Learning as aSocial Process

Robert D. CormiaFoothill College

Learning as aSocial Process

Learning is a social process – it is in our biology – it’s actually in our DNA!

– Anthropology– Sociology– Psychology– Networks

Humans are a learning animal – not just our capacity to learn – our desire to learn

Social Learning is the Tail of the Learning Process

Posted by: John in social learning Kevin Jones (from the Cascadia blog , but not this time) has presented at the ASTD TechKnowledge Conference in San Antonio this week and shows the role of Social Learning as the tail of the learning process. http://frontlinelearning.edublogs.org/tag/cascadia/

Complex Learning Communities

• Society

• Communities

• Organizations

• Disciplines

• Classrooms

• Workplace

Learning as a social process – or society as a learning community?

http://newlearning.wikispaces.com/

New Technology Means New Learning (or should it be New Ways of Learning?)

• Actively engaging students in the learning process rather than allowing them to be passive recipients of content.

• Experts proposed that interaction, participation, and social learning experiences might be key factors that promote connection and less isolation.

• http://activeinstruction.com/custom3.html

What is Social Constructivist Learning?

What is Social Constructivist Learning?

http://activeinstruction.com/

Social Computing

• Social computing is a general term for an area of computer science that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It is used in two ways.

• Technology mediated social transactions

• Augmented social cognition (PARC)– Think, reason, and remember (Wisdom of Crowds)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_computing

What is Web 2.0?

• Eras of the Web

• Techno-interactions:• People• Information• Applications

• Collaboration

• Read / write Web

• Annotating information

People

Applications

Information

http://www.bit-tech.net/modding/2004/12/20/hypercube_part_1/1

Eras of the Web

• Content Web (1995-2005)– HTML for browsers

• Process Web (2000-2010)– XML for machines

• Semantic Web (2005-2015)– RDF for humans / machines

• The Metaweb (2010-2025)– Networked machines / applications

http://novaspivack.typepad.com/RadarNetworksTowardsAWebOS.jpg

http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/metaweb_graph.jpg

Web 2.0 Technology

Fostering a world of emergent collaboration and augmented social cognition

What is Web 2.0?

• Web 2.0 is ‘made of people’

• It is both human and ‘emergent’

• Augmented social cognition

• A lot like ‘pre-web’ AOL and BBS

• More powerful, and ‘generational’

• Web 2.0 tools social process

Made of People

• People are the secret to Web 2.0

• Bottom up ‘swarming’ of content

• Power mass knowledge – consensus?

• Building actives, collective wisdom

• Emergent nodes / human network

The Read-Write Web

• People interacting with information

• Information isn’t as static, and a ‘dynamic flow / process’ begins

• Comments and tags add metadata and context, and are a springboard for human interaction

manikandakumar.blogspot.com

What are Social Networks?

• Sociograms

• Process

• Modeling and analysis

• Roles

• Applications

• Pivot browsing

• Networks

Social Graph: Concepts and Issues

• In his post, Ben Fitzpatrick defines "social graph" as "the global mapping of everybody and how they're related".

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/social_graph_concepts_and_issues.php

Social Graphs

LinkedIn will help you organize and explore your extended networks – Allows you to extend your network by pivot browsing across contacts

Navigating Social Graphs

• Visualization• Navigation• Pivot browsing• People• Associations• Interactions• Data• Applications

Pivot Browsing

Topic – Concept Map

http://cs-alb-pc3.massey.ac.nz/notes/59102/mindmap.gifhttp://www.topicscape.com/concept-mapping.html

Review of Web 2.0 Tools

• Blogs

• Wikis

• Forums

• FAQs

• OERs

• Twitter

• G-snap

• YouTube™

Blogs

• Personal and group publishing– You publish – readers comment

• Basis of ‘citizen journalism’– Early and ‘informal’ reporting – ‘Bottom up’ vs. ‘top down’

• Easy Web publishing / templates– Blogger.com– WordPress.org

RSS

• Really Simple Syndication– Publishing news and content alerts– CNN news alerts

• Snippet publishing– News, alerts, lists– iTunes top 10 list

• Addendum to blogging– Notification of new posts

Wikis

• MediaWiki

• Wikipedia

• Wikibooks

• Wikiversity

• WikiProject

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

Wikipatterns

• Optimizing:– Adoption– Productivity– Collaboration

• Interactions– Flows– Conflict

• Management– Goals– Outcomes

http://www.wikipatterns.com/display/wikipatterns/Wikipatterns

Forums and FAQs

• Q&A

• Dialog

• Debate

• Discussions

• Collaboration

• Solving problems– Current problems

• Learning / sharing

User Built FAQs

• WikiAnswers

• Yahoo! Answers

• Slashdot

• WebMD

‘Tagging’

