Dr Steven Warburton, King’s College London
Centre for Distance Education
Annual Conference, February 2009
DESIGN CHALLENGES FOR FUTURE LEARNING
ENVIRONMENTS:
LEVERAGING THE POWER OF
SOCIAL SOFTWARE

context
• How can we exploit social software to
create rich distributed learning spaces?
• What are the challenges we need to
address to accomplish this?

What are our design
choices?

thinking about future learning
environments

Image by Flynn Burhoe
Making the connections

learning is about conversations
• if learning is a social activity …
• how do we facilitate conversations and
interactions around educational content and
resources?
• can learning content be considered a ‘social
object’?

social objects
“An egocentric social network places the individual
as the core of the network experience (Orkut,
Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster)
… while the object-centric network places a non-
ego element at the center of the network. Examples
of object-centric networks include Flickr (social
object: photograph), Dopplr (social object: travel
instance), del.icio.us (social object: hyperlink) and
Digg (social object: news item).”
Stutzman (2007, p.1)

the power of social software
• the attraction of social software is that it offers
a platform for transforming content and
resources into social objects

Case Study 1
BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES
AS SOCIAL OBJECTS

problem: how do we transform our
bibliographic data into social objects

Bibsonomy – open source bibliographical
management software http://www.bibsonomy.org

VRE – Graduate student virtual research environment

1. Integrate Bibsonomy

2. Add commenting functionality

3. Enhance resource discovery through tag cloud

solution
• Leverage the power of a social library
system:
– maintain core functionality of Bibsonomy
codebase – personalisation, discovery, tagging,
groups and sharing
– add social functionality through a commenting
system, local search, local groups, and
contextualise by embedding inside a VRE
(Virtual Research Environment)

Case Study 2
SCALING UP LEARNING USING A
DISTRIBUTED TOOLSET

emerging technology maps: course designers

Integrate personal tools

Access, organise, manage and discover content

emerging technology maps: learners
http://www.flickr.com/photos/actionhamster/2850879730/

transitional design for learning
• It is not so much about doing away with
institutional VLEs but rather shifting their
position as the central point of reference -
by allowing integration with and aggregation
to and from other distributed tool-sets that
may be personally owned by the learner

challenges for the future

1. what are our models?
VLEs? hierarchical industrial PLEs? a personalised open
model that can respond to distributed model with
increasing student numbers flattened structures and
and pressures on staff time community-based knowing
• architecture of participation,
• reusable learning objects, democratisation, collaboration,
quality frameworks, standards
(SCORM, LOM, QTI) autonomy and ownership
• scripted learning activities (IMS • emergent classifications
LD) • remix, reuse, redistribute
• content and assessment driven • Open Educational Resources
VLE deployment
• self centred knowledge
acquisition

2. who are our learners?
• educating the Net generation
• http://www.educause.edu/educatingthenetgen/5989
• the Google generation is a myth
• http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2008/01/googlegen.aspx
“The report by the CIBER research team at UCL shows that
research-behaviour traits that are commonly associated with
younger users – impatience in search and navigation, and
zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information
needs – are now the norm for all age-groups, from younger
pupils and undergraduates through to professors.”

3. who are our teachers?
“Teachers are split over the merits of Web 2.0 tools in the
classroom, according to research conducted for ntl:Telewest
Business. Half of teachers questioned believe that Web 2.0
applications, such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and
Wikipedia are valuable educational tools, yet the rest felt
they are a distraction with no real academic benefit.”
http://www.nmk.co.uk/articles/1020

4. where are our learning spaces?
negotiation of meaning
Traditional student (resistant)
Net generation (open)
Internet, social software: VLE, institution:
informal formal
‘Educational blogging’ – an emergent, disruptive learning space
blurring the boundaries between informal and formal i.e. the demands
of the internet versus the demands of the institution.

Dr Steven Warburton
School of Law
King's College London
Email: steven.warburton@kcl.ac.uk
Liquid Learning at http://www.liquidlearning.org