Connectivism and Social Learning in Practice

Connectivism and Social Learning in Practice

          This week is all about the cooperative and social learning in the classroom. Cooperative learning what a compelling way to learn. The instructional strategy of cooperative learning focuses on having students interact with each other in groups in ways that enhance their learning (Pitler, 2012, p. 73).  As I hit on in last week’s blog, there’s been some disparage toward the word “Social” in social learning, and it is confused with social media. Organizations have yet to understand the power of “social”, whilst others view their use simply as time-wasting or social “NOT-working”.  Most people in administration and management equate social with the farm building and candy crush saga that does little but waste time. Social cooperative learning is not about Facebook, and twitter exclusively, although some technologies can be used in conjunction with this style of learning it is not the true definition of the theory.

         

          Cooperative learning often times require more than just assigning students to groups and saying have at it! It requires teachers to take a role in learning, or as Karen Casselman says it is necessary to have confidence in their partnerships. She requires that the students check with each other prior to engaging with the teacher. Realize that all students are mathematicians which build encouragement between each other. The take away is in these types of instructional strategies is that cooperation is the key. Students need to learn to be interdependent of each other.

      

            In collaborative and cooperative learning, Dr. Orey talks about how the possibilities of cooperative learning are endless. Teachers employ different strategies to set up various levels of skill driven groups. There are projects teachers can do where they can introduce group consequences, which drive the peers in the group, to help out in terms of learning what the project requires. When creating these types of strategies teachers can include positive interdependence, such as, the Big Project, Jigsaw and Peer Review.

          Cooperative learning techniques can be loosely categorized by the skill that each enhances (Barkley, Cross and Major, 2005), although it is important to recognize that many cooperative learning exercises can be developed to fit within multiple categories. Categories include discussion, reciprocal teaching, graphic organizers, writing and problem solving. Each category includes a number of potential structures to guide the development of a cooperative learning exercise. For example, the category of problem-solving helps to develop strategic and analytical skills and includes exercises such as the send-a-problem, three-stay one-stray, structured problem solving, and analytical teams.       

             This week we opened up a Voice Thread account for our application assignment. In using tools for learning in connectivism and social learning, there are apps and sites which can help aid in the learning process. I decided to create this thread for a basic introduction of foreign teachers and behavioral expectations in the classroom. The level of technical integration in my school is exceptionally low so it would be curious to see how this gets implemented in a real world situation.
Here is my link to my Voice Thread. In it, I proposed a solution to a problem to where the parents of the students were unable to understand who the foreign teachers are. Aside from 1 yearly winter festival, there is really no proper introduction to the parents. With this Voice Thread, the parents are able to view a brief introduction of the teachers, as well get a better understanding of their roles within the school

Link: https://voicethread.com/share/5804475/

         

          To conclude cooperative and social learning is the intriguing way of getting students to learn and work together towards a common goal. We looked at Bandura extensively and how his Bobo doll experiment determined that children’s behavior was learned by observing the actions of others. (Bandura, 1977) As well, self-efficacy within the behavioral context of working in the social groups. Depending on different interactions, self-efficacy determines one's strengths to complete a task to fruition.

Reference

Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.

Barkley, E. F., Cross, K. P., & Major, C. H. (2005). Collaborative learning techniques: a handbook for college faculty. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Pitler, H., & Hubbell, E. R. (2012). Cooperative Learning. Using technology with classroom instruction that works (2nd ed., pp. 73-87). Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

What is Cooperative Learning?. (n.d.). What is Cooperative Learning?. Retrieved May 31, 2014, from http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/cooperative