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SOCIAL NETWORKING THEORIES AND TOOLS TO SUPPORT CONNECTIVIST LEARNING ACTIVITIES M.C. Pettenati, M.E. Cigognini Electronics and Telecommunications Department University of Florence (IT) {mariachiara.pettenati, elisabetta.cigognini}@unifi.it Abstract. This paper considers the affordances of social networking theories and tools to build new and effective e-learning practices. We argue that “connectivism” (social networking applied to learning and knowledge contexts) can lead to a reconceptualization of learning in which formal, non-formal and informal learning can be integrated as to build a potentially lifelong learning activities to be experienced in “personal learning environments”. In order to provide a guide in the design, development and improvement both of personal learning environments and in the related learning activities we provide a knowledge flow model highlighting the stages of learning and the related enabling conditions. The derived model is applied in a possible scenario of formal learning in order to show how the learning process can be designed according to the presented theory. Keywords: networked learning, collaboration technologies, collaborative learning, informal learning, learning 2.0, web 2.0, personal learning environment, connectivism.
TOWARDS AN E-LIFELONG-LEARNING EXPERIENCE Formal, non-formal and informal learning have become subjects of study and experimentation as for their potentialities to be carried on through the network. The pervasiveness of telematic technologies in current learning and knowledge processes justifies the hopes of success and emerging approaches become always more open, destructured and non-formalised. According to this vision, formal, informal and non formal learning can be seen such as integration of actions and situations which can be developed both in the network and in physical contexts. New reflections can therefore be made on the practice known as e-learning, starting from a revision of these dimensions. Formal learning has been defined as a type of learning that occurs within an organized and structured context (formal education, in-company training) and is intentional from the learner’s perspective. Normally it leads to a formal recognition (diploma, certificate) (European Commission, 2000; Cedefop, 2000). As regards adults e-learning, formal education in the last decade has encountered and experimented a sort of paradox which often witnessed low returns in term of knowledge acquisition, compared to cost investment which is often significantly high. Non-formal learning has been defined as learning embedded in planned activities that are
not explicitly designated as learning, but which contain an important learning element. Nonformal learning is intentional from the learner’s point of view (Cedefop, 2000). Informal learning is learning resulting from daily life activities related to work, family, or leisure. It is often referred to as experiential learning and can to a certain degree be understood as “accidental” learning. It is not structured in terms of learning objectives, learning time and/or learning support. Typically, it does not lead to certification. Informal learning may be intentional but in most cases, it is non-intentional (or incidental/random) (Cedefop, 2000). Informal learning is an adaptive process determined by the exploration need which is realised in specific experiential contexts (Calvani, 2005). People acquire their competence in everyday life, talking, observing others, trying and making mistakes, working together with colleagues more or less expert. Informal learning can therefore be intended as the natural corollary of daily life (Bonaiuti, 2006). Intentionality of learning is a discriminating factor shifting “non-formal” learning in “nonintentional” or “incidental” learning; contrarily to what happens in formal learning, informal learning is not necessarily intentional and can be non recognized sometimes from the subject himself as knowledge and competence acquisition (Cross, 2006). According to this perspective, aimed at retrieving and valuing the potentialities embedded in spontaneous contexts – in this case the network – the emerging domain of study of informal e-learning is receiving greater attention because of the widespread of social networking practices and technologies. The online transposition of the social network is nowadays referred as to “social networking” phenomena, and it is related to a set of available technologies and services allowing individuals to take part in network-based virtual communities. Social networking is emerging as a highly natural practice because it is deeply rooted in our daily behaviour; spontaneous relations, interactions and conversations support informal learning practices, contributing to the creation and transmission of knowledge. In informal learning practices the social behaviour and the support of technologies converge toward the “network”; a network made by people and resources, a social network, unified by personal needs or common goals, interaction policies, protocol and rules and telematic systems all together favouring the growth of a sense of belonging to the “net” community. At the same time, the culture of lifelong learning is gaining importance as one of the most effective answers to face the challenges brought by the Information and Knowledge Society (Siemens, 2006): the rapid obsolescence of professional knowledge and skills requires updating and continuous training as well as recurring and personalised learning. Under these premises, the domain of e-lifelong-learning is being configured as a socio-technical system in which Knowledge and Learning are both the form and the content as for their social and relational meaning. The subject undergoing an e-life-long-learning experience crosses this territory doing practices and strategies of continuous interconnection and combination. In this work the informal e-learning area constitute a modularization of the educational socio-technical system towards the full enactment of a lifelong learning experience which could value the subject as for his personal and professional characteristics. In 2004 the paper “Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age” (Siemens, 2004) launched the theory of connectivism based on a critique of previous main learning theories synthetically labelled as behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism. According to Siemens, even the latter theory, which appeared to be the possible theoretical framework for e-learning practices (more specifically in its variant named “social constructivism”) – could not provide an adequate theoretical support to the instances brought by the new learning approaches. To fill this gap, Siemens introduced the connectivism theory. According to this author “The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe”, meaning that it is the network itself which is the basis of the learning processes. If the knowledge society
