Harnessing the power of social and participatory media

Humans are fundamentally social beings; we learn and develop through dialogue and interaction with others. Today's digital landscape offers a rich variety of ways in which we can communicate and collaborate with others. In other words, ‘we-learning’ the theme of this year's ICEM conference is now a reality. The talk will consider how technologies can be used to promote different pedagogical approaches and will argue that the ways in which we interact with others is fundamentally changing. Social and participatory media mean that learners today are part of a distributed, global network of peers, engaging in collective intelligence, distributed cognition and trans-media navigation. Teachers need to adopt new approaches to design which harness the affordances of technologies, to create more engaging learning interventions that are pedagogical informed and that promote creativity and innovation through social learning.