IT, Education & Co-Production

Marshall Van AlstyneTeaching Day, Boston University SMG

Strategic Mgmt Society - Facebook

Benefits– Free– Very familiar– Students already there– Can get good

discussion– Great news feeds

Costs– Can have exclusive

subgroups.– Still need Blackboard,

Sakai or etc.

Jive

Benefits– More commercial /

fully functional– Great collaboration

tool– News feeds like FB– Private and public

groups

Costs– Not as widely used– Not a freemium model

One Laptop Per Child - Yammer

Benefits– Free– Very like Facebook– Great group support &

news feeds– Replace blackboard

Costs– Can get too noisy– Groups still tend

toward non-overlap– Almost too

unstructured

Q&A - Piazza

Benefits– Students answer each

others’ questions– Faculty can designate

“approved” answers– Recurring question just

reused

Costs– Not a collaboration tool– Not a news tool– Still needs blackboard

Twitter

Jim Freedman uses twitter– Students share news– Discuss at class start– Enters in class

participation grade– 12 of 40 highlighted as

great experience

Costs– Participation drops when

class ends

Barter Information Market

Benefits– Students answer each

others’ questions– “Experts” become

readily visible.– Supports questions,

news, documents, ideas.

Costs– Points can be

competitive– Points “grubbing”

Social Software Overview

Benefits• Student engagement• Quiet students speak up• Co-creation of content• P2P learning• Offload some work• Objective grading

Costs• Loss of control, complaints

public• Creates new “flow” work• FB private groups• Optimal collaboration vs

competition.

Gamification

Faculty designs question set for each module.

Crowdsource new questions to students.

Students pass each module once they’ve demonstrated learning.

Compete for high scores.Take as often as like (or

not!)

Ideas cluster together with individual expertise

Real Time Feedback

Information Overlap

Silo Model Shared Model

GuidedCo-production of learning

Questions: marshall@mit.edu@InfoEcon on Twitter