requires the individual to continuously updates his knowledge, this cannot happen as a process of progressive “knowledge accumulation”, instead this can occur through the preservation of our connections. Learning, as it is also intended in Wenger’s community of practice vision (Wenger, 2002) and in Lévy’s collective intelligence work (Lévy, 1996) is seen as a mainly social activity. In this perspective, the true competence for a lifelong learner of the knowledge society would be the capability to “stay connected” and “belong” to digital communities with which interests are and can be continuously shared. Owing a given information is less important than knowing where and how to retrieve it. Hereafter we will refer to e-lifelong-learning as a possibility that each knowledge society citizen has to build an individual and personalised lifelong learning experience which will come across formal, non formal and informal learning stages with various degree of uses of technology. In this domain theoretical reflection and applied research is still at the beginning. In this paper we try to provide a reference knowledge flow model to support the design of learning experiences in a networked environment accounting for new practices and technologies of social networking currently wide spreading in the Internet. The model aims also at giving suggestions to designer of personal learning and personal knowledge management environments in order to maximize the advantages deriving from the effective networking to enhance and improve learning and knowledge management functions. To this extent in paragraph 2 we analyse the affordances brought by the connectivist learning environment. In paragraph 3 we discuss the new buzz word of the domain, elearning 2.0 as a pretext to highlight methodology and technology role in learning. In paragraph 4 we introduce the conceptual view of a Personal Learning Environment as a place where lifelong learning experience can occur. Then, in paragraph 5 we revise the social network technological applications which can serve the scope of the Personal Learning Environment features. In paragraph 6 we discuss how learning can take place in such a context, introducing a knowledge flow model highlighting the learning stages and related enabling conditions in a connectivist environment. Eventually, in paragraph 7, we illustrate how the model of paragraph 6 can be applied in a formal learning situation of a possible higher education scenario.
AFFORDANCES ENVIRONMENT
OF
LEARNING
IN
A
CONNECTIVIST
Scenarios which become always more common highlight that through informal channels new learning and knowledge management spaces are more easily enabled, thanks to people and their ability to “networking” and reciprocally learn in a natural and spontaneous way. To synthetically analyse the strengths emerging in the context of learning in social network, we refer to Table 1. From this perspective the main characteristics of social networks are schematized as for their sharing/cooperation/collaboration features.
Social Network Characteristics
Goal
Relation based on individual interests, debate, confront on specific topics; multiplicity and heterogeneity of joining interests and motivations
Belonging
Spontaneous motivation
Duration
Non-defined
Cohesion and enabling factors
High level of trust (relevance of reputation), sense of responsibility, high technological skills, distributed reflexivity and evaluation (non autonomous, nor heteronymous but socially spread) Type of relation: share/evaluate
and
autonomous
Table 1. Social Network Characteristics, adapted from (Pettenati et al., 2006b). The concept of social networks and theirs characteristics have been studied by (Siemens, 2006) as for their potentials in knowledge management. This author firstly introduced the term of connectivism in order to make up for the lack of theoretical framework to learning in the digital age; “Research in traditional learning theories comes from an era when networking technologies were not yet prominent. How does learning change when knowledge growth is overwhelming and technology replaces many basic tasks we have previously performed?” (Siemens, 2006). “Knowing and learning are today defined by connections... Connectivism is a theory describing how learning happens in a digital age. Connectivism is the assertion that learning is primarily a network forming process” (ibidem). Siemens' statement adds sociality characteristics to the territory in which learning (lifelong learning) can occur. Connectivism is characterised by nine principles (ibidem): 1. Learning and knowledge require diversity of opinions to present the whole… and to permit selection of best approach. 2. Learning is a network formation process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources. 3. Knowledge rests in networks. 4. Knowledge may reside in non-human appliances, and learning is enabled/facilitated by technology. 5. Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known. 6. Learning and knowing are constant, on going processes (not end states or products). 7. Ability to see connections and recognize patterns and make sense between fields, ideas,
and concepts is the core skill for individuals today. 8. Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities. 9. Decision-making is learning. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision. According to this principles, learning, as it was already conceptualised in (Wenger, 2002) community of practice vision and in (Lévy, 1996) collective intelligence theory, is seen as a prevalently social activity. “Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, complexity, and self-organization theories. Knowledge and learning are processes that occur within nebulous environments of shifting core elements—not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning, defined as knowledge patterns on which we can act, can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets” (Siemens, 2006). Connectivism is therefore social networking applied to learning and knowledge.
