Designing Social learning

Over this past weekend an assignment was issued in my ITEC-544 course effectively asking what is required in order to design effective social learning. After much though and deliberation I came up with 2 key ideas which I believe to be of the utmost importance in regard to social learning design. In the constant effort to save time I have decided to include what I wrote for class in the blog post bellow rather than rewrite what has already been written. When designing for social learning one must do numerous things in order to not only get the message across but also make the material take root, and grow. That being said one of the most important things to take into account in designing social learning is the Audience. One can identify the audience by first looking at the type of people who are interested in the material you are discussing. For example, If your teaching the best practices for car sales than chances are your audience is outgoing. Given that you can design your social learning to be geared more intensely on interaction. If you are teaching individuals about algorithmic design than chances are they will need some time to get comfortable in their surroundings. Forcing this type of person in to a social learning situation to soon would simply close there minds to any further learning that may have taken place. Another thing that must betaken into account is Age. If you are designing social learning for people over the age of 50 than you may want to consider a more tempered social learning approach. This is simply due to the fact that people of this age did not learn by interaction with others as much as they did by a lecture style of learning. Oppositely people of a younger age will most likely be used to leaning socially and thus a more intense social learning module can be implemented. Once again, There are many other things that must be done in order to design social learning these are just 2 different things i decided to discuss.