Florian Burka: Can we use the momentum of social networks to stimulate e-learning?

Online social networks have paved a path to continuous information exchange in voluntary user groups, and thereby successfully established a community-based conversational culture in the Web. Digital natives have largely adopted this perspective, and expect the paradigm of socializing online. Social interaction stimulates active involvement, and could facilitate a culture of learning discourses. However, it is not met by current e-learning approaches or platforms.

The presentation will briefly present the current state of e-learning in the Mindstone Project and its LCMS hylOs. After this we will take a look at online communities and online social networks. hylOs and social networks both are built on virtual network relations: hylOs interconnects learning objects by semantically annotated links, while in contrast social networks express weak links between people. We want to explore how those networks could be linked together and how we can use those links for a better next generation learning environment.