IDENTIFYING "CONNECTIVISM" IN ONLINE PERSONAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS IN STUDENT ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKING IN THEIR HIGHER EDUCATION STUDIES

This presentation reports on early findings in relation to a study of the how social networking technologies were used by a group of teachers in training to organise their studies in relation to informal and formal learning tasks.

Using George Siemens (2005) theory of "connectivism" a group of higher education students in Australia were encouraged to use social networking technologies to communicate between peers so as to assist in organising both their personal study especially in relation to informal and formal learning tasks and to share as well as comment on the ideas and posting of their peers in relation to the general findings and observations in undertaking these formal and informal learning tasks,

Personal online learning environments such as blogs and RSS feed aggregators were used as online repositories of personal observations were made available to others for comment, connect their own environments to, and make suggestion that mutually assisted the development of outcomes around the common formal and informal tasks,

The study reports on the observed use of these various social software and digital personal learning spaces under a set of categories that are designed to identify some of the learning approaches that connectivism elaborates as present in this form of online learning.

The study particularly focused on the extent to which the learners using these systems relied upon the technologies and/or the personal or social networks to develop positions in relation to the task set. The initial findings have been that a categorisation of postings of participants and their use of personal learning spaces and technologies indicated that the building of knowledge in response to tasks could sometimes observed in personal network spaces and that cooperative and collaborative tasks were not always lead to the most productive learning outcomes.