Content Aggregation and Knowledge Sharing in a

Personal Learning Environment: Serendipitous and Emergent Learning in

Open Online Networks

Mohsen Saadatmand, Kristiina KumpulainenUniversity of Helsinki

Finland

First of all!I like …

Don’t you?www.blog.schoox.com www.govloop.com

Social Media Landscape

http://tinyurl.com/cvthgcg

The abundance and the learner’s choice! Characteristics of disruptive technologies (Conole 2012)

No central ownership

Ecology of abundance

Personalized digital learning environment

www.disruptive-tech.com

Pedagogy of Abundance

(Weller 2011)

New culture of learning (Thomas & Brown 2011)

Changing learning environments

http://tinyurl.com/99peo8c http://challengefuture.org/news/291

Personal Learning Environment (PLE)

A combination of social media-enabled systems, applications and services which help learner to take control of their learning by using them for aggregating, manipulating, creating digital contents and learning artifacts and sharing them with others.

The Study

• Tools and services used by participants in open online courses for aggregating contents and sharing knowledge as part of their PLEs

• Likelihood of serendipitous learning and emergent learning in the process of seeking, aggregating and sharing contents using various web 2.0 tools and services?

Online Ethnography

Auto-ethnography

Participants

MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses)

• Online survey

• Online semi-structured interviewing

• Online public data (blogs, FB groups)

• Participant observation

Data

access

aggregate

create

connect

share annotate

bookmark APIs

widgets

Mash-up Tools and Services

(Kop, 2012)

Semantic principles of learning in networks:

•Openness

•Connectedness

•Diversity Unexpected discoveries, by accident and sagacity

http://www.bethkanter.org/nten-curation/

The unanticipated benefits of content aggregation

• searching for knowledge may happen by chance, or as a by-product of the main task• surprising information and unexpected social relationships can lead to meaningful learning• unexpected realization of hidden, seemingly unrelated connections or analogies for learning and research

(Buchem, 2010)

Emergence and unexpected connections

Emergent learning (Williams et al. 2011)

• Self-organizing agents interact freely and openly• Unpredictable and unprecedented• Open and distributed • Interactivity and connectivity

www.ideonexus.com

Conclusions

• Unanticipated benefits of content aggregation and curation

• Openness and connectedness are important

• Abundance and disruptiveness may foster serendipitous learning

• Serendipity as a great source for learning

• Need for more research to explore the value of serendipty for learning

Questions, Comments

Mohsen Saadatmand

Twitter: @saadat_m

saadatmand.m@gmail.comwww.saadatm.com