Educational Informatics Systems: Social Approaches

Abstract

This chapter concentrates on a number of educational informatics systems that focus explicitly on social, collaborative, and community-based aspects of learning. These aspects arguably align better with the social and knowledge creation perspectives on learning introduced in Chapter III. In some ways, the systems presented here bring into relief some of the limitations of the relatively individual-focused approaches introduced in the previous chapter. Ultimately, however, educational informatics is essentially a social collaborative enterprise, since one of its key defining features is a concern with the discovery, sharing and reuse of learning resources within and between learning communities. The difference between systems included in this and the previous chapter is relative rather than absolute, relating to the degree of emphasis on collaborative features built into the systems.