{"id":305384,"date":"2011-12-15T09:00:05","date_gmt":"2011-12-15T17:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/?p=305384"},"modified":"2016-10-13T11:10:13","modified_gmt":"2016-10-13T18:10:13","slug":"cl-gives-students-new-way-learn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/blog\/cl-gives-students-new-way-learn\/","title":{"rendered":"So.cl Gives Students a New Way to Learn"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Douglas Gantenbein, Senior Writer, Microsoft News Center<\/em><\/p>\n

The web, search, and social networking are changing the way students collaborate.<\/p>\n

To bring these elements together, Microsoft Research\u2019s FUSE Labs (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> is launching a site designed to give students the ability to network with peers, share useful information quickly, and build their own pages that collect information from both inside and outside the classroom\u2014in a sense, transforming the web and social networks into the new classroom.<\/p>\n

Called So.cl (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> and pronounced \u201csocial,\u201d the experimental research project is being made available to students in information and design schools at the University of Washington, Syracuse University, and New York University. In time, more schools will be added, potentially expanding So.cl\u2019s use as a learning and information-gathering tool.<\/p>\n

So.cl has been designed for students studying social media to extend their educational experience and rethink how they learn and communicate. They can build posts with many elements\u2014photos, video, text, and more\u2014and share them with colleagues. They also can find students with similar interests and build communities around specific educational goals. So.cl might even give students the ability to create their own social tool, customized for their own community.<\/p>\n

The researchers behind So.cl deliberately sought to collaborate with a student audience that is more holistic\u2014encompassing representation from the sciences as well as the humanities\u2014rather than simply technical, says Lili Cheng<\/a>, general manager of FUSE Labs.<\/p>\n

\"Lili

Lili Cheng<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWhat we\u2019ve seen in the last year or two is innovation in the way schools are teaching and learning from students, creating new programs to study how information spreads, motivates learning, and creates expertise,\u201d Cheng says. \u201cA hugely popular freshman course in some schools is Social Media 101, which often leads to a project-based innovation course where students build and deploy their ideas.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are not just computer-science students, but also business, design, or humanities students. They don\u2019t necessarily write code, but they can be encouraged to reimagine how social software and the way people are sharing and exchanging information shapes the world. We are experimenting with So.cl to use our own tools to partner with more students and learn from students with a broad base of expertise.\u201d<\/p>\n

So.cl reflects the fact that students today approach learning in a different manner than they did even a few years ago, says Shelly Farnham, a FUSE Labs researcher working on So.cl.<\/p>\n

\"Shelly

Shelly Farnham<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cToday, social media is a really active part of the learning process,\u201d Farnham says. \u201cIt\u2019s a common story that we hear: Someone will first hear about something because their friend mentioned it on Facebook or they saw it mentioned on Twitter, and from there, they search in Wikipedia or through a search engine. Then they\u2019ll go back and do searches within Twitter to find out not just the content of a news story, but also how their friends are responding to that news story. There\u2019s this real sense of a conversation happening within social media around what they\u2019re learning.\u201d<\/p>\n

So.cl\u2019s ability to connect students who have shared interests is important, given that students today have more varied pursuits than those in the past. As Cheng notes, it wasn\u2019t that long ago that students involved in athletics largely played only long-established sports such as football, basketball, or baseball. Now, they also pursue paddle-boarding, breakdancing, karate, or fencing\u2014sports not necessarily part of the school curriculum\u2014and they use YouTube or Internet how-tos to find experts and learn. With So.cl, students can build their own communities and collections around these pursuits or anything else they enjoy.<\/p>\n

That, in turn, will help them learn more, Farnham says. Students today often choose study topics based on the passions of people with whom they connect. Subsequently, a goal of So.cl is to understand motivation and to give students a way to broaden their interests and to connect more effectively with people with similar interests.<\/p>\n

\"So.cl's

So.cl’s user interface: clean, open, and flexible.<\/p><\/div>\n

Using So.cl will come naturally to anyone who uses the web. It has a clean, open look and lets users follow people, set up feeds, search, and more. So.cl users can follow specific people or view the entire feed stream. Searches can be webwide, confined to news feeds or specific people, or limited to only images or video.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019ve ever used a social network, it\u2019s a comfortable experience,\u201d Cheng says. \u201cWe expect people to continue using their favorite social network and search tools, and we hope that, by experimenting with how search and social networking can be combined, more people experiment with tools we already take for granted.\u201d<\/p>\n

