[OLR] Exercise 2.1: Virtual environments and my cognition

The great hope / promise of collaborative / online learning is that it will allow us, as educators, to achieve some sort of learning outcome that we couldn't otherwise achieve (or achieve so well) without the use of the technology. A certain richness is implied. For example:

"By using these tools we expect our students to create and publish content and respond to the content creation of others. Created content can be aggregated to show progress and richness and depth of learning. Students can respond to the work of others, provide feedback and learn through their interactions with others online. Not only are our students learning, they are also learning how to be independent learners."

Linked to from here

As a teacher I'm all for this but I think that delivery presents challenges. Of course one of the benefits of something like Facebook is that you're only relating to people that you know - not strangers. Pedagogically this is important - because potentially students can know that they will be relating to people within their trust circle, within the circle of

[OLR] Exercise 2.1: Virtual environments and your cognition

a. Are you happy with the ethics? Report your findings.

No. In particular I am concerned about adding friends who add students as friends on Facebook. In particular I'm concerned about responding to an adult conversation and then having that friends own friends (i.e. students) being able to read my own comment. If I'm using a virtual environment to work do I really want to go to the bother of using this sort of virtual environment.

b. What do you think is the difference between social cognition and visual cognition?

Social cognition means acquiring knowledge and understanding through social thought and experience. In the case of a virtual environment it would allow for knowledge acquisition that doesn't so obviously relate to the appearance of a person or their social standing in a class peer group. Implies to my mind the idea of shared knowledge, knowledge that exists by virtue of the social processes that gave rise to it. cognition to me means the reading in of visual stimuli into the knowledge acquisition process. I kind of have the feeling that it's a bad thing because it could imply overemphasis on the appearance / delivery of information rather than focus on content.