Week Five: Naturally Social

This week we had three discussion sections under our group, but no one participated in the Expert Q & A. I wonder why that is. I participated in the other two, but was most intrigued and interested in the first. The first discussion, “Where’s the ‘social’ in self-paced instruction?,” really got me to thinking about what is social and how we can and should incorporate it into eLearning.

Our group stated out with a debate on if our learning experience stories were self-paced and what does self-paced mean. Even after this discussion, I believe if a student or learner is choosing there own deadlines and timing to work on the learning, then it is self-paced, although not all the rest of the group agreed, I think we could see each other’s points.

Since I was most familiar with my own story and I feel it is 100% self-paced, I wanted to get it out there and I it was my best contribution to the group.

"There is no schedule for us. And I do feel a lot of our learning experiences fit this…yes, there were goals of when it was to be don, but those time-constraints were chosen by the learner, no a teacher.”

This statement explained the thinking of our learning experiences being self-paced and gave Joni an opportunity to re-direct the conversation back to social. (Which I did notice Joni was more involved with our discussion this week and asked more questions to direct where we were going, but this made for a more involved discussion.)

We discussed if social can be a simulation of social or if it has to be true, human-human interaction. I think the majority of the people discussing eventually felt that as long as the person is having a social dialogue (whether that be on paper, computer, with themselves or others) it is social.

Phillip ended our conversation with what I thought was the best point of anyone. In a nut shell he said, we shouldn’t get too wrapped up in incorporating social interaction because most of the time it will happen naturally.

This really hit home for me because in all my schooling, teachers have tried to force me to be social. When it is forced I tend to resist and feel uncomfortable and remember more how I didn’t like the experience, than what I was actually learning. On the other hand, two subjects that I never thought I would enjoy – Nutrition (classroom based) and Meteorology (online based) – I found that my social interactions came from being excited about the content, being able to apply it to my life and then I shared it all the time with my family and friends. This was a positive social experience and had little do to with the instructor forcing it upon me.