Social Software - Social Learning

May 26th, 2006

This is the first of two posts about the excellent Social software - Social Learning conference in Salzburg. In a later post, I will make a few general comments about the conference, which I greatly enjoyed. In this post I provide notes on what the keynote speakers said. It is a sort of asynchronous live blog. I would love to blog these events live but my typing is just too poor! I do not know how much sense these notes will make to those not there, but hope they provide a flavour of some of the issues discussed.

The first contribution was by John Erpenbeck. John is XXX. His presentation was entitled something like (translating from the German title “Learning cultures for competence development”.

He presented a discourse on knowledge and the nature of competence and how the uses of social software can develop and support what he sees as real competence as opposed to “expert knowledge.”

John said that values can bridge non knowledge,
He said the German Dual system of apprenticeship and training had been developed on the idea of expert knowledge - this was an illusion - we always need socially based values which are not correct or incorrect but valid or not valid.

He distinguished between the learning of values and valuing learning…he said we have to evaluate a situation and act - whether that acting was seen as successful or not was due to social recognition or not - this is a social issue -values become social.

Values he said are not valuable unless transferred into our own emotions. This was core to the development of competence - in competence development you make certain values your own in order to act - competence had nothing to do with expert knowledge.

John said traditional e-learning has nothing to do with competence development - it is just “monologues” - with exceptions like Sim City, e-learningis just a transfer of expert knowledge. The other exception is learning by computer specialists who are learning in the process of working.

We need e-learning from which we have the potential to establish and open conflicts which “labelise” (think the translator might have got this wrong) the emotional basis and when a problem is solved it is made our own and internalised - this is how we really develop competencies.

The trend for blended learning recognises the deficit in e-learning - the need for emotions included into real social context.

John went on to say that web 2 - blogs, wikis etc. - directly introduce opinions and emotions - blogs about aesthetics, attitudes, teenagers talking about attitudes to love, jealousy etc. (this communication can be used to evaluate knowledge and discuss knowledge - and critically to communicate vales.
The web 2 model can also time shift - it is a conversation model and open to evaluations.
If Web 1, he said was based on the knowledge of experts, Web 2 is based in the wisdom of the masses.
For metadata Web 1 was based on a hierarchy established by experts whilst Web 2 which allows us to add our own tags, determine our own semantics and evaluate our own emotions, introduce evaluations on a meta level into the dialogue.
In Web 1 the teacher decides the content of learning. Web 2 is based on self organised memory (memory is always determined by knowledge).In Web 2 self reflection is encouraged.

I am not sure I always understood what John was saying but it feels right to me.
Helen Barrett from the University of Anchorage spoke next.

She said a personal lifetime web space might be more appropriate than an e-Portfolio. She went on to say that evidence of our competence is part of our personal archive system - the challenge or problem is the danger of a hard drive crash. How do back up and store all this stuff.
Helen said self knowledge is an outcome of learning - she counter-posed a learning portfolio to the assessment portfolio).

Summative portfolios, she said were an assessment of learning. Formative assessment was assessment for learning.

Helen promotes the use of a portfolio to tell a story because this is where she sees reflection as being based.

The final keynote presentation - “Smarter, Simpler, Social” was by Lee Bryant from Headshift Internet Consulting in London.

Lee said the highly structured, sequential nature of learning systems and software hinders our ability to look around the periphery and stops us using intuition.
He saw web logs as sense making networks
He said different social software tools have different action spaces, different modes of interaction, can be used in different contexts and have different learning curves - we need to provide a diverse range of tools and allow people to dip in and use what they like and what suits the context - the development of hybrid systems is likely.
Different users will have different combinations of tools.

He promoted a web of links - which provides an organisational and social immune system and bypasses the hubs.
The internet was originally built on a gift economy, he said and the gift economy is good for business.

It is unusual to get three great presentation in one session at a conference. You can find the presentation on the web here.

Technorati Tags: describing knowledge, e-learning, e-portfolios, edublogs, eportfolio, social software

Entry Filed under: Social Software