Socializing Teaching and Learning

Presented to:Canadian Network for Innovation in Education

George SiemensJune 18, 2008

Learning Technologies Centrewww.umanitoba.ca/learning_technologies

Technology

Is not neutral

And it’s not “only a tool”

Cognition and mind as social phenomenon:- Mind/self created through social participation- Practices/tools/language are social

constructions- Power fashions practices/tools

Garrison, 1995, p. 737

“designed, accessed, interpreted, and used to further purposes that embody social values”

Bruce & Hogan, 1998

“every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards”

Postman, 1998

Technology as Faustian bargain

What are we getting?

What are we giving?

Consider...

Technology is

an ideologya carrier of affordancesa disrupter an enablera reflector of mindsets/world viewsa shaper of new realities

“What we have here is a transition from a stable, settled world of knowledge produced by authority/authors, to a world of instability, flux, of knowledge produced by the individual...”

Institute of Education, London, 2007

“by creating space and place, we create ourselves”

Cannatella, 2007, p. 632

Co-evolution of individual and related networkLazer, 2000

Fifth estate: reshaping “communicative powers of individuals and groups”

W. H. Dutton, Oxford, 2007

Complexification of knowledge reduces individual capacity to apprehend its unity

“The major responsibility of education is to arm every single person for the vital combat of lucidity”

...New problem: access to info, skills to organize info

Morin, p 12, 13, 1999

Participatory sensemakingDe Jaegher, Di Paolo, 2007

New media adds new opportunities for connections/relations, enacting latent ties

Haythornthwaite, 2002

Social activity system...heedful interrelatingWeick & Roberts, 1993

“Gossip, people-curiosity, and small talk...are in essence the human version of social grooming”

Zufekci, 2008

Shall we chat?

What are the implications for teaching/learning?

Learning is...

ContextualSituationalTool-mediatedSocialNetworkedCarries DNA of previous ideologies

Individual knowledge possible due to social practices of engagement

Tsoukas, 1996

What do different technologies do?

Connect

1. Access

2. Presence

3. Expression

4. Creation

5. Interaction/co-creation

6. Aggregate our fragmentation

...and while we’re here..

Open Online Course: Connectivism and Connective

Knowledge(Sept, 08)

http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/

Websites and Newsletters

www.elearnspace.orgwww.knowingknowledge.com

www.connectivism.cahttp://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wordpress/

gsiemens AT elearnspace DOT org