MESHGuides

In their model of online communities of inquiry, Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2003) suggest that online communities have three forms of presence: cognitive, social and teaching. They believe that these three forms of presence overlap to create the educational experience.

Teaching in a Digital Age: How Educators Use Technology to Improve Student Learning.  McKnight, K, O’Malley, K, Ruzic, R, Horsley, Franey, J and Bassett, K (2016). Journal of Research on Technology in Education, Vol. 48 Issue 3 pp194 -211

This is a review of 47 articles from a sample of technology-enhanced learning interventions in HE.

Summary and key points

Wenger identifies three elements that need to be in place to form a CoP: the domain, the community and the practice.

Some activities were designed to help the pupils from different countries get to know each other. For example, pupils swapped newscasts about their countries and about outdoor science themes in their countries. They used Tellagami avatars to tell each other about their spare time activities. And they made instructional videos of each other’s outdoor games. A Thinglink image of a set of drawers made it possible for classes in different countries to post and respond to digital content they made on the theme of outdoor celebrations.

The idea of situated learning underpins authentic e-learning opportunities. It is essentially a matter of creating meaning from the real activities of daily life and follows the work of Dewey, Vygotsky and others who claim that students are more inclined to learn by actively participating in the learning experience.

Garner, R. and Rouse, E., 2016. Social presence–connecting pre-service teachers as learners using a blended learning model. Student Success, 7(1), pp.25-36.

This article is a content analysis of 23 selected articles with the aim of presenting a theoretical framework of dimensions and indicators of online and offline social learning in groups of teachers. The starting point is the three overarching perspectives of social learning: social networks, communities of practice and learning teams. Wenger et al. (2011) distinguish between a community as a partnership with a common agenda and a network as a set of connections between people (Wenger et al., 2011).

Bandura's social learning theory is based on the idea that people learn from one another, via observation, imitation, and modeling. Attention, memory, reproduction and motivation are necessary conditions for learning through modeling.