I store my knowledge with my friends

I'm at Colchester Institute on Friday to present a workshop entitled: Communities, Spaces and Pedagogies for the Digital Age. It's for a Learning and Teaching development day the Institute is holding where they will explore the theme of Transformational Learning and Teaching. I have spoken several times on transformation learning, and a few years ago actually brought out a book about the transformational power of ICT in education. It's not an easy subject to tackle, particularly in conservative organisations such as schools and colleges, where change of any kind is looked on either with horror (I don't like change) or a jaundiced eye - (yeah right, as if that's going to make any difference...)

During my workshop, which I'm running twice, I'm going to explore how Web 2.0 tools and new approaches to creating learning space might transform the learning experience of students. I'm going to draw on all I have learnt from my recent overseas trips to challenge the audience to think differently, and in so doing, explore what might be possible in both physical and virtual spaces. The notion of community too, will come under scrutiny - what is it that learning in a social world can offer, and how can we foster communities of practice and interest with our students, not only within groups but across entire continents? I'm going to touch on a number of theories, not least Social Constructivism, but also Connectivism, a theory for the digital age.

I have an excellent quote from Karen Stephenson on Connectivist theory: She says: "Since we cannot experience everything, other people’s experiences, and hence other people, become the surrogate for knowledge". In practice, if you put a number of people in the same room and set them a task, they will all apply their own individual knowledge and experience, and in so doing, the sum of the collective effort will be greater than that which each individual could bring to bear on the task - it's known as distributed cognition - that is, no-one can know everything.

Distributed cognition is a multiplier - as some of the exercises I will facilitate will demonstrate. Stephenson goes on to say: ‘I store my knowledge in my friends’ is an axiom for collecting knowledge through collecting people. Wow - this is just the kind of stuff I do within my own community of practice and it's the social web that helps me to achieve this kind of learning. Notably, on Twitter or other social networking services, we all now have the capability to build up and maintain our own personal learning networks (PLNs) which we can draw upon like a water well, when we need it, with specific questions, whilst at the same time, sharing our own ideas, knowledge and expertise, and in so doing, enriching the distributed knowledge of the entire community.

Applying all of this in practice in authentic learning and teaching situations is the real trick.

Image source

I store my knowledge with my friends by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.