The Role of Open Educational Resources in Personal Learning

The Role of Open Educational Resources in Personal Learning Stephen Downes Open Social Learning Barcelona, December 1, 2009

Meta-message
The conundrum of open educational resources - Who produces, who uses?
Joel Greenberg: people are taking this stuff - but what they're not doing is giving it back - but that's what they're doing in Youtube and Flickr - so why isn't it happening in learning?

Personal Learning
Learning thought of as from the perspective of the learner
Not from the perspective of the institution
Not from the perspective of the content to be taught

The Product is the Learner
Personal learning is more about an individual’s growth and development
We usually talk about it in terms of skills and capacities
But (for various reasons) it’s more accurate to think of it as being like literacy

Personal Learning Environment
Best thought of as an ecology in which learning takes place
Is represented with the student thought of as being at the centre
But is in fact a mesh or a web of interconnected students

Connective Knowledge (1)
The most common way of representing connective knowledge
The knowledge created and shared by an interconnecting community of learners
Knowledge is distributed
Knowledge is created by conversation and interaction

Role of the Learner
Participates and engages in a community
Participation is guided by personal interest and motivation
(Not staged, akin to Lave & Wenger, no hierarchy of interaction, akin to Salmon, Carr)

The Connectivism Course
A good example of such a learning network
There was no ‘right’ way to interact
No set of processes to master or undertake
No specific body of knowledge to assimilate
The connectivist course is an example of open sharing

Connectivism as Mesh

The Pedagogical Imperative
But why? Why do it that way?
What pedagogical purpose is served by open sharing (as opposed to, say, curricular materials, or scaffolded practice)?
The answer lies in the nature of knowledge and learning itself

Views of Science (1)
The traditional view: science (and knowledge) as a set of propositions
Learning = the remembering of the body of these ‘facts and principles’. But:
Facts, principles are dynamic, not static
In chaotic systems, facts and principles do not exist

Views of Science (2)
The functional view of science, as a set of procedures or practices
Amounts to the teaching of methods or rules rather than facts
This creates the danger of emphasizing process rather than result
Amounts to a confusion of indicators with results

Science as Conversation
The first conversation, scientists with their body of enquiry, experiments, tests, projects, etc., - a conversation with nature
Scientists with each other, a network of interactions instantiating a vocabulary, ontology, way of thinking about the world

Science as Mesh

Science as Connecting
As George Siemens said yesterday, science becomes essentially the formation of connections
The result is a complex web of connections between concepts, artifacts, phenomena, people, theories, actions…

Scientists
The key to science is the creation of scientists as connectors
That is to say, the creation of people who are literate in this form of conversation
(This is akin to the creation of scientists as experts, who recognize patterns, who see the way scientists see)

Connective Knowledge (2)
The less common way of representing knowledge
This is personal knowledge , the knowledge shared by an interconnecting network of neurons
Knowledge is distributed
Knowledge is ineffable

Connecting neurons
Neurons (like scientists) are connected through principles of association
Major mechanisms include Hebbian association (similarity), proximity, back propagation, Boltzmann (harmony)
Learning is therefore a process of varied, authentic experiences, which generate patterns in the mind

Views of Learning (1 & 2)
Learning as the remembering of facts
Learning as processes or skills
Learning as conversation - where the product of learning is the set of connections in the individual that results
(ie., learning where the product is the learner)

The Language of Thought
Papert - constructionism - when people construct artifacts they are constructing media with which to think
What vocabularies are we using in our digital materials? What vocabularies are publishers using? Are students using?
Who owns the conversation?

The Students Own Learning
Alejandro Piscitelli - we have this mystic idea that by saying things that people will change
from mention to use -- technology as persuasion -- it is by speaking the language that we internalize it, that we become it

Social Networks as Mesh

The Meta-Message Revisited
We cannot produce knowledge for people
The greatest beneficiaries are the people who produce the resources
Why then do we fund universities and institutions to produce knowledge?
The only sustainable OERs are produced by the learners themselves

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The Role of Open Educational Resources in Personal Learning

by Stephen Downes on Dec 01, 2009

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