Definition and description

• Social media
• "umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words and pictures."
• “wisdom of crowds” to connect information in a collaborative manner.
• different forms, including
• Internet forums,
• message boards,
• weblogs,
• wikis,
• podcasts,
• pictures and
• video.

• "Examples of social media applications are Google (reference, social networking), Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), Facebook(social networking), Last.fm (personal music), YouTube (social networking and video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), and Flickr (photo sharing)."

Writing collaboratively
In many of our courses, we ask students to develop collaborative artifacts. The tools that we have available for collaboration, have been greatly enhanced in previous years. From sharing files online, to collaborative editing of text, presentations and other documents, many tools are available for free online, generating documents with extensions that are common to all users.

Here are a few examples of such tools:

Video explaining Google docs and the advantages of sharing files online

A tour of Google docs..

A few videos explaining different products from Zoho