A Collection of Citations on Open, free, participatory, and commons-oriented learning approaches.
Citation 1: The Open Education movement is gaining momentum
“The field of open education is gaining momentum around the world. Literally hundreds of open education projects are springing up from Tokyo to Boston to Paris to Beijing. Over 2000 courses are now available through OpenCourseWare projects alone. Add to this the growing number of open access learning object repositories, increases in the number and quality of open source educational software projects, the open education work agencies like UNESCO and the OECD are doing, and the field is diversifying as quickly as it is growing..”
(http://cosl.usu.edu/conferences/opened2006/)
Citation 2: Schools need to open up to peer-based learning models
“When you look at children’s learning outside school, it is driven by what they are interested in, which is the direct opposite of school-based learning. For example, in the United States a group of students were interested in Manga, the Japanese animated cartoons. In order to get hold of them before they were due to arrive on the market, this group got together, taught themselves Japanese, subtitling and web streaming, because they were motivated to.
What is the relationship with this idea that education is handing down a general base of knowledge? I think that is one of the tensions.
When you look at learning in the home you see knowledge-building communities. Children can act as teachers, they are allowed to adopt different identities and they are not just learners. They have control over the time of their learning and how long it will take. The school system needs to know a lot more about what is happening outside school in terms of children’s passions, interests and abilities than it does at the moment.
We need a shift towards an education system that is about listening to what the learners are bringing into the school situation, as well as thinking about an education system that is pushing things out.”
(http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2006/07/smart_learning_.html)
Citation 3: the Learning 2.0 approach
“The traditional approach to e-learning has been to employ the use of a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), software that is often cumbersome and expensive – and which tends to be structured around courses, timetables, and testing. That is an approach that is too often driven by the needs of the institution rather than the individual learner. In contrast, e-learning 2.0 (as coined by Stephen Downes) takes a ‘small pieces, loosely joined’ approach that combines the use of discrete but complementary tools and web services – such as blogs, wikis, and other social software – to support the creation of ad-hoc learning communities.”
(http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/e-learning_20.php)
Citation 4: Education is diverging from schooling
“Education, the means by which young people learn the skills necessary to succeed in their place and time, is diverging from schooling.
Media-literacy-wise, education is happening now after school and on weekends and when the teacher isn’t looking, in the SMS messages, MySpace pages, blog posts, podcasts, videoblogs that technology-equipped digital natives exchange among themselves.
This population is both self-guided and in need of guidance, and although a willingness to learn new media by point-and-click exploration might come naturally to today’s student cohort, there’s nothing innate about knowing how to apply their skills to the processes of democracy.”
(http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2006/11/14/participatory_media_and_the_pedagogy.htm)
Citation 5: Theresa Williamson on The power of peer teaching
“Everybody knows the proverb about how it’s better to teach a man to fish than just to give him a fish, but there’s a step beyond that: it’s better that a man’s neighbor is the one teaching him to fish, his peer. If some expert swoops in from afar you miss half the value of the interaction because of the inequality in that relationship. But if it’s his peer teaching him? Then the man is much more likely to offer something in return. You are much more likely to create a real sustainable relationship rather than just a new dependency.”
Theresa Williamson, Founder, Catalytic Communities (http://www.nextbillion.net/node/1723)
Citation 6: John Maloney on the new knowledge leaders
“The silent killers of effective knowledge leadership are the pervasive 20th-century traditions of linear, mechanical and reductionist thinking paired with their obsolete managerial behaviours of control, dominance and technocracy.
Top knowledge leaders routinely ‘suspend their disbelief’ to unlearn their harmful industrial-era habits and models. They learn from the emerging future through authentic conversation. 21st-century knowledge leaders actively pursue external interactions and continuously use genuine action/research networks to their strategic and collaborative advantage.”
(From http://www.kmcluster.com/ , newsletter, 2004)
Citation 7: From learning “just in case” to “learning on demand”
Paul D. Fernhout:
“Ultimately, educational technology’s greatest value is in supporting “learning on demand” based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to “learning just in case” based on someone else’s demand. Compulsory schools don’t usually traffic in “learning on demand”, for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the “real world”. In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.”
(http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html)
Citation 8: Teachers as world-changers
Clay Burrell:
“Putting “what it is about” in positive terms is more difficult, but here are a few stabs. It’s about not being “a Nobody doing anything” when my students are looking for “Somebody doing something” about what they care about. It’s about inviting them to discover that they have the power to do something too. It’s about being a community leader more, and a teacher less. It’s about extending my relationship with these young adults beyond the nine-month term (if church youth group leaders can do it, so can teachers). It’s about re-conceptualizing schools as community action centers instead of walled gardens (or day-care centers, or juvenile detention centers). It’s about designing relevant experiences and projects in which any metaphors or synecdoches that, god help us, they learn, will have a purpose and meaning beyond an alphanumeric grade.”
(http://burell.blogspot.com/2007/07/im-nobody-goodbye-to-all-of-that.html)