I recently visited a local playground with my two daughters, and as I sat watching them run around and play, I realised that the playground politics I was observing bore a striking resemblance to the approaches our learners often take in an online environment. In particular, I could see direct comparisons with how our learners approach their online presence both within the education sphere and wider within social networks. By examining these personalities and how they might interact, we can perhaps identify approaches to teaching and learning, and particularly (for the purposes of this series of articles) orientation and induction that might help students to become more socially, and educationally, inclusive.

In this post, I’m going to look at the comparisons between the playground and people’s use of online social networks, and in the next post we’ll compare that with our educational approaches, and in particular the orientation aspects.

So, looking around the playground, what did I see?

Well, naturally, my daughters. The first thing they do at the park, most days anyway, is run to the slide or the roundabout and have a couple of goes. They’re comfortable with that as a starting point, and it eases them into play as they start to think up games. Amongst social network users, there can be a similar approach. What’s the first thing you do when you log into Facebook? Check your news feed? Your notifications? A particular group? I personally start with my news feed, even if I’ve logged in for something specific. I guess I do that for the same reason, that it starts me off with a few quick posts and memes while I figure out what I am trying to achieve.

There was one boy already playing on the roundabout, and he really didn’t want to get off. Long after my girls had moved on to a new game, he was still there, spinning, spinning…. just keep spinning, just keep spinning, just keep spinning… (Dory, Finding Nemo, 2003) (apologies to Dory!). He was clearly very comfortable with that one activity, but so much so that he didn’t engage with anything else in the playground. He would play with other children on the roundabout, and indeed found different games to play using it, but when asked to play elsewhere he wasn’t interested. A lot of people have the same approach to social networks. I know plenty of people who only Facebook (“Facebook, intransitive verb, meaning ‘to spend time using Facebook'”), and don’t use/know/want other systems. Some people will only post in their particular group, and not engage with friends outside of that. Others will lurk on Twitter, following celebrities, but never consider posting themselves. They’re comfortable in their little corner of the social networking world, and don’t see the need to travel further.

Then there are the more social children, those that tend towards playing with others. I noticed that most fall into one (or more) of three broad categories.
There are those like my elder daughter who are shy, nervous to approach people they don’t know, but if approached themselves will happily play in the group. Some of these children will be happy just to be part of the game, and some (like my daughter) may actually then feel comfortable enough to take on a leadership position, forming the direction of play.

Some children will actively seek out others to play with, trying to form that play themselves from scratch. These children know what they want to play, and actively encourage other children to join in. Some may want to control the play entirely, and depending on the make-up of the group this can be either a positive or negative approach.

Finally, there are those children like my younger daughter. They are happy to be included in the group, but equally if the play isn’t of a style that they like they will revert back to the lone-wolf approach and happily play on their own.

We see versions of all of these social behaviours within our online learning – some students actively encourage interaction by others. Some are comfortable with how to approach online learning, others aren’t. We see natural leaders crop up both at the start of an activity or module, and also during its formation. (I notice with interest that within our recent group project, my team had really two distinct leaders, both of whom worked well in that role, and without tripping each other up.)

There are a lot more parallels I think we can make between our online learners and our children at play, but as this post has been sitting in draft for about a fortnight, I’ll finish it here and we’ll look in more detail at those parallels and how they might apply to the orientation process in particular in the next post.

Image licensing

Featured image courtesy of Wikipedia user Specious licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0