Social Learning Experiences Research Articles

Seeing with the Blind: Teaching and Learning with Differently-Abled Students

This paper is situated at the junction of feminist pedagogy and critical disability theory and draws from the insights gained from interviews with visually impaired students as part of a project on 'body', learning and 'disability theory'. The paper attempts to bring into mainstream discussion, tertiary teaching amongst the visually impaired, compelling us to rethink their corporeality within our classes. The paper works through the methodological approach of narrative analysis and suggests that teaching the visually impaired calls for recognition of a more specific kind of productive pedagogy that works to embrace the (social) learning experiences of this category of student. While critical disability theory speaks to the political insights and issues of power (or lack thereof) within contexts of material and social impairment, feminist pedagogy speaks to a democratic (co)creation of knowledge, and participatory teaching and learning in classrooms that we seek to construct as being inclusive.

Measurement Issues: Assessing language skills in young children.

Language and communication skills are central to children's ability to engage in social relationships and access learning experiences. This paper identifies issues which practitioners and researchers should consider when assessing language skills. A range of current language assessments is reviewed. Current screening measures do not meet psychometric prerequisites to identify language problems. There are significant challenges in the interpretation of language assessments, where socioeconomic status, language status and dialect, hearing impairment and test characteristics impact results. Psychometrically sound assessments of language are an essential component of developing effective and efficient interventions. The language trajectories of preschool children vary substantially; current screening measures have significant limitations. Composite measures of language performance are better indicators of language problems and disorders than single measures of component skills.

Revisiting the Translator’s Visibility: Does Visibility Bring Rewards?

There has been a huge revival of interest in the role of translators and their visibility. Some Translation Studies scholars have mobilized French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theorical concepts of field, habitus and capital to carry out empirical research studies in an attempt to understand how translators or interpreters perceive their roles and what kind of capital they pursue. This article presents part of the findings from a large empirical study in which quantitative and qualitative approaches are combined in an attempt to carry out a thorough investigation of translators’ visibility, understood as the capacity to communicate directly with clients and/or end-users. The present article reports on the quantitative analysis of the relationship between translator’s visibility and the amount of capital that they say they receive. The analysis is based on 193 Chinese translators in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao. The findings suggest that visibility is rewarding in terms of social exchanges and learning experience, but not in terms of pay and prestige. In addition, the analysis shows that some social variables including sex, level of education, region that the translator lives in, the translator’s major field of study and the time spent on translation are not related to visibility or capital received. Meanwhile, the appearance of the translator’s name on translations is significantly related to the capital received.

When Failing doesn’t Matter: A Narrative Inquiry into the Social Work Practice Learning Experiences of Black African Students in England

This paper reports the findings of a small-scale empirical study into the practice learning experiences of black African students of social work in England. Undertaken in the form of a pilot study, the findings reveal that practice learning experiences can be beneficial in enhancing skills and knowledge but can also cause distress, lower self-esteem and result in students feeling discriminated against. For participants, failing their practice learning appeared to be a far more pleasant outcome than undergoing the levels of disrespect and discrimination they believed they were subjected to on a regular basis during placements. Using elements of the critical race theoretical (CRT) framework, an attempt is made to conceptualise the narratives generated from participant interviews.

Building a Social Framework: Utilising Design/Build to Provide Social Learning Experiences for Architecture Students

In her book, Architecture: The Story of Practice, author Dana Cuff maintains that the social context of architecture—the economic, the interactive, and the political—is as critical to the outcome of a given project as any of its physical properties. The potential importance of these social dimensions in the creation of architecture necessitates an examination of their weight in the academic training of future architects relative to the traditional development of technical proficiency and the nurturing of design skills. This essay argues that the introduction of community-based design/build projects to the curriculum has the ability to supplement key social learning experiences not obtained by the architecture student through traditional courses.

Providing emotion awareness and affective feedback to virtualised collaborative learning scenarios

The enrichment of computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) systems with emotion awareness features (detect emotion patterns and respond affectively) opens a window towards an authentic social interaction and learning experience. In the current paper, we first review prominent emotion theories and models with respect to learning, detection techniques and affective feedback strategies, and then we present a system’s design and implementation that provides collaborators with a usable, web tool for self-reporting of emotions. In response to the user’s emotions, the system activates an animated, virtual assistant that employs expressive faces and synthesised speech to provide affective and task-based feedback. The specific tool was customised and adapted to the virtualised collaborative session (VCS) system for the needs of an experiment that we run in the Open University of Catalonia. The respective results and findings are presented and discussed.

