Formal learning takes place in classrooms, using organizationally owned assets and technologies. Social Learning takes place beyond classrooms -- facilitated by collaborative technologies, it involves learners creating assets, and collaboratively narrating their learning. Despite being outside classrooms, it can still be a guided, reflective, journey, taken over time, with application into the real world of the learner. Social Learning is a distributed, co-creative, and highly dynamic, learning design methodology, where extensive ‘sense making’ takes place within a community. The design of effective Scaffolded Social Learning maps out specific activities, techniques, and opportunities to be leveraged by the learner. Central is the notion of an effective ‘Learning Community’: not simply a space, but a high functioning entity, providing knowledge, context, challenge, and support to individual learners.
In this paper, we will consider ‘Engaged Social Learning Communities’ as holding a specific capability to support learning effectiveness. We consider mechanisms of community formation, explore what can be done to practically assist in this formation stage, and how ‘formation’ carries later implications for ‘effectiveness’. To do this, we consider eight elements that contribute to the effectiveness:
1. Rituals of engagement: how members join a community.
2. Tribes and Trust: the granular social structure of a learning community.
3. Identity and ownership: how communities gain engagement through identity and self-determination.
4. Rules and Consequence: implicit vs explicit rules, and the ownership of consequence.
5. Totems and Tokens: artifacts of membership, and trading in the reputation economy.
6. Interconnectivity: between individuals, and diagonally through segregated social structures.
7. Segmentation of spaces: learning, rehearsal, and performance.
8. Currencies of Vulnerability, Gratitude, Reputation, and Reward.
Understanding each of these gives us a stronger foundation for design. We will share case studies and research exploring how these are used in practice in a range of international Organizations.