robert fitzgerald, phd

Our Digital Learning Communities (DLC) Project considered the potential of social software to support peer engagement and group learning in higher education. The project established a series of pilots that examined ways in which social software could provide students with opportunities to engage with their peers to supplement the more formal aspects of their education. It spoke with teaching and support staff about the use of social software to support learning, and to students about how they saw social software being used in their university lives. It established a wiki-based cookbook that provides ideas and suggestions for the use of social software, and conducted surveys of staff and students’ use of new social technologies. The full report is available for download.

Our chapter "Using social software to support digital learning communities in higher education" will be published in February 2009 in The Handbook of Research on Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies. This book examines the impact of new technologies and explores how social software and developing community ontologies are challenging the way we operate in a connected, distributed, and increasingly performative space.

From the Canberra Times (16 March 2008), an interview I did talking about social software in education with specific reference to students as co-designers and the importance of network literacy.

Stephen Barrass and I have just had our paper, Social Software: Piloting MyToons As A Digital Learning Community For Teaching New Media, accepted for Edmedia 2008 to be held in Vienna, Austria later this year. The abstract follows:

This paper describes a pilot project using the MyToons.com animation social networking site to teach a New Media unit at the University of Canberra in 2007. MyToons, modeled on MySpace and other popular social software sites, has additional characteristics that focus on the construction of social identity and peer networking. The location of MyToons in the public space beyond the classroom embeds the students in an authentic community of practice, with exemplars, technical support, and opportunities to network and showcase their creativity and productions. In this study we reflect on the process of integrating MyToons into the unit syllabus, and the results from an evaluation survey of the students. This analysis confirms the importance of usability and sociability for the creation of an online community of practice for peer learning.

Our social software survey is now available. We are asking academics and students from UC, QUT and RMIT to help us find out more about the ways they are using social software and web2.0 technologies.