So.cl borrows from other FUSE Labs projects to make it easier to compile photos and videos. It has a feature derived from the content-aggregation project Montage that enables authoring of a visual collage of images, videos, and stories. Montage influenced So.cl\u2019s ability to let users quickly assemble content from a variety of sources to build pages about particular interests.<\/p>\n

Cheng says she\u2019s eager to see how students use So.cl. She recalls talking with students at New York University\u2019s Interactive Telecommunication Program about the ways they engage with social media as a learning tool. She says she was shocked at their cleverness in employing it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was just blown away,\u201d she says. \u201cThey are so sophisticated about the way they share, riffing off one another\u2019s ideas, having fun, and flowing between interests. A group of students lingered after and asked us how we could stay in touch and continue to share experiments.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of Cheng\u2019s goals for So.cl is to create a platform on which students can experiment with their own ideas about a social network.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am surprised by the amount of frustration and the lack of design innovation in the design of everyday tools such as search, social networking, text messaging, and email,\u201d she says. \u201cNone of these were designed for the way students communicate, and I haven\u2019t found anyone who really loves the way they work together. We hope to reduce some technical barriers for students who are interested in exploring something different\u2014and show that more experimentation is needed.\u201d<\/p>\n

So.cl got its start when Cheng and others in FUSE Labs were examining Facebook and Twitter data and how it is used in Bing (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>. They could track URLs people were sharing on Twitter, for instance, and see how news and information were gathered and spread.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe started to think about how we could create an experience around that,\u201d Cheng says, \u201cabout making search social and making it easy to share rich, beautiful posts without having to leave your network.\u201d<\/p>\n

Key to that experience was taking the So.cl experience a step beyond what people have been doing.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere have been social-search projects in the past,\u201d Farnham says, \u201cbut they\u2019ve generally focused much more on how to improve the experience of search. In So.cl, there\u2019s a shift in emphasis toward improving collaboration and connecting with other people around common interests.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Douglas Gantenbein, Senior Writer, Microsoft News Center The web, search, and social networking are changing the way students collaborate. To bring these elements together, Microsoft Research\u2019s FUSE Labs is launching a site designed to give students the ability to network with peers, share useful information quickly, and build their own pages that collect information […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39507,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":[],"msr_hide_image_in_river":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194460,194461],"tags":[195630,186686,202903,186595,186405,186954,186913,214148,197334,214151,186527],"research-area":[13555,13559],"msr-region":[],"msr-event-type":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-promo-type":[],"msr-podcast-series":[],"class_list":["post-305384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-search-and-information-retrieval","category-social-sciences","tag-fuse-labs","tag-learning","tag-montage","tag-networking","tag-search","tag-so-cl","tag-social-media","tag-social-networking","tag-students","tag-virtual-classroom","tag-web","msr-research-area-search-information-retrieval","msr-research-area-social-sciences","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_event_details":{"start":"","end":"","location":""},"podcast_url":"","podcast_episode":"","msr_research_lab":[],"msr_impact_theme":[],"related-publications":[],"related-downloads":[],"related-videos":[],"related-academic-programs":[],"related-groups":[],"related-projects":[],"related-events":[],"related-researchers":[],"msr_type":"Post","byline":"","formattedDate":"December 15, 2011","formattedExcerpt":"By Douglas Gantenbein, Senior Writer, Microsoft News Center The web, search, and social networking are changing the way students collaborate. To bring these elements together, Microsoft Research\u2019s FUSE Labs is launching a site designed to give students the ability to network with peers, share useful…","locale":{"slug":"en_us","name":"English","native":"","english":"English"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39507"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305384"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":305399,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305384\/revisions\/305399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305384"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=305384"},{"taxonomy":"msr-region","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-region?post=305384"},{"taxonomy":"msr-event-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-event-type?post=305384"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=305384"},{"taxonomy":"msr-post-option","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-post-option?post=305384"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=305384"},{"taxonomy":"msr-promo-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-promo-type?post=305384"},{"taxonomy":"msr-podcast-series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new-cm-edgedigital.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-podcast-series?post=305384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}