Improving Students' Educational Experience by Harnessing Digital Technology: elgg in the ODL Environment

Given the rising popularity of both open and distance learning (ODL) and social networking tools, it seems logical to merge and harness these two popular technologies with the goal of improving student educational experience. The integration seems to hold tremendous promise for the open and distance learning mode. To reduce the gap in the literature, this study explores the educational benefits of social media tools on distance learners’ perspectives and experiences in an online course taught using elgg (open source social media tool) platforms. To achieve this, the study relied on collecting qualitative and quantitative data from students who were required to use elgg, in addition to LMS, for one semester as part of their coursework. The findings indicated that students enjoyed the social learning experience afforded by the elgg better when compared to LMS to support one another in their distance learning experiences. It was also noted that students, with little experience in social networking and the sharing features on elgg, in most cases, exhibited high involvement in course-related work and graded exercises. Additionally, it was observed that students shared information limited only at the level required by the instruction mode. The study concludes that most students perceived their learning experience was enhanced by their interaction with each other and with the instructors in the elgg. The article ends with a discussion of results and highlighting the areas for future research on the topic.

The Use of Internet-Based Social Media as a Tool in Enhancing Student’s Learning Experiences in Biological Sciences

<p>This study explored the use of social media as a tool in enhancing student’s learning experiences, by using online instruction as a supplement to a face-to-face general education course, such as biological sciences. Survey data were collected from 186 students who were enrolled in a Biological Sciences course. The course was taught in a blended format using Facebook and Edmodo online social networks. A four point Likert scale was used to interpret the data collected. Findings indicated that, when traditional face-to-face instruction was combined with online components, students’ learning was enhanced. Findings from this study indicate that students had better experience, better engagement, and appreciated both the social learning experience gave by the online social network. Results revealed that students through student-student interaction and student-teacher interaction enhance their own experiences and improved their learning ability. The findings were used as bases in developing new practices and methodologies involving social networking tools for learning. Moreover, findings were used to design a blended format syllabus and blended learning guidelines.</p>

Perceived learning experiences regarding Education for sustainable development – within Swedish outdoor education traditions

This article presents results from a Swedish exploratory study investigating perceptions of the learning experiences related to education for sustainable development (ESD) by students 10-12 years old. A comprehensive questionnaire with both open and closed questions asking for the students’ cognitive, emotional, practical, social, and situated learning experiences was developed. The empirical material consists of the responses from 209 students from six schools. The schools were selected to get a variety of both school programs regarding ESD and outdoor education activities. The results reported here reveal relationships between areas of students’ learning experiences, mainly between the cognitive, emotional, and social areas. Comparisons between the schools illustrate different approaches to teaching as well as the students’ diverse perceptions of these practices. The questionnaire developed for the project proved to be a valid instrument for researching the relationships and complexities in ESD learning, thus demonstrating its potential for use in future studies.

Exploring the Antecedents to Learning Continuance in Virtual Worlds

Many education institutes are planning to use virtual worlds to offer distance education programs and to reach potential students globally. However, the success of such programs depends on students’ willingness to use virtual worlds for learning continuously. Students’ learning continuance helps to decrease the drop-out rate of the programs. Motivated thus, this study uses the lenses of the balanced thinking-feelings model and socio-constructivism to model how students’ personal learning and social learning experiences influence virtual world learning continuance. Our results show that the utilitarian and hedonic values are critical to learners’ continuous intention of virtual world learning, and they are influenced by learners’ social learning experiences. Social learning factors are also found to interact with students’ personal learning factors to influence their perceived utilitarian and hedonic values of virtual world learning. The findings provide theoretical implications by integrating information systems theories and education psychology to understand the factors influencing the virtual world learning continuance in a systematic way. The findings also provide educators empirical evidence on what influences users’ learning continuance in virtual worlds.

Policy resistance undermines superspreader vaccination strategies for influenza.

