All of us

"Maybe one day we'll look back on this period of the internet as our caveman era"

 Technology can be baffling and difficult to navigate, but we have the resources of billions – those who came before and those around us now.  For those lucky ones who have kids or grandkids, you’ve got someone to set your brand spanking new DVD v.2.0 player with all the bells and whistles and a remote control designed by NASA to record Big Fat Gypsy Weddings for you.  For the rest of us, we might go online and Google “How do I programme my DVD Megamaxxx v.2.0 player to record Big Fat Gypsy Weddings?”  Hopefully Google will direct us to a useful site.

First, we need to formulate the questions.  Chances are that someone will come along soon to answer them.  Chances are that there will be someone else out there with questions you or I can answer for them.  We live in an ever-widening society with a deep pool of overlapping strengths and knowledge that can be transmitted symbolically down and across generations and cultures.  Our complex systems of flexibility and cooperation open up routes closed to other creatures.

As humans, we’re apes who have taken a blueprint of community (hierarchy and cooperation) to dizzying heights.  Society is synergistic: the combined strengths of societal units can amount to more than the sum of their individual parts.  Society as an evolutionarily stable strategy isn’t endemic to humans, but includes examples of insects, birds and other mammals such as dolphins and elephants.  But with our linguistic capabilities that are not limited to living entities, we have overcome certain temporal limitations. Yes, we’ve done some pretty horrific things with our societal tinkerings (anyone for World War III or another round of us-versus-them genocide?), but looking at it positively, we can see that we have the chance to work together to lift our social networks up by the bootstraps to new heights. (Clippinger, n.d.)

This increasingly deepening understanding of human organisation underlines the importance of community at every level.  Some of us are happy working out problems on our own, but at some point we are likely to require information from another person, be it through a pamphlet, a colleague, a chat over the fence with the next door neighbour or a radio emergency broadcast.  Students require a large amount of social support, whether it comes from a tutor, a book or a fellow student, but despite the strengths of distance learning (eg student-centredness and flexibility), the lack of a face-to-face social setting can stifle confidence, reduce motivation and raise dropout rates (reviewed in Galusha, n.d.).

Digital literacy is, as Gillen and Barton (2009) stress, socially situated, especially given the collaborative aspect of Web 2.0 technologies (An and Williams, 2010). Many learners may not acquire the basic tools necessary to take advantage of this increasingly social medium from formal schooling situations, however.  While some students may be confident enough in developing their own digital literacy outside of a formal educational setting, enough to overcome obstacles such as low motivation, alienation and lack of feedback, what about those who fall behind in the technology from issues such as technological anxiety or economic stress? (Galusha, n.d.; Saadé and Kira, 2009; Winterwood, 2010.)  How can we, as members of a vast tribe, contact and support others we may never meet in the flesh via technology?

So here is one question, as posed by yours truly in the 169.005 paper:

“How can learners develop social support networks for distance learning of LLN?”

I’ll look at answers to this question in an upcoming blog.