Development of individual agency within a collaborative, creative learning community

By the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, conflicting interests have emerged in higher education learning environments. On the one hand was an increasing call for ubiquitous, personalised learning. On the other, there has been a growing societal understanding that successful and creative innovation and entrepreneurialism are embedded in collaborative and networked activity. Whilst successive international New Media Consortium Horizon reports have identified emerging technologies that are promised to support and transform higher education, only those associated with societal change have been adopted, which include predominantly mobile and cloud computing, open content, and personal learning environments. These technological advancements have sponsored primarily the development of personalised learning. In distance education, this focus has often been at the expense of collaborative and networked learning. It is proposed in this paper that the development of individual agency within a collaborative, creative learning community is able to develop an active society that is capable of responding to contemporary and emerging work demands. This requires interrogation of issues of the locus of control of learning, the creative development of the individual within a collaborative learning environment, and a fore-fronted learning design.