A New Role for the Learner: Continuously Change and Be Creative If from one side we value connectivism as a context in which learning can more favourably occur, thanks to available technological solutions (Fallows, 2006), on the other side we acknowledge that connectivism is also enabled and allowed by an always stronger user participation to the creation, sharing, use and management of resources (contents, relations, applications, etc.) through social software. Users have certainly became always more aware consumers and producers of resources, they have became prosumers1. This radical change of the users' role is under our eyes; among 2000 and 2004 relevant literature reported about researches investigating on the possible use of the blog tools in education without being capable of bringing credible answers: the use of the tool at that time had not yet entered in the praxis and communicative modality of the people and the potentialities related to the aspects of meta-reflection and self-evaluation of the blog had not yet clearly emerged (Barrett, 2004; Barret 2006; Barzato, 2006). More recently, the exponential growth of blog use, coupled with the syndication technologies which added the “relational” dimension to this tools, made the blog one of the most important social networking asset used at the moment. This is just an example which serves to highlight that the determinant variable of the shift in the use of the tool was not due entirely to technology but also to the spontaneous change in the practice of use together with the overcoming of the diffusion critical threshold which could make the tool an important instrument in learning (formal, informal, non formal) processes. Another relevant mark of this change in users' role is related to a recent news; in December 2006 all the blogosphere rumoured about TIME magazine cover title: “TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you”. According to Lev Grossman (Grossman, 2006), author of this news, the explosive growth and the enormous influence of the user-generated content (such as blogs, video sharing sites, etc.) should be read in a new way: “But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and
the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.”
“E-LEARNING 2.0” OR JUST “LEARNING”? Innovation in technology has brought new (or revisited) processes and practices, expressed through new (or revisited) criteria and terms: the possible educational universe of elearning, formal, informal, non formal, lifelong coupled with connetivism features has been named (or tagged) e-learning 2.0 or learning 2.0, analogously to what happened for the web 2.0 phenomena (O'Reilly, 2004). E-learning 2.0 is therefore a tag identifying an open, destructured, immersive and relational learning process amplifying the learning curve towards the social, relational side of knowledge co-construction over the net. Stephen Downes (Downes, 2005) illustrated the main concepts of e-learning 2,0: 1. it is a type of learning which is tied to the interests of the learners, 2. it is a immersive learning which is acquired by doing, realised not only in the class but also in appropriate environments (for instance museums...), 3. it is a type of learning in which web 2.0 technologies connect the learners to the rest of the world. However stated, the focus stays on the attention risen by the affordances that the socialtechnical connectivist learning environment can engender, in light of a background which remains primarily and unavoidably methodological: the design and development of educational environment is, beyond any revisiting, a learner/learning-centred process. When knowledge technologies change so radically, they change not only “what” we know, but also “how” we come to know (Laurillard, 2003). Knowledge is the result of a fluid combination of experiences values, contextual information and specialist competences, all together providing a reference framework for the evaluation and assimilation of new experience and knowledge (Pettenati, 2006b). (Norris, 2003) highlights the recursive, dynamic and networked character of learning in digital contexts: “Knowledge can be understood as interpreted content, available to a member of a community and always shaped by a particular context. Digital representations of content and context become eknowledge through the dynamics of human engagement with them. The digital elements of e-knowledge can be codified, combined, repurposed, and exchanged”. The relational aspect of learning and knowledge processes which is proposed in this work is supported by (Wilson, 2002) essay “The nonsense of knowledge management”, in which the author states that: “'Knowledge' is defined as what we know: knowledge involves the mental processes of comprehension, understanding and learning that go on in the mind and only in the mind, however much they involve interaction with the world outside the mind, and interaction with others. Whenever we wish to express what we know, we can only do so by uttering messages of one kind or another oral, written, graphic, gestual or even through 'body language. Such messages do not carry 'knowledge', they constitute 'information', which a knowing mind may assimilate, understand, comprehend and incorporate into its own knowledge”. Analogously, we attribute to e-learning a social connotation, for us, elearning is a type of learning which is somewhat supported by technologies, but it is not necessarily conducted at a distance; it allows interaction between people and contents, and among people but (most important) is a type of learning valuing the social dimension of the underlying knowledge processes (based on (Calvani, 2005) definition, freely translated and adapted by the authors).
