I guess this post at the Remote Acces blog shows in practice what I tried to explain in theory in my last post.

 

Great to see teachers who are really implementing these great learnng opportunities!

 

People are changing the way they communicate and access information, they are increasingly doing this through the use of web 2.0 services. In this process of harvesting, sharing and discussing information, people are personalizing information by giving meaning to it. By situating this information in practice through the use of (web) communities, it becomes actionable knowledge. This social (relational) view of knowledge shapes how we think about learning. When examining how Net-geners use digital media and web technology for learning it is thus important to have a better insight in what kind of learning is facilitated through the use of these technologies. This post reviews a small spectrum of the available literature on epistemology, notions of knowledge and the relation to the social nature of learning. I will explain this trough elaboration on two views of the world, the positivist and constructivist view. Within these views several cognition theories are explained. Further, a connection is made between the constructivist view of the world with the Net-generations’ use of digital media and web-technology.

 

POSITIVIST VIEW OF THE WORLD

From the positivist point of view, the world is seen as an objective reality, a pre-given state in which “the aim of the cognitive process is to create the most accurate presentation of this reality” (Harrison & Kessels, 2005; pg. 142). The cognitivist view of knowledge is rooted in this positivist view of the world. It views knowledge as abstract, task specific and oriented towards problem solving (Von Krogh, Roos & Slocum, 1994). Learning is seen as acquiring knowledge by reshaping your personal view of the world through the assimilation of new experience (Von Krogh et al., 1994; Akkerman, 2006). Within the cognitivist view, knowledge, as the managers representation of the world, can be stored and retrieved in organization wide repositories or content systems that give organizational members a shared perception of the world (Von Krogh et al., 1994).

 

CONSTRUCTIVIST VIEW OF THE WORLD

The constructivist point of view sees the world as an objective external reality, a not pre-given state (Harrison & Kessels, 2005). A powerful cognitive theory rooted in the constructivist view of the world is the autopoiesis theory. Originally developed in the field of neurobiology, autopoiesis theory was later developed in the field of social science as a theory of knowledge of a social system. Autopoiesis theory views cognition as a creative act of bringing forth a world (Von Krogh et al., 1994). It views knowledge not as abstract, but as embodied in the individual. Or, as Brown and Duguid (2002) put it: “knowledge entails a knower” (pg. 119). The autopoiesis theory makes also a clear distinction between data, information and knowledge. In this view, the mere storage and availability of knowledge in organization wide repositories as within the cognitivist view is not sufficient. (Digital) materials stored in repositories are viewed of as data. People create information of these data by not only retrieving it, but also discuss it and file it for later use (Von Krogh et al., 1994). Pieces of information are used to actively construct knowledge trough a process of personalization and adding meaning to it.

 

Under influence by the ideas of Vygotsky, the social-constructivist and the socio-culture perspective emphasize more on the social nature in which the construction of knowledge takes place. The two perspectives differ in their notion on where information processes lie. The social-constructivist perspective makes a distinction between the learner and the environment, but the socio-cultural perspective sees the individual as part of that environment (de Laat, 2006). Also Akkerman (2006) outlines this specific situation of the socio-cultural perspective in a comparison with the cognitive theory and notes that with the former, information processes lie within social interaction. The construction of knowledge lies within the social interaction, such as might be found in work related learning networks as networks of practice and communities of practice.

 

Networks of practice are networks of people who have a shared practice and knowledge in common, but these people are mostly unknown to each other (Brown & Duguid, 2002). Web-technologies have extended the reach of such networks, in which information can know be transmitted with higher speed to a larger audience of people. An example is a network of people established through the website “Wikipedia”, an online –free of charge- encyclopedia. The content of this encyclopedia is produced by the members of the network, everyone who surfs on the web and wants to make a contribution.

