ABSTRACT
Learning has gained new meaning with the increasingly wide acceptance of social-constructivist views in the field of education. Thanks to social constructivists, learning today is regarded as a social phenomenon in which interaction and knowledge sharing are necessary preconditions for reaching the best results. Learning requires a collaborative or cooperative effort from all participants in the learning process in order to fulfill certain tasks meant to lead to targeted cognitive development. This—together with the appearance of forms of technology that make interaction and knowledge sharing an almost cost-free everyday life practice—has created a new world where learning not only takes new forms but also happens in new spaces. As Fogg et al. (2011) put it:
The proliferation of digital, social and mobile technologies has created a culture in which youth participate more in creating and sharing content, profoundly changing the way students communicate, interact, and learn. In many cases students spend as much (or more) time online in an informal learning environment—interacting with peers and receiving feedback—than they do with their teachers in the traditional classroom.
(p. 3) MOOCs, blogs, wikis, and other forms of technology-based spaces that are open to and are increasingly being used by practitioners today stand as evidence of this new direction in education. With this change in the nature of learning and learning spaces comes a change in the teachers’ role. For example, the idea of teacher as expert has been shifted to teacher as one among many sources of knowledge. Teachers have become creators of learning communities rather than creators of learning (Schrader, 2015, p. 33). Such changes are expected to—and, in fact, should—change practices used in teacher education programs to ones leading to a more collaborative, technology-based learning model similar to the one teachers are currently encouraged to use in their own classrooms.