Towards a New Learning: The Scholar Social Knowledge Workspace, in Theory and Practice

This article describes the thinking behind the development of Scholar, a ‘social knowledge’ technology developed as part of a series of research and development projects at the University of Illinois. Seven pedagogical openings are identified in this article, possibilities for the creation of innovative learning environments afforded by a new generation of educational technologies: ubiquitous learning, active knowledge production, multimodal knowledge representations, recursive feedback, collaborative intelligence, metacognitive reflection and differentiated learning. The article explores these ideas in general terms, and also describes the ways in which the Scholar environment attempts to translate these ideas into practice.