Fighting Context Collapse with Ning
After thinking more about
identity management and context collapse in education, I felt the need to share
a social networking platform
(SNP) that I am highly interested in: Ning. The online SNP named ‘Ning’ is an
effective piece of technology for incorporating Web 2.0 into an LMS. Ning is a scalable-hosted
platform that has the tools and support to allow learners to publish and connect
with any chosen community. Beach & Doerr-Stevens (2011) claimed that the
Ning platform was particularly useful for online role-play and collaborative
argumentative strategies – two learning strategies that facilitate effective
learning.
Conradie (2014) looked at the way learners viewed
connectivism as a pedagogical approach within a learning environment. He
defined connectivism as an amalgamation of constructivism and cognitivism. Conradie
(2014) stated that connectivism could come about as a direct result of the
‘open’ learning era facilitated by Web 2.0. Conradie (2014) found that the
reflective nature of this environment grants learners the opportunity to easily
reflect on their own progress at any time. Conradie mentions Vygotsky’s
Activity Theory where it is postulated that knowledge exists within systems
that can only be accessed by the learners that are actively participating
within them. Conradie (2014) claimed that education is entering a ‘radical
discontinuity’, and that informal online learning is the new frontier of
learning. The social context of learning is a central tenet in education –
aggregation, relation, creation, and sharing are all associated with the
integration of Web 2.0 in learning. Conradie’s (2014) research showed that
learners were engaged and motivated with collaboration in the Web 2.0
environment and self-actualization was supported as well. Additionally, Ning
can also be used to offer new approaches to assessing learner performance.
Learners can present their learned knowledge and prove that they have gained
competency by participating in collaborative work within a social network.
Employers these days want to see that learners can apply learned skills in
various contexts, and Ning can provide this exact opportunity . Portfolios are
already quickly gaining popularity - it will be interesting to see the
different types of informal assessment that will be emerging in the next
several years.
Ning gives instructors the opportunity to create a
customized social network with the tools and features of their choice – these
can be changed on a whim depending on the needs of the learners within the
social network. The instructor can give the learners the opportunity to post
photos and videos and learn information about the other network members. It
also includes many communication tools such as forums, wikis, and blogs. The
instructor will have full control over privacy controls and will be able to
easily moderate content if they choose to do so. Very little technical skill is
required and once a social network is created, it can be set as public or
private. The instructor can also grant the learners the power to manipulate the
network or create social networks of their own within the classroom network.
The exposure to informatics in the asynchronous learning
environment is another benefit of Ning. This program will be very easy for
students to pick up - the students log into the social networking site that is
created for their specific course. Once they have entered, they will be
completely familiar with the interface since it is so similar to other social
networking sites. This platform is very similar to Facebook. They will first
need to create an extensive profile – the instructor can set limits on what
type of information they want the learners to include. They will then be able
to look over each of their classmate’s profiles and automatically determine
which learner’s hold similar/different world/pedagogical views. The learner’s
profiles will evolve and change over time as tags are assigned to their
profiles for various aspects of the course. Learners can also create separate
tabs within their profiles based on certain tags. There are drag and drop tools
that are used to customize features for the specific network. Information and
media can be imported from all other social networking sites. Real-time aggregated
RSS feeds give users the ability to subscribe to various updates from specific
parts of the social network. The instructor will have the opportunity to enable
or disable ‘liking’ and ‘sharing’, they can set up as many ‘subgroups’ as they
would like, students can customize their profiles, and there are various member
categories. Ning is also smartphone and tablet ready – this is probably one of
the greatest benefits to online learning. Students in online courses can join a
specific network and will have the opportunity to stay connected with their
peers after the course has ended – this could lead to some amazing
collaborative networking opportunities in the future and students could
endlessly continue sharing knowledge with each other. This sort of activity
will help encourage life-long learning.
A specific example of how Ning could improve an activity in
an online course would be ‘selective collaboration’. The research behind
collaborative learning is extensive and it is a widely agreed upon strategy to
be used for the enhancement of learning and instruction. One of the major
strengths of Web 2.0, and Ning in particular, is that it facilitates
collaboration. The open social aspect of Web 2.0 gives people the power to
contribute just as much information as they devour. With Ning, a student could
easily identify the tags associated with each learner in their online class and
then choose to engage with various learners based upon common beliefs or
differences. Learners could immediately find students that they would like to
hold further discussions with by simply looking at their peers tags. Instead of
students scrolling down a forum and reading every single post, they could save
a lot of time and energy by simply reading each learner’s tags within the
network. They could then use the energy saved from reading fifty or more
entries to explore and post new research and information within the online
learning community. Learners could also work together to expand on the
information they find within the learning network and possibly come up with
novel ideas that could change the ideas of their peers in some extraordinary
ways. Ning would give learners the
opportunity to easily recognize problems, filter criteria within the class
discussions, interconnect information between various discussions more readily,
facilitate the expression of personal viewpoints, clarify viewpoints within the
discussions, negotiate agreements between class mates, facilitate debates, and
simplify the construction and presentation of new knowledge. Of course,
self-regulated learning will be necessary if this type of collaboration is to
be effective at all. Overall, I think that Ning is an excellent choice for
fighting context collapse!
Beach, R., &Doerr-Stevens, C. (2011). Using social
networking for online role-plays to develop students' argumentative
strategies. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 45(2),
165-181. doi:10.2190/EC.45.2.c
Conradie, P. W.
(2014). Supporting self-directed learning by connectivism and personal learning
environments. International Journal of Information and Education Technology,
4(3), 254-259. doi:10.7763/IJIET.2014.V4.408
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