Citizen science is a growing field of research and practice, generating new knowledge and understanding through the collaboration of citizens in scientific research. As the field expands, it is becoming increasingly important to consider its potential to foster education and learning opportunities. Although progress has been made to support learning in citizen science projects, as well as to facilitate citizen science in formal and informal learning environments, challenges still arise. This paper identifies a number of dilemmas facing the field—from competing scientific goals and learning outcomes, differing underlying ontologies and epistemologies, diverging communication strategies, to clashing values around advocacy and activism. Although such challenges can become barriers to the successful integration of citizen science into mainstream education systems, they also serve as signposts for possible synergies and opportunities. One of the key emerging recommendations is to align educational learning outcomes with citizen science project goals at the planning stage of the project using co-creation approaches to ensure issues of accessibility and inclusivity are paramount throughout the design and implementation of every project. Only then can citizen science realise its true potential to empower citizens to take ownership of their own science education and learning.

Workplace learning happens in the process and context of work, is multi-episodic, often informal, problem based and takes place on a just-in-time basis. While this is a very effective means of delivery, it also does not scale very well beyond the immediate context. We review three types of technologies that have been suggested to scale learning and three connected theoretical discourses around learning and its support. Based on these three strands and an in-depth contextual inquiry into two workplace learning domains, health care and building and construction, four design-based research projects were conducted that have given rise to designs for scaling informal learning with technology. The insights gained from the design and contextual inquiry contributed to a model that provides an integrative view on three informal learning processes at work and how they can be supported with technology: (1) task performance, reflection and sensemaking;(2) help seeking, guidance and support; and (3) emergence and maturing of collective knowledge. The model fosters our understanding of how informal learning can be scaled and how an orchestrated set of technologies can support this process.

In most cases, the traditional Web-based learning management systems (e.g. Moodle, Blackboard) have been designed without any built-in support for a preferred pedagogical model or approach. The proponents of such systems have claimed that this kind of inherent "pedagogical neutrality" is a desirable characteristic for a LMS, as it allows teachers to implement various pedagogical approaches. This study is based on an opposite approach, arguing for designing next-generation online learning platforms - so called digital learning ecosystems - with built-in affordances, which promote and enforce desirable pedagogical beliefs, strategies and learning activity patterns while suppressing others. We propose a conceptual and process model for pedagogy-driven design of online learning environments and illustrate it with a case study on development and implementation process of a digital learning ecosystem based on Dippler platform. We also describe the pedagogical foundation of Dippler that was guided by a combination of four contemporary pedagogical approaches: self-directed learning, competence-based learning, collaborative knowledge building and task-centered instructional design.

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This chapter presents the findings from an experimental postgraduate student-centered course using social media tools and services to support learning. The main aim of this research was to evaluate a course design that was heavily supported by social media. The main aspects of this course design were that students were granted the freedom to select social media tools and services and use them in a personalized way, construct personal and distributed learning spaces, and visualize their conceptual understanding of these environments and their activities. Students’ perceptions of the social media they used was used to evaluate the overall course design. Their perception of the affordances of social media are presented by noting conceptual changes in how they represented the structure of their personal and distributed environments, and by how they rated their learning experience with social media. This chapter concludes with the most important aspects of course design that need to be taken into account in higher education learning environments seeking to integrate Web 2.0 tools.

When organizations create new knowledge and work practices as a reaction to challenges they face, they often have difficulty to adopt these new practices "on the ground". One of the reasons is that in these cases, individual informal learning and collective knowledge creation are often insufficiently connected. In this paper, we investigate knowledge practices that explain how new knowledge generated in the process of creating and adapting new practices is applied in work situations. We conducted 30 semi-structured interviews in five networks of organizations focusing on knowledge sharing in the German construction industry. Through a qualitative content analysis, we first identified five patterns of situations where individual and collective knowledge interact to implement new work practices. We detail these patterns with four knowledge maturation practices that explain how individuals contribute to collective knowledge development, and three scaffolding practices that explain how individual learning processes are facilitated through help seeking and guiding. Four practices of knowledge appropriation explain how knowledge is adapted and validated in concrete work situations. We combine scaffolding, maturation and appropriation practices into a model of knowledge appropriation that extends workplace learning research by offering a distinctive perspective on the practices that shape the interaction between knowledge creation and individual learning.

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