Facebook as a Learning Tool?

Facebook.com and it's in some ways more capable companion, Ning.com, are definitely changing learning as they support people connecting in groups and sharing what interests them. Whether these tools will be useful as supports for communities of practice is yet to be seen, and in some ways, they are low-end collaboration systems as their primary functionality is to connect to others socially, share media, and more recently, to play games. From the CoP viewpoint, maybe they function best as discovery tools for those forming ad hoc communities of practice who then move to other platforms for true collaboration.

One potential should not be dismissed, which is the use of facebook to support learning across boundaries through games. An interview with Curtis Bonk by Robin Good suggests the potential of games like farmville and asks how we create educational games with that platform? I ask, who and what would we want to teach? And why? In this case, the boundary spanning potential for learning is like marketing -- it's to push awareness either for the direct purpose of learning/teaching a particular idea or the indirect purpose of capturing an audience.

Any suggestions?

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If this is the Frontier, where are the Boundaries?

We start learning early before going to primary school, and if we survive higher-ed, then we keep learning. I purposely didn't call this blog the "Education Frontier" as I wanted to ensure that we don't limit ourselves (me and you all) to the standard practices of the U.S. based education system. Surely, those practices themselves are changing, and to help accelerate them, we need to look outside the global education system, and look where learning is happening.

As an example of non-school learning, one of my best learning experiences was working in computer science at the same time I was studying it in my bachelors. I was writing visual basic and Z80 assembler programs for career exploration funded by the State of Kansas. While my professors were criticizing Basic as a toy language, I was learning what made for effective and ineffective interfaces, search algorithms, and the business of applied problem solving. I never took a class that was as effective as working with real customers. Decades later, I discovered that this is learning in the "Legitimate Peripheral Participation" style defined by Lave and Wegner published 10 years after my experiences.

There are many types of learning, and to push the frontiers, we have to push the models and the technology that implement them. What are your favorite examples of great learning?

Mindtools

A significant topic of this blog will be about new mindtools together with new ways to use them.

MindTools was coined by David H. Jonassen. A MindTool is any tool that represents thinking abstractly and gives a high degree of control to the user to, in effect, reason by manipulation of the representation. A good example is freemind, an open source mindmapping tool. Truly useful mindtools support shared thinking. Wikipedia and debateGraph are good examples.

A MindTool supports some or all of the following learning and professional activities: meaningful learning, knowledge construction, reflective thinking, cognitive partnership, and scaffold thinking.

Some of the other mind tools mentioned in (Jonassen, D. H. (1999). Computers as Mindtools for Schools: Engaging Critical Thinking, 2e. Prentice Hall) are mindmaps, databases, spreadsheets, and simulation creation tools.

Please share some of the tools you are using to think bigger.

The Professional Learning Model (PLM)

PLM is a model we created in 2004 at Colorado Technical University to capture our approach to learning that emphasizes realistic problems and projects. This combination of university-level learning with professionally useful learning is based on learning theory (most notably legitimate peripheral participation and social constructionsim).

Typically students work through realistic scenarios that represent the full complexity of problems and situations found in the professional environment. They may also bring projects into the class from work.

An important part of PLM is the use of mindtools for amplifying individual and collective problem solving. Some of these tools are found in professional settings, while others are not common, yet would be of great help. We often call them "cool tech".

We'll explore in this blog the problems and projects used in the model and the supporting technologies that people find helpful in the real world and in learning.

Now, in 2009, I see a few more universities using a model like this, but most offer versions of the digital lecture.

I'd love to hear about other technologies and models that help push the frontiers of learning.

Social Learners

Learning starts social - the feeling of our mother holding us, feeding us, and the love response within. As we grow, our world widens to include the people who talk to us, who show us things, and make us laugh or cry. As we learn, the world around us learns about us and with us. Our wonder reflects in them.

We are social learners from the beginning. And it never ends.

Please join together to explore our ever expanding world, testing new social technologies and content, new relationships, and new models.