There was a very interesting article in the Washington Post a while ago about how students can use online communication to facilitate learning. Online collaboration is not new and there are definitely many examples here in Australia as schools and universities connect with their peers internationally to help learning.
With the recent addition of pencasts to the functionality in the Livescribe Smartpen and the existing capability to share Livescribe content into Facebook, Livescribe is becoming an important tool for educators and students alike.
There are many ways Livescribe can aide borderless social learning. For example, students studying say Japanese in Australian schools might create Pencasts of a lesson tutorial and using Facebook could have this assessed by their peers in Kobe – this is a two way street – so students in Kobe can practice articulating English words and share these Pencasts with Australian students who can then provide feedback and help.
I can see schools encouraging students to create borderless study groups so that a subject or lesson topic could be worked on by students located around the world. So we take this idea of Randy Pausch from Carnegie Mellon breaking down faculty barriers and apply that on an international scale – why should learning be limited to known borders?
If you work in education or are interested in this subject – we’d love to hear from you
