Functionality for learning networks: lessons learned from social web applications

Learning Networks are online communities for lifelong learning. How they should be designed to encourage participants interaction and active participation is a key issue in the development of technology intended for communities. Given the capacity of social web applications to encourage members participation for sharing resources and creating communities, we hold that some lessons can be learned from them. In this paper we analyze the functionalities of three well-known social web applications, namely del.icio.us, Flickr and YouTube, and we discuss how these functionalities can be used to encourage participants to manage, organize and regulate Learning Networks.