I am responding to Cris’s picture meme in Evolve, as she challenges us to share a picture that represents our views/experiences on social software in schools and institutions!
My picture is of a broken down wall between the tended part of my garden and the wild part. This wall roughly delineates where we stop weeding. You can see the cow parsley growing beyond the wall, and a fern that is not quite sure if it is a weed, growing on the boundary.
But of course, nothing is quite as simple as it seems. Even if the wall were not broken down, it is easy for seeds to blow across between the wild and the tended parts. As I am quite a lazy gardener, there are often weeds in the tended part. Three years ago we converted a pond in the wild part into a bog garden and so now we have a little oasis of order in the wild. The wall within my garden is broken down but I do have walls and fences around the property boundary.
I can hear you asking what this has to do with social software in schools and institutions. Depending on the breadth of your definition of social software, I think that a similarly complex situation is revealed when we look at social software inside and outside the institutional wall. What makes for complexity is the wonderfully resourceful behaviour of learners and teachers. They can use the order of organised groups like virtual learning environments (VLEs) to exchange contact details with their friends to meet up in the wild, creating areas of order and purpose as well as unruly spaces. Even the most unadventurous VLEs allow links to the web (in content areas or forum posts). Learners are inventive and adopt the channel and locus of communication most suited to their purposes, not just the one(s) we offer them.
Good teachers inspire their students to learn away from the classroom as well as in it – thinking is the first mobile technology – the question is how do institutions learn about what is appropriate support for learners and teachers using social software. As danah boyd said, walls are not always a bad thing, http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/02/05/about_those_wal.html
I’ll just leave you with a link to one of my favourite walled gardens. It is a new modern design within an old walled garden, and it contains a viewing hill , where you everything in the garden, and quite a lot beyond it, http://www.scampston.co.uk/metadot/index.pl?id=2484;isa=Category;op=show
4 responses so far ↓
1 June Pic-Meme - a broken down walled garden » Frances@Evolve // Jun 2, 2008 at 8:26 pm
[...] here « Hello world! | [...]
2 Cristina Costa // Jun 2, 2008 at 10:30 pm
HI Frances,
Welcome to Evolve and thank you so much for your insightful post. It does bring a lot of issues. As you know i am a great fan f open spaces, or at least of spaces I, as user, can decide who has access to. I feel a little bit claustrophobic when I am invited to join gardens where I am not supposed to thread or feel the grass,but just appreciate the landscape. They can good for a while but then I need more. And as you said The human being is inventive and we become even more creative when the need arises. ANd that is why I like windowns. When I don’t have them, I do welcome the ropes (links) and the stairs which enable me to climb those walled gardens and see what goes on on other side of the wall. I like to be in touch with a larger part of the “cyber-world” (the one that relates to my interests). But that is only me
3 Keith Lyons // Nov 16, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Frances
Absolutely delightful. I am so please I found this post.
Keith
4 CCK08: Week 10 Wild Flower Garden « Clyde Street // Nov 17, 2008 at 4:45 am
[...] include other posts that come my way from alerts. Today I lost my postscript! I had written about a post by Frances and her walled garden discussion of social software in schools. I liked her observation [...]
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