Social Networking Technologies for Teaching and Learning

Transformation

May 27, 2009Dakar, Senegal

Review of Day One

Information and Society’s Institutions

Institutions mirror informationMcNeely & Wolverton

Universities map reality

Frank & Gabler

What happens when the primary elements of education change?

The gatekeepers

Institutions

Curriculum designers, educators

Assume to know what learners will need later

We fundamentally relate to information differently

Not created by select few

Learn lesson from news, media, music industry

Not controlled by select few

Learn lessons from PR, marketing, and politics

What are information trends?

IntuitiveGrowth Fluidity Impact on authorityImpact on certainty Technology

Big changes change big institutions

Participatory sense making

Our world makes sense through our interaction with information and others

....(and in turn, their interactions with information and others)

De Jaegher, Di Paolo, 2007

Requires new approaches to making sense of abundance

“Significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential”

Vannevar Bush, 1945

Associative trails between information

Associative trails between people

“All the knowledge is in the connections”David Rumelhart

Information becomes knowledge through connections

Undiscovered public knowledge

When connections are weak…not more research, but better connections

Undiscovered public knowledge systems of information that are similar but

distinct or not normally connected(Don Swanson)

By design, today’s institutions & systems serve to handle information

of a different nature

“What we have here is a transition from a stable, settled world of knowledge produced by authority/authors, to a world of instability, flux, of knowledge produced by the individual...”

Institute of Education, London, 2007

Emergence and tradition

Social Learning

“The major responsibility of education is to arm every single person for the vital combat for lucidity”

Morin, p 12, 13, 1999

New challenge: sensemaking & wayfinding in abundance

What is our mind like?

Black box

Computer

Social, cultural

Modular

Ecology…and a network

“What aspects of learning are obscured by one theory may be illuminated by another”

(Driscoll)

Behaviourism

Concept: Learning is a change in behaviour…mind is a black box

Figures: Pavlov, Thorndike, Watson, Skinner

B.F. Skinner

Cognitivism

Concept: information processing, metacognition, thought process, knowledge is organized

Figures: Bruner, Ausubel, Gagne, Piaget, Vygotsky

Cognitivism

Motivation– Attribution– ARCS• Attention• Relevance• Confidence• Satisfaction

Constructivism

Multiple camps: cognition, interaction, context

Broad influence: Dewey, Von Glasersfeld, Kuhn

“Knowledge constructed by learners as they attempt to make sense of their experiences” (Driscoll)

Piaget

Piaget: – Process of development– Stages of development

“I think that all structures are constructed and that the fundamental feature is the course of this construction: Nothing is given at the start, except some limiting points on which all the rest is based. The structures are neither given in advance in the human mind nor in the external world, as we perceive or organize it.”

Social Constructivism

Vygotsky– Language– Social and cultural context

Constructionism

Concept: people learn through making things – “creative experimentation”

Learning vs. Teaching“find ways in which the technology enables

children to use knowledge”

Seymour Papert

Connectionism

Concept: Learning - neural networks, not symbol processing

Figures: – Early: Thorndike (behaviourist)– More recently modular models of learning

(Minsky), Bechtel, Abrahamsen, Pinker, Churchland, Hebb

Situated Learning

Concept: “learning as it normally occurs is a function of the activity, context and culture in which it occurs”

Figures: Lave, Wenger

Activity Theory

Concept: “More than ever there is a need for an approach that can dialectically link the individual and the social structure”

“Transcending Context”

Figures: Leont’ev (based on Vygotsky)Engeström (in current iteration – expansive

learning)

Biological views of learning

“It appears that complex and distributed systems of neurons are implicated in learning, with some systems centrally involved with the development and representation of a memory trace, and others peripherally involved in the expression of learned behaviour”

(Donegan & Thompson)

Biological views of learning

Brain-based learning approachesNeural architecture & neuroscienceEmotions

“Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain.”

(Time Magazine)

“To the neuroscientist, learning is a whole-person/whole-brain activity what confounds received organizations”

Theodore Marchese

Learning in relationship to knowledge and mind

Distributed – Hutchins – Not “in skull”– Spivey et. al. – “not always inside brain”– Bereiter – “knowing outside the mind”

Externalization – Wittgenstein, Vygotsky

Socialization – Papert, Piaget, Bruner, Bandura

Ethical/moral obligations…structures – Freire, Illich, Papert, Dewey

Cognition and mind as social phenomenon:

Mind/self created through social participation

Practices/tools/language are social constructions

Power fashions practices/toolsGarrison, 1995, p. 737

“The intelligences…are distributed…across minds, persons, and the symbolic and physical environments”

Roy Pea

Fifth Estate: Reshaping “communicative powers of

individuals and groups”W. H. Dutton, Oxford, 2007

Complexification of knowledge reduces individual capacity to apprehend its unity

“The major responsibility of education is to arm every single person for the vital combat of lucidity”

...New problem: access to info, skills to organize info

Morin, p 12, 13, 1999

New media adds new opportunities for connections/relations, enacting latent ties

Haythornthwaite, 2002

“Gossip, people-curiosity, and small talk...are in essence the human version of social grooming”

Zufekci, 2008

Individual knowledge possible due to social practices of engagement

Tsoukas, 1996

Participatory Pedagogies(Collis & Moonen, 2008)

(Askins, 2008)(Harvard Law School, 2008)

Networked Learning

Co-evolution of individual and related networkLazer, 2000

Stages of development: networks in education

1. Physical infrastructure

2. Merging with other fields

3. Theoretical and transformative views of learning, cognition, knowledge

4. Popularization of networks

5. Integrated learning/knowledge/education networks

Depth and diversity of connections determines understanding

Frequency of exposure

Integration with existing ideas/concepts

Strong and Weak Ties

Determining understandingDetermining understanding

How attributes of connections reflect learning

The primacy of the connection

Framework of Emerging Technologies

What do different technologies do?

1. Access

2. Presence

3. Expression

4. Creation

5. Interaction/co-creation

6. Aggregate our fragmentation

Thinking about tomorrow

Where are we going?

Given the changes in how we interact with content and each other, how should we change the educational process?

Open Teaching

Alec Couros Stephen DownesLeigh BlackallDavid Wiley

Learning design?

Thin walls

“by creating space and place, we create ourselves”

Cannatella, 2007, p. 632

Spaces are themselves agents for change. Changed spaces will change practice

(JISC, 2006)

Away from hierarchies and classrooms

To

Networks and ecologies...

Schools as a single node in networks of learning

Bigger shift than that from a Ptolmeic to Copernican view of the solar system…Self-organization is the way the relevant sciences are heading.

Carl Bereiter (2002)

Architecture of participation powered by network effects

“Roads no longer merely lead to places; they are places”

John Brinckerhoff Jackson

gsiemens@elearnspace.org

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