Socio-Digital Participation

How to engage learners and boost their participation with the learning material is one of the hot topics of digital education worldwide. Here, we will take a step back and think about how to engage learners that are already digitally active. Simply put, all digital activities can be conceptualised as socio-digital participation. 

Socio-digital practices have changed how we interact with each other, learning material, and the wider world. Digital activities are often social because they involve interacting with others and participating in the activities in the community. A chat or online event is something most of us are familiar with. Socio-digital activities allow us to be present and absent simultaneously and interact with communities of practice worldwide. It is not rare to use multiple media modalities to keep the connections alive – more modalities, stronger connection! 

Bridging the Gap

Digital educators are in a unique position where they can offer their learners powerful ways for connected learning.  One thing to keep in mind is the gap hypothesis: learners flourish and fulfil their potential when their preferred learning method is in line with offered practice. On the one hand, learners used to social-digital participation usually struggle in more traditional settings and should more readily accept and interact in the digital learning environment. On the other hand, you should take more care with learners more suited to traditional methods. 

1. Prepare yourself! Learners are sensitive to your readiness to support their digital engagement. Take time and care to prepare yourself and your learning environment to create an engaging environment with more possible modalities of digital tools and ways to engage. 
2. Cultivate a safe environment. State rules of conduct, and moderate when necessary. Trolling on the forums can shut down any meaningful conversation pretty quickly. If doing synchronous education, model your learners’ respectful, inclusive, and tolerant conduct. Don’t ban outright – mark the offending post (“flag it”) and offer a chance to correct it! 
3. Create opportunities for collaboration. Communities of practice are groups gathered around a topic, interest, or skill. The goal is not just to share learning assignments but to actively share knowledge and skills or create spur-of-the-moment projects on their own. Moderate lightly but firmly, so everyone feels invited to share and participate. You don’t always have to think so big: some peer-to-peer grading can also serve a purpose here. 
4. Make your learning meaningful. Learners engage more with problems relevant to them or their interests. Give your learners projects that cross boundaries and domains and address real-life issues. Not only it is more engaging, but it also develops learners’ sense of agency! 
5. Enable valuable and immediate feedback. Give some ways for your learners to learn via trial-and-error and immediate feedback. Short quizzes in Google Forms can do the trick – and don’t forget to make it possible to redo them to maximise the self-learning potential. 

Author: M.C.

REFERENCES 

Forsström, H. (2019). Tracing Students’ Socio-Digital Ecology: Learning through Socio-Digital Participation Inside and Outside of School, downloaded in June 2022 at: https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/305311

Hietajärvi, L., Tuominen-Seini, H., Salmela-Aro, K.,  Hakkarainen, K., Lonka, K. (2019). Beyond screen time: Multidimensionality of socio-digital participation and relations to academic  Well-being in three educational phases, Computers in Human Behavior, 93, 13-24.
Kruskopf , M., Hakkarainen , K. , Li , S. & Lonka , K. (2021). Lessons learned on student engagement from the nature of pervasive socio-digital interests and related network participation of adolescents, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 37, 521-541. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12506