We’ll be at a symposium at The Open University today, organised by the Open Systems Research Group. This event will bring together people at the university with an interest in, and different perspectives on, social learning as an area of interest to researchers and designers from multiple fields, including education, governance and technology.

Simon Buckingham Shum will be introducing an emerging suite of social learning technologies*, Kevin Collins will be considering international perspectives on social learning, Kasia Kozinska  will examine social learning in the context of OpenLearn, Chris Blackmore will focus on social learning systems and communities of practice and Joe Corneli will discuss the crowdsourcing of education. The event will end with a discussion on the future of social learning at the university.

Resources and discussion relating to the event are already appearing on a related cloudscape in Cloudworks, which is open to everyone.

Twitter hashtag for the social learning symposium – #SLsym

UPDATE:

Just out… the Open U’s new reader on Social Learning Systems & Communities of Practice by OSRG’s Chris Blackmore 🙂

*This talk gives a rapid overview of the range of social learning technologies emerging from various R&D projects.

An Emerging Suite of Social Learning Technologies

Conversations from this very stimulating afternoon are now seeded to explore how the deep understanding of social learning coming from research across a range of authentic f2f contexts (e.g. in OSRG), helps us derive software requirements for online tools. Practising what we preach, the live deployment of some of the tools during the symposium is shown in the Cloudworks space accompanying our session.