Jenn, your video is very interesting and it is good food for thought. I agree with you that we're not being social simply because we're connected. It is leading us to being each time more by ourselves and interaction is changing.
While researching some data, I found out that "According to comScore (2013), consumers in Brazil spend more than 27 hours per month online on their computers (global average: 24.7 per month)." (source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/
Cara, I think you express very well the idea of learning being social as "it takes place in the context of society". I think it is difficult to imagine learning without interaction, as behaviors are copied and influeced by the environment and people around us. As I was researching more about learning interactions, I came across the "Bobo doll experiment", which was an experiment conducted between 1960 and 1963 and studied children's behavior after watching adults interacting violently with a Bobo doll. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobodollexperiment)
The results were quite interesting, as "Bandura found that the children exposed to the aggressive model were more likely to act in physically aggressive ways than those who were not exposed to the aggressive model. "
Event thought there were criticism against this experiment, I still think that somehow it represents how human behavior is influenced by our interactions and observations of others.
Very interesting your video. I can think of my young learners at school. As an american school in Brazil, most of our students are portuguese speakers, so the way they learn is by reproducing what they hear from others. Some of not sure of what they do / say, but they tend to go with the flow in the beginning.
Thinking about the question, my first thought is that learning is definitely social as we live and interact with people all the time. Many things we learn are actually because of that. We live in society, we interact with people directly and indirectly, as for in this debate. I like what Lexi reproduced on her comment that “(…)people learn from one another, through observation, imitation, and modeling. People learn through observing others’ behavior, attitudes, and outcomes of those behaviors”. We`re social beings, and therefore we are constantly interacting with others.
I found this picture that I think very simply summarizes what social learning is all about:
http://www.danpontefract.com/wp-content/
On the other hand, however, some people can self - teach themselves, they do not need / want interaction with others. Then, I understand that there`s no social learning on that.
