Ubiquitous Learning and Instructional Technologies MOOC’s Updates

Essential Peer-reviewed Update #5: Social Learning and Ubiquitous Learning Devices

Describe and analyse an example of social learning supported by ubiquitous learning devices.

This question is so relevant to my learning as a newbie in the field of Learning and Development. As an instructional designer who is hardly two-months-old in terms of experience, there have been numerous discussions as to how to make sure learning goes beyond an individual. Now, social learning and ubiquitous learning devices make me go immediately to the MOOC courses that I have been doing in Coursera and other distance education platforms like the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. A word about the Knight Center, one of the things that I love about them is that they have a course archive where all content is accessible even after the course is over!

Here is a screenshot of the review and suggestions that were given to me in one of the courses that I had completed earlier during mu undergrad days.

Suggestions and peer-review on Coursera

And also, by extension, as I am typing out this response in CG Scholar, I realise that this platform too fits into this criterion.

And for this, I would like to put up my notes of the lecture video 1.5. In this particular video, Bill Cope introduces the Scholar Environment and compares it with the typical ‘Classroom discourse’ and puts this forth as an example of why there need not be a difference between learning in person (face-to-face, in the same space and time) and learning online (asynchronous learning, learning at a distance). He further elaborated that the platform has a construct of community, the social networking way but with just ‘peers’ and not ‘friends’ like in the case of Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. But at the same time, this platform that is CG Scholar also allows you to post photos and link it back to the source so that one can be redirected to it.

He says, “Scholar is to knowledge, what IG is to pictures…” that is to say, as I understand it, the former is a social ‘knowledge-oriented’ network whereas the latter is a ‘Social Network!’