Community tools exist, but they are drastically underpowered… As a result, they are drowned out by the far more successful alternatives… To change this, we need something that can:
Host niche communities without isolating them from the rest of the world.
Give individuals a chance to shine without letting their egos dominate the content.
Attract enough people to drive collective intelligence, while maintaining the level of granularity needed to provide a truly personalized experience.
That isn’t too much to ask for… right? I personally believe that these systems will be the key to meeting community information needs.
I think we will have an opportunity to address these issues in and through the InSPIRE Centre. The Centre:
is a learning commons, a place to imagine, experiment and design new ways of working and learning digitally. INSPIRE services highlight quality teaching and contemporary learning practices through staying connected to global initiatives and trends about learning design and design thinking. We focus on a futures perspective and developing foresight, not just knowledge and skills.
I am hopeful that my visits to the Centre will help me explore learning ethnographies of the emergence of inspirational practice.
I have followed Richard and Sue’s work for some time and am awe struck by their altruism. Bloggers like Richard and Sue (as well as the indefatigable Stephen Downes) have inspired me to encourage students to develop their own e-portfolios.
I hope I have encouraged them to understand that reciprocal altruism is a wonderful characteristic of open access. I will affirm with them Richard’s point from Sue:
… while the web is all about sharing, it’s also important to respect the time and effort that a person puts into his or her blog posts.
This means that we must be careful about the auto posting RSS feeds noted in Richard’s update.
News of Sebastian Thrun’s development of Udacity (“We believe university-level education can be both high quality and low cost”) has added to my interest as did the video of his talk at DLD. (See this update.)
Matt Welsh ponders the “failings of the conventional higher education model for a minute and see where this leads us, and consider whether something like Udacity is really the solution”. Matt looks at three failings of ‘conventional’ universities: exclusivity; grades; lectures. Matt suggests that online universities bring to the table: broadening access to higher education; and leveraging technology to explore new approaches to learning. He observes that:
The real question is whether broadening access ends up reinforcing the educational caste system: if you’re not smart or rich enough to go to a “real university,” you become one of those poor, second-class students with a certificate Online U. Would employers or graduate schools ever consider such a certificate, where everyone makes an A+, equivalent to an artium baccalaureus from the Ivy League school of your choice?
I have been wondering how to offer sufficient rich experience to overcome the value laden and static nature of education credits. My aspiration is to encourage a collaborative approach to sharing and learning that personalises everyone’s learning environment and journey.
At present I am thinking about four stages in Open for Learning:
Invitation
Provocation
Transformation
Realisation
I have been wondering too about all this work being shared through Open Access, Creative Commons licensed material.
Participants in this Open for Learning model would:
Choose their level of entry
Follow any course without charge at whatever pace they wished
Decide whether they would like formal credit after successful completion of the course
Pay an affordable fee for a credit to add to their portfolio
My aspiration is for all these learning opportunities to have a fractal quality. Each learning opportunity would be scalable but would contain the principles of all other opportunities, particularly as learners moved to the realisation phase.
I see enormous benefits of using work integrated learning models for Open for Learning and I am particularly interested in the recognition of prior learning.
I liked Matt Walsh’s observation about grades:
Can someone remind me why we still have grades? I like what Sebastian says (quoting Salman Khan) about learning to ride a bicycle: It’s not as if you get a D learning to ride a bike, then you stop and move onto learning the unicycle. Shouldn’t the goal of every course be to get every student to the point of making an A+?
In my thinking getting an A+ grade is not a chronological event. It is, I believe, a kairological experience.
Just as I was completing this post I noticed this ABC post about homeschooling:
As a new school year begins, more than 50,000 Australian children will be home-schooled and in most cases, their parents are doing it illegally. It is compulsory to send children between the ages of six and 16 to school, or register them for home schooling, but more parents are opting out of the traditional school system and keeping their children at home. However, thousands of parents across the country are not registered and that means they potentially face prosecution.
I wondered what would happen if wherever we learned we were at home and overwhelmed by the interest someone took in us as a learner rather than a commodity.
Advances in technology should also make us think about the broader school curriculum in a new way. In an open-source world, why should we accept that a curriculum is a single, static document? A statement of priorities frozen in time; a blunt instrument landing with a thunk on teachers’ desks and updated only centrally and only infrequently? … The essential requirements of the National Curriculum need to be specified in law, but perhaps we could use technology creatively to help us develop that content. And beyond the new, slimmed down National Curriculum, we need to consider how we can take a wiki, collaborative approach to developing new curriculum materials; using technological platforms to their full advantage in creating something far more sophisticated than anything previously available. (My emphasis)
I am profoundly interested in collaborative learning and have been using wikis for some time. My use of wikis was accelerated by some work I did with Leigh Blackall at the University of Canberra in 2011. One aspect of this work was for a unit titled Business, Politics and Sport, the second was connected to a history of the Paralympic Movement in Australia.
I am hopeful that Laura Hale will work with me in this workshop. I am keen for Laura to share her experience and I would like her to say something about her Mind the Gap writing.
Postscript
I was delighted to discover that Jenni Parker is involved in a wiki workshop this week.
I started the Open Content Licensing for Educators online course on WikiEducator today. It is a free open course that runs for 5 days. I am already familiar with the concepts of open learning and open educational resources as I have been an advocate of open resources for the past few years and a WikiEducator user since 2007. I license most of my work under creative commons licenses and I encourage my students to “give back to the community” by publishing their work under a creative commons license. We obtain much of the information and photos for our own creations from the work others openly publish on the web and I believe we should return the favour in kind by adding our own work to the open web.
I received my OLDaily early this morning.
Clyde Street 