Towards a social learning space for open educational resources

This chapter examines the meaning of ‘open’ in terms of tools, resources and education, and goes on to explore the association between open approaches to education and the development of online social learning. It considers why this form of learning is emerging so strongly at this point, what its underlying principles are, and how it can be defined. Openness is identified as one of the motivating rationales for a social media space tuned for learning, called SocialLearn, which is currently being trialed at The Open University in the UK. SocialLearn has been designed to support online social learning by helping users to clarify their intention, ground their learning and engage in learning conversations. The emerging design concept and implementation are described here, with a focus on what personalization means in this context, and on how learning analytics could be used to provide different types of recommendation that support learning

Ludic Approaches to Teaching and Learning

Ludic approaches to the everyday tasks faced in higher education have become a receptacle for individuality, creativity, and the acknowledgement of the value of individual thought processes. Thoughts, meanings, and emotions are not just an embedded part of or neatly contained within people; rather they exist as connectors within and between human individualities as part of wider collective aims, values, and experience. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an insight into how ludic approaches to learning and teaching have the capacity to facilitate the emotional self at work in the context of higher education. An insight into the use of the Lego Serious Play method is used in illustrating how gamification can impact upon processes of critical introspection and reflexivity