When I started this blog, I wondered if I should call it a personal learning environment or a social learning environment. To me, ‘personal’ sounds a bit isolated but ‘social’ seems too obvious so I left out both and trimmed it back to ‘a learning environment’. However there remains an interesting tension between the personal and social aspects of any learning technology we might use or be planning to build.
Crysta Metcalf, an anthropologist working for Motorola, has talked about how we tend to focus on the relationship of the user to the technology when, in fact, the goal of any social tech is to assist the link between users; the technology should be transparent so the people can see each other and connect. She puts it very well:
…designing for sociability means thinking about how people experience each other through the technological medium, not just thinking about how they experience the technology. The emphasis is on the human-to-human relationship, not the human-to-technology relationship. This is a crucial difference in design focus. It means designing for an experience between people.
It was on Joshua Porter’s excellent design site, Bokardo, that I first read Metcalf. Porter understands the tug between personal and social and he regularly reminds his readers that “personal value precedes network value”. If the technology doesn’t provide some obvious and immediate benefit to the user – the single user – then he or she won’t use it. A comment to one of Joshua’s posts makes the useful point that there’s a temporal aspect to the relationship. Personal use is the fuse that must get lit in order for there to be the subsequent social fireworks.
The example Joshua uses is del.icio.us. People started using the site because it was a better place to store bookmarks, especially if you were working on several computers. The social value grew from the fact that if you and I share some similar interests and can see each other’s favorites, it’s quite possible that we can learn some links from each other. My bookmark is a way to improve my memory process, my personal record of sites I’ve been to and want to remember. Your bookmark stored for all to see on del.icio.us is a social link to what I might discover by knowing your links, and, perhaps, knowing you. With delicious, the rule is, no storage, no glory.
Metcalf’s point, however, still stands: How does the structure and performance of del.icio.us foster the link between me and you? Or does it simply suggest a possible social connection without doing anything to make that bond dynamic and productive? Whatever we can do to improve the dynamism will help but the evaluation of the personal and the social will be different. A system to store bookmarks will be judged for its use value and pretty well the only issue is control. A system to store and display links to other people’s favourite sites will face a more complicated assessment. First, it must work and be useful; second, it should enhance your presence and my presence - awareness will be as important as control.
For those of us interested in online learning, designing awareness is going to be critically important. The teacher in a learning environemnt - if there is one - needs to be aware of the learners and what they doing, how they are interacting. But much more important is the motivation of learners that can be generated if we can see each other through all the technological mumbo-jumbo that is necessarily between us. For this reason, I think the new user-interface environments such as Adobe’s AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight are going to be essential to the kind of environments we want to build.
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