The Rise Of Social Learning
Integration into everyday, mainstream activity is certainly how many of our students see ICT. The arrival of new services (often referred to as 'Web 2.0') has helped to remove many of the barriers in traditional web authoring and seen a massive rise in the uptake of web authoring and collaboration. This new wave of social activity has been termed various things e.g. Social Software, Social Media and Social Computing. The key word is however 'Social'. Elsewhere on the JISC infoNet website you can find a brief overview of the Social Software phenomenon including a number of links to examples of the genre.
The social software used by the Google-eyed, del.icio.us technorati that we currently teach is highly successful because it meets two key requirements of the modern student psyche - it enables them to participate and values their contribution. These two 'benefits' are ones identified by creative class people, interviewed by Richard Florida in his research that formed the basis of his book 'The Rise of the Creative Class', as the most important things that creative people want.
It should come as no surprise that our student body values opportunities to contribute, and that such opportunities prove to be strongly motivational. The tactics that many tutors in FE and HE have been taking to increase the extent and use of techniques such as problem-based learning, group assignments and project work makes real sense for a generation that values contribution and participation. In turn such teaching tactics have repercussions for the sort of spaces that we provide both for the student-teacher interactions that are needed and for the 'out of class' group work that these teaching strategies demand. Often the default location for such 'out of class' work has traditionally been the college or university refectory, but we can't help feeling that new learning spaces should do better than this!
A key point here is the changing relationship between the teacher and the learner. We are all too familiar with the picture of active teachers and passive learners. The conclusion has to be that the new learning paradigm that is student-centred requires changed behaviours by both teachers and learners. A key question is how far is that changed behaviour hampered by current learning facilities and how can new facilities be configured to enable this change?
