As the Director of Online Solutions for Champions, a big part of my job is to stay in tune with all things technical, and the innovative trends happening on the internet and off. With that said, I’ve spend a good amount of time over the past few years immersed in the digitally social (or is it socially digital?) world of social networking. I’m a regular Twitter user, I try to blog with some regularity and I follow several great blogs pretty closely, and I’ve even reconnected with some old friends through Facebook.

The key to most of the social technologies lie in the end-users, who are generally groups of people with similar interests who need a space to gather, discuss, learn and share information about those interests. With that said, as I was recently evaluating some content for an online course we are planning to build, I realized just how much of just that eLearning has been doing for well over ten years now.

The electronic school provides a space for learners to gather and learn about/interact with/discuss what we would hope are topics of interest (although this might be more or less true depending on the course topic and the learners enrolled in said course:). Like a blog, the online course often allows the teacher or instructor to provide topic-relevant updates (often in the form of announcements or a lecture), and then allows the readers (in this case, students) an opportunity to comment on that information–either through discussion boards or even in chat rooms. There are places to submit user-generated content (”Drop-boxes” for turning in papers and other submissions–even pictures in an art course), complete with a feedback loop (the gradebook). There are even systems out there that provide wiki technologies that allow students and teachers shared responsibility in creating and editing discovered or gathered course information.

Although there are certainly pieces of social networking that aren’t very prevalent in the eClassroom–microblog (i.e. “Twitter”) technology is not yet a prevalent feature in most common Learning Management Systems, and there are certainly opportunities for tagging and searching to further develop as a tool for sorting learning information, it is kind of neat to think that students and educators were taking advantage of socially interactive technologies years before they became everyday household terms. Chalk one up for the teachers and learners.