Social Context of Learning

In the late nineties and first dozen or so months of our new century, if you were paying any attention to eLearning in the corporate world, you probably noticed that much of the excitement about (and investment in) online learning was directed to courseware systems and instructional design processes that built learning "content" for individuals.

For the most part, these courseware systems were "instructor-less" (or instructor-minimal) and had very little, if any, social context. Essentially, they used technology to take learning out of the social context and reduce the role of the trainer.

Most of those companies, trading high in 2000, were going for a few cents per share by 2002.

The dot.com bust happened, of course. But drop-out rates for these eLearning courses were reported to be in the 60-70% range, and companies that bought much of the early course-ware started pulling back and rethinking their eLearning strategies.

Why?

Learning tends not to work very well when the organization's primary focus is on delivering content to individuals.

Learning tends to work much better when the organization's primary focus is on building a learning community.

And what does this learning community entail?

That's one of the central questions that drives our selected readings this week

The Readings

Swan & Shea provide a nice overview of the research on virtual learning communities. This article is valuable not only because it provides an excellent state of the research in virtual learning communities, but also because it provides some direction on how to build one.

In Swan & Shea's discussion of immediacy and social presence, they reference an article by Rourke, et. al (2001), which provides a set of categories for analyzing the development of social presence in online discussions.

Rourke et al. suggests three basic kinds of immediacy responses:

1. affective responses
2. cohesive responses
3. interactive responses

The online article includes a helpful table reproduced below.

Since we are at the midpoint of the semester and have a significant body of online posts, it might be interesting to examine your own posts as well as others. What posts have been cohesive, interactive, and/or affective?

Hiltz and Goldman provide a brief history and overview of Asynchronous Learning Networks and offer a definition of ALN.

Is the definition they suggest sufficient to cover your own definition of online learning? Clearly, they privilege the development of community and the role of the teacher in the community. Does the ALN framework they suggest correspond with the framework of online learning you are developing?

Speaking of frameworks, Benbunan-Fich, Hiltz, and Harasim take on this task specifically. It is likely that this article will be one of your primary sources as you develop your own "personal framework" for online learning.

And finally, the Pallof and Pratt chapter (2) covers the issue of community and social presence with a special emphasis on the student's role in developing community. As always, Pallof and Pratt end their chapters with some specific instructional techniques--in this chapter: techniques to foster students' formation of community.