Image via WikipediaPontydysgu – Bridge to Learning » Blog Archive » We have the ideas and the technologies – what changes in the system do we need for Open Education?
Here are P’s elements for an alternative to the current system
- Open Educational Sources: there are many, good resources available to gather and learn from, many of which are free or nearly so if you factor out the cost of getting to them on the Internet. Given the rise of netbooks and $100 laptops the spigot for knowledge, data, and even wisdom is open.
- Social Networks: we seem to be muddling toward conviviality to butcher Warren Johnson and Ivan Illich only a little. Our human need for society is being leveraged every day and not in the way our hedge fund thieves managed. This is cognitive extension of an unparalleled kind where the Internet becomes the ‘long enough lever’ and each student stands in the place to move it.
- Curricula: The centrally controlled, Texas-Textbook-scope-and-sequence model is being supplanted by a rhizomatic model. Or maybe we are whales in an ocean full of krill. Open our maws, filter and eat. While courses still predominate other food sources are becoming available every day.
- Personal Learning Environments: The place where all the threads are gathered. These will most likely be ’small tools, loosely joined’ model where a blog/CMS becomes the place where ’stuff’ is aggregated and ‘things’ get created. The beauty of the PLE is that they really don’t need to be defined any further than that. The next step forward here is within the PLE where workflow is customized to each learner and tied into a fresh and interesting set of sources.Or perhaps, as Harold Jarsch discusses, we become small schools, loosely joined.
Four key changes:
- Teachers’ roles: School is a zero sum game. If they stand in front of class, they are not doing the guiding and supporting that are what really makes for good learning. So we need to move toward crowdsourcing. This will free teachers to take on new roles as learning brokers/concierges.
- Assessment: Reassign assessment to its ‘proper’ role as a measure of learning rather than as a method of making teachers accountable.
- Role of schools and design of learning environment: We must recognize that schools are only part of what amounts to our learning ecology. We need to “de-school” our institutions so that they become obsessed with learning instead of all of the other sideshows they are currently masters of.
- Accreditation: We need a complete re-view of how we validate and accept learning wth schools changing their role as grantors of ‘keys to the highway’ to abettors in demonstrating competence.
I would like to see a “thought” experiment that would take each of these points and try to imagine them into existence within today’s educational system. In other words what kind of acts, by whom, and in what manner would make your four points above possible. I think one assumption that bears scrutiny is that technology is driving this change, cargoism at work. Rather I think we might look at the new affordances that they offer to our existing human condition. I am assuming that we are not creating a new homo techologensus unless some mutant is being born among us even now. How does this new system make humanity better? What I mean by this is to ask what hindrances do technologies sweep away that allow for the growth of already existing human characteristics both good and bad?
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