| |
| Open ed activists report back to iSummit plenary |
 |
Reflections on the Dubrovnik iSummit Open Ed whirlwind are now settling in. Here's the picture: there were 25 hardcore open education activists attending the track throughout, with another 25 people flowing in and out from the main summit. We spent three days in a beautiful – albeit boiling hot – building on the Aegean Sea, dreaming up ways to collaboratively build the open education future.
The people who hung for the whole track were from all corners of the world: Australia; Chile; Estonia; Finland; Netherlands; Peru; Poland; South Africa; the United States. Almost everyone in this core group spends the bulk of their time running practical projects applying open source and commons thinking to education. Whether teachers or policy makers or students, they all had a concrete stake in opening up education.
Listening to three days of buzzing conversation, it's clear that we don't yet have a good open education 'map', or even a clear picture of what it is. However, there is growing amount of energy in this space and some pieces of the map are rapidly making themselves evident. Free text books. Collaborative processes. Volunteering models. Curriculum repositories. Authoring platforms. Licensing approaches. Policy visions. All these things are being articulated and experimented with in multiple places around the world, and all were discussed as a part of the education track at iSummit.
Over the next couple of weeks, University of the Western Cape's Philip Schmidt and I are going to write up a paper reflecting on the patterns and ideas emerged from the summit. Some of my questions are:
What are we talking about? While we may not have a shared map or definition of open education, the conversations that happened at iSummit offer some interesting foundations. There was clearly a consensus that we are talking about freely available and mixable content by and for educators. And, there was even a pretty broad push for the idea that we are talking about actual changes to how education works, with students more in the driver's seat. We'll need to look at the patterns here to see what comes up, and also compare these patterns with the recent John Seely Brown Hewlett paper and a framework from Finland that Philip mentioned. We might also look at the open access Budapest Declaration, which participants at the summit mentioned as an example of what's needed at this stage in the evolution of open education.
Resources or ecosystems? The term 'open educational resources' dominates this space. Yet, at the iSummit, the message over and over again was: It's about collaboration. It's about students and teachers. It's about connections. My gut says that we should starting thinking bigger than just content and resources. A few months back in Cape Town, Jimmy Wales said that Wikipedia is '10% technology, and 90% community'. The same math may well apply to open education – the resources are only 10% of the picture. If so, we might need to start talking about open educational ecosystems as our frame of reference, and not just about resources.
How do we work sidewaysout? For better or for worse, the best known open education projects come from the United States, and mostly from big universities. However, there is a ton of emergent work in other countries and from smaller players, many of whom were at iSummit. It's essential that these emerging players can easily get on radar and into the game. Doing this means consciously embracing a way of working together that is not top down or bottom up, but sideways out. It also means not getting hung up on North vs. South, but rather embracing North/South/East/West/Everywhere engagement from the very beginning. Open source movements give us models for how to facilitate this kind of innovation from the edge. However, actually working this way requires a ton of intention and focus.
Even without solid definitions, it feels like something amazing is happening. The people who were around me at the iSummit – the Delias, Werners, Amys, Neerus, Lisas, Martijns, Steves and Jos of this world – are a part of something bigger than themselves. It may be too early call this a movement, although I don't think so. Certainly, it is dynamic and fluid as good movements are, with new formations and innovations emerging around every corner. Maybe this fluidity is better with verbs than with nouns. Maybe it is the open sourcing of education. Hmmm. Philip?
tags: toronto canada education summit07
|
|
| |
comments  |
 add a comment |
|
| |
 |
Hi Mark - Philipp here. Just landed back in Cape Town with a head full of ideas on open education. These are exciting times and we are (finally) seeing some incredible changes in the way learning is let loose. I like your starting points of mapping the terrain, considering collaboration and community, and the global impact of open education. A few additional thoughts to get the ball rolling ...
* Local versus global - Open education is asking some interesting questions about how universal knowledge is. We need to better understand the knowledge flows between local communities (anywhere in the world) and the global knowledge commons. For example, public health is a crucial area for South Africa. Local universities have developed very high-quality course materials that are directly applicable to the local environment. However, donors focus on opening up access to international courses, arguing that it is these materials that will benefit the developing countries.
* Accreditation - In the discussions around a Peer2Peer University we talked a lot about the need for accreditation, and realised that there are many different ways how accreditation could work. Open source software developers find that contributing to well-known projects is just as useful for finding a job as having a computer science degree. In other areas and countries there is a stronger need for papers (for some reason nobody wanted to go to a peer2peer dentist). It will be interesting to see how open education includes or interfaces with accreditation.
