The photo shows smoke rising up from a volcano some 30 km away – last spring – see below.

A blogpost from Hróbjartur Árnason

Due to some interesting technical glitches last week. My blog post from last year was posted. So I will not delete it, but add the one I had planned to post on Friday in front of it – there are still some interesting points in the last one… if you can be bothered to read 😉

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The more I think about learning and teaching, the aspect of learning as a social phenomenon becomes more and more central in my mind.

For centuries people have viewed learning in school as an individual endeavour, where a professor delivers HIS 😉wisdom to the students who are tested individually on how much of this wisdom they can retain in their memory.

However, if we look critically at what happens when learning takes place, starting with a toddler’s learning to become a person… connecting to parents, forming words, walking… all of these learnings happen through and because of social interaction. If we then consider learning in the workplace we see the same thing again, people learning together through formal and informal interactions. Take any meaningful learning and you will see many aspects of social interaction as a central element.

But for a long time, when we have organized formal learning at schools and universities we have very often focused on delivery and individual testing, and not on the social part where learners search for meaning and implementation of the learning materials. The same is true for many other types of learning events. Possibly this can have been one aspect of the reasons why humanity faces some of the huge challenges it does. When learning takes place in isolation, and is only about acquiring knowledge through individual interactions with isolated facts about narrow aspects of reality, there is a possibility that our specialists and others who take important decisions do so from very narrow points of view.

By celebrating the social aspects of learning and organizing learning events in such a way that participants in the learning event are supported in working with information in such a way that they connect it to their collective context, search meaning together and being part of a diverse group of learners consider different points of view, we can hopefully create learning events that offer the opportunity for deeper and broader learning, and learning that can be meaningful for the participants.

On Wednesday I will present some ideas connected to this thought and offer you opportunities to discuss social collaborative learning and together we have two webinars to prepare you further to find ways each of you can spur and incorporate social learning in your learning events.

Click here to access the readings for this theme and links to the webinar

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The blogpost from the lastime the course was held:

Viewed from 30 km away you can see the smoke coming up from a volcano erupting close to the village of Grindavík in south western Iceland.

This eruption has been going on for about two weeks. But we have had eruptions in this area regularly during the last three years. What has this got to do with our third topic. Learning in communities? Well to begin with social learning is probably the way people have learned for the whole of human history, it is humanities oldest way to learn. In Iceland, where ever you go, you will probably be going through an old lavafield, be it like the 1000 year old lava fields close to my home, or others which can be up to 10000 years old (before that Iceland was totally covered with ice… so you would not get lavafields as a result of volcanic eruptions. And now Icelanders are experiencing something new – eruptions close to home. Most eruptions in the past have been far from human habitation.

The first eruption in this series, started in Fagradalsfjall in March 2021, and because it was small and relatively accessible it soon became a tourist attraction and a gathering place for locals. Donal Boyd, an American photographer and wildlife conservationist captured the social feeling that was created by the incredible mix of location, size of the event and people´s reactions to it and to one another. This event showed me how we ravel in our connections to other people and manage to create incredible connections in amazing situations.

So while we are experiencing geological events that connect us to the beginnings of our earth and of life on earth, we are reminded of the deep roots of social connections in our human legacy and how deep social learning lies embedded in human nature. At the same time as we are experiencing an exodus from the classroom we hear calls for more human connections both from students and teachers at the same time.

We will be studying why we should create collaborative learning experiences in our online courses and how we can do that.

Before you start reading it could be useful for you to reflect on your experiences of social and collaborative learning and how you have experienced engaging learning communities. In this course you have already experience one aspect – or a few – of collaborative online learning, you could also reflect on how that manifests itself and how you experience it yourself. Before we meet on the webinar, you will benefit from reading or at least scanning the three main readings for the topic