One of the leading scientific publishers -- the Nature Publishing Group -- has realized the importance of social networks to promote science research and education. According to Vikram Savkar (SVP and Publishing Director) at Nature, "... science education needs to become interactive and social". According to him, "... kids and young adults learn from people, not from static words in a textbook". A new Web site called Scitable has been launched to enable teachers, researchers, and students to collaborate and share work. Instuctors can create a classroom using content management systems such as Blackboard and Desire2Learn. It is interesting to see a major publisher realizing the importance of learning through people, rather than just learning from content. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Scitable is it's business model -- essentially where business provides "social value advertising", rather than specific product placement or paid content placement. Rather than provide large banners highlighting particular products, sponsors are able to directly add content (such as job openings) on certain pages.
A new book entitled Bursts -- The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (of Northeastern University, in Boston) has used a "social" experiment in it's launch. The complete text of the book is available on-line, but each word is covered by a rectangle. Each user can 'adopt' a word, and at that moment all words adopted by others will become visible to that individual. Once 84,000 individuals have each adopted a word, roughly the number of words in the book, the whole book will become visible to the adopters. Additionally, to make the process more interesting (!), any user can unlock the whole book within days by guessing a sufficient number of covered words, as each successful guess offers additional points that helps the user reveal further content.
Both of these social network-based approaches to collaborative learning indicate the importance of involving people in the learning process. Proving texts on-line is only the beginning to a learning journey that could utilize on-line resource in a much more effective way. As educators, perhaps, we all need to take note and adapt to the possibilities and enormous potential opportunities.
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