Technological advancement has given education a new definition—Cyber-Social Intelligence resulting in fundamentally new ways of teaching and learning.

One of the most important interpretation of cyber social intelligence is cyber-physical- social intelligence (CPSI), which is the advanced intelligence that emerges from the integration of the digital, physical, and social worlds.

According to the works of Jean Plaget and Lev Vygotsky, learning stems from not only learners’ independent exploration of knowledge but also culture and social interactions play an important role. This lead to a new definition of education—Cyber-Physical-Social Education (CPSE).

The interactions between real learning and virtual learning then gives a rise to a new research area—Parallel Intelligence in Education, where people are connected with different tools, materials, institutions on a global scale with access to education 24/7.

The way how we learn has also greatly shifted from a traditional book studying with memorizing different facts to more constructive learning methods with applying new knowledge in real world.

This creates a synergy between education and other discipline fields, such as educational psychology, anthropology, sociology, computer sciences, information sciences, neurosciences, and instructional design, etc., provides new ideas, new methodologies, and new ways of thinking about learning called learning sciences.

Social media also play a great deal in a learning process through the interactions with their peers. Mutual exploration, thoughts exchanges and a constructive feedback among peers produce intellectual synergy of many minds on a problem solving .

How does the role of teachers change then? Teacher cannot assume anymore everyone learns in the same way. Educators have to guide student learning in the way that suits him or her the best.

The fundamental step in developing such a personalized framework is learning analytics by collecting and analyzing data generated by learners on their social interactions with various contexts in order to understand and optimize learning environment. For example, the patterns in each student’s engagement level, moods, use of classroom resources, social habits, attention span and academic performance might be very helpful to develop this personalised framework for each student.

Please note those changes also present challenges in contextual integrity, privacy, and trust. Technology driven tools like bots, cyborgs, trolls cause a spread of misinformation. This issue needs to be addressed by new scientific disciple – social cybersecurity.