Article - Minds On Fire

By John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler
This is a summary of the article. The full article can be found at http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0811.pdf.

“The Internet has also fostered a new culture of sharing, one in which content is freely contributed and distributed with few restrictions or costs.” Web 2.0 applications such as social networking sites, blogs, wikis, etc. are reversing the traditional roles of providers presenting and providing content to consumers becoming the providers of content on the Web. Some examples are YouTube, FaceBook, Flickr, SecondLife, Blogger, MySpace, etc. where people can share and distribute ideas. “…Web 2.0 is creating a new kind of participatory medium that is ideal for supporting multiple modes of learning.

Social Learning
The Internet has impacted the ability to expand and support social learning. Social learning according to the authors is:

"…based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning."

There is evidence that social interaction improves learning. One study supporting this type of interaction in learning comes from Richard J. Light, of Harvard. Light found:

"…that the method used by students to study and do home work assignments is a far stronger predictor of engagement and learning than particular details of their instructor’s teaching style. Specifically, those students who study outside of class in small groups of four to six students, even just once a week, benefit enormously. …as a result of their study group discussion, students are far more engaged and better prepared for class, learning significantly more (http://athome.harvard.edu/programs/light/light5/light5.html)."

Traditionally, emphasis in education has been on transferring knowledge from the instructor to the student. However, social learning focuses “…our attention from the content of a subject to the learning activities and human interactions around which that content is situated.” In these groups students are able to ask questions, clarify, and take on the role of instructor, which is a powerful method of learning.

Learning to Be
"There is a second, perhaps even more significant, aspect of social learning. Mastering a field of knowledge involves not only ‘learning about’ the subject matter but also ‘learning to be’ a full participant in the field. This involves acquiring the practices and the norms of established practitioners in that field or acculturating into a community of practice."

This is similar to apprenticeship programs where the apprentice begins with small simple tasks and gradually progresses to more demanding tasks as skills improve, all done under the supervision of an expert. A variation of the apprenticeship is where students work together and participate in each other’s design under the guidance of an expert. The students all benefit from the instructors comments on and critique of each other’s projects.

Wikipedia is an example of that type of learning as well. Anyone can edit the content. Then on one tab a person can see who made the contributions and when, as well as discussions about the content, which may be questioned by the reader.

"In this open environment, both the content and the process by which it is created are equally visible, thereby enabling a new kind of critical reading… that invites the reader to join in the consideration of what information is reliable and/or important."

In traditional teaching students may spend years learning about a subject, then only later they are able to practice and apply that knowledge.

"…viewing learning as the process of joining a community of practice reverses this pattern and allows new students to engage in ‘learning to be’ even as they are mastering the content of a field. This encourages the practice of… seeking the knowledge when it is needed in order to carry out a particular situated task."

Social Learning Online
This section describes several examples of social learning online where students are able to join a community of professionals, participate, and make contributions.

Second Life is an online virtual world. It supports lecture style teaching and students to break off into groups. The instructor can send messages to the groups, or virtually visit the group. Harvard Law School experimented with Second Life for the course “CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion.” There were three levels of participation. First, students registered for the course attended in person. Second, Harvard students who were not law students could attend the course, attend lectures, participate in discussions, and visit faculty during their business hours in Second Life. Third, anyone could review lectures and course materials through Second Life at no cost.

Another initiative called the “Digital Study Hall” records lectures from model teachers. The recordings are then distributed to schools in India where they lack resources for teaching. A local teacher or bright student plays the recording and pauses it a various places and asks questions to engage the students and initiate discussion.

With the online social networks like FaceBook, there is informal and formal learning happening. John King, associate provost of the University of Michigan, claimed that although the university has an enrollment of 40,000 the actual number of students being reached by the university is closer to 250,000. Students coming to the university are bringing with them their friends virtually through their social networks. Through these connections the students extend the discussions, study groups, and debates that take place in their classes. “…it makes sense for colleges and universities to consider how they can leverage these new connections through the variety of social software platforms that are being established for other reasons.”

