Amber Oliver

Originally Posted at http://www.hastac.org/forums/hastac-scholars-discussions/hastac-scholars-modeling-new-collective

I really appreciate the process of reconceptualizing the collective and how it fits with education in the post-internet era. While I am intrigued with the question of how we, as education policy makers, thinkers and tinkerers, can function as a collective with the power to effectuate change, I would urge the conversation to move even further to what it means for education to have students function as a learning collective, and educators.

The concept of a social learning network of students and educators is only possible in today’s Web2.0 networked world. And I am not talking only about a class-wide network, but a collective made up of students from different schools, states and even nations. What would this do to the way we think about learning? The role of the educator? The role of the students as active participants in their own learning?

For us at the World Wide Workshop, this is what the future of education will look like, and this is a model we are implementing and assessing everyday with the Globaloria Social Network for Learning Game Design – www.Globaloria.org.

With Globaloria, students are honing STEM skills and digital literacies, problem solving and engaging in deep research and analysis collaboratively, daily for 90-minutes, as part of their formal school curriculum, using an online, open-sourced wiki and blog-based learning platform. They are posting their works-in-process and final projects, sharing their work process, and mashing, remixing and commenting on students across the newtork in nearly 50 schools in 2 states.

You can see the results of this new collective-based view of learning in our research, www.WorldWideWorkshop.org/Reports/ – it works.

So my question would be to consider the impact of a collective, collaborative, network-based approach to education made up of diverse students and educators…and what we as the HASTAC collective can learn from it.

Amber