1 Introduction and background

From Stellar Deliverable 1.1

STELLAR is a multidisciplinary consortium that bring together researchers from psychology, education, cognitive science, computer science, organizational and management science with the overall aim of focusing on advances in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) that engage learners and teachers in new ways of learning in order to radically change both what it means to learn and what it is possible to learn. The emphasis is on both adapting learning to local cultural and personal situations and transforming learning into permanent and valuable knowledge assets. An important focus will be the shift from learning as a focused, individual activity to lifelong learning that is interwoven in our daily activities and that involves collaborative knowledge sharing and building. This type of learning has become commonplace, but is not yet sufficiently understood and supported by technology – most current learning management systems are based on individual, formal learning. The work of STELLAR is based on the view that in today’s knowledge society, people are not only confronted with classical transitions from school to university, from university to a company and so on. They are also faced with additional transitions, for example, between companies, between formal institutional learning and informal learning, between, learning for personal growth and learning for work. These transitions place high demands on people in terms of self-managed lifelong learning, including the acknowledgment of the acquisition of new competences and new knowledge (assessment and evaluation).

As a multidisciplinary consortium we are aware that each scientific community has its own theories and methodologies visible in its professional practices, rituals, tools, and ways of disseminating. Within the field of TEL a multitude of sciences (natural as well as social sciences) work together to support people to learn, apply, and combine existing knowledge as well as to construct, create new knowledge and ideas, all of this in different settings and environments. In particular TEL research needs to draw on the following perspectives:

• The design perspective — a focus on the design and co-evolution of new technologies and new learning activities.
• The cognitive perspective — a focus on what the individual can learn under certain conditions in different types of contexts.
• The social and cultural perspective — a focus on the social and cultural factors that influence learning.
• The sociological perspective — a focus on changes brought about by digital technologies in activities in schools, universities, workplaces, and informal settings.
• The epistemological perspective — how the specificity of the domain impact on the technology enhanced learning.
• The pedagogical perspective — a focus on concrete problems and possible solutions offered by teaching/learning situations mediated by the use of technology.

Currently there are two potentially conflicting drivers of change in technology enhanced learning. See discussion The first emphasizes the phenomenon that has been called ‘collective intelligence’ or the ‘wisdom of crowds’ (Surowiecki, 2004). This is based on observations that when solving cognition, coordination, and cooperation problems requiring decision-making, prediction, and estimation, especially if the solutions are fuzzy and less definitive. Under appropriate circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them, the whole is more than the sum-of-the-parts. This is true for groups of people within organizations and groups of students within schools and universities. Theories that explain this phenomenon draw on complexity science (Capra, 1996) and have been used to explain dynamic interactions within the workplace (Stacey, 2001) and within the classroom (Davis & Sumara, 2006). By contrast the personalized learning agenda with its emphasis on ‘providing a teacher for every learner’ could be pulling in the opposite direction and sometimes appears to hark back to the computer-aided learning systems of the 1990s. A challenge is to reconcile these drivers by enabling people to learn through a continually unfolding process of collaborative engagement and personal reflection.

Interestingly, developments in Web 2.0 technology have the potential of radically changing the ways in which people interact and develop knowledge in contexts outside of the traditional workplace and educational institutions. New, dynamic communities bring together self-directed, self-managed and self-maintained users and, thereby create successful new forms of collaboration, making use of a wide range of tools. Replacing the current centralized, static technology-push models with new interactive models that reflect the continuous, social nature of learning requires a radical shift from a focus on knowing what to a focus on knowing how and knowing who.

STELLAR will use the tension between the ‘wisdom of crowds’ and ‘a teacher for every learner’ as a starting point for engaging partners in a productive dialogue in order to identify and formulate a Grand Research Challenge for TEL that will drive the capacity building and integration work of the network (WP 1). The central idea is that such a starting point will evolve, and new trends and disruptions in the field will emerge throughout the integrating work of STELLAR. Our aim is to actively engage with various communities of relevant stakeholders, with the aim of connecting them to our research base and engaging with them jointly in developing shared/negotiated perspectives of the field.