Edu-leaders

Adecade has passed since the well known American writer and speaker on learning and education, Marc Prensky famously said “Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our education system was designed to teach ,” in his essay Digital Immigrants, Digital Natives. This statement rings true even today. As the global network of people becomes instrumented, interconnected and intelligent, dramatic shifts are taking place in interactions, business and learning. The ways students interact, form relationships, make decisions and accomplish work is changing, and with it comes the need for education tools that cater to the workforce of tomorrow — tools that allow collaborative learning and encourage students to explore, engage, and interact in a manner that they are used to in their regular lives.

Informal learning, has always been social, but thanks to technology and collaborative tools in our daily lives, collaborative learning is now making its way into formal education as well — a trend that is here to stay, and in fact evolve further over time. Students today are ‘native speakers’ of the digital language of computers, video games, instantaneous communication, the internet, and now the ubiquitous mobile phone.

Effective collaborative learning embodies a culture characterised by sharing, transparency, innovation and improved learning. Such a culture enables deeper relationships with all stakeholders in the academic ecosystem, and builds a better participatory environment. Students become content producers and not just receivers. Through access to tools such as blogs, wikis, podcast, profiles, for both students and teachers, the institute can help various stakeholders, document and share their knowledge and ideas, and others to recognise, refine and promote the value of those ideas and content, thus al lowing bet ter real - t ime use of current knowledge.

Businesses faced the same conundrum a little more than a decade ago, when the internet went through its first maturation phase. It changed from being a digital novelty for educationists and technologists to being a platform for doing business. From e-commerce and peer-to-peer file sharing to the emergence of IP-based solutions for financial, accounting and supply chain systems, the Web became a serious business tool.

Just as the dawn of e-business changed business forever,  10 years later, educational institutions find themselves at another junction in the evolution of business and learning: the coming of age for Social Business as social computing and social media are integrated into the change in learning patterns and courseware design.

A successful and effective collaborative platform would include:

Networks: Globally integrated networks of students, teachers and administrators  are the backbone of a social transformational learning in an institute. Rich online profiles of trusted experts enable collaboration and agility and allow for exploration of expertise, publications and networks of colleagues to quickly initiate action or fulfill a business need.

Social and real-time collaboration: Connecting remote teams to improve decision-making and discover relevant expertise empowers people.

Mobility: Speed and relevancy of information exchange are increasingly essential as social business benefits from enabling individuals to use the device best suited to their needs and keeping them connected.

Integration: Bringing social collaboration capabilities into the applications people use without overwhelming them, allows for information sharing within the context of learning and eventually business processes.

Singapore Polytechnic for instance, uses IBM Lotus Quickr and WebSphere Portal to create a social networking hub that not only encourages student interaction, collaboration and feedback, but also helps drive student involvement. These tools help cultivate community development and participation to extend knowledge sharing between students, teachers and alumina. The results of these efforts can be seen in all the key areas of activity in the educational ecosystem.