Social technologies for online learning: theoretical and contextual issues

Three exemplars are presented of social technologies deployed in educational contexts: wikis; a photo-sharing environment; and a social bookmarking tool. Students were found to engage with the technologies selectively, sometimes rejecting them, in the light of their prior conceptions of education. Some students (a minority in all the studies) were unsympathetic to the educational philosophy underpinning the technology’s adoption. The paper demonstrates, through an examination of in-context use, the importance of socio-cultural factors in relation to education, and the non-deterministic nature of educational technology. The academic study of technology has increasingly called into question the deterministic views which are so pervasive in popular discourse and among policy makers. Instead, socio-cultural factors play a crucial role in shaping and defining technology and educational technology is no exception, as the examples in the paper show. The paper concludes by drawing out some implications of the examples for the use of social technologies in education

Authentic education: lessons from an online Finnish teacher development Program for 21st century faculty

The Finnish education system has received a lot of media attention due the results of PISA examinations. Many countries have considered ways to implement the \u27Finnish model\u27 into their own context. This paper examines the experience gained from the first graduating cohort of a fully online Finnish teacher development program in a Middle Eastern country with diverse, multicultural faculty participants. It examines the challenges of implementation and reflects upon the successes and participant experience. The paper describes how the principles of authentic e-learning (Herrington, Reeves and Oliver, 2010) were used to design the program and whether it was possible to harness these to enable real change to take place in professional practice. The program made use of both formal tools and social media to engage and support staff as they implemented new ideas and methods into their classroom practice and reflected on their professional identities