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KMi Seminars
Knowledge Architecture (Free and in Flow) in a Social Network
This event took place on Monday 03 September 2012 at 11:00

 
Izabel Meister Mackenzie University, So Paulo, Brazil


This presentation is an overview of my PhD research related to the OpenScout project and developed during my visiting research internship at KMi. It is a working in progress. It aims to discuss a virtual social network as a knowledge space. The research field focuses on  the Colearn community. It is a Portuguese language community (Brazil, Spain, Portugal and England) interested in educational technologies whose some members are participating in the OpenScout - Tool Library social network. The OpenScout - Tool Library, developed in KMi,  is a space for communities sharing stories and tools for adapting OER. My research focuses  on the process of sharing and acquiring knowledge through a network of practice.  



 
KMi Seminars
 

Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.