The presence of the “e-” before all learning and knowledge concepts is therefore now being abandoned by many researches as to underline that pervasiveness of technologies do not differentiate any more “traditional” contexts from “virtual” ones. The “traditional” concepts of learning and knowledge, newly restated and deprived by the Internet-ic “e-”, globally revolutionize the education and knowledge systems, both in the practices and in the social processes they imply. As the learner in an early stage of the Knowledge Society had to change and shift identities and practice to access to the same processes over the network (Liguorio, 2005), so the learning and knowledge practices regain possession of their integrity to come back to their original complexity, now completed and evolved by technologies but not distorted by the same technologies.
Personal Learning Environments as New Learning Landscapes In this scenario, many of the innovative technologies of the so-called “social software” (see next paragraph) are now playing crucial role as a support to learning and knowledge processes. This does not mean that the scaffold provided up to know by formalised online educational environment is to be entirely rebuilt, but the current “extended cognitive context” (environmental, situational, cultural characteristics) in which the learning dynamics occur must reshape the learning environment itself (Bonaiunti, 2006). Metaphorically getting out from the often narrow space of the learning/course/content management systems is equivalent to the reasoning conducted up to now: learning does not take place only in classes, for a limited period of time and under specific certification conditions but (in light of the socio-technical context now available) can easily take place in non-formal, informal, lifelong settings, prospecting new, challenging and interesting development perspectives. Most evidently, according to this perspective, new coordination and integration needs emerge, as for the experiences conducted in heterogeneous systems, from the functional and from the pedagogical and methodological viewpoints. A new technological solution is never a didactic solution – quite the opposite – it urges to be considered after the methodological design has been carried out, in order to properly balance the use of the tools with respect to learning objectives, learners, available resources and infrastructures (Ranieri, 2005). Stating that the “social software” (or Web 2.0) technological apparatus has great educational potentials would be reductive and misleading; which type of learning can occur and under which conditions and ways this learning can occur should always be methodological priorities to be accounted for during instructional design. The shift required at this stage of the reasoning can be conducted with the avail of a specific environment, personalised on the needs and the competences of the learner, which could always be a “door” to enter learning experiences and a “glue” to support the learner in mastering the heterogeneity of his learning experiences, easily jumping across formal, informal, unexpected and intentional learning activities (Conner, 2004). This “door-glueenvironment” is represented – in the hopes of the practitioners of this domains, and in concrete available solutions, by Personal Learning Environments (PLE) which are “concretization of operational spaces in the network where the subject is at the centre of his network of learning resources” (Bonaiuti, 2006). PLEs represent the temporal horizon through which look at the potential lifelong learning of a subject (Tosh, Werdmuller, 2004; Tosh, 2005); they are open, transversal and personal environment intercepting and capitalizing learners competences and skills by aggregating, publishing, combining and integrating diverse and distributed resources and contents. E-porfolios are another way to name PLE (e-Portfolio, 2006); “an e-portfolio can be seen as
a type of learning record that provides actual evidence of achievement. Learning records are closely related to the Learning Plan, an emerging tool that is being used to manage learning by individuals, teams, communities of interest and organizations”2. The attention given recently to this topic at the eStrategy conference on e-Portfolio (Baker, 2006) is but another evidence of the rising importance of studying this field. “In the context of a knowledge society, where being information literate is critical, the portfolio can provide an opportunity to demonstrate one's ability to collect, organise, interpret and reflect on documents and sources of information. It is also a tool for continuing professional development, encouraging individuals to take responsibility for and demonstrate the results of their own learning. Furthermore, a portfolio can serve as a tool for knowledge management, and is used as such by some institutions.”
TECHNOLOGY TO SUPPORT THE LEARNING EXPERIENCE The further step in the analysis leads us to the problem of evaluating and devising which tools and technologies exist or can be developed in order to match the requirements and purposes of the Personal Learning Environment. Technologies and tools now referred to as web 2.0 software (Hinchcliffe, 2006) (O'Reilly, 2006) (Fallows, 2006)3 certainly provide both the origin of this reasoning as well as the goal to which aim to. Sharing Paul McFedries (McFedries, 2006) tentative definition according to which Web 2.0 is “a second phase of the evolution of the World Wide Web in which developers create Web sites that act like desktop programs and encourage collaboration and communication between users”, we focus on the characteristics of the Web 2.0 applications, highlighting the social perspective of relation, collaboration and userparticipated architecture (McFedries, 2006): 1. content is user-created and maintained (peer production, user-content ecosystem), 2. user-created and maintained content require radical trust, 3. application usability allows rich user experience, 4. combining data from different sources leads to creation of new services, 5. services get better as the number of users increases in an architecture of participation.