* By the way, in these discussions we also realised that setting up a Peer2Peer University is really difficult, and decided that the best way to figure out how it can be done is to give it a try ourselves first. We will be launching a course on Democracy soon and if you are interested in contributing, drop an email to p2puniversity@gmail.com.
What do others think?
Best, P
philipp (South Africa) · Jun 22nd, 2007 6:13 pm
1 out of 1 person believes this is useful
your take:   |
 |
I think that "accreditation" can mean different things.
The first meaning is the most common, that of third party agencies validating the educational value of an institution. This is the model used by higher education in the U.S., for example.
Another meaning is looser, and is whether an educational program is respected by relevant third parties, such as potential employers of a programme's graduates, or institutions considering whether an applicant's credentials are sufficient for entry into a more advanced programme.
A third refers to an institution's approach to quality assurance, mostly involving internal processes.
I'm not sure that whether an educational institution is open or closed would make a huge difference on any of these. I expect that there can be good and bad closed institutions, and good and bad open ones.
Three cheers to the idea of experimenting with an open education course, by the way. So much of education is hierarchical that it will be interesting to see an example of it being done cooperatively.
Steve Foerster · Grand Savanne, Salisbury (Dominica) · Jun 24th, 2007 6:56 am
1 out of 1 person believes this is useful
your take: |
 |
I find it interesting the CC Learn is committing to setting learning and teaching free of the 'constraints' of the 'old' style of teaching. Of course, this raises questions about the fact that this new approach seems to me to be deeply technocratic - assuming that the way to solve teaching is through technology rather than smaller class sizes, better teaching facilities and more pay and respect for the teaching profession.
For example, personally, I have found zero advantages in the move for teaching from Blackboard -> Whiteboard -> Smart Board. Apart, of course, for the advantages for the technology sector and associated industries... I also note that the spread of e-learning, PDFs and the word-processor have done more to reduce the application to reading and writing from students than improve it.
The suggestion that Second Life can 'improve' teaching seems to me laughable. Education is not entertainment, it requires the application of critical and rational faculties, not the mere moving of pixels on a screen. There is something deeply worrying about the move from students performing tests, in say physical science, to performing them virtually within e-learning environments, equally the mediation of the student/teacher nexus makes one wonder what exactly is being 'fixed' here. Afterall, it sounds suspiciously linked to the deskilling and removal of labour from the education of students, and the implementation of technology that needs constant upgrades, technical support and licence fees. We should be very careful in moderating our claims about how technology will 'improve' education.
david.berry · Swansea (United Kingdom) · Jun 27th, 2007 12:50 am
your call: is this comment useful?
your take: |
|
Hi David:
I agree with many of your concerns, and thanks for the reality check.
I can't speak on behalf of the open education movement (are we a movement yet?) but I did not get the impression in Dubrovnik that people in the education track promoted a technocratic approach. Maybe the education panel in the main hall gave a slightly skewed impression - the break-away sessions were clearly driven by people whose primary interest is education. And just adding technology to current practices is definitely a terrible idea. The power of the web lies in communities and collaboration (enabled by technology) and that's the direction many of us are working towards.
An example from South Africa: In classes with 900 students, there is no interaction between lecturer and student or between students. Using an online discussion forum and some clever ways of letting people assess each other's contributions could make things more interactive, rather than less.
Alternatively, some of us are interested in specialised areas and would like to study them in more flexible arrangements, and with global peers whose intellectual ability we respect. The Internet has created the opportunities for such communities to self-organise beyond the restrictions of physical location. That's exciting.
I am probably not as positive about the 'old' style as you. I agree that small classes and great teachers are fantastic, but they are only available to a tiny minority of people on this planet. Beyond that, there has been very little true innovation in education over the past few hundred years - and many existing institutions are very resistant to change. Why is it -- for example -- that a first higher education degree takes exactly three (in South Africa) or four (in the US) years to complete? Communities of peers and more informal learning opportunities could inject some much needed energy. Technology is an enabler of this, but should not by the primary focus.
Do you want to join our democracy course? We are limiting group sizes to 6 people exactly for the reasons you mention. We are the very very beginning and just realised that putting together the curriculum will be a bigger than expected effort. We have not even talked much about technology. But you could help us make it work. (Write to me separately if you are interested)
Best, /P
philipp (South Africa) · Jun 27th, 2007 1:32 am
your call: is this comment useful?
your take: |
|
|
|
| |
add a comment: you must be logged on in order to comment. please log in or register at iCommons.org and and your comments right after.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
send
printer-friendly version
invite to vote