Theoretical models of infection spread on networks predict that targeting vaccination at individuals with a very large number of contacts (superspreaders) can reduce infection incidence by a significant margin. These models generally assume that superspreaders will always agree to be vaccinated. Hence, they cannot capture unintended consequences such as policy resistance, where the behavioral response induced by a new vaccine policy tends to reduce the expected benefits of the policy. Here, we couple a model of influenza transmission on an empirically-based contact network with a psychologically structured model of influenza vaccinating behavior, where individual vaccinating decisions depend on social learning and past experiences of perceived infections, vaccine complications and vaccine failures. We find that policy resistance almost completely undermines the effectiveness of superspreader strategies: the most commonly explored approaches that target a randomly chosen neighbor of an individual, or that preferentially choose neighbors with many contacts, provide at best a relative improvement over their non-targeted counterpart as compared to when behavioral feedbacks are ignored. Increased vaccine coverage in super spreaders is offset by decreased coverage in non-superspreaders, and superspreaders also have a higher rate of perceived vaccine failures on account of being infected more often. Including incentives for vaccination provides modest improvements in outcomes. We conclude that the design of influenza vaccine strategies involving widespread incentive use and/or targeting of superspreaders should account for policy resistance, and mitigate it whenever possible.

Technical Feasibility of a Mobile Context-Aware (Social) Learning Schedule Framework

The purpose of this paper is to show the technical feasibility of implementing their mobile context-aware learning schedule (mCALS) framework as a software application on a mobile device using current technologies, prior to its actual implementation. This process draws a set of compatible mobile and context-aware technologies at present and can be used as a reference point for implementing generic mobile context-aware applications. The authors’ mCALS framework retrieves the learner’s location and available time contexts via the built-in learning schedule (i.e., electronic organizer) on a mobile device. These contexts together with the learner’s learning styles and knowledge level (on a selected topic) are used as the basis for the software application to suggest learning materials that are appropriate for the learner, at the time of usage. This retrieval approach eliminates the use of context-aware technologies and the need to directly request the user to enter context information at the time of usage. The authors develop a fully functional prototype of this framework for learners to plan their individual as well as social learning activities amongst one another to make their individual learning processes collaborative and as a way to enhance individual and social learning experiences.

Intermediate Collaborative Adaptive Management Strategies Build Stakeholder Capacity

Monroe, M. C., R. Plate, and A. Oxarart. 2013. Intermediate collaborative adaptive management strategies build stakeholder capacity. Ecology and Society 18(2): 24. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-05444-180224

Comment Cards 2.0: An Interactive Student Project Using the Internet, the 80/20 Rule, and Checklist Analysis

Given the need for hoteliers to develop real-time tactics for managing their properties' online reputation, this teaching note is intended to provide hospitality educators with a recipe for implementing an effective social media reputation management learning experience for students. The experience described below allows students to become acutely aware of the power of online social networks and the potential effects of user-generated content on hotel operations. The project which is the basis for this note was designed to replicate (albeit on a much smaller scale) the capability of software that analyzes public feedback by using online reviews and social media. Students use readily available technology to obtain user-generated/guest feedback from various social media sources and then create useful recommendations for lodging managers to follow in managing their properties online reputation.

Online social networks as formal learning environments: Learner experiences and activities

<p>While the potential of social networking sites to contribute to educational endeavors is highlighted by researchers and practitioners alike, empirical evidence on the use of such sites for formal online learning is scant. To fill this gap in the literature, we present a case study of learners’ perspectives and experiences in an online course taught using the Elgg online social network. Findings from this study indicate that learners enjoyed and appreciated both the social learning experience afforded by the online social network and supported one another in their learning, enhancing their own and other students’ experiences. Conversely, results also indicate that students limited their participation to course-related and graded activities, exhibiting little use of social networking and sharing. Additionally, learners needed support in managing the expanded amount of information available to them and devised strategies and “workarounds” to manage their time and participation.<br /><strong></strong></p>

Transforming education in South Africa: comparative perceptions of a South African social work learning experience

The state of tertiary education in South Africa is not adequately meeting the needs of its populace. The system in place does not effectively nor appropriately target the racial group of students which forms the democratic majority. This paper portrays the reasons why these students are not succeeding on the basis of a mismatch between their preparation at secondary level and their required or perceived level at a tertiary standard. This lack of responsiveness and adaptiveness shown by the pedagogical system to the effects of poverty and disadvantage on youth entering the tertiary system indicates a potential unintended bias towards students of higher socio-economic standing. This is demonstrated through a case example of social work students underperforming on a written assignment at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. The article further contrasts the similarity and important differences between the American and the South African socio-educational contexts to illustrate the differences in approach needed within the South African example in order to examine American methods in dealing with similar problems when facing the integration and incorporation of students from differing backgrounds. It discusses the appropriateness of these methods in a South African context, as well as in the universal context of a local population.

