New learning contents and platforms

In an interview with Jaron Lanier, the author of (very) interesting You are not a gadget, he claimed to be surprised by the still high level of passivity of people on the Internet, as well as with digital technology in general.

According to Lanier, big mass media, because of their particular nature, had alienated citizens as creators and had made them become spectators. Information and Communication Technologies, with their versatility and very low cost (both in matters of access to infrastructure and, relatively, in terms of learning curve to master their usage) should have brought a creative and communicative shock that would turn upside down the pre-digital landscape of television, radio or the printing press. However, despite the undeniable revolution of the Web 2.0, in most cases we have but changed of screen which we now use for the very same purposes as before.

In educational environments, it is quite true that we talk more about interactivity than about creativity, and the difference is not a minor one.

Historically, learning by doing has always been very expensive. Sometimes because of the materials: carving a marble David is a task that leaves little room for corrections. Sometimes because of time: managing a database with thousands of records on paper and producing the basic statistics manually entails hours and hours of calculations. Sometimes because of the risks: how many casualties adds up the history of aviation? And yet there seems to be consensus that learning by doing is how people learn best, especially if we add to that explaining how things are done.

Digital technologies in knowledge-intensive areas (such as teaching and learning) have cut down to the minimum the cost of building, testing, trying, simulating, of being wrong. In his Carta a los editores de libros de texto (letter to the textbook publishers), professor Jordi Adell argues why the textbook as a closed and immutable object is at odds with a society (and a school) where digital content is created, transformed and constantly destroyed.

In a similar train of thought, the advisory board behind the Informe Horizon: Edición Iberoamericana 2010 (2010 Horizon Report: Iberoamerican Edition Released) identifies six major trends to watch in the future of education:

1. Collaborative environments.
2. Social Media.
3. Open content.
4. Mobile technologies.
5. Augmented reality.
6. Semantic Web.

Amongst these six, two of them (#3, #6) are closely related to the openness of the contents, two (#1, #2) to collaboration in creation and co-learning, and two (#4, #5) to new platforms and educational spaces.

Thus, it is not only about being possible a certain de-institutionalization of education to regain the attention to the learner, a non “industrialized” learning; or about being possible capitalizing the learning that takes place outside formal channels: the question is that it already is technically possible… though the road still to go (having the will to do it, getting an agreement) is yet the most complicated.

Initiatives such as those presented in the Open Content Studio, Video Lab, the lounge or the Wikimedia learning Local incubator of Mozilla Drumbeat Festival may be more or less replicated, more or less representative, but certainly point in the same direction, so that change is possible and, moreover, it is happening.

Initiatives such as those presented in the Open content studio, the Video Lab, the Wikimedia lounge or the Local learning incubator of the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival may be more or less likely to be replicated, more or less representative, but certainly point towards the same direction: that change is possible and, moreover, that it is happening.