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social interactive potential of large-scale peer-based learning

Each node that joins the network amplifies the network’s potential for peer learning and participation.

Content duplication, scaling, and reproduction are far better managed by technology. One recorded lecture can be seen a thousand times online without significant increase in expense. The content broadcast of any course can be opened and shared online fairly easily, using simple tools like Skype, ustream, or Elluminate. Duplicating content – where we are now with open educational resources is easy and cheap. The exciting and fascinating potential available to educators around the world today is to engage in social, participative, and networked learning with students and colleagues. Technology can facilitate this, but the social dimensions of learning are still best managed by humans. This is the exact model Stephen Downes, Dave Cormier and I are utilizing in open courses (we are hosting an upcoming open course on personal learning environments and networks …if you’re interested, you can sign up here). Open courses offer a model of learning that enables educators to utilize existing learning activities and distribute them across a network. Sugata Mitra has demonstrated the value of peer and self-directed learning in India. In online learning, I think my work with Cormier and Downes has similarly demonstrated how people in networks can help each other to learn, even when more that 2300 learners are involved (our CCK08 course).

instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing.

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.

psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong. For instance, many study skills courses insist that students find a specific place, a study room or a quiet corner of the library, to take their work. The research finds just the opposite.