Web 2.0 tools Folksonomies, co-browsering, tagging and social networking are “2.0” practices. The fil rouge they share is that they all are expressions of a shared, diffused cognitive strategy for information retrieval in a spontaneous way, as support to social sharing tools (such as social bookmarking tools, image sharing tools, blog search engines, etc.). Through social tagging the member of the community defines a link among resources (sites, images, videos, audios, etc.) and the terms used to describe them (Bonaiuti, 2006). This is a bottom up process, starting from a single user adding a link to a web site and tagging it at his
complete discretion, using keywords which are meaningful to himself. Social sharing tools can display this tags through using a visual approach (which increases the font size of most popular tags), thus realising tag clouds which immediately provide users with a perception of the popularity of the tags. This “folksonomic” classification method, which relies on the spontaneous users' contributions (be him an author or a sporadic resource user) leads to results capable of reflecting the information according to the conceptual model of the population that creates it (Bonaiuti, 2006). Representing information in classificatory structure is information in itself: classification incorporates information and provides the interpretation context which (in its globality) appears transparent, objective and neutral (Surowiecki, 2005). Practices and applications described above as an example implement ideas derived from “social network theory” which sees social relations expressed through nodes and links in which nodes represent the subjects in the network and the links represent relations between subjects. Under this theoretical basis, these applications explicitly represent relations favouring the interconnection among subjects based on interest, competence, hobby, research goals, study, work etc. (Fini, 2006). Social networking is the connective tissue in which new applications emerge daily, allowing us to creatively use them for learning purposes. The following table reports a synthetic view of some of the currently available applications matching this philosophy; however the list is not complete neither exhaustive and is intended just to be a memorandum for personal learning environment designers. Web Application
Description
Social networking, online social networks
Category of Internet applications to help connect friends, business partners, or other individuals together using a variety of tools.
Social network search engines
Social network search engines are a class of search engines that use social networks to organize, prioritize, or filter search results.
Blogs
A weblog is a website where entries are made displayed in chronological order. They often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, typically combining text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to the specific topic.
Blog guides
Specialized search engines for searching blog and news contents.
Social tagging (folksonomy)
Ad hoc classification scheme (tags) that web users invent as they surf to categorize the data they find online.
Social bookmarking
Saving and applying keywords to one's personal collection of Web site bookmarks on a site that enables other people to share those bookmarks.
Web Syndication, Web feed management
Web syndication is a form of syndication in which a section of a website is made available for other sites to use through to making Web feeds available from a site in order to provide other people an updated list of content from it (for example one's latest forum postings, etc.).
Tag clouds
A list of tags used in the site with some kind of visual indication of each tag’s relative popularity (ex. large font). Web sites that implement tag clouds functions allow both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity. Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag.
Peer production news
Websites combining social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a form of nonhierarchical, democratic editorial control. News stories and websites are submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system.
Wikis
Collaborative web sites that allows users to add, edit and delete content.
Collaborative real time editing
Simultaneous editing of a text or media file by different participants on a network.
Content aggregation and management, Mashup (web application hybrid)
A website or web application that combines content from more than one source.
Instant Messaging
A form of real-time communication between two or more people based on typed text.
Podcasting
Podcasting is the method of distributing multimedia files, such as audio programs or music videos, over the Internet using either the RSS or Atom syndication formats, for playback on mobile devices and personal computers.
Personal and group organization
Allow collaborative tools, project management, calendar, etc.
