Both Wegner’s and Prensky’s theories focus on individual learning with the possibility of getting together with others in a ‘community’ to discuss the findings.
Wegner’s notion of Communities of practice is not as focused on doing everything digitally as Prensky but the sense of community is still the same digitally.
Natives can learn online individually as well as in groups which allow a larger number of people to be together and share ideas at the same time. A point that Wegner makes is that “Many of the ways we have of talking about learning and education are based on the assumption that learning is something that individuals do. Furthermore, we often assume that learning has a beginning and an end; that it is best separated from the rest of our activities; and that it is the result of teaching” (Wenger 1998: 3). Unlike face to face seminars discussions can continue online for as long as people continue responding to a certain topic and also the major thing this that people are no longer bound by geographical location.
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I don't think Prensky is particularly 'community' oriented. His original work very much assumed individualised students playing edutainment games (it could be argued that as these developed into collective online games, the 'community' aspect might come to the fore) but I'm not sure he made much of this?
ReplyDeleteAlongside of the question you're answering was placed
"Notions:
1) If young people are more able to digitally 'connect' how can co-operation be included into 'education'? Where does plagiarism start and e-connection end?
How do the technologically challenged and the socially rejected compete in a fully wired, yet individually assessed world?
Is your Dad, Mum, elder sibling, boy/girlfriend part of your CofP? -is their computer hard-drive? Who gets to graduate?"
Although your consideration of Wenger in relation to learning is good, you don't choose to deal with these questions do you? That's a shame (mind you almost no-one else did either, I wonder what was going on?)