eDesign Groups

Join the eDesign groups to communicate (Skype), collaborate (Google Docs) and curate content (Diigo) with your peers. Effective authentic learning focuses on creating realistic complex tasks that learners complete over a period of time. Collaboration and communities of practice are vital components for successful authentic learning (Lombardi, 2007). "An educational community of inquiry [CoI] is a group of individuals who collaboratively engage in purposeful critical discourse and reflection to construct personal meaning and confirm mutual understanding" (Garrison, 2011).

In creating a community of learners it is important to develop social presence: the ability to comfortably and effectively communicate through a technical medium (Garrison, 1997). Anderson (2009) identified many challenges academics face in supporting the development of social presence and suggested creating and sustaining these communities may be more challenging than we think. However, technologies that encourage students to connect, communicate and share ideas go some way towards meeting these challenges.

We encourage you to explore the eDesign group technologies and reflect on how they could be used to encourage social presence to support student learning in your own courses. You might also like to visit the Technology Toolbox for Educators

to view more technologies, ideas and examples of how technologies can be used in education to support student learning.