SOCIAL LEARNING IN THE AGE OF UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING. HOW SOCIAL COMPUTING IS CHANGING THE LEARNING

In the Digital Age the information is the most valuable asset available and it changes quickly due to the development of new media and new interactions. The learning is an exchange of information and it is closely connected with knowledge. In this paper we talk about the new kind of learning characterized by two global trends that affects the knowledge: the social use of web technologies and the use of mobile device.
We observe how social computing changes the learning space, the interaction and fruition, the proximity and the affordances for computation.
Relevant mutation is about new social use of technologies.
It’s about a new kind of behaviour people have in using web and tools to create and share the information.
Social computing refers to systems that enable processing, gathering, representing, sharing and disseminating information on the web. It is a general trend about behaviour and not technology, moving the focus toward people.

We have many changes about knowledge, particularly in learning. Social computing in learning involves mostly digital natives: they go from content to another, scanning results for useful ones to insert in personal learning environment. It involves a transformation from a culture based on receiving and transferring to a new one based on social making meanings.
In learning we observe important outcomes due to social computing:
- Engagement: for students motivation;
- Participation: for mediated global relationship in peer communities;
- Design for website and repositories: facilitating participation and having better affordance for share educational contents.
Social learning aspires to be rewarding for all so that everyone could be happy to learn in a smart way. It is possible making it game-like; encouraging study with real time feedback, with rules not too rigid; connecting outcomes and success in the peer community and creating a system for reliable credentials.
Social computing in learning seems to be composed by four dimensions:
- Time, for the real time interaction;
- Space, for working in the same peer-place;
- People, for linking a lot of individuals;
- Contents, for creating a kind of lifestream.
In our university for the course of “Science Communication” we create a blog, www.leparoledellascienza.org where every student share own audio file about a scientific problem. Students study in deep the matter, interview an expert, create and share the final content. The so created contents are not only matter for the exam, but they become pedagogical contents available for other students. Every student becomes teacher for others in a continuous updating.
Learning is so characterized by openness, in a personal learning environments (PLE) characterized by flexibility, modularity and intercreativity.

This extended learning environment, where the knowledge emerges from the conversation and not from monologue, is now linked to a kind of ubiquitous computing. It is a trend based on mobile computation, wireless technologies and social relationship, which are changing the pedagogical interaction between students, teachers and the environment. We are going to observe a lot of changes in pedagogical methodologies and in the possibilities to use new device for a new kind of learning not limited to formal tasks.