2. Educational Theory
• Dewey
▫ Education as experience
▫ The importance of the social aspect of learning
• Piaget
▫ Socio-Constructivist Theory
Emphasis on interactions rather than actions
Students master new approaches of learning
through interacting with others
Development of the individual
http://www.inholland.nl/NR/rdonlyres/14C97038-08C2-4D9C-BD6B-F467AA97EE55/812/PierreD.PDF
3. Educational Theory
• Vygotsky
▫ Socially constructed knowledge
▫ Socio-Cultural Theory (ZPD)
Focus on causal relationship between social
interaction and the individual's cognitive
development
ZPD is the distance between actual development
and potential development (adult, more able peer
assisted)
4. Educational Theory
• Shared Cognition
▫ Focus on environment of learning rather than just
on the individual
▫ Physical and social contexts important
▫ Social context makes the collaborations happen
L Resnick
“collaboration is viewed as a process of building and
maintaining a shared conception of a problem”
5. More Theory
• Wenger and Lave
▫ Communities of practice
▫ http://wenger-trayner.com/theory/
• The domain:
▫ It has an identity defined by a shared domain of
interest
• The community:
▫ Unless they interact and learn together, they do not
form a community of practice
• The practice:
▫ Members of a community of practice are practitioners
6. Communities of Practice
• Forums about everything
• Phpbb http://www.phpbb.com/
• Has a ‘community’, which includes a forum
about forums
7. Wikis as Communities of Practice
• The practices of participating in wikis, and social
software more generally, could potentially
provide a structure supporting a community of
practice model of learning as individuals come
together, and develop a repertoire of shared
practices, bringing new experiences to the group
and learning from the group’s existing practices.
8. Wikis as Communities of Practice
• The wiki itself could be seen as both the site of
participation, and the reified artefact that acts as
a record of that community’s practices.
9. Wikis as Communities of Practice
• Wikipedia
▫ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
10. More Terms
• Distributed cognition
▫ Hutchins
▫ Salomon
cognitive processes that are distributed across the
members of a social group
11. More Terms
• Pea
▫ Distributed intelligence
“knowledge is commonly socially constructed,
through collaborative efforts toward shared
objectives or by dialogues and challenges brought
about by difference in persons’ perspectives” (Pea,
1993, p. 48).
• MIT World – Distributed Intelligence
• http://mitworld.mit.edu/
• TED http://www.ted.com/
13. Some Approaches
• Learning Communities Catalyst
▫ http://lcc.edu.au/?page_id=28
• Victoria as a Learning Community
▫ http://www.education.vic.gov.au/about/department/v
▫ State Government’s approach
14. Open Source Solutions
• Community Learning Network
▫ http://sourceforge.net/projects/bangthedrumcln/
• Elgg
▫ http://elgg.org/
18. Education
• Awareness of the existence of tools
• Awareness of the existence of communities
• Access to tool/communities
• Development of effective communities
• Not just for the students
• DLTV
▫ http://www.dltv.vic.edu.au/
▫ http://www.dltv.vic.edu.au/news-blogs
Notes de l'éditeur
In socio-constructivist theory, emphasis is given to interactions rather than actions themselves. A given level of individual development allows participation in certain social interactions which produce new individual states which, in turn, make possible more sophisticated social interactions, and so on [Dillenbourg et al. 1994]. The socio-constructivist approach focuses on the individual's development with respect to the social interaction, without really differentiating or identifying the underlying factors that enhance collaborative learning. Here the social interaction is assumed as a black box that boosts collaborative learning.
Socio-cultural theory focuses on the causal relationship between social interaction and the individual's cognitive development
http://www.cs.usask.ca/grads/vsk719/academic/890/project2/node7.html
http://www.inholland.nl/NR/rdonlyres/14C97038-08C2-4D9C-BD6B-F467AA97EE55/812/PierreD.PDF
Shared cognition theory is different from the other two theories in the sense that the environment in which learning takes place is given the focus rather than the environment-independent cognitive processes. The environment consists of both physical context and social context. The previous two approaches attributed the learning only to the physical context. But the shared cognition approach places the focus squarely on the social context that is claimed to make the collaborations happen and not just the presence of the
collaborators.