Enseignement supérieur et logiciels collaboratifs: un ouvrage de référence

How to Use Social Software in Higher Education

"This handbook is a result of the iCamp project, a three-year EC-funded research project that set out to encourage innovative educational practices within European higher education. iCamp’s vision is to support competence development in self-organizing intentional learning projects, in collaborating and in social networking by making systematic use of interoperable, networked tools and services. When we started the project about three years ago, the attitude towards Social Software was rather diff erent from today, both at European Higher Education Institutions as well as amongst the community of TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning) researchers. People were suspicious of this technological shift and many regarded it as just another gimmick, which would fade away within a few years. Now it seems that these critical voices have been proven wrong. Social Software technologies are here to stay and have already started to penetrate into educational landscapes. iCamp has been one of the pioneers in promoting the use of Social Software within higher education. Our project has been strongly motivated by the three trials that were performed in the “wild” world, where we were facing many challenges that had nothing to do with our core research questions, being largely concerned with organizational aspects. We experienced some highly restrictive institutional policies with regards the use of technologies, which in our opinion hinder any attempt to educate autonomous and self-organized citizens. The democratization of institutions remains an important move that we need to take in Europe and we believe that the iCamp approach may be one small step in this process. iCamp promotes the eff ective integration of emerging Social Software technologies within the changing landscapes of European higher education. This handbook illustrates possible strategies for making gooduse of these technologies, guided by a constructivist pedagogical vision."

(source: JISC / iCamp project)