuate
a student’s e-portfolio is a matter pertaining to the examiner. To aid in this process, e-
portfolios can be linked or associated in some way to a rubric (see the next subsection),
which is a description of the rules to evaluate an evidence. It is not mandatory that this
association exists, however.
3.7 Rubrics
Generically, a rubric is a set of clear criteria to assess any learning activity, published
in advance so that the community of students is aware of the requirements their output
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Fig.4. View of the tasks module.
should satisfy. Also, the rubric is a commitment to the instructors, who comply to judge
the outcomes of the activities according to the principles stated in that rubric. Clearly,
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rubrics are particularly important in informal learning, in order to avoid any bias or
subjectivism when the quality of the students’ work is under evaluation.
In SocialWire, rubrics are implemented as a matrix of categorical dimensions, such
as clarity, correctness, extent, etc. For each dimension, the matrix specifies a range and
a scale of achievement (not necessarily linear), along with an optional description for
every level in the scale (usually, the scale will be discrete, i.e., the range is divided
into suitable intervals or buckets). Otherwise, rubrics may be defined freely, both in
evaluated dimensions and type of measurement scale. To glimpse an example, Figure 5
displays part of the screenshot showing a hypothetical rubric, as seen by the user.
Fig.5. View of the rubrics module.
3.8 Gradebook
This plugin is self-explanatory. The gradebook is a compilation with the grades a stu-
dent has received for his homework, exams or any other formalized test of knowledge.
In SocialWire, without loss of generality, gradesare always numeric, and the plugin pro-
vides functions to compute simple descriptive statistics for an individual or for a group:
averages, medians/modes, histograms, ... Obviously, the gradebook plugin receives in-
put from every other plugin where the students make their work, and does not generate
output to any other plugin. Thus, the design of the gradebook is largely independent of
the other system components.
3.9 User Ranking - Reputation
One of the main motivations for developing SocialWire was the belief that online social
interaction between students promotes the effectiveness of learning. In online systems,
where the users cannot hold face-to-face contact, the possibility to compare one’s per-
formance with that from other participants turns out to be of outmost importance for
sustaining the students’ engagement. One of the simplest and most effective ways to
push the dynamics in groups is to use an understandable rank of members. The rank
shows a number of things simultaneously. First, it exhibits the degree of achievement
for every users, i.e. where I am vs. where are the others. Admittedly, a list is an over-
simplification for measuring degree of achievements, but the implicit information con-
tained in it is otherwise a good feedback that tells how well a student fulfilled the work
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compared to his colleagues. Second, it establishes a hierarchy within the group. Once
known, the ranking operates unconsciously on the whole group: answers, outcomes or
deliverables contributed by highly-rated members will probably be better esteemed by
the rest. In the opposite direction, persons with high position in the ranking are likely to
be compelled to deliver high-quality work in future activities if they aim to keep their
rank.
The ranking plugin in SocialWire simply organizes all this information about the
points received by every group member. In this respect, recall that the points awarded
to a student in a particular task can come from the instructors or from votes from other
group members, depending on the type of activity. The plugin just accumulates the
ratings of each user and sorts the list appropriately. Whether the position in the ranking
will affect the final grade of the student is an open issue, up to the instructors’ decision.
The plugin is designed to be agnostic about these concerns. Similarly to the gradebook
plugin, this one is fundamentally a collector module that receives input from any other
module in the system, organizes the information and renders the data in appropriate
form.
3.10 Polls and Decision Trees
The last plugin allows SocialWire to conduct polls. More generally, the plugin imple-
ments a voting system, where users can choose their preferred options among a set
of options, and about different questions (a poll may embrace several questions, re-
lated or not). Polls can be anonymous —SocialWire does not reveal the author of any
opinions— or not, and the system carries out the simple accounting of responses, mak-
ing a final report with the data. A variant of a pure poll, also implementedin this module,
is that of a decision tree. It is well-known that decision trees are a common tool to solve
complex decision-taking problems, after following a series of individual decision steps.
Accordingly, in SocialWire a decision tree is essentially a sequential poll, where each
step in the poll is a single question. The logic for advancing is the natural one, namely
majority vote.
Polls and decisions are orthogonal to the rest of plugins. Although a decision tree
could be used to solve a problem (formal or informal) within a group, probably the most
realistic case will be to use it as a supporting tool in some of the plugins described so
far. Similar considerations apply to the polls, in the sense that those object have been
devised to take the opinions from the users, not to solve tasks by popularity.
4 Application
The tool has entered in a test stage during the previous academic year.
Initially it will be used in two subjects of the Communications Engineering Cur-
riculum:
Computer Networks (second year, obligatory).
Advanced Computer Networks (third year, in a speciality).
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These subjects represent a coherent thematic unity and develop with different levels
of complexity the discipline of communications networks.
The sequential implementation will allow us to observe the response of our stu-
dents to informal learning activities and to detect the possible improvement (in working
habits, in participation) and the increase or decrease of previous social reputation.
Following, we summarize the methodology and results obtained the previous aca-
demic year in the subject Computer Networks.
These activities were carried out by means of the platform:
Thirty questions proposed by students (opened during the whole term). Students
received 1 point for each approved question, 2 points for the best answer and 1
point for other good answers.
Two questions proposed by teachers. We rated them with 5 points for the first good
answer.
A challenge. Students looked for a resource related to the subject (video, presenta-
tion, ...) for two weeks. After this time, each student distributed 5 votes among the
answers during a week. Finally, the three answers with more votes received 15, 10
and 5 points.
A task. Programming a HTTP server (opened for a month).
An assessed questionnaire (opened for a week).
Practice tests during the two last weeks of the course.
The continuous assessment represented a 30% of the final grading (the task sup-
posed a 10% and the questionnaire a 20%) and was not obligatory. The points obtained
by means of the questions and challenge modules supposed an extra 10% of the final
grading (each student received a grading proportional to the points obtained).
From the results obtained, we highlight that 85% of the 54% of the students that
followed the continuous assessment and participated in the proposed games passed the
subject (and with the best grades). Nevertheless, only 30% of the students that did not
follow the continuous assessment passed the subject.
Other advantages of the informal learning activities proposed can be highlighted:
Questions: The resolution of doubts and habitual problems helped to the joint com-
prehension of the subject.
Challenge: Some students engaged in the search of interesting resources. Other
students had to read the contributions of the companions in order to vote and to do
reasoned comments.
This year we are repeating the experience, but we haveintroduced newactivities and
some changes in the methodology in order to motivate more students and to increase the
level of participation in these informal activities. We plan to report the results obtained
in the near future.
5 Conclusions
In this paper, we have described a software platform that sees online learning as a spe-
cial social activity process. In this realm, it seems natural to embed informally-defined
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activities into the design of the LMS, and moreover, to revolve the design around an
OSN instead of a LMS. That is precisely the novelty of SocialWire: start from an OSN
engine and adapt it to become not only an online social network, but also a learning
platform.
Preliminary tests of SocialWire in a real environment are being carried in our col-
lege, among undergraduate students. We are in the second year of the field experiment,
and plan to report more results (degree of students engagement, participation, relation-
ship between the ranking/reputation and the distribution of grades, observations related
to the sequential implementation, etc.) in the near future.
As further work we are going to extend the functionality of the platform with new
modules, as:
Forms module: This module can be useful for example for implementing activities
related to the detection of previous knowledge about a subject.
Badges module: We think that badges assignment may generate positive emotions
and can help to motivate students.
Acknowledgements
This work has been partially funded by the University of Vigo, under its program for
innovation in education methodologies.
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