How to bring forth good social learning in teacher education through technology

A core theme of this context statement is the contribution that digital technology can make to social learning in online and face-to-face contexts. The work contributes to the field of educational technology across sectors, by considering some of the obstacles currently facing practitioners such as new curricula, new pedagogical approaches and the fast pace of change. I present a rationale for technology supporting social learning and discuss several significant themes, such as the role of learning communities in supporting the co-creation of knowledge, the pedagogic approaches that support computational thinking, digital literacy and mobile learning, and the potential of international projects and online courses to make purposeful connections between teachers and learners. Looking firstly with a distant lens at the forms of technology-enabled learning communities (TELCs) in my public works, and then with a closer lens at the interactions and behaviours within them, I present a characterisation of the learning landscape that involves a topology and typology of TELCs. These consist of five distinct forms of TELCs together with a set of five dualities that describe conditions for knowledge-building. This framework contributes towards an understanding of the epistemology of TELCs within the context of my public works. It offers descriptive and diagnostic tools for analysing the nature of learning, knowing and knowledge-building within TELCs, and demonstrates how some key variables are interrelated. As such, it has relevance to the design and evaluation of social online learning and makes a contribution to the debate around theories of learning in a digital age.