Distributed Teaching

The central phenomenon that this entry seeks to explore is that people with the job title of “teacher” are almost never the only teachers in a learning transaction, and autodidacts are almost never solely responsible for their own learning. As well as designated teachers and students, text book authors, editors, illustrators, exam boards, curriculum designers, governments, timetablers, classroom designers, architects, learning management system managers, counselors, career advisors, makers of YouTube videos, discussion forums, friends, family, and very many other individuals and groups can and do play an active and often highly significant teaching role in guiding, supporting, and managing the learning process. Online learning, especially when it involves a team of specialists working on a course, makes the distributed nature of the process very visible, and the relative autonomy of online learners makes it more likely that they will seek additional or alternative supports for learning, but virtually all conventional in-person teaching involves multiple teachers too, from peers to textbook authors and, most especially, the learners themselves

Transactional distance in a blended learning environment

This paper presents a case study that describes and discusses the problems encountered during the design and implementation of a blended learning course, largely taught online through a web-based learning environment. Based on Moore's theory of transactional distance, the course was explicitly designed to have dialogue at its heart. However, the reality of systemic behaviours caused by delivering such a course within a group of conventional further and higher educational institutions has led to an entirely unanticipated reversion to structure, with unpleasant consequences for both quality and quantity of dialogue. The paper looks at some of the reasons for this drift, and suggests that some of the disappointing results (in particular in terms of the quality of the students' experience and associated poor retention) can be attributed to the lack of dialogue, and consequent increase in transactional distance. It concludes with a description and evaluation of steps currently being taken to correct this behaviour

Lost in social space: Information retrieval issues in Web 1.5

This paper is concerned with the application of Web 2.0 technologies within a conventional institutional learning setting. After considering the affordances of Web 2.0 technologies vs Web 1.0 technologies and a framework for viewing social software in terms of groups, networks and collectives, we describe an instance of trying to use Elgg, a rich social application, to support a distance-taught course within a conventional face-to-face university. A number of issues are identified, some of which are related to Elgg’s interface but the biggest of which relate to the tensions between top-down and bottom-up control and the shifting contexts of personal, group, network and collective modes of engagement. These problems suggest that, in their current form, social technologies pose intractable difficulties in information organisation and retrieval when used for formal learning. We propose a range of solutions that make use of the wisdom of the crowd combined with human intervention. This paper addresses and extends themes explored in SIRTEL 07

The Distant Crowd: Transactional Distance And New Social Media Literacies.

Sociality is not just a cultural phenomenon but is embedded in our genes as eusocial creatures (E. O.Wilson 2012). Learning is an innately social activity, and the processes of teaching, the passing of knowledge from one generation to the next, are well-adapted to our eusociality. The size and nature of the groups we have evolved to form has, so far, been codetermined by exigencies of our situated existence as, initially, bands of hunter-gatherers, evolving into agricultural thenindustrial societies. Dunbar (1996) suggests the size of such groups is naturally limited. Though his research has been challenged on multiple fronts (Russell, Shelley, and Killworth 1987; de Ruiter,Weston, and Lyon 2011), the vast majority of close social ties for any single individual are limited to a relatively small number of other individuals, and our learning generally occurs in relatively small groups. Larger organizational forms such as cities, nations, universities, or corporations are mainly constituted as hierarchies and networks that maintain close personal contact at a manageable number for any given person. The focus of this paper is on describing how, after countless millennia of gentle evolutionary change, the Internet is challenging us to discover new forms of sociality and, with it, new forms of social literacy to help us become more effective learners and citizens

