Confessions of an elearning skeptic

This week’s readings focussed on the social aspects of adult learning.  In my context of looking at learning ‘communities’ social psychology certainly offers a wealth of information and guidence.  I was particularly interested in the negatives associated with this type of learning that the reading stressed, such as:

• Individuals ‘complying’ with the group to avoid rejection
• The use and focus of power within learning communities being used improperly
• The notion of ‘group think’ actually reducing the learning that is occurring

All these negatives really stress the importance of the leading role that we, as educators, play in the creation and ongoing maintenance of learning communities and I can see this role being played in the learning communities that I am a member of, particularly the role of the educator to:

• make explicit the ‘rules’ of such communities so that all members are aware of them
• manage the leadership role and ensure power is evenly shared
• set the level and range of ‘disclosure’ through the disclosures that they make themselves ( based around social penetration theory)

From my perspectives the key points from these reading are:

1. that it is important to avoid getting caught up in the ‘excitement’ of new technology for learning and to view this technology objectively as something with both pros and cons that need to be managed.
2. that, like all things to do with adult learning, there is no single approach to learning communities that will meet all individual needs or all groups and that it is important to monitor the group and adjust the strategy, rules or behaviour as required.

A scan of the internet identified an interesting article about the use of social psychology to increase user contributions to on-line learning communities.  The study can be found here http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue4/ling.html.  I found this particularly interesting as I am also studying research perspective and this experiment reinforced the limitations of scientific method in the study of human behaviour.

A lot of technological trends mentiond by the Horizon Report and John Seely Brown concern the idea of community and social networking, so it seems prudent to examine what these actually mean to me (to give you a starting point I have linked each term to its Wikipedia definition):

Community: To me, the term community refers to a group of people who share one or more common characteristic.  Our most fundamental concept of community being a group of people whose common characteristic is geographical location.  With the rise of the web this concept has blossomed, to say the least, with many communities rising up bringing people with shared common interests together.

Community of practice: Simply because something is a community does not necessarily infer a common goal or purpose.  People who live in the same suburb are a community, but it is highly unlikely that they all share a common purpose or goal.  From my perspective, the community of practice takes the concept of community one step futher to introduce a shared purpose or goal to which all members are contributing.

Network:  For me, a network is a series of links that joins communities together.  For example, an elearning network could act as a link between a number of communities such as elearning developers, elearning practitioners, elearning users.  These groups can be distinct communities in their own right.  The network creates a thread that links them all together.

Social network: For me, a social network is a specialist form of community where the defining characteristic is the desire to ‘network’, or create links with others based around common characteristics.  The interests of people on Facebook are incredibley diverse, but they all shared the desire to create links between themselves and others.