 

Communities of practice are smaller units within the networks of practice. These are small groups of people who work together and mostly know each other also in the real world. Communities of practice are emergent, they evolve around a shared topic of interest. Within these communities, some members are core participants, while others act more peripherally (Brown & Duguid, 2002; Lave & Wenger). Whereas the learning that resides in networks of practice remains more static, in communities of practice allow for rich creation of knowledge through collaborative learning activities between members. Social software or web 2.0 technologies made these rich collaborative learning activities also possible trough the web, thereby enhancing the reach of such communities and the ability to people to form communities that don’t know each other in the real world. Especially weblogs or blogs might be a great opportunity to facilitate such networks.

Last Thursday I've had a very interesting day at the Hotel School in The Hague, the Netherlands. I've had the honour to do a group interview with 2 Net-gen students, 2 teachers and two ICT managers.

 

When I came in the school building me and my colleague Carlo were welcomed like we entered a real hotel and a student guided us to the meeting room. They're actually seeing the school building as a hotel! Very nice concept.

 

As an inspiration for the questions we had to ask, we used a survey from the Pew Internet group. But eventually it went on as an open interview in which we tried to discover in what ways students are using ICT for learning. Also, we've tried to discover possible differences with the teacher and managers' use of ICT in preparation of an implementation of opensource software Sakai.

 

For starters, everyone in the interview group is online. With the students, social software programm Hyves and MSN are very popular. Hyves is a tool for networking with friends and one student found it very usefull for meeting "old friends" that got out of sight. For example because they went to other cities for university, or went abroad. Interesting is that students have formed a (large) group on Hyves in which students of the Hotelschool gather. Even Alumni have joined this group, something that they didn't do with the schools' digital network.

 

MSN is being used for direct, quick communication. For informal messages, but also to communicate about school projets and to exchange small documents. For sending mp3 or video files, MSN is to slow. Other people that are in the students contact list are all people they also know in the offline world and they find that ICT could never replace a real face to face contact. One of the ICT managers, a former student, thinks differently. He is a member of seceral online communities and knows through that a lot of people that he has never seen in the real world.

 

When we asked if the students want to use their own MSN in the school learning environment, they told us that they appreciate a distinction between school and personal tools. As an example they told that they don't know every classmates hotmail adress.

 

The two students are not gaming, they tell us that they rather drink beers in a bar with a couple of friends :)They have a view of gamers as a couple of "nerds" that are not prolifirate communicators in the real world. We told them about the recent advances and popularity in online gaming, and especially MMORPG's (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game's). So we asked if they saw this as an opportunity for learning and experimenting with different roles. Their reaction was that it could be helpfull, but eventually real contact couldn't be replaced. In my opinion this is a very interesting question to ask to younger people or ones that are more into the online world. Isn't it so that the real and online world are mixing more and more? To illustrate my view in this, I told the students that they just previously were argueing with their teachers about the defenition of "social behavior": students think online communication is social, teachers don't.....!

 

Google and Wikipedia are widely used to search for information. As Wikipedia doesn't provide in depth information on a topic, it is used as first and quick info supplier. Students are checking other information resources (on the web) to check the information correctnes. Also the teachers are familiar with Wikipedia, but we don't know if they implement it in their lessons. Interesting detail is that we came to this point when we asked about their use of Wiki's and the students didn't knew what it was, until we said that it was like Wikipedia. This supports Oblinger & Oblinger's argument that most Net-geners don't know technical details or tech names, but are more focused on services.

 

Last point we discussed was about privacy and security (this came from the IT people!). Quite interesting to hear that students are worried about there privacy when using wirelsess networks. Also the issue of plagiarism came up. The Hotelschool hast just recently started to digitally scan reports on plagiarism and there is also punishment for the students that are providing their texts. This results in very carefull behaviour of students in sharing their documents with others and thus decreasing knowledge sharing and learning opportunities. Is this what was initially ment by the policy makers?

 

To sum it was a intersting day and very motivating to hear from students and teachers how they are using ICT. In the near feature we are go to do a more broad research via digital survey's to see if these result represent the findings of a larger group.