Week 4 - Digital Collaboration Learning Theories

Notes:

Top Ten Learning Theories for Digital and Collaborative learning 2015

Dr David Parsons, National Postgraduate Director, The Mindlab by Unitec, Auckland, New Zealand


Instrumental conditioning Burrhus Skinner (1904 - 1990)
Behaviour leads to reinforcement
needs rapid feedback and work at own pace
Positive Reinforcement

Connectionism Edward Thorndike (1874 - 1949)
Law of effect: reinforcement increases the strength of a connection, punishment does not change it.

Progressive Education John Dewey (1859 - 1952)Co-operation between school and home
Hands on learning
" Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing this is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results."

Constructivism - social development Lev Vygotsky (1896 - 1934)social learning precedes development
"the teacher must adopt the role of facilitator, not content provider"

Constructivism - Equilibration PiagetEducational environments should provide the opportunity for discovery by students.

Situated Cognition/Learning John Seely -Brown (1940) Allan Collins, Paul DuguidLearning is embedded in the activity, context and culture it was learned.
Learning while interacting with others through shared activities and language
Learning is about performance in situations rather than accumulation of knowledge.
"instead of pouring knowledge into people's heads, you need to help them grind anew a set of eyeglasses so they can see the world in a new way."

Community of Practice Jean Lave and Etienn Wenger (born 1950s)three components
1. domain
2. community
3. practice
Learning is unintentional and situated within authentic activity, context and culture
Learning based on social relationships; co-operation

Olsen, M.& Hergenhahn, B. (2013). An Introduction to Theories of Learning (9th ed.) Boston, Mass: Pearson



Constructionism in 21st Century classrooms (Video)A brief overview, by Margaret Pierciey, of constructionism, as outlined by Seymour Papert and Marina Bers. Covers the 4 basic subconcepts of:
Learning by designing within a community - initiate and design projects which are meaningful or useful to themselves or communities. Taking time to discuss along the way gives opportunities for new thinking. (debugging). Sharing what they have learnt and letting them inquire about what they need to know gives rise to an emergent curriculum. Interact and collaborative - peer mentors
Technological tools for learning
Powerful ideas and wonderful ideas- power of computers in the classroom lies in their potential to assist children in encountering powerful ideas and engaging them with experimenting and testing their ideas.
Learning about learning with technology - documenting and sharing the successes and achievements of a constructionists learning experiences are important 

Collaborative LearningCollaborative learning is a learning process that brings learners together (including the teacher) and enables students to be responsible for their own learning as well as the learning of their peers.
Collaborative learning is aimed at having students fully appreciate the process of building knowledge together and improving learning outcomes by collective knowledge and collective capability.

Dillenbourg (1999) identifies the difference between collaboration and cooperation as defined by a degree in the division of labour. In cooperation, partners split the work, solve sub-tasks individually and then assemble the partial results into the final output. In collaboration, partners do the work 'together' (Dillenbourg, 1999). Similarly, Kozar (2010) uses the analogy of a pot luck dinner where cooperation is defined as the guests bringing separate dishes to contribute to the meal, and collaboration as a messier chaotic process where guests cook together to create the meal, but gain new knowledge or experience from the interaction.

Dillenbourg P. (1999) What do you mean by collaborative learning?. In P. Dillenbourg (Ed) Collaborative-learning: Cognitive and Computational Approaches. Oxford: ElsevierKozar, O. (2010). Towards Better Group Work: Seeing the Difference between Cooperation and Collaboration.English Teaching Forum, 48(2), 16-23.

Learner at the Center of a Networked World
1. Learners need to be at the centre of new learning networks.
2. Every student should have access to learning networks.
3. Learning networks need to be interoperable.
4. All learners should have the literacies necessary to utilize media as well as safeguard themselves in the digital age.
5. Students should have safe and trusted environments for learning


Aspen Institute Task Force on Learning and the Internet, Learner at the Center of a Networked World, Washington, D.C.: The Aspen Institute, June 2014.