Learning as a Social Process

Learning as a Social Process

1. Learning as a
Social Process
Robert D. Cormia
Foothill College

2. Learning as a
Social 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

3. 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/

4. Complex Learning
Communities
•Society
•Communities
•Organizations
•Disciplines
•Classrooms
•Workplace
Learning as a social process – or society as a learning community?

5. http://newlearning.wikispaces.com/
New Technology Means New Learning (or should it be New Ways of Learning?)

6. •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?

7. What is Social
Constructivist Learning?
http://activeinstruction.com/

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

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

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

13. Web 2.0 Technology
Fostering a world of emergent collaboration and augmented social cognition

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. What are Social Networks?
•Sociograms
•Process
•Modeling and
analysis
•Roles
•Applications
•Pivot browsing
•Networks

18. 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

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

20. Navigating Social Graphs
•Visualization
•Navigation
•Pivot browsing
•People
•Associations
•Interactions
•Data
•Applications

21. Pivot Browsing

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

23. Review of Web 2.0 Tools
•Blogs
•Wikis
•Forums
•FAQs
•OERs
•Twitter
•G-snap
•YouTube™

24. 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

25. 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

26. Wikis
•MediaWiki
•Wikipedia
•Wikibooks
•Wikiversity
•WikiProject
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

27. Wikipatterns
•Optimizing:
–Adoption
–Productivity
–Collaboration
•Interactions
–Flows
–Conflict
•Management
–Goals
–Outcomes
http://www.wikipatterns.com/display/wikipatterns/Wikipatterns

28. Forums and FAQs
•Q&A
•Dialog
•Debate
•Discussions
•Collaboration
•Solving problems
–Current problems
•Learning / sharing

29. User Built FAQs
•WikiAnswers
•Yahoo! Answers
•Slashdot
•WebMD

30. ‘Tagging’
•Digg
–Collective site ranking
•Del.icio.us
–Adding tags
•Tag clouds
–Collection of tags on a site
•StumbleUpon
–Site discovery by user type

31. 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

32. Social Media
Meets Social Learning
Image from http://www.biojobblog.com/ Trademarks property of respective owners

33. Social Media Properties
•YouTube™
•MySpace
•Facebook
•Wikipedia
•LinkedIn
•Del.ico.us
•StumbleUpon
•Second Life

34. 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/

35. g-snap!
•SMS plus content
•Archives to stories
•Collaboration
•Event casting
•Informal learning
•Unstructured events
•Data can be searched
http://www.gsnap.com/

36. Second Life
•Social interactions
•Avatar personas
•Obscure physique?
•Richer interactions?
•Role exploration?
•Collaboration
•Classes / meetings

37. Business Meets Learning
•Facebook™
•Twitter™
•YouTube™
•LinkedIn™
•Wikipedia
•Wikiversity
•Café classes

38. Web 2.0 Learning Portals
•Science blogs
•Open access
science (PLOS)
•InnoCentive™
•Wikibooks
•Wikiversity
•iTunesU http://engineering.curiouscatblog.net/

39. Facebook & Twitter
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=28901872314

40. 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

42. Web 2.0 meets Web 3.0
•Human tagging
•Machine readable
•Knowledge constructs
–Assertions
–Connections
•Knowledge arcs
–Hyper documents
•Navigable paths

43. Semantic Wiki Project
•WikiProteins
•Google Knol™
•Semantic Web
•One Notebook™
•One Textbook™
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki

44. 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

45. Hyper-document Tagging
http://www.textensor.com/enhancing-documents-2007.html

46. Collaboration Tools
•Google Docs
•TeamViewer™
•CCC Confer
•MediaWiki
•TelePresence™
•WebEx™
•Microsoft
Roundtable™

47. Workplace Learning
http://professional-learning.eu/

48. Informal Learning
Communities
•New social
process
•Topic centric
•Un-conferences
•Un-classrooms

49. Strategies and Tips for Un-
Course Management
•Teams
•Contact
•Goals
•Support
•Participate
•Reflection
•Archiving
Unconference - discussion based
learning – facilitation is critical!

50. Collaboration / Learning
•Synchronous
•Asynchronous
•Exchanging
formal and
informal
learning
•Process / flow
•Social patterns
http://resolutionarythinking.com/

51. 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).

52. 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/

53. 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/

54. Augmented Social Cognition
•PARC
•How groups
–Remember
–Think
–Reason
http://asc-parc.blogspot.com/

55. Learning Organizations
•Education
•Social disciplines
•Science
•Society
•CSR efforts
•The Social
Enterprise
http://www.hbs.edu/socialenterprise/

56. Tribes – Learning to Action
oSocial / network
computing
oTurn learning into
process
oProcess into action
oAction into results
oEngineering change
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

57. Learning as a Social Process
–New social process
•Inclusion
–Collaboration
•Global reach
–Moving the needle
•Gap analysis
–Connected media
•Tagging

58. Social Computing
and knowledge
building
Social networks
RSS
Open source software
Search engines
Portals
P2P
C2C
Podcasts
Wikis
Tagging
http://www.forrester.com/

59. 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

60. 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/