Understanding collective behavior of learning design communities

Abstract

Social computing enables collective actions and social interaction with rich exchange of information. In the context of educators’ networks where they create and share learning design artifacts, little is known about their collec-tive behavior. Learning design tooling focuses on supporting educators (learn-ing designers) in making explicit their design ideas and encourages the devel-opment of “learning design communities”. Building on social elements, this pa-per aims to identify the level of engagement and interactions in three communi-ties using an Integrated Learning Design Environment (ILDE). The results show a relationship between the exploration of different artifacts and creation of content in all the three communities confirming that browsing influence the community's outcomes. Different patterns of interaction suggest specific impact of language and length of support for users.