• Digg– Collective site ranking

• Del.icio.us– Adding tags

• Tag clouds– Collection of tags on a site

• StumbleUpon– Site discovery by user type

Tag Clouds

A tag cloud is a set of related tags with corresponding weights. Typical tag clouds have between 30 and 150 tags. The weights are represented using font sizes or other visual clues. Meanwhile, histograms or pie charts are most commonly used to represent approximately a dozen different weights. Hence, tag clouds can represent many more weights, though less accurately so. Also, frequently, tag clouds are interactive: tags are hyperlinks typically allowing the user to drill down on the data.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/~blamb/FolksonomyCast.mov

Social Media Meets Social Learning

Image from http://www.biojobblog.com/ Trademarks property of respective owners

Social Media Properties

• YouTube™

• MySpace

• Facebook

• Wikipedia

• LinkedIn

• Del.ico.us

• StumbleUpon

• Second Life

Twitter

• SMS– ‘IM cast’– 140 characters

• Tweets– Follow people– Searchable

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

http://www.twitter.com/

g-snap!

• SMS plus content• Archives to stories• Collaboration • Event casting• Informal learning• Unstructured events• Data can be searched

http://www.gsnap.com/

Second Life

• Social interactions• Avatar personas• Obscure physique?• Richer interactions?• Role exploration?• Collaboration• Classes / meetings

Business Meets Learning

• Facebook™

• Twitter™

• YouTube™

• LinkedIn™

• Wikipedia

• Wikiversity

• Café classes

Web 2.0 Learning Portals

• Science blogs• Open access

science (PLOS)• InnoCentive™• Wikibooks• Wikiversity• iTunesU

http://engineering.curiouscatblog.net/

Facebook & Twitter

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=28901872314

Open Access Learning

– Science• Directory of Open Access Science• PLOS - Public Library of science• PNAS - Proceedings of the National

Academy of Science– GIS

• Google earth• Google space• Google ocean

Web 2.0 meets Web 3.0

• Human tagging

• Machine readable

• Knowledge constructs– Assertions– Connections

• Knowledge arcs– Hyper documents

• Navigable paths

Semantic Wiki Project

• WikiProteins

• Google Knol™

• Semantic Web

• One Notebook™

• One Textbook™

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki

Semantic Wiki Ontology

Entity relationships

Assertions

Nodes

Arcs

Edges

Attributes

Associations

Namespaces

Inheritance

Navigation

Pivot browsing

http://www.mikeaxelrod.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/iswc-ontology-web.png

Hyper-document Tagging

http://www.textensor.com/enhancing-documents-2007.html

Collaboration Tools

• Google Docs• TeamViewer™• CCC Confer• MediaWiki• TelePresence™• WebEx™• Microsoft Roundtable™

Workplace Learning

http://professional-learning.eu/

Informal Learning Communities

• New social process• Topic centric• Un-conferences• Un-classrooms

Strategies and Tips for Un-Course Management

• Teams• Contact• Goals• Support• Participate• Reflection• Archiving Unconference - discussion based

learning – facilitation is critical!

Collaboration / Learning

• Synchronous

• Asynchronous

• Exchanging formal and informal learning

• Process / flow

• Social patterns

http://resolutionarythinking.com/

Knowledge Work Evolves

• Impersonal knowledge is those ideas and pieces of information made explicit in documents and files (sometimes email).

• Personal knowledge is the tacit learning locked inside our heads (not written down).

• Interpersonal knowledge is implicit between and among individuals and embedded in conversations and connections (esp. email).

Engineering Learning Communities

• New tools / techniques

• Serving the long-tail

• High performance work groups

• Collaborative learning http://www.enhanced-learning.net/

http://psalter.edublogs.org/

Bioinformatics / Genomics

What do our genes work? What do new discoveries mean?

Where does new knowledge ‘fit’?

How do proteins, genes, environment interact?

http://proteins.wikiprofessional.org/

Augmented Social Cognition

• PARC

• How groups– Remember– Think– Reason

http://asc-parc.blogspot.com/

Learning Organizations

• Education

• Social disciplines

• Science

• Society

• CSR efforts

• The Social Enterprise

http://www.hbs.edu/socialenterprise/

Tribes – Learning to Action

o Social / network computing

o Turn learning into process

o Process into actiono Action into resultso Engineering change

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

Learning as a Social Process

– New social process• Inclusion

– Collaboration• Global reach

– Moving the needle• Gap analysis

– Connected media• Tagging

Social Computing and knowledge building

Social networksRSSOpen source softwareSearch enginesPortalsP2PC2CPodcastsWikisTagging

http://www.forrester.com/

Summary

• Learning is a social process

• Web 2.0 tools strengthen social transactions and collaboration

• Informal and workplace learning is significant in a knowledge economy

• Adult learners and knowledge workers need tools for learning

References

• PARC – http://www.parc.com/

• Google – http://www.google.com/

• W3C – http://www.w3c.org/

• MediaWiki – http://www.mediawiki.org/

• WikiProject – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_wiki/

• Open Educational Resources – http://www.oercommons.org/