SocialLearn

Following The Open University’s decision to adopt Google Apps, I took part in a workshop (liveblogged by Doug Clow) on the use of these apps to enhance the OU student experience. For me, some of the main issues related to what happens when the flexibility of social learning in an informal environment comes up against the needs and concerns of a more formal setting.

We so often come back to assessment – how is individual assessment possible in a collaborative environment? How valid is an examination that denies you access to the many resources and collaborators you can access in any other situation? One proposed solution was to credit students for creating course content, and thus to shift to a model in which course design and material are dynamic rather than static. This would be a culture shift for The Open University, where most courses require years of painstaking production and may then be studied by thousands of students over a period of many years.

Culture shift was a recurrent topic. We know that OU students are already using these apps – as many as 33,000 already have Google mail or Gmail accounts. Our ‘walled garden’ of educational Google Apps can’t lag significantly behind the set of apps freely available elsewhere. To keep up with the pace of change, the university needs to be more agile in course production and development, to shift its assessment practices and, perhaps, to integrate work-based learning more closely with its formal courses.

And we need to stay in touch. It makes no sense to create a culture that splits the ‘Googlers’ from the ‘Moodlers’ – or that splits OU Googlers from potential collaborators in a wider community of Google Apps users.

Ideally, the university will add value to these apps, rather than restricting their functionality. From a social learning point of view, this could involve supporting learners to use them to frame relevant questions, identify relevant resources and engage in meaningful discussions.

Niall Sclater heads up the Learning Innovation Office here at Open U., and describes our move into the cloud providing students with Google Apps for Education… while Tony Hirst provides sideways commentary…

Taking a cloud-based platform for granted obviously helps as we plan how to embed additional sociality in the learner experience.

Our project title – SocialLearn – focuses attention on social learning, but our remit is wider. From the start, SocialLearn has faced the challenge of aligning current thinking on good pedagogy with the use of Web 2.0 technologies.

There is a continuing tension between social learning, with learners freely ranging the Internet and constructing meaning together, and institutional provision of selected high-quality resources and individual assessment.

I’m currently looking back at SocialLearn’s work over the past year – not only in terms of how it supports learning, but also in terms of the principles articulated at the start. These are currently available in various articles and blogs, and I am linking them together here in order to support evaluation of what we have done so far, and development of what we will do in the future.

Two years ago, Martin Weller identified six principles of SocialLearn (the hyperlinks are mine):

• Openness
• Flexibility
• Disruptive
• Perpetual beta
• Democracy
• Pedagogy

These articulated the underpinnings of the project, connecting it with the underpinnings and origins of The Open University, where SocialLearn is based.

Following a series of workshops and discussions, Gráinne Conole set out the proposed learning principles of SocialLearn in her blog and, in a related article, articulated how these would be linked to characteristics of learning, specifically: thinking & reflection, conversation & interaction, experience & interactivity and evidence & demonstration.

• Supports a range of pedagogies and styles
• Formalises the informal; informalises the formal
• Is built on relationships between people
• Harnesses the net
• Aggregates learning events, resources and opportunities
• Provides structures and scaffolds for the learning process
• Uses metaphors and simple approaches to impart pedagogy
• Encourages a range of participation
• Provides evidence via range of informal and formal assessment mechanisms
• Provides lifelong support across different learning goals
• Provides access to expertise
• Supports collaborative elements
• Helps surface incidental learning
• Wraps learning around an individual’s interests
• Enables learner control and learner responsibility
• Allows users to build reputation within the system
• Encourages legitimate peripheral participation
• Encourages learning through observation
• Supports different subject areas and styles
• Encourages mentorship

Over the next weeks, I shall be investigating how these sets of principles have influenced the development of SocialLearn.

One of the crucial aspects of becoming a more open project is that we can share our thinking, opening it up for debate and discussion. We want to discuss the principles underpinning SocialLearn, to show how they were implemented on our Closed Beta site, and to share what we have learned.

To start with – what do we mean when we talk about ‘social learning’? What is learning ‘based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions’ (Seely Brown & Adler, 2008).

To give an example: I want to learn why someone has sawed down half of the beautiful cedar tree outside my office window. I can’t easily find this out from a book or a website, and I don’t know anyone with the precise knowledge that I am looking for. It is as I engage in conversations with different people that my understanding of what I see outside my window increases and I learn more about the tree’s history, health, ecosystem and future possibilities.

