Monday, March 12, 2012

When Psychology meets Web 2.0

Title sounds a bit strange doesn't it? Yeah! Today I was working on a paper for an international conference by my HOD. He wanted me to modify the paper on BlueIgnis and send it, but I was not interested. I wanted to something from scratch. It is an international conference and what else do you expect if its your first time?

I was moved to "Web-Based Learning: Innovation and Challenges", one of the available topics for the conference. I knew I had to do something in this. I am good at Web (it is supposed to be my area of expertise, self trumpet!), but I never worked on Web based Learning side of the web. Almost everything I knew was learnt by searching through google, but that does not constitute web based learning. I never really went through a full web based course, need to do that sometime soon.

On the other hand, I was desperate to do something on this topic and I finally remembered Nivi and her PhD research topic which has its roots on Contextual Learning on Smart Classrooms - How on the earth do you bring contextual learning to a classroom in India? That's what she does, you must really talk to her and you will know what I mean :-)

After talking to her for around 20 minutes and I have got everything I want for the paper. She introduced me to Lev Vygotsky and Howard Gardner. Her work is based on their work on Social Development Theory and Multiple Intelligence. She is using them on a real world classroom, while all I needed to do was try to apply those on a virtual classroom :-)

Bring about some technologies that tie them on the Web, and how we can marry them with today's social media burst (Vygotsky's theory) and how personalized (Gardner's theory mapped to web as it is now) the content on the web. All we need is a good POC to give it a go.

I did some googling to figure out there has been very less participation on these topics after 2001. I personally feel Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, etc. These services can definetly be tuned to provide both social and personalized learning experience to respective target audience.

Seems like not only News, e-Commerce or searching can be personalized after all. Welcome to the new era of #Personalization in (almost) everything.

3 comments:

Anu said...

He asked you also to change the topic huh?? big deal.. Enjoy...

Ashwanth Kumar said...

This is not for the project work Anu. Its just for a conference.

NIVI said...

Thank you dear.

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