Teaching Crowds

Jon Dron, Terry Anderson

• Publisher: AU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781927356821
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Within the rapidly expanding field of educational technology, learners and educators must confront a seemingly overwhelming selection of tools designed to deliver and facilitate both online and blended learning. Many of these tools assume that learning is configured and delivered in closed contexts, through learning management systems (LMS). However, while traditional "classroom" learning is by no means obsolete, networked learning is in the ascendant. A foundational method in online and blended education, as well as the most common means of informal and self-directed learning, networked learning is rapidly becoming the dominant mode of teaching as well as learning. In Teaching Crowds, Dron and Anderson introduce a new model for understanding and exploiting the pedagogical potential of Web-based technologies, one that rests on connections — on networks and collectives — rather than on separations. Recognizing that online learning both demands and affords new models of teaching and learning, the authors show how learners can engage with social media platforms to create an unbounded field of emergent connections. These connections empower learners, allowing them to draw from one another's expertise to formulate and fulfill their own educational goals. In an increasingly networked world, developing such skills will, they argue, better prepare students to become self-directed, lifelong learners.

1

ON THE NATURE AND VALUE OF SOCIAL SOFTWARE FOR LEARNING

In this chapter we define what social software is, and present a list of ways that it can be of use to learners, describing some of the potentially valuable functions and features that are available in these systems. The chapter is intended to establish a common understanding and vocabulary that provides a background to issues explored in greater depth throughout the rest of the book.

WHY LEARN ONLINE WITH OTHER PEOPLE?

The first reason to learn online with others is opportunity: what Stuart Kauffman (2000) calls the “adjacent possible.” New technologies offer such an opportunity. There are more networked devices than people in the world, with around one-third of the world’s population (2.26 billion people as of 2011) having access to the Internet, a figure projected to rise to around 40% by 2016 (Broadband Commission, 2012, p. 44). In Europe, over 60% of the population has regular access to the Internet, in North America, over 78% (Internet World Stats, 2012). In some countries, nearly the entire population has regular, personal Internet access. The digital traces this population leaves are vast. Google alone indexes over 30 trillion Web pages (Koetsier, 2013), which does not include countless others that are not indexed or contain dynamic, ever-changing content. The International Telecommunication Union (2012) reports that there were over 6 billion cellphone subscriptions worldwide by the end of 2011. Of those, over 30% (and rising) sold are smartphones, capable of connecting to the Internet. Nevertheless, there remain massive inequalities and barriers: only 24% of people in developing nations currently have Internet access and the number of countries that censor or prohibit the use of the Internet is rising. However, it is not unreasonable to suppose that, before very long, nearly every human on the planet may be able to connect with nearly every other in order to share information, knowledge, and ideas in a myriad of ways, virtually instantaneously. In our pockets we carry devices that can connect us not only to billions of living people but also with the digital traces they have left and the things they have shared, and with much of the accumulated knowledge of our forebears. Not only can we connect with people and their products but we can also connect with their aggregates—groups, organizations, companies, institutions, networks, communities, nations, and cultures. Social technologies for learning, from email to learning management systems, are ubiquitous in our schools and colleges.

The second reason for learning online with others is that, with every connection, direct and indirect, comes the opportunity to learn, and learning happens in many of these interactions. Almost every search on Google, visit to a page on Wikipedia or a how-to site is an act of intentional learning, one that is only possible because many people have, intentionally or otherwise, acted on our behalf as teachers. Meanwhile, a vast amount of intentional and unintentional learning is facilitated every day through posts on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and countless other services. Smartphones and dumbphones (basic phones) are increasingly used more as information-finding devices than as simple communication tools. Large-scale courses and tutorials, often clumped together under the label of MOOCs (massive open online courses) are gathering millions of learners, eager and willing to learn.

