Toward Social Learning Environments

We are teaching a new generation of students, cradled in technologies, communication and abundance of information. The implications are that we need to focus the design of learning technologies to support social learning in context. Instead of designing technologies that ldquoteachrdquo the learner, the new social learning technologies will perform three main roles: 1) support the learner in finding the right content (right for the context, for the particular learner, for the specific purpose of the learner, right pedagogically); 2) support learners to connect with the right people (again right for the context, learner, purpose, educational goal etc.), and 3) motivate/incentivize people to learn. In the pursuit of such environments, new areas of sciences become relevant as a source of methods and techniques: social psychology, economic/game theory, multi-agent systems. The paper illustrates how social learning technologies can be designed using some existing and emerging technologies: ontologies vs. social tagging, exploratory search, collaborative vs. self-managed social recommendations, trust and reputation mechanisms, mechanism design and social visualization.