Dr Saunders’ (yes that’s Shirley from UTS) article “Social Psychology of Adult Learning” makes interesting reading for on line learners from p 39 on.
She says if the task is complex people learn better through cooperation. She also points out that we tend to learn better from people who know a bit more, but not too much more, than we do.
This ties in with the concept of “bricolage” that Sealy Brown spoke about in his earlier paper (1999). We adopt bits of existing material as our own new knowledge. Clearly it is going to be more likely that we adopt and adapt pieces that are only a little way ahead of where we are. If they are too far ahead we won’t understand them.
Shirley’s article (this is a blog post, I’ll academic reference for the assignment) also says [if we are asked to] “perform in front of others then … [the others] … will be using the performance to evaluate their own ability”.
Tags: cooperation V competition, on-line, social learning
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