LEARNING WITH TECHNOLOGIES IN CROWDS

In prehistoric times, knowledge spread through time and space by word of mouth and through example, stories and songs, apprenticeships, direct engagement, copying and observing others. The temporal and physical space between the original knowledge creator and knowledge constructor was sometimes very great, but the learner and teacher were physically and temporally adjacent. This is, of course, an oversimplification, even if we conveniently ignore things like cave paintings and other representations of knowledge such as sculpture and jewellery available to our ancestors. From the time we first started shaping tools, clothing, dwellings, and weapons, we have offloaded some of our cognitive processes into the spaces around us and shared in the intelligence of others as a result. In some cases, such as the carefully aligned stones of Stonehenge or cuneiform impressions in clay, the cognitive element of the artifacts we create is obvious: these are technologies at least partly intended to embody and enable thinking, though they may serve other functions as well. In the case of Stonehenge, the stones’ alignment enabled prediction and calculation of solstices and other significant temporal events. Cuneiform impressions served many purposes that extended our cognition, including as an adjunct to memory, a means to record and manipulate numbers, and as a way of sharing our knowledge with those not occupying the same time and space. However, even the haft of a spear or the pressed clay of a drinking bowl makes a tool that we think with, a shared object of cognition from which our learning and thinking cannot be glibly separated (Saloman, 1993). These are shared objects that are innately social: they do not just perform tasks for individuals, but carry shared meanings, communicable purposes, and the memories of those who created, refined, and developed them over time. As S. Johnson (2012) observes about the skill of the pilot in a modern airplane, the pilot’s success is only possible through a “duet” with the thousands of people whose learning is embodied in the systems, devices, and methods used to both create and sustain the aircraft.

Historically, learning was nearly always with and from a crowd: methods, tools, customs, dances, music and stories, whether prototypical or fully formed, all played a role in establishing a collective, learned culture. While the transmission of knowledge could be, and perhaps often was a one-to-one exchange, the innate physics of dance, music, and speech made much cultural transmission a crowd phenomenon, a sharable and shared performance.

In the past, written words conveyed and shared our insights and ideas beyond co-located groups, separate in both space and time. Writing is a technology that allows one individual to directly address another, whether separated by thousands of years, thousands of miles, or both. Artifacts like paintings and sculptures provide further examples of this mode of engagement, communicating facts, beliefs, and emotions over time and space. Similarly, once the skills of creating and reading have been mastered, writing seemingly requires no further interpretation or context to complete the connection between learner and teacher, though our familiarity belies much of the vast complexity of mastering the tools and sharing meaning in the most intricate and subtle of technologies. Writing is, in a sense, a one-to-one technology that may be replicated many times, the same one communicating with many other individuals, one at a time. Rarely, save in some limited contexts such as inscriptions on statues, shop signs, scoreboards at football games, or sacred texts read aloud in public gatherings, is writing a one-to-many technology like speech. Writing is ostensibly direct, a communication channel between writer and reader that seems unmediated and undistorted by the intercession of others. It thus serves to contract time and space. Even today, when writing is a medium that may be shared with billions of others both now and in the indeterminate future, it shares this interesting characteristic: it is at once the epitome of social technology and the most private of engagements since the reader is potentially unknown to the writer, and his or her context may be entirely different from that of the writer’s.

The invention of printing changed the scale of this imbalance between the one and the many. Publication for the masses—without the need for an intermediary interpreter, or a creator of glosses—separated the writer (content creator) and the crowd almost entirely. This process continued in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which saw the emergence of mass, instantaneous, and global communications: sound and video recording, radio and television broadcasting, and a host of accompanying technologies and infrastructures combined with ever-more powerful tools for printing, and the dissemination of printed materials made one-to-many communication the predominant form of knowledge distribution. Though social in some important ways, this development made possible mass educational processes that were in many other ways asocial. Alongside that, first the telegraph and fax and later the telephone and mobile phone made it simple to engage in near instantaneous one-to-one communication across vast distances almost as easily as local conversations. A many-to-many gap had been created.

THE RISE OF CYBERSPACE

In recent decades we have witnessed the increasing convergence of all forms of communication, publication, and information-sharing onto networked digital platforms—mainly the Internet but also cellular networks, digital TV, gaming networks, satellite communication systems, personal area networks, and other networked digital media. Collectively, to emphasize that we are not always simply talking about the Internet, we will refer to this connected set of tools and the interactions they enable as “cyberspace,” a term first coined by William Gibson (1984). Cyberspace may mimic other media, but it always carries with it far greater potential for two-or-more-way communication. In addition, its digital character makes the possibility of precise replication a simple task that, as often as not, needs little or no thought or effort to achieve. Even when there is no intention or facility for dialogue, the protocols and standards that underpin computer networking systems are seething with internal and hidden dialogues, exchanges, caches, and buffers that replicate and communicate between the devices we attach to our networks. Earlier forms of learning and teaching tools still exist but, increasingly, they are formatted first for cyberspace, and then placed in a secondary medium such as textbooks, classrooms, DVDs, or broadcast television.

