Social Learning

Cooperative learning supports social constructivism and connectivism as students are working together to accomplish a task that demonstrates their understanding of some knowledge. The discussion and feedback evident in cooperative groups allows students to come to a deeper level of understanding of the material. While students may take pages and pages of notes on a subject, until they have to use that information it is just writing on a paper. Allowing students to explain the information to each other forces the students to process what they have written to be able to put it into their own words and apply the knowledge. Even this week as I wrote the definitions to what connectivism and social constructionism mean, the definitions are meaningless until now when I have to explain and consider how they can be used in my classroom.  When students are given new facts we have learned that those facts are stored somewhere in the brain. The brain works by forming connections between pieces of information; when students are distributing their information amongst themselves they are forming more and more connections with that information so that it can later be more easily retrieved.

The internet provides so many opportunities for students to actively engage in constructing artifacts and conversing with others, perfectly aligned with the definition of social learning theories (Laureate Productions, Inc., 2011).  Students can work with the people in their classrooms or even in another continent through the use of blogsites, voice threads, wikipages, and keypals. Most students are very familiar with using sites like facebook to give their input on their personal lives, so providing input about their content knowledge via educational tools is often easily accepted by students as well. Most teenagers are not comfortable sharing their answers or ideas in front of the class or their peers, but feel safer to share when they are hidden behind a computer screen typing what they know.  As we continue to move towards a global economy I feel that students need to be capable of communicating their thoughts and ideas to others even if they are on another continent.

Please visit a voicethread I created: http://walden.voicethread.com/share/4087569/
to see one resource we can use to create discussion in our classrooms.

References

Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2011). Program eight: Social learning theories [Video webcast]. Bridging learning theory, instruction and technology. Retrieved from http://laureate.ecollege.com/ec/crs/default.learn?CourseID=5700267&CPURL=laureate.ecollege.com&Survey=1&47=2594577&ClientNodeID=984650&coursenav=0&bhcp=1