E-LEARNING SUPPORTED BY SOCIAL COMPUTING TOOLS

Despite social computing has had a rather short history, various approaches to this phenomenon appear. The paper focuses on the project "Tools supporting human sources development" which deals with critical analysis and research of social computing tools (i.e. blogs, wikis, Twitter, RSS, instant messaging, interactive games shared by several players, open-source software development, sharing files, social media etc.). They are implemented in the process of e-learning which aims at increasing knowledge of the tools. The added value of the project is the proposal of improving the existing ( expensive and of low efficiency) system of education applying mainly face-to-face training. The methodology is presented which is based on bibliographic search of adequate sources, analysis of the current state and users' activities, on statistic evaluation of the collected data. This process results in designing the portal which includes both the e-learning and social computing elements, presents the discovered information both to the system users and system suppliers and defines in which target fields e-learning based on social computing could be efficiently applied.