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!

Week 1 : Right to Education

The following is for an Open Education course on Open Education offered by David Wiley of Utah State University. It is unique (but hopefully not for long!) in that he has made it not only accessible for people throughout the world, but also free – taking “Open” to its extreme.

As a quick introduction for those who are in this course, I’ve just finished my Masters thesis at OISE/UT, Canada, on how civil society networks affect education policy in Tanzania. I’ve got a background in comparative education and critical international development, and have lived/worked in several ‘Southern/developing’ countries. I’m also very involved in the Canadian Global Campaign for Education – which is part of the international GCE – a transnational advocacy network for the right to education. Coming from that perspective....

Week 1's Question of Open Ed Course: In your opinion, is the "right to education" a basic human right? Why or why not? In your opinion, is open *access* to free, high-quality educational opportunity sufficient, or is it necessary to *mandate* education through a certain age or level?

I find the first question, of whether education is a basic human right, as a bit misleading. Human rights are essentially social constructs. The notion of rights itself has only come into common usage in the past 100 years (and the Convention on the Rights of the Child only since 1989!!), although connected ideas like habeas corpus, have existed for several centuries. I think the common denominator for the enactment of human rights, or habeas corpus for that matter, is that societies and/or states agree that these should be the standards from which to conduct themselves, and certain guarantees that all people should enjoy, simply for being human. In other words, if we agree that the right to education is a human right, then it becomes so. Given the number of countries that have agreed that education is a human right, even if they cannot fulfill it (both of which Tomasevski (#2) demonstrates), I think it is safe to say that education is a basic human right.

Finnemore and Sikkink (1998), from the international relations field, have argued that novel and quaint ideas, such as women being equal and having the right to vote, or that slaves are real people, can over time morph into accepted norms of thought and behavior. For the first while, not everyone accepts these principals, and the ‘norm entrepreneurs’ must work very hard to advocate for these ideas. But a critical mass can slowly build around these ideas, which leads to what Finnemore and Sikkink refer to as a ‘norm cascade’, and then finally into a situation where these ideas are internalized and become the default of our thinking. In this way, the right to education, too, has evolved from being a novel idea into a critical mass. As the ideas surrounding it are further worked on, and as more countries get closer to realizing its enactment, ‘education as a human right’ will also become an entrenched internalized idea, an idea that years from now people will look back on and say, “well, of course!”.

A more practical question may be: what is the utility of having education as a human right? What use does it serve, especially if countries cannot even uphold their commitments? In fact, appealing to human rights has allowed civil society organizations (CSOs) and international organizations (such as Unicef and Unesco) an important moral high-ground. Over the past decade, CSOs have tended to shift towards a “rights-based approach”, as opposed to previous approaches that favoured developing human capital (biasing aid towards higher education, at the expense of basic education), or a ‘needs-based’/charity perspective, where Southern/developing countries were seen as incapacitated, poor and helpless (which allowed Northern/richer countries to engage in a ‘holier-than-thou’, ‘white-man’s burden’ relations – which Anto'stuff and Karen rightly criticized by stating that ‘we’ shouldn’t be telling ‘them’ how to do ‘their’ education - whoever we and they are). A rights-based approach, however, allows Southern governments to appeal for aid, not out of charity, but because it is their duty to provide education for their children, and it is the international community’s responsibility to assist. This is incredibly important, especially given the increasing interconnectedness of our world – both through communications and trade.

An example of the utility of education as a human right is pertinent. In about 1998, only 60% of kids in Tanzania went to primary school, only 6% went past Grade 7, and less than 1% went to University. (It is interesting to dwell upon how many doctors/lawyers/engineers/teachers were actually possible with these numbers, particularly when richer countries contributed to a brain-drain, preferring those educated – on another countries dime - to immigrate). Tomasevski (#1) mentions that in 2000, world leaders committed to the Dakar Framework for Education for All. Equally important, world leaders also agreed in 2000 upon the Millennium Development Goals, of which the universal primary education is the second goal. A group of NGOs got together to form the Global Campaign for Education, in order to keep the pressure on governments to fulfill these goals – using the premise that it was the governments’ human rights responsibilities. Oxfam, in particular, connected Southern government’s inability to fund basic education to the high debt payments they owed – i.e. Tanzanian children were not getting their right to education because the money was instead being used to pay interest on debts owed to rich countries. This line of reasoning was really effective in both getting debt-relief for Southern countries, as well as freeing up money in the budget and outside aid for basic education (Mundy & Murphy, 2001). The result? As of this year, Tanzania has close to 100% of primary kids in school (although kids with disabilities and nomadic ethic children still pose challenges) – in fact, when the Tanzanian government announced that primary schooling would be free in 2002, 1.6 million more children got a chance to go to school (UNDP, HDR 2005). (Secondary level is also being expanded to 25%, because of the pressure of parents to have more schooling for their children.)

As to the second question, whether access is enough, or whether it is necessary to mandate education to a certain age or level, I think that Tomasevski would have argued that mandating it to a minimum age or level was important, to ensure that governments fulfill their responsibility to provide education. By mandating some basic education, governments and parents are not able to deny children with disabilities or children who are working some basic knowledge (even if school is confined to only a few hours in the evening a week in the case of children that work, or maybe a few weeks a year, in the case of the Masaii or Lesotho herders). To deny children basic knowledge on nutrition, HIV-AIDS, health, literacy and numeracy is to assume that we now that these children will not need these skills in the next 50 years. It also ignores the fact that individuals have an impact on their communities, that a person who is malnourished cannot work as effectively or one who has HIV-AIDS must be cared for by others. Education has the potential to help prevent some drains, while enhancing other aspects of contributing to a community. Education has also long been known as the great equalizer, and it would be wrong to deny children a part in this. That being said, I agree with Stian and Tomasevski that the type of education, provided by whom, in what language, during what hours and in what building, is very much still an open debate. One that I will leave for another day.

Basic education aside for a moment, it is a more difficult question as to whether higher education should be free and accessible to all. I would love to think it should be, but do believe that basic education should come first. I am, however, grateful to the Canadian government for subsidizing about half of my high education costs, because I see the benefits of having several smart but quite poor friends who are subsequently able to afford to go to University. As well, although this course is provided free, with open access, it is really only accessible to those who already have a certain skill base and access to technology. I’m very grateful for the opportunity to take this course, and I hope to be able to teach the type of course David Wiley advocates for, being open, digital, mobile, connected, personalized, and participatory. But I am also aware that this trend has the potential to further widen the gap between those who have technological access and those that don’t. I believe it is known as the digital divide? Perhaps the $100 laptops that others also mention will make this argument obsolete. I hope so.