Teaching Crowds: Learning and Social Media Jon Dron and Terry Anderson TEACHING CROWDS
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TEACHING CROWDS Issues in Distance Education Series editors: Terry Anderson and David Wiley Distance education is the fastest-growing mode of both formal and informal teaching, training, and learning. It is multi-faceted in nature, encompassing e-learning and mobile learning, as well as immersive learning environments. Issues in Distance Education presents recent research results and offers informative and accessible overviews, analyses, and explorations of current topics and concerns and the technologies employed in distance education. Each volume focuses on critical questions and emerging trends, while also situating these developments within the historical evolution of distance education as a specialized mode of instruction. The series is aimed at a wide group of readers, including teachers, trainers, administrators, researchers, and students. Series Titles The Theory and Practice of Online Learning, Second Edition Edited by Terry Anderson Mobile Learning: Transforming the Delivery of Education and Training Edited by Mohamed Ally A Designer’s Log: Case Studies in Instructional Design Michael Power Accessible Elements: Teaching Science Online and at a Distance Edited by Dietmar Kennepohl and Lawton Shaw Emerging Technologies in Distance Education Edited by George Veletsianos Flexible Pedagogy, Flexible Practice: Notes from the Trenches of Distance Education Edited by Elizabeth Burge, Chère Campbell Gibson, and Terry Gibson Teaching in Blended Learning Environments: Creating and Sustaining Communities of Inquiry Norman D. Vaughan, Martha Cleveland-Innes, and D. Randy Garrison Online Distance Education: Towards a Research Agenda Edited by Olaf Zawacki-Richter and Terry Anderson Teaching Crowds: Learning and Social Media Jon Dron and Terry Anderson TEACHING CROWDS LEARNING AND SOCIAL MEDIA Jon Dron Terry Anderson Copyright © 2014 Jon Dron and Terry Anderson Published by AU Press, Athabasca University 1200, 10011 – 109 Street, Edmonton, AB T5J 3S8 ISBN 978-1-927356-80-7 (print) 978-1-927356-81-4 (PDF) 978-1-927356-82-1 (epub) doi: 10.15215/aupress/9781927356807.01 A volume in Issues in Distance Education ISSN 1919-4382 (print) 1919-4390 (digital) Cover and interior design by Sergiy Kozakov Printed and bound in Canada by Marquis Book Printers Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Dron, Jon, 1961-, author Teaching crowds : learning and social media / Jon Dron and Terry Anderson. (Issues in distance education series) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. 1. Educational technology. 2. Education--Social aspects. 3. Social learning. 4. Social media. 5. Group work in education. 6. Distance education. 7. Critical pedagogy. I. Anderson, Terry, 1950-, author II. Title. III. Series: Issues in distance education series LB1028.3.D76 2014 371.33 C2014-901074-5 C2014-901075-3 We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CFB) for our publishing activities. Assistance provided by the Government of Alberta, Alberta Multimedia Development Fund. This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons License, Attribution– Noncommercial–NoDerivative Works 4.0 International: see www.creativecommons.org. The text may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that credit is given to the original author. To obtain permission for uses beyond those outlined in the Creative Commons license, please contact AU Press, Athabasca University, at [email protected]. This text is dedicated to our lifelong friends and wives Kestra (Jon) and Susan (Terry), who have, on too many occasions, felt disconnected from us because we have been connecting with the crowd. We are learning. CONTENTS List of Figures and Tables ix Preface xi Chapter 1 On the Nature and Value of Social Software for Learning 3 Chapter 2 Social Learning Theories 35 Chapter 3 A Typology of Social Forms for Learning 71 Chapter 4 Learning in Groups 93 Chapter 5 Learning in Networks 131 Chapter 6 Learning in Sets 165 Chapter 7 Learning with Collectives 199 Chapter 8 Stories From the Field 237 Chapter 9 Issues and Challenges in Educational Uses of Social Software 275 Chapter 10 The Shape of Things and of Things to Come 299 References 327 Index 349 FIGURES AND TABLES Figures Figure 2.1 Community of Inquiry model 47 Figure 2.2 Activity theory view of a human activity system 51 Figure 2.3 Transactional distance quadrants 63 Figure 2.4 The relationship between transactional control and transactional distance 66 Figure 2.5 Paulsen’s model of cooperative freedoms 67 Figure 2.6 Decagon of cooperative freedoms 69 Figure 3.1 Social forms for learning: sets, nets, and groups 73 Figure 3.2 Venn diagram view of the typology 83 Figure 3.3 View of the typology as a continuum 83 Figure 4.1 Notional levels of control in a typical paced course 99 Figure 5.1 Notional cooperative freedoms in a network 138 Figure 6.1 Notional