OST'12: Open and Social Technologies for Networked Learning

Open and Social Technologies play an increasingly important role in many educational settings. Social technologies are naturally entering primary, secondary and higher education where they blur the boundaries between formal and informal learning. Social technologies also enter the workplaces where they connect learners and bridge the boundaries between individual learning and organizational knowledge processes. Not only do these technologies connect learners independent of place and time, they have also been found to exert emergent properties. For example, wikis or social tagging environments are increasingly used for collaborative knowledge construction where new knowledge emerges from a large scale interaction of individuals. These properties and their impact on individual, group and organizational learning have only started to be researched.

Open Source Software (OSS) and Technologies have received extensive research attention due to some favorable properties contrasting with a traditional understanding of software development and the use of those systems. Many OSS issues are motivations for OSS developers and licensing bodies. However, important research areas in OSS are product and implementation success and the use of OSS in different educational and enterprise settings. OSS can also serve as a platform for providing services to user communities. Especially in developing countries, OSS provides an attractive opportunity.