Research on Construction of Personalized Learning Enviroments Based on Social Network

The development of information technology and learning theory presents several new features: 1) Knowledge is constructed with social interaction and the meaning is generated in social and cultural settings and with other's help. Using social learning framework to promote learning interaction is important. 2) There is a need for knowledge share and learning tools and models. 3) Learning is about network creation as indicated by the connectivism theory. Knowing where to find knowledge is more important than the knowledge itself. So we need to provide learners a personal learning space for knowledge to aggregate,manage and share. 4) Learning not only requires different learning strategies,but also personalized resources according to the learners' personality traits. Therefore,teaching and design of the learning environment need shifts from a teaching- centered approach to learning- centered one. We educators need to explore more intelligent and efficient personalized framework to promote the effective interaction and to foster learning community. Social network mirrored the interaction and social relationship of human society and its design ideas are aligned with the social constructivism,connectivisim,distributed cognition and other learning theories. Therefore,a social network framework can be used to build a learning environment which will fit well with the socialization,connection,distribution,fragmentation and personalization features of learning.This paper discussed the following aspects. First,the paper analyzed how to use social network to construct personal learning space. Personal space of social networking can be thought as network memory space. Learners can associate aggregate learning resources into their space and manage or share it easily.Second,this paper analyzed the learning resource aggregation patterns and principles. Learning resources aggregation mainly has two ways: one is the outside learners of learning platform who can aggregate resources into the platform,and theother is the inner user of the learning platform allowing users to share their resources with other learners.Third,the paper analyzed the construction of personalized recommendation engine. Social network user interaction can produce big behavioral data in the process of learning,via analysis of the big data,which could help teaching decisions and optimize the learning process.Lastly,this study adopted the open source social software which named Sakai- OAE to build a personalized learning platform and applied it to practice. The results showed that the usability and user acceptance are great.