It’s not just the social construction of understanding that’s important – that is a part of most human interactions. My intention to learn is part of what makes this social learning, as are my interactions with others. This isn’t a one-sided engagement with books or with online content, it involves social relationships. As such, it has lots of  ‘affective’ aspects – people must be motivated to engage with me and I must have the confidence to ask questions in the first place, as well as some way of assessing the expertise of the people I’m talking to.

I’m not convinced that ‘social learning’ is a useful term in a purely face-to-face context. Without the Internet, social learning is just a subset of social constructivism, with an emphasis on affective and interpersonal elements. It may sound more user friendly, but it’s just another label – and not one that adds much to our understanding.

Web 2.0 extends the possibilities for social learning, making it possible not only to locate and access a vast amount of content from all around the world, but also to engage in extended interaction around and about this material. Learners – particularly those learning outside formal settings such as schools and colleges – may find themselves adrift in an ocean of information, struggling to solve ill-structured problems, with little clear idea of how to solve them, or how to recognise when they have solved them. It’s here that social learning has its place – helping people to use these resources to construct knowledge together effectively.

Social learning can take place when people:

• clarify their intention – learning rather than browsing

• ground their learning – by defining their question or problem

• engage in focused conversations – increasing their understanding of the available resources.

These three actions help us to build meaningful connections online, and offer learners the benefits of co-operative activity and of collaboration.

The challenge for SocialLearn is to support and encourage users to clarify their intention, ground their learning and engage in focused conversations.

Happy New Year Everyone…
May 2010 be an Open, Social, Connected year for us all!

Things have been busy here on the SocialLearn project since the summer, and since we’d been hoping for a Q4 public beta launch, it’s about time we gave you an update.

We’ve been pondering long and hard what it means to tune social media spaces for learning. We’ve been building prototypes, and seeing what makes and breaks the user experience. And believe me, along with some very positive responses from our 1000+ early beta test users, we also heard loud and clear when we didn’t get that experience right! So, lots of detailed design work to tune.

We’ve also been presenting the motivation and design concepts for this work to all sorts of audiences from education and government, to business and foundations, plus a few public forums. We’ve been  getting an overwhelmingly consistent message: As we contemplate an education system, and workplace learning, deemed by most thought leaders as increasingly not fit-for-purpose in the 21st Century, the SocialLearn team has made some significant steps forward in its thinking and design.

None of the team has ever presented anything that had so positive a response. But the ultimate irony, in an open social world, would be to think we can navigate these rapids alone.

Meanwhile the world has not stood still… more and more people have been tuning into learning of all hues as one of the compelling, untapped applications for the participatory, large scale conversations that the social-semantic web enables, which is exciting to see. Oh, and the planet went into financial meltdown, which has hit us as hard as many other institutions.

So… even as we get a grip on the design challenges, the sands are shifting under our feet. We’re therefore about to transition out of our strategic “exploratory project” status within the OU as follows:

1. We’re moving from operating as a confidential business project, to an open source, open architecture, open partnership modus operandi. In forthcoming posts we’ll share how we’re thinking about the challenges and opportunities, and invite your participation.
2. One area of focus up until now was to explore whether the project could generate new revenue streams. This is no longer a current priority, so we’re not seeking to create a joint venture with commercial partners.
3. Internally, we’re building a light, agile, responsive space to be rolled out for use initially by OU communities (students, staff, alumni). Once it’s proved its worth, we’ll then open it up to informal learners outside the OU.
4. In parallel, in order to take the work to the next level we’re also seeking external R&D funding and, as a result, will be engaging in-depth with external partners and their communities, to shape the user experience to their particular needs.

What we’re also saying, of course, is that we’re not about to throw open the doors to a public site, as originally envisaged. Sorry to disappoint, but it’s an uncertain design space we’re in here, and we’re not there yet.

The next phase is going to be the most interesting, and we’ll keep you posted

Image sources:

John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler: Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0

Joel Greenberg on Code, Community & Commerce for Open Social Learning at Open Social Learning 2009 [Twitter archive]

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Neon_Open_green.jpg

Pioneers of Change’s work on Dialogue and Learning: a social, relational, conversational, transformative and liberational Learning Circle, South Africa. [Twine photo]