Social Software and Disrupted Learning Spaces

What happens when informal social tools are introduced into formal educational settings? This session will report on a recent qualitative distance education case study, where students were presented with blogs as a means of augmenting social presence, negotiating their identity as learners, and building personal learning spaces. Tensions between the demands of the Internet (freedom and autonomy) and those of education (outcomes and assessment) were explored by studying the intersection of the learner (motivation, experience, expectations), the use of social software (networked, personalized, collaborative), and the context of use (informal, formal).