A fundamental role for the teacher is to foster social learning. Social learning features interaction, discussion and collaboration between students, and creates a positive, inter-personal learning climate. It involves taking a flexible and interactive approach which encourages engagement across the class, while also retaining a ‘real-time’ sensitivity to individual needs. As this type of learning is focused on the application of knowledge, it also encourages higher-order thinking skills such as analysis and evaluation, or – in the case of language learning – the development of communicative competence. Current digital technologies cannot enable this type of social and collaborative learning as well as a teacher can, since such learning environments are highly dependent on the inter-personal relationship between the teacher and their class. Technology, instead, delivers learning content in an ‘atomistic’ way, as the educator Philip Kerr notes, where learning is broken down into discrete ‘atoms’ which (it is assumed) eventually come together to create ‘learning’. Current technologies are unable to handle the complexities, and therefore deliver the benefits, of ‘social learning’.
What teachers and tech can both do
That’s not to say that technology is irrelevant in a socially collaborative learning environment. In terms of classroom administration, for example, technology can provide enhanced record keeping, greatly improving the teacher’s analysis of student performance, especially the identification of skills which could be improved by deliberate practice.