Table 2. Sample web 2.0 applications, a synthetic view
A MODEL FOR AN EFFECTIVE LEARNING EXPERIENCE To comply with the objectives detailed in the previous paragraphs, we hereafter propose a schema to illustrate a (simplified) knowledge flow in a connectivist environment. This model is the result of a re-elaboration of four models: - the online collaboration model presented in (Calvani, 2005), which was the starting point of our analysis; this model accounts for effectiveness conditions and principles which are considered to be fundamental for collaboration as highlighted in reference literature (Dillenboug,1996). However, while in (Calvani, 2005) the model is conceived to provide useful steps to support an online collaborative group, the model is rooted in a formal educational context; - the second model studied is the one presented in (Ranieri, 2006); this model accounts for individual and collaborative knowledge construction processes but it is not specifically conceived focused on telematic environments and does not account at all for collaboration enabling conditions; - The third and fourth models are those presented in (Pettenati et al., 2006a) and then in (Pettenati et al., 2006b) in which the authors tried to focus on framing the reasoning in a social networking context in order to account for the benefits of informal learning and online collaboration, as described in the previous paragraphs of this paper. Nonetheless that model did not account for the knowledge flow (or learning stages) occurring in an online learning experience, thus being only partially helpful in the design of a learning experience. After having confronted the previous three models with the knowledge flow presented in (Siemes, 2006) the idea of the model was re-purposed in light of the "connectivist" idea of the author's work, thus leading to a new design of the model now focused on highlighting the possible stages on an effective connectivist learning experience. In this new version the schema can provide more concrete help in the design of online learning activities, as it will
be detailed in section 7, using an example. In Figure 1 the transformation processes that involve personal comprehension and knowledge as well as social knowledge creation are illustrated in order to highlight some important processes which should occur during an effective learning experience. Rectangles in Fig. 1 represent the knowledge processes whose results can be concretized in various forms of knowledge (not illustrated in Figure1) such as enunciations, argumentations, justification, shared meanings, collaborative knowledge, cultural artefacts, etc. (Ranieri, 2006). The schema in Figure 1 has no claims to be exhaustive neither perfectly accurate, as knowledge processes are complex, fluids, iterative and certainly not univocally directed thus leading to various relations among the composing elements (represented by rectangles in Figure 1). However this schema will be used in section 7 to drive the choice of methodologies and available technologies and their combination in order to serve the educational needs in a possible higher education scenario.
Fig. 1. Knowledge process in a connectivist environment: stages of the learning experience and enabling conditions
Enabling Conditions The model in Fig. 1 envisages five subsequent stages (or knowledge processes) which are at the hart of the schema. The processes are framed by an external layer where the enabling conditions which are relevant for the knowledge processes development are highlighted: 1. basic skills: the acquisition of basic technological as well as online-comunicational skills is fundamental (Ranieri, 2006) to allow the subject to positively enter and live the informal and potentially lifelong educational experience; the lack of these conditions can
compromise the success of the entire learning initiative; 2. generation and support to motivation: in informal e-learning contexts the motivation is spontaneous; it is often induced by fun and pleasure that individual have in their network activity; it is also rooted in the positive interaction among people (a subject can more effectively and efficiently pursue his objective if the other subjects pursue theirs); 3. meaning perception: the subject must perceive as really meaningful (useful to himself) the objectives attainable in the learning activities and acknowledge that collaboration can derive real advantage; during the collaboration phases, supporting the individual self-perception of usefulness allows the subject to perceive the significance of its contribution to group activities in order to consider himself a useful contributor to other’s goals; 4. group culture: the awareness of being useful to other community members increases the self-esteem and self-perception of usefulness of the individual and fosters the motivation for a wider visibility (for instance being linked, have positive reputation, produce and/or proposed new contents). These factors increase the sense of positive group membership; 5. social climate: in informal environment the sense of belonging (membership) to a group is spontaneously supported by the intensity of sharing interests on a topic; regardless from the expertise – which can be widely non-homogeneous among members – it is still the awareness of the positive interaction with others that sustain mutual understanding and social grounding; in this context the (often tacit) agreement of respect, use of reputation feedback, and respect of a common socioquette4, contribute to build a positive social climate making the online relational environment a “trusted” environment.
Stages of the Learning Experience In the centre of Figure 1, a simplified schema of the stages of a connectivist learning experience are schematized: 1. Awareness & receptivity: as (Siemens, 2006) points out, in this stage, individuals get used to "handling knowledge abundance", and are firstly confronted with resources and tools of the new learning habitat. If this stage is not sustained by a proper motivational context as well as the acquisition of basic skills, as detailed in paragraph 5.1, this phase can become a frustrating experience and often cause the drop out of the learner from the learning environment. 2. Connection forming and selection filtering: in this stage "individuals begin to use tools and understanding acquired during the previous stage to create and form a "personal network" of resources (people and contents). At this point the learners start to be active in the learning space in terms of "consuming or acquiring new resources and tools" (Siemens, 2006). Affective and emotive factors such as fun, pleasure, positive interaction and increasing sense of meaning are crucial to building the roots of an effective "personal learning network" (ibidem).
