Effective Social Learning: A Collaborative, Globally-Networked Pedagogy

By Nathan R. B. Loewen

The ground of higher education is shifting, but learning ecosystems around the world have much more space than MOOCs and trendy online platforms can fill, and Loewen shows how professors have an indisputable pedagogical edge that gives them a crucial role to play in higher education. By adopting the collaborative pedagogical process in this book, professors can create effective social learning experiences that connect students to peers and professional colleagues in real-time.

Loewen moves beyond surface questions about technology in the classroom to a problem best addressed by educators in bricks-and-mortar institutions: if students are social learners, how do we teach in a way that promotes actual dialogue for learning? Designing learning experiences that develop intercultural competencies puts the test to students’ social inclinations, and engagement with course material increases when it’s used to dig deeper into the specificities of their identity and social location. Loewen’s approach to inter-institutional collaborative teaching will be explored with examples and working templates for collaborative design of effective social learning experiences. This is done by collaborative dialogue with G. Brooke Lester and Christopher Duncanson-Hales. As a group, Loewen, Lester, and Duncanson-Hales create a text that extends pedagogical innovation in inspiring but practical ways.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781451489521

Nathan R. B. Loewen

Nathan Loewen is an assistant professor in the departments of religious studies at the University of Alabama. He also serves as the faculty tecchnology liaison for eTech in the faculty of arts and sciences. His research on teaching and learning adopt and adapt web-based technologies in order to enact pedagogies of active learning, universal design, and sustainable internationalization.

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