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Oh, so that’s what that meant
Because the internet, and particularly the web and social media, are so pervasive now we have a tendency to overlook how recent it all is, and how rapid the change and associated social adjustments have been. If the founding of the pre-web can be seen as the gestation of the internet’s role in society, then since the 90s we’ve been going through its childhood. This was a time filled with optimism, charm, naïveté, and rapid development. We’re now in the teenage years – it can be dark, moody, but also positive, engaging and realistic. It is a stage where it seeks meaning and its role in the world (and by…
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Maybe more isn’t better
In education (and ed tech especially) we have a number of assumptions that seem obvious and they drive a lot of our thinking, particularly around change and implementation of technology. They usually get positive responses when you ask people about them, and often they are valid, but I’ve had a few examples recently that highlight the value in questioning some of those unspoken beliefs. The first assumption is “Personalised learning is better” – I mean, that seems obvious right? It’s better to have something tailored to your needs rather than one size fits all? That’s probably true, but this report found that students in personalized schools feel less positive about…
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Mapping the open education landscape
This post follows on from the previous one, which focused on the Open Education Beginners Guide. In this I want to look at the citation network in more detail. To restate, this work arose from some initial research Viv Rolfe did, exploring the references for open education. Using a bibliographic search for “open education” and related terms, she identified a set of publications in the 1970s and 80s, which referenced earlier foundational work. This work was largely a product of the growth of open universities and distance learning. However, what is more latterly often meant by open education (particularly in the US) rarely relates to this earlier work. Katy Jordan…
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Openness & Education – a Beginner’s Guide
At last year’s OpenEd conference Viv Rolfe gave an interesting presentation on how Open Education had forgotten its past. She found that many of the early papers which explored pedagogy, the social function of open education and critical perspectives was largely unreferenced. She got talking to Irwin DeVries, and they pulled me into their side project also. We were interested in seeing whether we could in some sense ‘reclaim’ this past and broaden some of the references and understanding within the broader open education movement. Back home I brought Katy Jordan on board, and she developed a citation analysis approach to try and map the ‘open education’ landscape. We seeded…
