Group items tagged

Rambe, P. (2012). Constructive disruptions for effective collaborative learning: Navigating the affordances of social media for meaningful engagement. Electronic Journal of E-Learning, 10(1), 132-146. The essentialist view that new technological innovations (especially Social Media) disrupt higher education delivery ride on educators' risk averse attitudes toward full-scale adoption of unproven technologies. However, this unsubstantiated logic forecloses possibilities for embracing the constructive dimensions of disruptions, and grasping the tremendous academic potential of emerging technologies. Community of inquiry and virtual ethnography adopted as theoretical and methodological lenses for exploring the productive pedagogical impacts of appropriating Social Media in an Information Systems course at a South African University. Lecturer-student and peer-based postings on Facebook examined to understand the influence of Facebook adoption on student meaningful learning and pedagogical delivery. The findings suggest that Facebook constituted a collective "Third space" for student enactment of counter scripts, augmented traditional academic networking, fostered "safe" havens for student democratic expression, and afforded learning communities for student co-construction of knowledge. Shortfalls identified include challenges of developing quality academic discussions and fostering student engagement at epistemological and conceptual levels to ensure deep learning. The study recommends a multi-pronged strategy that foregrounds contingent relaxation of academic authority, on-task student behavior, strategic alignment of powerful collaborative technologies with pedagogical designs, and learning needs and styles of students.

The Synergy Workshop facilitates the collective development of new, feasible ideas and plans, the creation and the strengthening of new and existing partnerships. You will be able to induce future collaborations by engaging the conference participants in highly interactive and practical working group activities

"Community of Inquiry Framework The CoI framework is comprised of three interdependent and dynamic structural elements: social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence. As shown in Figure 1, the framework assumes that learning occurs within the community through the interaction of these three core elements. The underlying foundational perspective of the framework is a collaborative constructivist view of teaching and learning (Garrison & Anderson, 2003). Collaborative constructivism is in essence the recognition of the interplay between individual meaning and socially redeeming knowledge; hence, a community of inquiry is a personal and public search for meaning and understanding (Cleveland-Innes, Garrison, & Kinsel, 2007). A recent study conducted by Shea and Bidjerano (2009) concluded that the epistemic engagement approach, which foregrounds the role of learners as collaborative knowledge builders, is more fully articulated and extended through a community of inquiry."