Deepening e-Learning through Social-Collaborative Intelligence

Abstract

Traditional education promotes the self as it seeks to encourage learners to acquire knowledge and cultivate individual cognition through memorization and the application of procedures to achieve expected answers. Collaboration in class has been sporadically practiced when major tasks require necessary group-work and coordinated team efforts with clear objectives to instill a sense of collaboration within learners in preparation for demands of the workplace. In this paper we present a case study of how we engage graduate students through new media within our online environment, whereby, instead of memory work they focus their evidentiary work as knowledge artefacts created through digital media. We encourage and value the learners’ knowledge representations assembled in the form of rich, multimodal sources employing any of the available media.