Seeking Connectivist freedom and Instructivist safety in a MOOC

Many MOOCs rely on instructivist pedagogies, in which teaching follows a top-down transmission model. Whether they follow a behaviourist, cognitivist or constructivist path, teachers guide or dictate activities as well as provide information that learners use in learning. In most cases, learners are not treated as sources of knowledge but as recipients or, at best, constructors of it. This is a waste of the vast pools of skills and knowledge that inevitably exist in any large collection of learners and is diametrically opposed to the principles behind earlier but now less commonplace connectivist MOOCs (cMoocs). Such cMOOCs, at least in principle, benefit from scale – they gain value the more people there are engaged in them because, though they coalesce around shared events and resources that resemble the instructivist patterns of publication, learners generate and design their own learning paths, discussing, debating, sharing their learning in rich networks and clusters of networks. As part of a strategy to explore different approaches to MOOC delivery, we developed a site using the Elgg social media framework in order to attempt to gain benefits of social sharing to support learning. Participating in the Digital Age, a six-week Australian MOOC (PDA MOOC), self-referentially was concerned with learning to be a digital citizen while using participatory tools to do so. In this paper we report on the theoretical foundations of the design, its technical implementation, and the benefits and disadvantages of the approach when the course was run

Agoraphobia and the modern learner.

Read/write social technologies enable rich pedagogies that centre on sharing and constructing content but have two notable weaknesses. Firstly, beyond the safe, nurturing environment of closed groups, students participating in more or less public network- or set-oriented communities may be insecure in their knowledge and skills, leading to resistance to disclosure. Secondly, it is hard to know who and what to trust in an open environment where others may be equally unskilled or, sometimes, malevolent. We present partial solutions to these problems through the use of collective intelligence, discretionary disclosure controls and mindful design

On the Design of Social Media for Learning

This paper presents two conceptual models that we have developed for understanding ways that social media can support learning. One model relates to the “social” aspect of social media, describing the different ways that people can learn with and from each other, in one or more of three social forms: groups, networks and sets. The other model relates to the ‘media’ side of social media, describing how technologies are constructed and the roles that people play in creating and enacting them, treating them in terms of softness and hardness. The two models are complementary: neither provides a complete picture but, in combination, they help to explain how and why different uses of social media may succeed or fail and, as importantly, are intended to help us design learning activities that make most effective use of the technologies. We offer some suggestions as to how media used to support different social forms can be softened and hardened for different kinds of learning applications

Educational technology: what it is and how it works

This is the submitted version of the paper, published with corrections in AI&Society. This theoretical paper elucidates the nature of educational technology and, in the process, sheds light on a number of phenomena in educational systems, from the no-significant-difference phenomenon to the singular lack of replication in studies of educational technologies. Its central thesis is that we are not just users of technologies but coparticipants in them. Our participant roles may range from pressing power switches to designing digital learning systems to performing calculations in our heads. Some technologies may demand our participation only in order to enact fixed, predesigned orchestrations correctly. Other technologies leave gaps that we can or must fill with novel orchestrations, that we may perform more or less well. Most are a mix of the two, and the mix varies according to context, participant, and use. This participative orchestration is highly distributed: in educational systems, coparticipants include the learner, the teacher, and many others, from textbook authors to LMS programmers, as well as the tools and methods they use and create. From this perspective, all learners and teachers are educational technologists. The technologies of education are seen to be deeply, fundamentally, and irreducibly human, complex, situated and social in their constitution, their form, and their purpose, and as ungeneralizable in their effects as the choice of paintbrush is to the production of great art

Soft is hard and hard is easy: learning technologies and social media

Questo articolo riguarda principalmente la natura delle tecnologie per apprendere, con una particolare attenzione ai social media. Muovendo dalla definizione fornita da W. Brian Arthur delle tecnologie come un insieme di fenomeni orchestrati per un qualche uso, l’articolo amplia la teoria di Arthur ridefinendo e allargando la distinzione comunemente accettata tra tecnologie soft e hard, laddove le tecnologie soft sono intese come quelle che richiedono l’orchestrazione di fenomeni da parte degli esseri umani, mentre le tecnologie hard sono quelle per le quali l’orchestrazione è predeterminata o incorporata. Le tecnologie per apprendere sono quelle in cui le pedagogie (anch’esse tecnologie) sono parte dell’insieme. Le conseguenze di questa prospettiva vengono esplorate nel quadro di diversi modelli pedagogici e in relazione agli approcci basati sul social learning in una varietà di contesti, dai corsi per corrispondenza ai MOOC