Social learning

Social communities – why bother? After all we’ve all got enough on our plates without having to worry about people we don’t know or like wanting to become our ‘friends’ – haven’t we?

They’re here to stay, of that there is no doubt – so I guess I’d better learn to use them to my advantage rather than just whine about them.

My students are involved in a project using a Ning community set up by one of my colleagues and we’re using an Eduspaces community for my masters project. Both are proving to be interesting, both have their own little usability problems that get in the way of things a bit.

I’ve also been doing quite a lot of reading on how journalists are using things like Facebook to their advantage, great article on Magda’s Web Creation called Facebook – love it or loathe it that features what the Beeb and other organisations are up.

This electronic form of social link between disparate individuals has massive implications for journalists and educators alike.

Found an interesting white paper by Ruth Clark called Leveraging Multimedia for Learningon the Adobe site earlier, which talks about social learning.

She says:

“All of us feel embarrassed when we are caught not listening to someone talking to us. This social convention is the basis for what Mayer (Richard Mayer at the University of California) calls ‘the personalization principle’.
According to his idea, learning is better when participants in eLearning feel they are engaged in a conversation.
To engage your learners in a social experience, use informal writing that relies on first and second person language. Of course learners consciously know that they are working with a computer proram and not a human partner.
Nevertheless, Mayer found that just a few simple changes in language that involved adding ‘you’ and ‘we’ pronouns resulted in dramatic improvements in learning.
The reason is that at an unconscious level, we tend to process more deeply when we are in a social-like setting.”

Ok, she was talking about learning agents and how computers can put people off as it difficult to relate them, but the point still holds true.

I did some work with a bunch of external trainees last year. They came in to see us for a day, and then worked at a distance – blended learning.

This was paper based, but for the first time I offered chat tutorials as well as phone calls. One of the students really took to the chats, we used Google’s chat client as Messenger was blocked by their firewall, and was able to really clarify points that worried her – sometimes she’d stop by for nothing more than a friendly word and reassurance she was on the right track.

I tend to bounce ideas off friends and family on the phone, or by email. The use of etools, and particularly social sites, is just a further step in that direction for me.

So, do I accept your offer to become my new friend? Go on then, seeing as it is you – whoever you are!