Development of the breast milk expression experience measure

Exclusive breastfeeding provides optimal nutrition through 6 months. Recent research has shown that milk expression may affect breastfeeding duration. A woman's experience with milk expression might mediate the effect of milk expression on breastfeeding duration. The objective of this study was to develop a measure to evaluate women's experiences of expressing milk. Based on the available literature, we developed a brief measure of the Breast Milk Expression Experience (BMEE) assessing three dimensions: (1) social support for milk expression; (2) ease of learning how to express milk; and (3) personal experiences of milk expression. All items used 1-5 Likert scales, with higher scores indicating better experiences. We administered the items immediately after expression to 68 mothers who expressed milk post-partum. We evaluated this measure for reliability using Cronbach's alpha. Mothers completing the BMEE were 57% primiparous with 75% vaginal births. The BMEE demonstrated appropriate reliability with a Cronbach's alpha of 0.703 for the summary index and 0.719-0.763 for social support, learning experience and personal experience subscales. The BMEE also indicated good predictive validity; of the six mothers who had a mean score <3 on the 11-item scale post-partum, two (33.3%) were expressing breast milk at 1 month, compared with 37 (80.4%) of the 46 mothers who had a mean score ≥3 on the 11-item scale post-partum (P = 0.012). The BMEE is a promising measure of milk expression experience in this population. Use of this measure may allow improved understanding of women's experiences expressing milk.

The role of education and intellectual activity on cognition.

Although educational attainment has been consistently related to cognition in adulthood, the mechanisms are still unclear. Early education, and other social learning experiences, may provide the skills, knowledge, and interest to pursue intellectual challenges across the life course. Therefore, cognition in adulthood might reflect continued engagement with cognitively complex environments. Using baseline data from the Baltimore Experience Corps Trial, multiple mediation models were applied to examine the combined and unique contributions of intellectual, social, physical, creative, and passive lifestyle activities on the relationship between education and cognition. Separate models were tested for each cognitive outcome (i.e., reading ability, processing speed, memory). With the exception of memory tasks, findings suggest that education-cognition relations are partially explained by frequent participation in intellectual activities. The association between education and cognition was not completely eliminated, however, suggesting that other factors may drive these associations.

Social anxiety modulates amygdala activation during social conditioning

Aversive social learning experiences might play a significant role in the aetiology of social anxiety disorder. Therefore, we investigated emotional learning and unlearning processes in healthy humans using a social conditioning paradigm. Forty-nine healthy subjects participated in a 2-day fMRI differential conditioning protocol. Acquisition and extinction were conducted on Day 1 and extinction recall on Day 2. BOLD responses, ratings and skin conductance responses were collected. Our data indicate successful conditioning and extinction on the neural and subjective level. As a main result, we observed a positive correlation of social anxiety and conditioning responses on the subjective level (valence and fear) as well as on the neural level with significant CS(+)/CS(-) differentiation in the left amygdala and the left hippocampus. Further, significant CS(+)/CS(-) differentiation in the left amygdala was found during extinction and was associated with lower scores in social anxiety. During extinction recall, we found a tendentially negative correlation of social anxiety and CS(+)/CS(-) differentiation in the vmPFC. In sum, we were able to show that social anxiety is related to conditionability with socially threatening stimuli. This could point to an important aspect in the aetiology of social anxiety disorder.

Assessing student learning by way of drama and visual art: A semiotic mix in a course on cognitive development

Abstract This article describes an atypical multimodal approach to assessment in a pre-service teacher education course. The author argues that many students enter programmes at South African universities with an underdeveloped competence in academic English. She argues that although they are learning English as an academic language, their learning is evaluated in written language via summative assessments that require verbal fluency. In this article the author reports on the use of a semiotic mix of drama and visual art as well as social learning experiences, as alternative ways to assess students’ learning. Components of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) are put forward as a theoretical framework for the course and assessment design, focusing on the flexibility of presentation and student engagement, and support for students who are still struggling with English academic language proficiency. The significance of the article lies in the analysis of the outcome of the multimodal approach to assessment, by presenting examples of students’ work and their response to this multimodal manner of conducting assessment. The author concludes that students could draw on atypical modes to express what they have learnt, since they have, initially, an opportunity to explore other forms of representation while they are still getting acquainted with academic language.