Week 3: OLCOS & Education as the practice of freedom?

Paulo Freire, in the 1960s, spoke about getting rid of a "banking" notion of education, and thought that learning, particularly literacy, should begin from the learner's own knowledge and building from their experiences (e.g. in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Education as the Practice of Freedom, and We Make the Road by Walking).

This week's reading, the European OLCOS article: Open Educational Practices and Resources: OLCOS Roadmap 2012, seems to centre around these same themes - of slowly transforming the practice of teachers and learners. Although this vision has yet to be achieved, four decades later. Similar to Freire, OLCOS speaks about the need for teachers to change from dispensers of knowledge (i.e. banking), to facilitators of learning (Ch. 4). Although OLCOS explicitly recognize that changing institutionalized teaching habits takes time, I thought it is very important that OLCOS suggests that Open Education Resources (content, software and tools), are only the means to the end of furthering this innovative form of learning and knowledge creation (innovation being one of the key hopes of the institution). Their focus on practice, and innovative practice at that, is notable. Will open education become a practice of freedom? too early to say.

Below I have some of the more pertinent thoughts this week's reading elicited. namely 1) collaboration and creating garbage. 2) value chains - rejigging this course to ensure more reflection on others' work - thereby re-using/improving one's ideas. 3) why don't we have open textbooks?

1) I really like the idea of collaboration and co-creation. But I do wonder what will happen to quality of content, and what will happen when so much garbage is on the web. Although there has been a massive growth in the access to useful info on the net (it was amazing to research my thesis and have a digital library of 1/2 of my references, as compared to nothing 10 years ago), on the other hand, this growth has been dwarfed in comparison to the amount of non-peer-reviewed material I need to wade through. And I only expect it to get worse - especially if each class, each year, is constantly creating and recreating. This can be a really wonderful thing, but how do we deal with it in terms of volume? quality? the dividing line between learning for oneself and collective learning?

2) I was inspired by OLCOS's notion of "value chains", where content is provided on the web, then reused and modified by the learner to become better. From this, I have new ideas what I think should be the requirements of postings on Sunday night... The following is a description of the creation of a value chain:

"Collaborative learning practices are most likely to allow for such value chains to emerge and
progress, because the learning community will:
| use some existing digital content or courseware as a starting point;
| consult other available content from e-learning repositories or other relevant sources of
information;
| document their own study process and results, such as use cases, experiences, lessons learned,
guidelines, etc. (note: documentation also includes metadata);
| make this enriched content available again to other learners, e.g. via repository and/or syndication services, and
| thereby share the results for re-use, and enrichment, by other learners." (OLCOS pg. 43).

It occurred to me, while reading this, that this is truly how I do learn in collaboration with my peers in the Open Education course. However, I have noticed that most people do not post until Sunday afternoon/evening...making it difficult to read and incorporate their views into my postings. The fact that it is late Sunday evening also means that my peers don't have a chance to read my work! As well, if I read their stuff at this time, before I write/post my views, my own views tend to get muddied in my post. It is as if the speed of learning I need to compose something that I like, that reflects my views but incorporates others, is too fast. The time period is too short for me to do this!

Following on OLCOS's process of value chains, described above, I think it would be much smarter to require two posts - even if they are each a little shorter. The first would be one's own reflections on the reading. The second would incorporate others' views of the reading, - it would be my other reflections on the reading in light of this, or perhaps a change to my original post. This would allow me to articulate my own thoughts clearly, but would also force me to revisit/rethink them in light of others' comments - an excellent learning value chain. Because this would not all be done on Sunday night before midnight, I actually would have a chance to read my peers' work before posting mine. How this process would correspond to OLCOS's value chain is described below:

"Collaborative learning practices are most likely to allow for such value chains to emerge and
progress, because the learning community will:
| use some existing digital content or courseware as a starting point; [e.g. the OCLOS article is the starting point this week]
| consult other available content from e-learning repositories or other relevant sources of
information; [in this case, I drew upon Freire, or I could have drawn on past weeks info too, or some of the resources mentioned in the OCLOS article]
| document their [the student's] own study process and results, such as use cases, experiences, lessons learned, guidelines, etc. (note: documentation also includes metadata); [I think this would be exploring my own ideas, as I have done in this piece - documenting what "I" think about this]
| make this enriched content available again to other learners, e.g. via repository and/
or syndication services, and [This would be through my post, by Sunday evening midnight]
| thereby share the results for re-use, and enrichment, by other learners.[Well, I think that by Wednesday evening, I should have to post another short blog, highlighting worthy thoughts/comments on other people's blogs. it would allow my thoughts to grow as a learner] (OLCOS pg. 43 - [closed brackets are my thoughts]).

Based on this thought process, I think I will try to imitate this chain over the coming weeks...starting this Wednesday...(David, let me know if this is not advisable, please - but it is my recommendation for future courses...)

3) The OLCOS article touched the important and different roles played by teachers vs. publishers. However, it also described publishers as the stop-gap for open content. Copyright issues can stop the re-use, modification and open sharing of content (p. 29). Although I recognize the important work that publishers do, I am of a similar opinion that textbooks are one area where the public would greatly benefit from having its own group of publishers that produces textbooks for schoolkids Gr. 1-12, within one country or region. The price of these textbooks, and replacing them every few years, is quite costly for the school system, and the books are "static" content - which is not very compatible with OCLOS's vision of the new learner in an information society. By having public publishers, we could afford to create high quality textbooks at a much lower cost, as the costs would be dispersed across a whole nation. How else would we resolve this tension between creating profit for publishers, and serving the common good? Or do we encourage a new breed of publishers to emerge as well....??? Perhaps I need to look again at OCLOS and the OECD's description of incentives!

My good friend, Mark Federman, drew my attention to the issue of providing textbooks for free as an OER quite a while ago. I later found out he had blogged on this very issue of free textbooks in 2005. I think it is an idea that should be thought about and grown - in the very same way that a values chain grows...it is a worthy idea!