Social Computing and the Sustainable Support of Learning Communities

by Ms Alannah Fitzgerald, Mr Shakib Ahsan, Mr Edward Clement Bethal

This paper will discuss issues in designing community and social spaces for NGO micro credit workers and interested parties who utilize information and communication technologies. A project environment, 'Overcoming Poverty', will be presented where the common learning goal is to access and engage with micro credit resources (experts, cases, resources) and tasks (reflective, interactive, and creative) designed to develop capacity building. A wider sense of the network that surrounds capacity building throughout different contexts will also be explored. In particular, this paper will be of interest to practitioners and researchers interested in designing constructivist learning environments, as well as managers who are involved in supporting, facilitating, and connecting learning communities.

As can be expected certain problems exist in developing training initiatives for capacity building. These include:

(1) training personnel with varying organizational goals and epistemological beliefs about what is understood by poverty, development, and empowerment and what these understandings signify across different contexts
(2) finding and maintaining development opportunities in resource depleted economies
(3) educating those people currently living in poverty about quality of life as a means to scripting a more sustainable future for themselves

Supporting learning and performance through (a) informal non-training and (b) formal training solutions is at the core of the practice of educational technology. Through the emergence of pervasive social computing tools that feature in the 'Overcoming Poverty' project environment (for example, open source learning course management systems, blogging, vlogging and wiki spaces), a third area is co-emerging: the creation, design, and sustainable support of learning communities. Moving beyond the usual vagaries of 'communities of practice', learning technologies for the social network generation bring about the existence of a portable collective identity that can be transferred from locality to locality, taking shape in different forms of volunteer activity across the divides of region, class, gender, and citizenship.

In designing and supporting learning communities, the emphasis is to support people in their self-chosen initiatives of learning and their building of new social networks while strengthening their existing ones. In one sense our project space is competing with other usenet (news) groups who maintain informal online communities of practice for volunteers working in the area of micro credit. However, we see our space as complementing existing spaces wherein resources for capacity building can be managed through the use of interconnected open source software with other volunteers in the greater learning community.

This paper will finish by showcasing learning examples, both successful and unsuccessful, from the 'Overcoming Poverty' network whereby learners have been repeatedly exposed to ambiguous and complex problems found in cases supplied by volunteers via text-based blogs and video-based vlogs. During case analysis, guiding questions found in the project environment encourage learners to face risks and move toward specific action enabling them to cope with the circumstances that may challenge them in their future practice as volunteers. Case-based reasoning which develops tolerance for ambiguity and the ability to make timely and effective decisions despite incomplete information, unclear problems, and uncertain consequences will also be presented.

ID Number: 1219

Date: Tuesday, 4th September 2007

Time: 1415

Location: Law and Social Sciences Building, Room B62

Theme: Learning and internationalism

Presentation: ALT_C_2007_Presentation_AF.ppt (The file which you can access from this link is the responsibility of the author of the Abstract to which the file relates, not ALT.