Colle’s thesis is quite simple, which does not mean that it is hence less true: reflection and practice, practice and reflection, must go hand in hand. Colle states that telecenters can function in at least three ways for universities:
A means for reaching beyond their “ivory tower” to extend their knowledge and learning resources
A laboratory for faculty and researchers
A learning environment for students
The first point is interestingly ambiguous: on one hand, it means that universities should open their output, content, knowledge outside of their academic environments and revert or bring back the investment that society makes in universities. On the other hand, it also means that faculty should open their minds and realize there’s a real world outside and not just statistics and survey reports.
Reversely, telecenters could benefit from universities in many ways:
Research about ICTs and information needs
Local and relevant content, especially tailored for telecenters’ users
Training and Learning resources — obvious
ICT skilled human resources
Again, the corollary for the University is that it should (once more) get out of the ivory tower, disclose its practices and, over all, open its outputs, in the line of what open access, open science, open content initiatives promote.
My own conclusion is twofold: engage in the conversation, in the projects and in reality and, to do so, open and disclose your procedures, your findings, your networks to the limit.
Straightforward? Not really. In a world of web 2.0 philosophy and applications, it took 13 pages to David Beer and Roger Burrows to state (demostrate?) that you have to run your own blog, or have 100 friends in Facebook, to be able to write — with grounded arguments and evidence — about blogging or social networks. And I wonder if they succeeded in convincing anyone but the already convinced.
Conference by John Seely Brown at UOC headquarters in the framework of the University’s Innovation Forums.
John Seely Brown: Creating a Culture of Learning. Leveraging and Extending Open Educational Resources
How to go beyond course material in the field of Open Access. Is there anything more in “open” and learning than Open Educational Resources?
Understanding is socially constructed.
Social software, especially social networking sites, are making possible more and better networks, groups to build understanding, knowledge together.
Michael Polanyi’s dimensions of knowledge: learning about (explicit) vs. learning to be (tacit). Normally, the flow is from explicit to tacit, but we should be able to reverse this flow, and first learn how to be and shape, then, how and what to learn about.
Open Source as a Participatory Learning Platform: writing code to be read, engagement through useful additions, social capital matters. A form of distributed situated learning (cognitive ‘apprenticeship’) enculturating to a virtual community of practice. Open code, open system, open community discussion.
Tinkering — enjoy fixing, experimenting — as a learning platform. We have to legitimate tinkering.
In the Digital Age, there is a culture of participation: tinkering, building, remixing, sharing. To create meaning by what one produces and others build upon. And sometimes this meaning creation happens without the original author of the work used as a basis for further meaning creation.
The Long Tail in Learning: leveraging and supporting each segment differently, supporting the rise of an ecology of learning/doing niches.
Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure: Open Educational Resources, e-Science, e-Humanities, Web 2.0 and beyond, etc.
Huge importance not on resources, but on how to blend them together.
My comments, thoughts
Are we preparing our students accordingly? But another (previous) question is: are we preparing our faculty accordingly? Are we taking for granted that faculty is either prepared or willing to be trained? How to engage people in tinkering? J.S. Brown answers that it is not a matter of knowledge, but a matter of attitude. And have to admit that we have to become mentors, not savvy priests. Admit that there are things we don’t know and that we will find out together. My question then becomes: how do we teach such an awareness that we don’t know and such a change of attitude (specially to faculty)?
How to legitimate tinkering within institutions and, more important, inside the academic system, where formality, traditional review is the Law?
How to deal with the traditional fears of traditional faculty: how to attribute authorship, how to correctly allocate reputation, how to assess tinkering?
The syllabus of the seminar is terrific and one of the one’s you’d like to be taught, so I’m doubly thrilled in taking part in it. The format is also interesting: onsite sessions at both Mexico and the US, virtual asynchronous lectures by means of videos and presentations, and online synchronous sessions using VoIP and other devices and joining all the participants in the same virtual space, thus highly enriching the experience by gathering different perspectives from different countries.
Another asset is that all readings, lectures, materials, etc. will be published open on the site of the seminar.
On my side, I’ll focus on Web 2.0 and presence on the web, adapting some concepts from my article on the personal research portal, but broadening its scope to include the practitioner, the entrepreneur, the politician and shift it towards participation instead of knowledge sharing and management.
Introduction to the Web 2.0, stressing the fact that the web is the platform, that putting up content to the web has been made quite easy — caveat: provided you have access to a computer and good bandwidth —, the power of RSS, the challenge of filtering and content quality.
Conferences are one dimensional: content delivered at one time and one place
Conferences should shift from information exchange to knowledge exchange
Before conferences: data and information sharing through websites, blogs, social networks
During conferences: knowledge sharing through instant messaging, browsing, blogging and nanoblogging, social bookmarking, shared list of resources/bibliographies, multimedia files, presentations, paper repositories, etc.
During conferences: interaction fostered by wikis, blogging (comments)
After conferences: strengthening the network using social software, blogrolls, keeping the track of conference “official” tags, feedreading, etc.
Opennes, a must
Going digital, or how to create huge (infinite?) economies of scale
The web is the platform, the way to overcome space (and time) barriers
Link, link, link, or how to contribute to reputation and filtering
Live recording of the session
Using the EyA System — thanks to Carlo Fonda for making it possible!
The collection is far more than just “Education” or “University” or “Web 2.0” but pretends to give a framework comprehensive enough to approach the Education 2.0 phenomenon. I personally think that a good approach to Education 2.0 should include:
digital capacity building, including the zilliion different digital literacies: technological, informational, media, e-awareness…
team working
digital identity, presence on the Net, e-Portfolios
creation and importance of social networks and connectivism
the digital natives concept
long life learning and student-centered learning
open educational resources
…
To which I would add Business 2.0:
creation based on gift economies
distributed creation and the wisdom of crowds
entering the conversation with the consumers… and the prosumers
…
And a longest etcaetera of concepts, hypes, buzzwords and so — easy to see this is just a superficial reflection, not a deep analysis of the concept. Of course, the categories are arbitrary and just a means not to have 47 references one after the other without a break:
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