This shift of both communication and content to cyberspace has profound implications for both lifelong learning and the formal education produced by our schools and universities. Clay Shirky (2008), in his insightful analysis of major communication innovations in history notes that cyberspace encompasses all previous innovations (print, video, radio, cinema, etc.) and supports one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many communications at the same time, using the same low-cost tools. Beyond what is practical or possible in conventional human interaction, cyberspace supports dynamic collective knowledge generation. Our activities in cyberspace create traces and artifacts that, when aggregated, allow us to better understand the activities, ideas, and the nature of other individuals, along with the societies and communities they belong to; these activities can also provide novel insights into our own behaviours and interests.

All of these capabilities create new and very exciting opportunities for formal and informal learning. However, McCarthy, Miller, and Skidmore have argued that these “networks are the language of our times, but our institutions are not programmed to understand them” (2004, p. 11). One major purpose of this book, therefore, is to explore these opportunities and provide both understanding and keys to action that can be used by educators and, as importantly, by learners.

As McLuhan (1994) and many others have observed, there is a rich interplay between the medium and the message it conveys. The media utilized by educators have very profound effects on the content taught, the organization of the learning process, and the range of available learning activities. The convergence of media in cyberspace has radically altered the conditions for teaching and learning, causing some to complain about the mismatch between the skills needed to operate effectively in a net-infused society, and the skills developed and information created in most of our industrial age schools and universities (Oliver, 2008). As W. Richardson notes,

in an environment where it’s easy to publish to the globe, it feels more and more hollow to ask students to “hand in” their homework to an audience of one . . . when many of our students are already building networks far beyond our classroom walls, forming communities around their passions and their talents, it’s not hard to understand why rows of desks and time-constrained schedules and standardized tests are feeling more and more limiting and ineffective. (2006, p. 36)

DEFINING SOCIAL SOFTWARE

The bulk of the applications introduced and discussed in this book can be classified as social learning technologies. The “social” attribute comes from the fact that they acquire their value when used by two or more people. Many of these tools are used to support sharing, annotating, discussing, editing, and cooperatively or collaboratively constructing knowledge among collections of learners and “teachers” (a loose term for anyone, or ones, along with machinery or systems that make learning more effective). Other social technologies connect people differently and less directly—for instance, by aggregating their behaviours in order to recommend books (e.g., Amazon), movies (e.g., Netflix) or websites (e.g., Google or Delicious). The size of the aggregations of people connected by social technologies can vary from two to many millions. The openness and potential for sharing makes social technologies particularly useful for education and learning applications, since in many ways the vast majority of learning is a social activity. As we shall see, many of our most powerful pedagogical theories and understandings of learning processes assume that knowledge is both created and validated in social contexts. Thus, developments in social technologies hold great promise to affect teaching and learning.

While social software has existed for many decades, the term social software is often attributed to Clay Shirky (2003), who defined it as “software that supports group interaction.” This definition is so broad that it includes everything from email to immersive, virtual worlds, so it has been qualified by a number of authors. Allen (2004) noted the historical evolution of social software tools as the Internet gained capacity to support human interaction, decision-making, planning, and other higher level activities across the boundaries of time and space, and less adeptly those of culture and language. Levin (2004) noted the affordance of the Web to support new patterns of interconnection that “facilitate new social patterns: multi-scale social spaces, conversation discovery and group forming, personal and social decoration and collaborative folk art.”

Coates (2002) describes the functional characteristics of social software to extend human communication capabilities. He notes the enhanced communication capacity provided by social software over time and distance, which are the traditional challenges of access addressed by distance education. He goes on to point out that social software adds tools to help us deal with the complexities and scale of online context such as collaborative filtering, spam...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Chapter 1 On the Nature and Value of Social Software for Learning
• Chapter 2 Social Learning Theories
• Chapter 3 A Typology of Social Forms for Learning
• Chapter 4 Learning in Groups
• Chapter 5 Learning in Networks
• Chapter 6 Learning in Sets
• Chapter 7 Learning with Collectives
• Chapter 8 Stories From the Field
• Chapter 9 Issues and Challenges in Educational Uses of Social Software
• Chapter 10 The Shape of Things and of Things to Come
• References
• Index
• Footnote