Two initiatives have helped students in astronomy, the Faulkes Telescope project (http://faulkes-telescope.com/) and the Hands-On Universe (HOU) (http://www.handsonuniverse.org/). In both cases, students can work on their own projects and also collaborate and participate on projects with professional astronomers in the field. The Faulkes project allows students to control high-powered robotic telescopes, one in Hawaii and the other in Australia. In HOU, students can request observations from professional observatories and then analyze the data from the software provided to them which encourages the interaction between professionals and students. “The students are making small, but meaningful contributions to astronomy.” The director of Yerkes Observatory said, “This is not education in which people come in and lecture in a classroom. We’re helping students work with real data.”

The Bug-scope project (http://bugscope.beckman.uiuc.edu/) also helps students to become participants in a field. K – 12 students send insects they find to the University of Illinois. Then via the Internet they are able to log on and control the microscope in real time to see their specimens.

The Decameron Web project (http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/dweb.shtml), developed by Brown University, “…is an impressive example of how the web can not only provide access to scholarly materials but also give students the opportunity to observe and emulate scholars at work.” The site provides the text of Decameron, as well as many other resources like bibliographies, commentaries, audio and visual materials, etc. “…the emphasis is on building a community of students and scholars as much as on providing access to educational content.” The site is a forum for discussions on the Decameron and related topics.

“Both scholars and students are invited to submit their own contributions…. The site serves as an apprenticeship platform for students by allowing them to observe how scholars in the field argue with each other and also to publish their own contributions, which can be relatively small—an example of the “legitimate peripheral participation” that is characteristic of open source communities. This allows students to “learn to be,” in this instance by participating in the kind of rigorous argumentation that is generated around a particular form of deep scholarship. A community like this, in which students can acculturate into a particular scholarly practice, can be seen as a virtual “spike”: a highly specialized site that can serve as a global resource for its field."

David Wiley at Utah State University taught a graduate seminar in which all students needed to post their writings on public blogs. The first few weeks the writing was average, but then on the fourth week Wiley shared the links to all the students’ blogs with each other and encouraged the students to reach each other’s blogs. The writing improved significantly. The students wrote more and the writing “was more thoughtful.” Then people from outside the class subscribed to the blogs and made comments on some. When the students saw they were part of a larger community, “…the quality of the writing improved again. The power of peer review had been brought to bear on the assignments.”

The Internet offers many niche communities of experts where students can join and participate. “These communities are harbingers of the emergence of a new form of technology-enhanced learning-Learning 2.0-which goes beyond providing free access to traditional course materials and educational tools and creates a participatory architecture for supporting communities of learners.”

From Web 2.0 to Learning 2.0
"…the Web 2.0… is sparking an even more far-reaching revolution. Tools such as blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging systems, mashups, and content-sharing sites are examples of a new user-centric information infrastructure that emphasizes participation… over presentation, that encourages focused conversation and short briefs… rather than traditional publication, and that facilitates innovative explorations, experimentations, and purposeful tinkering that often form the basis of a situated understanding emerging from action, not passivity."

Students need a demand-pull style of learning rather than the supply-push approach where knowledge is transferred to the student and stored for when it is needed. Emphasis should be on enabling participation through participation and informal learning.

"The demand-pull approach is based on providing students with access to rich… learning communities built around a practice. It is passion-based learning, motivated by the student either wanting to become a member of a particular community of practice or just wanting to learn about, make, or perform something. Often the learning that transpires is informal rather than formally conducted in a structured setting. The learning occurs in part… from being embedded in a community of practice that may be supported by both a physical and a virtual presence and by collaboration between newcomers and professional practitioners/scholars."

“The building blocks provided by… Web 2.0, are creating the conditions for the emergence of new kinds of open participatory learning ecosystems that will support active, passion-based learning: Learning 2.0.”