Crowd Learning: Innovative Harnessing the Knowledge and Potential of People

Background

Historically, learning was almost always linked with the crowd, from methods and tools, into customs and people’s culture (Dron & Anderson, 2014). In recent times in the 21^st Century, there is an increasing convergence of all forms of communication and learning using a digital platforms based on networks. The crowd learning as the element of social software existed for many years and was defined as “software that supports group interaction” (Shriky, 2003). Nowadays the Internet with its possibilities gained the capacity for human interaction and decision-making process. In theory there are three main types of interactions: one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many. There is a specific need of taking into account also other types of different forms of social software that aggregates interaction, i.e. many-to-one, the type of the synchronous and asynchronous communication that can transform into direct and indirect interactions. The comparison of the forms of social software, that are elements of crowd learning are listed in the Table 1 (Arthur, 2009).