W:
edtechnology.co.uk | T: @Educ_Technology
| DIARY | 05 Read a related story: click here
SOCIAL MEDIA AND NEW WAYS OF LEARNING
Much less than a lifetime ago, education was the gateway to rare and scarce information. Now we are swamped by digital data: perhaps valuable, often misleading and frequently irrelevant, says Martin Hall
There are new and emerging possibilities in the combination of trusted, open access content and the dynamism and flexibility of social media. Together, these can enable virtual classrooms that change the ways in which we learn and think. The foundations have been in place for
a while; Wordpress, Google, Facebook, Twiter. But it’s not about the particular app or the specific platform. What's new – the tipping point – is the convergence of ubiquitous Wi-Fi, cheap and massive data storage and affordable, location- intelligent mobile devices. As well as large-scale online courses – MOOCs – this convergence is enabling much more interactive ways of bringing people together anywhere, at the same time. Needs are also changing. As we plug
into these zetabytes of new information – wherever we happen to be and for almost anything we are doing – we need new, high-level skills: the abilities to discern relevance and reliability, to assemble and aggregate digital content, and to do new kinds of things. We are intolerant of any delay in accessing what we need. Because there is ever-increasing digital
information circulating in the internet we need dynamic and trustworthy intermediaries that do the job that the traditional library or bookshop used to do. This is where digital, open access content comes in. Digital resources can be online university platforms (almost every university in Britain now has one), specialised repositories, or national institutions such as the British Library. Their purpose is to stand between the virtual classroom and the wilds of the virtual world.
In themselves, though, online
repositories are not enough; they need to be integrated with social media. Effective online education needs the equivalent of the argumentative seminar, with talk, interruptions, gestures and dispute. Learners need to go away and build up chains of understanding by moving from source to source, interpreting, synthesizing and assessing new knowledge, talking to each other and coming back next week with an improved point of view. The genius in social media is in
enabling quick, non-hierarchical peer-to- peer networks that can assemble words, images and links around key concepts (tags). New combinations of open access content, micro-blogs and social media networks are beginning to show how the virtual classrooms of the future can be assembled.
Academia.edu, with 12.5 million subscribers, offers a repository of academic papers coupled with analytics and the ability to follow others and post comments. It’s a small stretch from here to a fully-fledged social media capability that allows Academia to be bolted onto a virtual classroom.
TheConversation.com, founded in
Australia and now launched in Britain and the United States, provides current and reliable content and the ability to follow selected topics. TheConversation is also growing rapidly and can provide a virtual classroom with a rich, by- the-minute resource for the frontiers of new knowledge. What to watch, as these new
approaches develop, is how freedom
from the limitations of time and space enables new ways of learning and understanding. Connecting people separated by continents and time zones is a key innovation for education practice. A course on climate change, for example, that connected learners’ living knowledge of the Amazon, or Greenland, or the Sahel will be a new way of creating knowledge about a key issue. Conflict zones provide limit cases that help think through these possibilities: online learners in Gaza and Israel together in a virtual classroom working from a common set of digital resources and using social media for free-ranging, peer-to-peer interactions; Tamil and Sinhalese students in Sri Lanka and South India critically re-examining cultural identities in the aftermath of civil war; Catholic and Protestant students in Belfast looking critically at the sectarianism that still makes coming together in the material world difficult and dangerous. Will we find it difficult to embrace
these new forms of learning? There is abundant digital creativity in education today, and innumerable experiments with online content and social media. The difficulty is rather in organisational structure; in the ways in which subject fields are organised and assembled in curricula; in conventional forms of assessment and validation. Until we look at these deeper, structural issues we will find it difficult to respond to the demands of digitally savvy learners of today and tomorrow, or to make use of the wealth of innovation and opportunity that is already with us. ET
Martin Hall is currently Emeritus Professor at the University of Cape Town and chair of the board of Jisc.
Martin Hall
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74