Effective Social Learning: A Collaborative, Globally-networked Pedagogy

The ground of higher education is shifting, but learning ecosystems around the world have much more space than MOOCs and trendy online platforms can fill, and Loewen shows how professors have an indisputable pedagogical edge that gives them a crucial role to play in higher education. By adopting the collaborative pedagogical process in this book, professors can create effective social learning experiences that connect students to peers and professional colleagues in real time.

Loewen moves beyond surface questions about technology in the classroom to a problem best addressed by educators in bricks-and-mortar institutions: if students are social learners, how do we teach in a way that promotes actual dialogue for learning? Designing learning experiences that develop intercultural competencies puts the test to students social inclinations, and engagement with course material increases when its used to dig deeper into the specificities of their identity and social location. Loewens approach to interinstitutional collaborative teaching will be explored with examples and working templates for collaborative design of effective social learning experiences. This is done by collaborative dialogue with G. Brooke Lester and Christopher Duncanson-Hales. As a group, Loewen, Lester, and Duncanson-Hales create a text that extends pedagogical innovation in inspiring but practical ways.

Christopher Duncanson-Hales teaches in the department of philosophy at the University of Sudbury in Ontario, Canada. Chris"s interdisciplinary formation and his concern for the academicresilience of incoming students led him to establish MindGap Scholastics, a program specializing in academic preparedness. Chris is co-chair of the International Development and Religion group at the American Academy of Religion, is published in Postscripts, and is a guest blogger with ecclesio.com and Postcolonial Networks.

Nathan R. B. Loewen is an assistant professor in the department of religious studies at theUniversity of Alabama.He also serves as the faculty technology liaison for eTech in the faculty of arts and sciences.Hisresearch on teaching and learning seeks to adopt and adapt web-based technologies in order to enact pedagogies of active learning, universal design, and sustainable internationalization. As scholar of religious studies, Loewen"s publications focus on globalizing discourses within the philosophy of religion and analyzing the intersection of religious studies and development studies.

G. Brooke Lester is assistant professor of Hebrew Scriptures and director for emerging pedagogies at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois. He curates and blogs at Seminarium and anumma.com.