The Design, Experience and Practice of Networked Learning
Edited by: Vivien Hodgson, Maarten de Laat, David McConnell and Thomas
Ryberg
This book brings together a wealth of new research that opens up the
meaning of connectivity as embodied and promised in the term 'networked
learning'. Chapters explore how contexts, groups and environments can be
connected rather than just learners; how messy, unexpected and emergent
connections can be made rather than structured and predefined ones; and
how technology connects us to learning and each other, but also shapes
our identity. These exciting new perspectives ask us to look again at
what we are connecting and to revel in new and emergent possibilities
arising from the interplay of social actors, contexts, technologies, and
learning.
Caroline Haythornthwaite, University of British Columbia
Despite creating fundamentally new educational economics and greatly
increasing access - teaching and learning in networks is a tricky
business. These chapters illuminate the complex interactions amongst
tools, pedagogy, educational institutions and personal net presences -
helping us design and redesign our own networks. In the process, they
take (or extract) network theory from the practice of real teaching and
learning contexts, making this collection an important contribution to
Networked Learning.
Terry Anderson, Athabasca University
What kinds of learning can social networking platforms really enable?
Digging well beneath the hype, this book provides a timely, incisive
analysis of why and how learning emerges (or fails to) in networked
spaces. The editors do a fine job in guiding the reader through the rich
array of theories and methods for tackling this question, and the
diverse contexts in which networked learning is now being studied. This
is a book for reflective practitioners as well as academics: the book's
close attention to the political, pedagogical and organisational
complexity of effective practice, and the lived experience of educators
and learners, helps explain why networked learning has such disruptive
potential -- but equally, why it draws resistance from the
establishment.
Simon Buckingham Shum, The Open University
The networked learning conference, a biannual institution since 1998,
celebrates its 14th year in this volume. Here a range of studies,
reflecting networked learning experiments across Europe and other global
contexts, show important shifts away from a conservative tradition of
OEe-learning¹ research and unpeel dilemmas of promoting learning as an
elusive practice in virtual environments. The authors point towards
important futures in online learning research, where notions of
knowledge, connectivity and OEcommunity¹ become increasingly elastic,
and engagements slide across material and virtual domains in new
practices whose emergence is increasingly difficult to apprehend.
Tara Fenwick - University of Stirling.
The chapters in this volume explore new and innovative ways of thinking
about the nature of networked learning and its pedagogical values and
beliefs. They pose a challenge to us to reflect on what we thought
networked learning was 15 year ago, where it is today and where it is
likely to be headed.
Each chapter brings a particular perspective to the themes of design,
experience and practice of networked learning, the chosen focus of the
book. The chapters in the book embrace a wide field of educational areas
including those of higher education, informal learning, work-based
learning, continuing professional development, academic staff
development, and management learning.
The Design, Experience and Practice of Networked Learning will prove
indispensable reading for researchers, teachers, consultants, and
instructional designers in higher and continuing education; for those
involved in staff and educational development, and for those studying
post graduate qualifications in learning and teaching.
This, the second volume in the Springer Book Series on Researching
Networked Learning, is based on a selection of papers presented at the
2012 Networked Learning Conference held in Maastricht, The Netherlands.
