This document discusses open education and knowledge building communities. It notes that open source is an institutional and social innovation, not just technological. It calls for an "ecology of experiments" to support learning. Key aspects of knowledge building communities identified include building social networks, developing capabilities, and ensuring sustainability. Examples provided are the Urban Universities Portfolio Project, Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research. Intermediaries are seen as important to support open education through knowledge building within social groups and sharing more broadly. Formative assessment and technological support for communication are also discussed as means to ensure the sustainability of open education initiatives.

1. Chapter 23
Sharadna Mungur
0919052

2. John Seely Brown:
“open source is an institutional innovation, not just a
technological one”
He calls for an “ecology of experiments and systems
for the learning landscape.”

3. Such a model requires
 building social networks,
 developing ways to accelerate capabilities
 assuring staying power.

4. Projects that characterizes these are:
 The Urban Universities Portfolio Project (UUPP)
 The Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of
Teaching and Learning (CASTL)
 The Inter/National Coalition for Electronic
Portfolio Research (Inter/National Coalition)

5. Steven Weber:
“criteria for entering (and leaving), leadership roles,
power relations, distributional issues, education
and socialization paths, and all the other
characteristics that describe a nascent culture and
community structure” (2004, p. 15)

6. Reflection Interaction Knowledge
Information

7. Knowledge building emerge from social
interaction where people build knowledge
within their social group first and then
extending this to others.

8. Features:
Intermediaries
Continued Invitation to Involvement and
Cultivation of Emergent Leadership

9. Intermediaries are knowledge-builders that
are essential for a social network involving
education.
They support open education by providing
the environment necessary for
wide-scale knowledge-building

10. Purpose of Intermediaries:
1. Provide coordination
2. Collaborative research

11. Change initiatives
often choose or invite a set of players
willing to work toward mutual educational
objectives but also structure future entry
points into the project.

12. “Sometimes the nature of the work itself
elicits interaction.”.
In fact, this interaction helps in the
knowledge building-community of practice.

13. Courage to change
Visible administrative support and
successful examples promote
courage

14. 1. Provides a “demilitarized zone.”
2. Disparate achievements can become more
than the sum of the parts.

15. “Build in assessment at every stage”
i.e. formative assessment to provide useful
feedback to correct errors and thus
building up successful projects.

16. “Incorporate the means for ensuring
staying power,” advise Bacchetti and Ehrlich
(2007, p.27)

17. One means for ensuring staying power is
technological support for communication
and dissemination of ideas and findings

18. “Building on the shoulders of giants entails
benefiting from ancestors but also
contributing to the next generation”

19. Learning theory and practice confirm that
scaffolding supports learning
in an open-education environment in
important ways