3. Contribution & Involvement: "In this stage the learner begins to actively contribute to the learning network — essentially, becoming a “visible node”. The learner’s active contribution and involvement allows other nodes on the network to acknowledge his resources, contributions, and ideas — creating reciprocal relationships and shared understandings (or, if social technology is used, collaboratively-created understanding)" (ibidem). In this stage group culture and social climat are key factors to enable the individual participation and involvement. 4. Reflection & metacognition: Reflection on the knowledge processes and products, self-reflexivity and self-evaluation as well as metacognition (thinking about thinking) play a prominent role in this stage. Individuals are actively involved in modifying and rebuilding their own learning network, acting as "network aware and competent" subjects (ibidem). The experience acquired at this stage within the learning network has resulted in an understanding the nuances of the space and the knowledge inputs, allowing the subject to act both as a provider of valuable support and help to other networked learners as well as being capable of accessing just in time and personalized knowledge to himself. The learning process depicted above can be used as a model to support design of learning activities and environments in different educational sets. An example of this approach will be shown in paragraph 7 to build a “connectivist learning experience” in a possible higher education scenario.
Building a Connectivist Learning Experience: a Possible Scenario This scenario subject is taken by (Bonaiuti, 2006) but is significantly detailed, revised and newly implemented according to what is presented in this paper. More specifically the focus is on building and exploiting a connectivist online environment according to the model in Figure 1 to match the educational purposes. Scenario: Higher education, course in "Urban Sociology", class topic: "Juvenile behaviour in urban suburbs" (Bonaiuti, 2006). Scenario details: this course envisages 2 hours face to face class and a total of 10 hours to be devoted to autonomous and group work. The teacher wants to structure the face to face meeting as a “role playing” activity. The scenario for the role play is the following: participants: a math teacher, a chancellor, 2 parents, a young boy. The young boy has been caught by the math teacher outside of the school while cutting the teacher's car wheels. The teacher has reported the happening to the chancellor and the student is now risking the expulsion from the school. Debate with arguments in favour of the expulsion, neutral, in defence of the student, and reflective, will be played in one hour during the face to face class meeting.
The model of Figure 1 can be used to help the teacher settle her teaching activities. To this extent the model is exploited during the three phases of class activities: pre-class activities, in class activities, post-class activities. Instrumental background: the university in which this scenario is set has installed a learning environment at a disposal of teachers and students who want to avail of it. This environment is a combination of a “traditional” elearning environment5 and a “personal learning environment”6 conceived according to the elearning 2.0 philosophy, as detailed in the previous part of this work, and opened to
students and alumni who want to keep alive their online lifelong learning landscape. Such combined environment7 offer both the course and content management system offered by traditional e-learning systems coupled with social-networking creation, sharing and management tools. 1. Pre-class activities: focus on content management and sharing a. Awareness & receptivity: teachers gives starting tasks to the student using the blog of the learning environment in the area reserved to the Urban Sociology course. In his post she proposes a selected reference reading (full text of the reading could be stored in the Course Material area) and suggests a vision of three short videos distributed through a video sharing social network8. The assignment for this phase is to prepare the debate which will take place during the face to face class: students are divided in 5 groups; each group is charged to represent one role in the scenario: math teacher, chancellor, 2 parents, young boy. Each group, in order to get prepared to sustain the arguments and debate can find external documentation to get closer to the discussed reality of juvenile behaviour in urban suburbs (multimedia resources are allowed, such as podcast, video, text, etc.). b. Connection forming, selection, filtering: in this phase students prepare themselves to work in group; each group decides how to carry on its task (for instance attribute roles to the group members, share tasks, provide complementary resources, etc.). This work is done in spontaneous modes for each group (some can use the course forum – teacher can open related threads, or can work in synchronous mode using voiceIP tool and sharing ideas and outline, or todos using the class wiki or a conceptual map tool – teacher can provide a tool area for each group of the course. c. Contribution & Involvement: in this phase students actively work using tools and combining resources to come to a shared strategy of discussion for the class meeting. Students post the outline of their argumentations in the course blog or forum (and can tag it with the group name). Students can use the social bookmarking feature of the course environment to organize and share their resources. 2. In-class activity: focus on content production a. Contribution & Involvement: during the first hour of the class the role playing game is set. The teacher listens to the debate and uses a mental map tool to synthesize the emerging discourse pattern. b. Reflection & Meta-cognition: After the end of the play, the teacher resumes what happened and comments of groups contributions. She provides ideas and questions for further insights and reframe all the play in the context of the topic of the class with reference to the selected reading assigned before the class. At the end of the class both the conceptual maps drawn and the audio-record of the play are shared on the course environment. Students are then given the evaluation assignment to be carried in a post class phase within 15 days. The assignment is a journalist-style individual writing of a possible local newspaper reporting the case of the role play in light of the analysis of the juvenile behaviour in the urban suburbs. Students are asked to post the assignment in their personal blog, tagging it with the course name and class topic.
