What Brian Lamb seems to confuse in this entry about the Open Education Resources, universities and information scarcity argument is that information (or more accurately a surfeit of data) available on the net does not equate to a surplus of quality learning content.
Quality learning content charts a path through complex issues, ideas and problems creating learning moments and activities. Early distance education theorists including Borje Holmberg wrote about “guided didactic interaction” by which he meant a style of writing, that engaged in simulated dialogue with the learner(s). This style is unlike the academic prose common in scholarly articles and the technical writing of advanced manuals, technical specifications and or popular press prose that is readily available on the net. It attempts to capture the personal motivation and excitement of the teacher to create the motivation often necessary to support learners through difficult content. Today, the learning conversations expand to simulations, games, web explorations, and even realtime and asynchronous conversations among learners. A skillful teacher creates these paths and simultaneously scaffolds learners new to the discipline and its associated discourse.
We do not have a surfeit of such learning content on the Net today. OERs are beginning to make a contribution to this effort. Properly licensed (read Creative Commons, with derivatives allowed) OER’s also allow other educators and learners to contextualize, mash, translate and republish this specialized content, thus creating an ever expanding and infinitely malleable resources. I write this note from Brazil where students regularly attend formal courses and engage in informal learning without the support of quality textbooks and the Net resources often bundled with these expensive textbooks. OERs offer the possibility of sharing not only the open access resource of research and scholarly content, but as well the expertise and passion of educators who are skilled at helping learners. We need more of these resources not constraints or misinformed criticism of the OER promise to increase access and public knowledge.
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I agree with this, especially as it pertains to OCW efforts. I think there has been a tendency to see the many different types of edcuational material as all grist for the mill, and therefore somewhat equivalent.
Part of this is because historically we’ve really neglected this informal learning bit of the equation — so this is the pendulum swinging over — if informal learning is the bulk of learning, and we have all these informal learning materials — then we’ve got OER.
Which is true, sort of. I mean, if the scaffolding comes from the social framework around them, then yeah, that’s right. Let’s get building that supportive network.
But the other way to see it is that the scaffolding can be built into the materials (or their sequence, or lectures surrounding readings, etc). And that is in fact what better professors have done over the years — constantly rearranged and improved their courses based on how well students react.
And the really neat thing is that for the first time, professors have, with OCW, a further way to contemplate ways of improving their presentation — by looking at the work of others in their field. This ability to see how others work will be particularly important as we try to evolve classes into new models.
Anyway, thanks for this. I think Brian’s what-if was helpful, in the way that it is helpful to return to these questions — but I think it may also be an indication that we’ve broken down one too many distinctions. The emerging educational environment is not a sausage mill, but an ecosystem, and not all open resources are interchangeable. We should expect that traditional scaffolded presentations will remain a crucial part of that ecosystem, even if they are bumping up against a lot of other types of material, even if they are encapsulated in more peer-to-peer oriented structures, even if more support is garnered through web means — and less is needed in the materials.