Watching apps is a fun pastime, and I just noticed an article about funding for Snapchat in Forbes. While I downloaded the app, I don’t actually use the app. I have noticed that Congressman Beto O’Rourke in El Paso asked for followers on Snapchat. Perhaps something for mellenials, but I do like to keep up to date.
In March, Snapchat unveiled a major overhaul of its chat platform that allows users to easily skip between video or audio calling, texting, sending photos, drawings and stickers in a continuous interaction with a friend.
Social Media is one core element of learning online that we call the “Learning Community”.
Paradoxically, the freedom to connect with anyone anywhere anytime tends to destroy boundaries that foster community. IOW, we really don’t understand the new forms of relationship, which can establish structure, or supersede structure.
Education has been based on semi permanent structures…institutions that put learners in a specific place….buidlings, teachers, and peers are organized to contain and define.
Today, it’s as if all the props that define have been made provisional. Can we do without them, lift them up and away like scenery in a theater? We don’t yet know which props really help us learn, and which get in the way.
Or to put it another way, is it a good thing that members of a learning community can drift outside its boundaries at any time, and include “outsiders”? OR should social media put up a “wall” defining the DLE group, which then enables meaningful collaboration?
If one needs a smaller group within the universal group, which seems to be one structure being used…how strong should the defining walls of a group be? How confining?
Maybe a learning community has to somehow find its niche within one of the larger, generalist apps and/or platforms without losing the “identity” and “practicality” of the smaller group. MOOCs have this challenge, and there’s probably a study that discusses how that’s been done well, and not so well.
Boundaries and structures seem very abstract, but they play important roles in learning process. We would like to know what forms activate human potential best. Adaptable creatures that we are, we change to fit our technology, creating a new civilization based on the automobile for example.
Now we are consciously or unconsciously changing to fit the mobile communication age. But what we don’t want to lose sight of, is that we are the ones who can control important aspects of technology, and adapt it to our needs, rather than vice versa. If only we knew how to do that.
We’re working on it.