3. Post-class activities: focus on knowledge acquisition a. Contribution & Involvement: students will work individually to study and analyze both the material produced by the whole class and the material provided by the teacher. Students can work at the writing using an both an online (to have easy backup and document portability) or desktop word processor or a wiki (to keep trace of the evolving versions). Eventually they will post the assignment in their personal blog tagging it as required. The teacher will easily follow the assignment submission using a syndication system9. b. Reflection & Meta-cognition: to support the production phase the teacher (or a tutor acting on his behalf) in the meanwhile will use the course blog to more deeply comment on the topic or provide further resources as well as posting comments on students posts (both on the blog, or forum or wiki). After the evaluation phase (marks have been given to students assignment in a privacy respectful way) the teacher could invite students to “digg” their preferred writing to highlight them in the school journal.
CONCLUSIONS In this paper we tried to provide our interpretation of the current socio-technical educational system shaped by technologies and practices of the “Knowledge Society” to locate the role of learning and learners in a lifelong perspective. We believe that both users attitudes and available technologies are mature to let us envisage that each network user could easily engage in a lifelong learning personal experience if properly lead by appropriate methodologies and sustained by accordingly designed and developed personal learning environments. To this extent we provided a model to schematize the knowledge flow occurring during an effective learning experience in a connectivist environment. The purpose of this model is twofold: from one side it can be used by personal learning environment designers as a guideline for checking if all phases and enabling conditions are supported by the integrated tools; on the other side it can be used by instructors or designers to set up learning activities. The provided model has some common points with other models at the state of the art; for instance in (Salmon, 2002) the author provided a staged model for online collaboration activities oriented to knowledge construction; however, that model and the related implementations and example presented in the essay, was developed in the “1.0” age, where neither technology nor people practice was mature enough in the sense of social networking perspective. We believe that a connectivist re-visitation of this theory is now necessary and this work intended to be a contribution in this sense. As a conclusion of the paper we provided a sample application of the model using the scenario. The scenario setting chosen for this purpose is a formal learning higher education context; this choice should not be read as contrasting with the lifelong perspective of learning claimed throughout this work. Instead, it should be read as a preparatory activity which could enter in people's practice diffused by a formal context but (once mastered as skill) potentially applied in all other non-formal and informal learning context. Applying the knowledge processes flow model in other scenarios such as professional training in enterprises, as well as refining and detailing the model to this purposes, could be object of future study. Many other issues are still open for further investigation and experimentation: how could personal learning environment used to develop pedagogical
thinking? How can they be used in professional contexts such as workers for placements / re-integration?, How can the formal educational system be changed as to support selfdirected learners?, What arguments can convince politicians (educational and labour ministries) to support individual institutions? These questions, as many others, were not addressed in this work but can an will be object of future studies. Whether we call it e-learning, e-learning 2.0, lifelong learning, knowledge management or not, the interesting question is to see if and how these approaches can lead us to a true actualization of a lifelong learning practice for all knowledge society members.
ACKNOWEDGMENTS We want to thank Prof. Dino Giuli for giving us the possibility to carry on our research in this domain. We are also very grateful to Prof. Antonio Calvani for keeping on asking us stimulating scientific research question pushing us to work in order to find possible answers. Moreover we want to thank the colleagues of the Educational Technology Laboratory and Telematics Technologies Laboratory for the fruitful discussions occurring both in formal and non formal settings.
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Endnotes 1 Prosumer is a portmanteau formed by contracting either the word producer or professional with the word consumer. The term has taken on conflicting spins: the business sector sees the prosumer (professional–consumer) as a market segment, whereas economists see the prosumer (producer–consumer) as having greater independence from the mainstream economy. 2 Definition from Wikipedia; retrieved on January 2007. 3 Although we use in this work the current web 2.0 jargon, we share Fallows parenthesis (The single most annoying aspect of the annoyingly named Web 2.0 movement is the use of the term “mashing up” to denote what in English we call “combining.”) (Fallows, 2006). 4 This term was firstly used in applied research by the Educational Technology Laboratory of the University of Florence. It indicates a set of rules and behaviour criteria that should be followed by people engaged in online collaboration. See also (Calvani, 2005). 5 Such as the well known free open source Moodle (www.moodle.org) course management and learning management system. URL retrieved on January 2007. 6 Such as the Elgg social networking educational system (www.elgg.net). URL retrieved on January 2007. 7 An example of this environment is Me2U electronic portfolio, weblog and social networking system, developed and used at Athabasca University (www.me2u.athabascau.ca). URL retrieved on January 2007. 8 For instance Youtube (www.youtube.com). URL retrieved on January 2007. 9 Such as RSS feed. 10 See also http://www.connectivism.ca/ URL retrieved on January 2007.
