SOCIAL LEARNING
Social learning is learning that takes place at a wider scale than individual or group learning, up to a societal scale, through social interaction between peers. It may or may not lead to a change in attitudes and behavior. More specifically, to be considered social learning, a process must: demonstrate that a change in understanding has taken place in the individuals involved, demonstrate that this change goes beyond the individual and becomes situated within wider social units or communities of practice and occur through social interactions and processes between actors within a social network. It is a process in which one observe the individual behavior and the consequences and modify himself accordingly.
Researchers have defined social learning in multiple, overlapping ways and confused social learning with the conditions and methods necessary to facilitate social learning or its potential outcomes. It is important to distinguish social learning as a concept from the conditions or methods that may facilitate social learning, e.g., stakeholder participation, and the potential outcomes of social learning processes, e.g., pro-environmental behavior. Building on this discussion, if learning is to be considered “social learning,” then it must:
- Demonstrate that a change in understanding has taken place in the individuals involved. This may be at a surface level, e.g., via recall of new information, or deeper levels, e.g., demonstrated by change in attitudes, world views or epistemological beliefs
- Go beyond the individual to become situated within wider social units or communities of practice within society
- Occur through social interactions and processes between actors within a social network, either through direct interaction, e.g., conversation, or through other media, e.g., mass media, telephone, or Web 2.0 applications.
As such, social learning may be defined as a change in understanding that goes beyond the individual to become situated within wider social units or communities of practice through social interactions between actors within social networks.
Social Learning Theory has been useful in explaining how people can learn new things and develop new behaviors by observing other people. It is to assume, therefore, that Social Learning Theory is concerned on observational learning process among people.
- Observational Learning: The Social Learning Theory says that people can learn by watching other people perform the behavior.
- After his studies, Bandura was able to determine 3 basic models of observational learning, which include:A Live Model, Instruction Model, Symbolic Model.
- The state of mind (mental states) is crucial to learning.
- Learning does not mean that there will be a change in the behavior of an individual.
With the growing use of social media, social learning is also more and more interpreted as learning with social media. Social Learning through open platforms like Facebook or closed platforms like Corporate Social Learning Network is growing up rapidly. Social Media can be used by employees to contribute, store, discover, search, learn and relearn, action, and review knowledge and skills, making hidden information and knowledge explicit. From an employee's or learner's point - this is also considered as "personal knowledge management" or "smart working" - e.g. using blogs to reflect their work, or using user generated content via platforms like Wikipedia or YouTube to learn on demand, e.g.
When they have a question or problem. From an organizational point of view, social learning can be added as an element to formal learning like courses or curricula - to add discussions, sharing of experiences and lessons learned. Also social learning can be driven more stand-alone - e.g. to create Communities of Practice for similar groups like new employees (called onboarding), team or project team members or other similar groups. The goal for the organizations is to make learning more effective. The new connotation of social learning is also pushed by software companies who want to sell social learning tools (like SAP AG or Microsoft). However practitioners agree that social learning is more than social media.
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