Hearing words like API and open standards, though important, in combination with words like “new” and in the context of the soon to come educational killer application makes me always being scarred that we end up with yet another tool / toy.
We have myriads of good cases at the web that show that vivid learning environments and communities are successfully working by using simple yet mature technologies, meanwhile all of our attempts within traditional educational settings haven't taken up as we hoped.
Learning is to a great extent a silent process and silence is difficult to be displayed and shared at the web. But the same web also show us how this silence can be made visible i.e. by people either actively discussing and developing a joint goal, or by sharing their thoughts within open unstructured debates, or by posting questions and receiving answers. Bringing content and tools to people is certainly helpful, but is not the most important thing to break silence, to scratch an itch, or to stimulate participation and engagement.
Additionally and talking about “open learning environments”, at least if it is to be “open”, also means that words like “students” become vague so we need to be clear to whom are we actually referring and for whom are we doing all of this: our students (for whom we bear the responsibility), fellow institutions' students (for whom someone else bears the responsibility) or free learner that just scratch an itch?
Within our traditional educational systems all our attempts going open or taking advantage of collective knowledge are somehow condemned to fail and this might be something to work on first. Is this the reason we keep on focusing on the technology side and develop large numbers of “yet another thing”, though we learned over the past decade that others do a much better job on this “out at the web”?
This leads me to 2 questions:
- What would we actually do with e.g. a ROLE once we created the ultimate “open” socio-technological system? Could we use it within our current educational system? Or would already the law prohibit us doing so to protect our students? More importantly, could we even test and pilot it during the development time with our students? Or with the students from others? On a large scale, to make sure it would be accepted and functions e.g. as a p2p system? How “close to the market” would such a system be after 4 years development? Seeing that this is a large scale 6.6 Mio Euros project I assume that it should be used successfully after market introduction by millions of people, having been tested over a year or to with thousands and experimented with community building and how they impact the system, but how could this work being applied in traditional educational systems?
- Why not using existing technologies and focusing on the organizational side, to see what's working and what not, and “let the system grow in an evolutionary way” by responding to actually identified needs, bugs and opportunities?
We can see at the web that humans leverage information, act as information broker, provide support and help each other, create and remix things, tag them, question them, improve them, and ultimately do this for a particular reason be it learning, work or fun . . .And IMO they are doing a fairly good job on this.
A simple bulletin board can be turned into a vivid learning community, as long as there is a motivation and reason for a diverse group to engage at it.
We have already for quite some years all those free tools at hand, but yet we haven't managed to apply them in the right way. If we are to “go open”, and not just use “open” as the trendy word it became, we might need to understand first how the web works and what's proven to work out well and to create similar conditions within an educational setting and than keep on going to improve and enhance it step by step.
But you might have taken this all into consideration and it is just me being scared by the wording or the way I interpret them, which gives me the idea that the focus is once again on new technologies.
Best, Andreas
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