KMi Seminars
MUP/PLE lecture series
This event took place on Friday 01 July 2011 at 14:00

 
Philippe Dessus University Joseph-Fourier and University Pierre-Mendès-Franc

This talk is about some core objects encountered in PLEs that can cause or even foster learning. Literature on PLEs often reports the features every PLE share. The following are worth mentioning among the most frequently reported: personalisation and malleability of the learning environment, its suitability for both formal and informal learning, focus on learner. Literature sometimes also reports the dimensions upon which any PLE can be analysed (Palmér et al., 2009; van Harmelen, 2006) or which processes are fostered in learning (Henri, Charlier & Limpens, 2008). Since reporting these features is sound from a technical viewpoint (even though problematic for some researchers, see Fiedler & Väljataga, 2010), they seldom are psychologically grounded and the question of how and why they can help or even trigger learning can be posed.

This talk will address this question: to which extent a PLE can mimic some core activities involved in teaching, and through which functions or objects? In so doing, the view is not purely technical or functional but psychological. In a nutshell, a PLE that fosters learning enables learners:1/ to be engaged in several activity loops whose main goal is exhibiting some material for learning purposes,2/ in so doing, to realize explicitly or more implicitly, the gap between their actual state (epistemic or social) and their expected state (e.g., what what remains to be learned, with whom to interact);3/ in parallel, to have the opportunity to contradict (or at least negotiate) the feedback if it appears to be non-optimal, either from an epistemic or social viewpoint.

The very specific combination and learners’ involvement or awareness on these three objects fosters learning. The talk is threefold: the presentation in more depth of the three objects, the illustration of these notions through some systems designed in our lab, and the listing of design principles for new PLEs to emerge from this view (Dessus, 2009). Beyond the explosion of PLE features, due to ever-growing research progresses lies the problem of their complexity and possible non-use (Norman, 2011). Grounding the design and development of PLEs with psychology-oriented principles may prevent this problem.

 
KMi Seminars
 

Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.