cooperative freedoms in sets 172 Figure 7.1 A model of how a collective forms 205 Figure 8.1 Screenshot of Elgg’s fine-grained access controls 240 Figure 8.2 Profile page on the AU Landing, showing widgets, tabs, and the “Explore the Landing” menu 254 Figure 8.3 COMP 266 group profile page on the Landing 265 Tables Table 1.1 Examples of social software 11 Table 1.2 Functions of educational social software 30 Table 3.1 Support for social forms in some common social software 79 Table 3.2 Groups, nets, sets, and collectives compared 89 PREFACE Learning is a remarkably social process. Social groups provide the resources for their members to learn. John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information This book is about learning online with other people. Its title, Teaching Crowds, is deliberately ambiguous: the book is about how to teach crowds, but it is also about how crowds teach. What interests us are the ways in which people learn from and with one another in an online context while playing the roles of both learner and teacher—not always intentionally, and not always even as individuals. As we intend to show, there are ways in which the aggregated behaviours of crowds can teach. Between the two of us, we have several decades of experience with using and creating social software for learning, and the time seems ripe to pull together some of what we have learned about learning. More than ever before, the crowd has become the teacher of the crowd, and, more than ever before, we have new tools and new methods with which to teach the crowd. This book is about how that vast cluster of connected individuals can learn together, within the context of institutions and beyond, and can begin to make sense of the torrent of useful and useless information that surrounds us all. In the pages to come, we will describe the theoretical foundations of the use of social software for learning and, building on those foundations, explore ways that such software can be used to support and enable learners to learn. The book begins with an unashamed trumpeting of the potential value of social software for learning. In the opening chapter, we provide an overview of this software and describe the many advantages that may be gained through its effective employment. We hope that this introduction will tempt even skeptics to xi read on and learn more about the benefits, and the pitfalls, of social media as tools for learning. In the second chapter, we present a range of theories—some mature, others still evolving—that have developed in tandem with social learning technologies over the past few decades. Our goal is to offer a theoretical foundation that both explains and predicts the value of different ways of understanding learning in a crowd. We make considerable use of our own three-generation model of distance learning pedagogies, describing the shift from early behaviourist and cognitivist models to the era of social constructivism and then on to the emerging con- nectivist age of distance learning. In addition, we explore a number of other theoretical constructs and approaches, such as the theory of transactional distance, complexity theory, the concept distributed cognition, and the notion of coopera- tive freedoms, that help to frame and illuminate many of the dynamics of social learning in both informal and formal contexts. Having laid the theoretical groundwork for social learning and teaching, in chapter 3, we provide a framework for understanding the different ways in which people engage with one another in a learning situation. We introduce our model of social forms, which categorizes three broad and overlapping modes of social engagement used for learning: groups, networks (or nets), and sets. We also intro- duce the notion of collectives—emergent entities that result from social engage- ment in one or more of the three basic social forms. Until recently, most research into social learning in formal contexts has assumed the centrality of a traditional closed group, with hierarchies, roles, rules, and a strong sense of membership. The closed group is the social form characteristic of classrooms and tutorial groups, in schools and colleges the world over. Social media have, however, made it consider- ably easier to engage with people in other ways, notably through social networks (formed from direct connections between individuals) and social sets (loose com- munities defined by a particular interest, or by place, or by some other shared trait). As a result, the role of collective intelligence has become far more prom- inent than it was in pre-Internet times. Today, it is possible to learn not only from individuals but also from their collective behaviour and interactions. Our contention is that different social forms suggest and sometimes require different approaches to learning and teaching. In chapters 4 to 7, we delve into the details of how learning and teaching happens in groups, networks, sets, and collectives.