Teaching Crowds: Learning and Social Media

Abstract

Distance education is the fastest-growing mode of both formal and informal teaching, training, and learning.It is multi-faceted in nature, encompassing e-learning and mobile learning, as well as immersive learning environments.Issues in Distance Education presents recent research results and offers informative and accessible overviews, analyses, and explorations of current topics and concerns and the technologies employed in distance education.Each volume focuses on critical questions and emerging trends, while also situating these developments within the historical evolution of distance education as a specialized mode of instruction.The series is aimed at a wide group of readers, including teachers, trainers, administrators, researchers, and students.Preface xv in fact tend to subvert traditional, institution-based approaches to learning.As will become clear, social software opens up possibilities for learning that do not sit neatly within a traditional educational context.Such unconventional learning, which often takes place far beyond institutional walls, in turn raises critically important questions surrounding equity and accreditation-how to recognize the legitimacy of such learning.If we sometimes seem to paint a rosy picture of the potential of social software, remember that we are often describing what is possible given state-of-the-art tools and methods of systems design.We are also aware of the irony of discussing revolutionary changes in communications cyberspace in the form of a book, even though many readers will view this text on a computer screen or on a mobile device such as a tablet.Like the subjects we explore, this book is caught in the flux of shifting paradigms, rooted at once in the past, present, and future.At the same time, because Athabasca University Press is a fully open access publisher, this book will be available not only for purchase, in both print and epub format, but also as standard PDFs that can be downloaded for free at www.aupress.ca.We wanted to ensure that the book would be disseminated as widely as possible and that no one would be prevented from reading it by financial constraints, and we thank Athabasca University Press for providing us with this opportunity.We hope that, in the spirit of open scholarship, you will blog about, tweet, and otherwise share your reactions to the text with the online sets, nets, and groups to which you belong, and thus become a part of the crowd that teaches and a teacher of the crowd.To help support such social learning we encourage you to visit http://teachingcrowds.ca,where you will find further opportunities to explore, discuss, and develop the ideas presented here, as well as other resources that we hope you will find useful.