Social Theory: A social theory of learning
What does it mean for software to be social?
"Intuitively, we know that Social Software is software that fulfills some sort of social function,
allowing us to form social connections, and perform social activities that give shape to social groups.
But as evidenced by the number of times I just used the word 'social' to define Social Software,
it is clear that what we have here is a tautology: by taking for granted what we understand by 'social,'
the adjective in question both provides an absolute definition and at the same time manages to define nothing."
-- Ulises Mejias
Over the past couple of decades, Social Software has become a growing feature of higher education. Student enrollments in distance learning and elearning programs is steadily increasing across the globe, allowing students to attend class while being physically separate from the instructor and classmates. What social software does is allow people to connect. By studying social software, we are able to make visible and trace what before only occured via physical human contact. As such, concepts such as Wenger's communities of practice help us to reconsider and re-evaluate how education and learning environments should be designed.
In Communities of Practice, Etienne Wenger (1998) makes the argument that learning is a process of social participation.
Wenger starts with four assumptions about learning, knowledge, knowing, and knowers:
1) We are social beings.... this fact is a central aspect of learning.
2) Knowledge is a matter of competence with respect to valued enterprises.
3) Knowing is a matter of participating in the pursuit of such enterprises, i.e., of active engagement in the world.
4) Meaning -- our ability to experience the world and our engagement with it as meaningful -- is ultimately what learning is to produce.(p. 4)
PARTICIPATION
Wenger (1998, p.4) insists that
"Participation here refers not just to local events of engagement in certain activities
with certain people, but to a more encompassing process of being active participants
in the practices of social communities and constructing identities
in relation to these communities. Participating in a playground clique or in a work team,
for instance, is both a kind of action and a form of belonging. Such participation shapes
not only what we do, but also who we are and how we interpret what we do." (author's emphasis)
WhatIs |
SocialSoftware |
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