Technology for Social Learning

In this week's video on Social Learning Theories, Dr. Orey describes social learning as occurring when students are actively engaged in conversation while constructing knowledge and artifacts. Web 2.0 tools such as wikis and blogs allow users to collaborate on editing and viewing conversations and documents. What makes this technology advantageous is that the users need not be together physically in order to work and learn together. In addition to collaborating to create knowledge, building web sites and multimedia projects have the added advantage of constructing a digital artifact which can be shared with an audience outside the classroom. Working as a team with web quests to find and validate answers to questions students are operating within Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development. The article on Social Constructivism at the Emerging Perspectives web site states that children develop thinking abilities through interactions with adults. Through the internet, students have instant access to experts in any field and can learn from these highly qualified more knowledgeable others. Connectivism, a new theory to describe learning in the information age, is the use of technology to seek out knowledge that others are willing to share. Unfortunately, all the information on the internet is not of an academic nature, and as educators, along with teaching students to find information, we must teach them to also be critical consumers of education, capable of seeing through bias and commercialism to find the truth as it is constructed through our social interactions.