According the Pew Internet & American Life project (Lenhardt & Madden, 2007), a great majority of today’s learners are actively developing new methods of communication and on their own acquiring competencies in content creation, sharing, and distribution. These learners are often actively involved in what has been called participatory cultures.
A growing body of scholarship (Gee 2004; Black 2005) suggests that participatory cultures offer benefits such as opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, a changed attitude toward intellectual property, and the development of skills valuable to the modern workplace and empowered citizenship.
Research shows (Jenkins et al) that access to this participatory culture functions as a new form of the hidden curriculum, shaping which youth will succeed and which will be left behind as they enter school and the workplace, in effect creating a participation gap.
Even with technology in place most schools have been slow to react to the emergence of this participation gap in part because of an epistemology that is based primarily on transmission of an accepted body of knowledge from expert to novice.
EctoLearning is a Web 2.0 online Software as a Service (SaaS) environment used for all types of learning, education and training. Schools, public and private, K-12 to higher education and post-graduate programs, as well as other learning organizations use EctoLearning to provide a collaborative learning environment for their learners, employees, partners and clients. EctoLearning is focused on the learner, the enviornment is fully collaborative and the learning content is always current and fresh as a result of the system enabling the users to create and share learning content it in a vast ever expanding library.
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EctoLearning to transform learning into an interactive, collaborative, and student centered activity.
EctoLearning is the only learning management system built from the ground up on the principles and architecture of social software.
No other system offers these capabilities and advantages. If you think this is how you want to teach or learn, then sign up, create a learning group, and invite your students and your teachers to join in.
Unleash active learning – join Ecto!