Opening up #learning: Access to knowledge

Learning is opening up like never before. Open learning was originally used to describe the opening up on education to previously disenfranchised individuals - those who had not followed the traditional pathways to education. In the 70s and 80s, many people suddenly had a chance to pursue a degree when the open universities were established. The British Open University for example, was nicknamed 'the university of the second chance'. As a concept, openness began to gain purchase. Soon there were open colleges, and open learning centres, and then open software appeared - software that could be shared and developed by anyone. The last few years have seen the rise of Massive Open Online Courses, used by millions of students around the world to participate in learning that was previously closed to them. It's something of a revolution for education.

Generally we have technology to thank for this sea-change in education. Based on the work of psychologist J.J. Gibson on perception, Ralph Putnam has identified four categories of technology affordances. All are specifically related to learning:

• providing access to information
• automating, simplifying, and transforming tasks
• representing knowledge and thinking
• communicating and collaborating with peers and experts 

In my next few posts I plan to elaborate on these four (and possibly other) affordances that will impact on learning and education in the foreseeable future.

Here's the first: Access to knowledge. Putnam's view of the Internet is similar to many other educators - it has provided unprecedented access to the world's knowledge. The advent of the Web, and subsequently the rise in use of social media and media sharing services has amplified this capability. The copious flow of user generated content offers great benefits but also presents huge challenges. The benefits are that we can all learn from each other, and can freely share our ideas, developing worldwide communities of practice that thrive on this access to knowledge. The ethos of sharing extends across open content, open source software, open courses and open scholarship. Resources such as Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons have advanced learning to new levels.

At the same time, users must be aware of content that is inaccurate, ill-informed or otherwise less useful than verified peer reviewed content. Some content is simply misleading, whilst other content can be extremely dangerous. Sat somewhere in the middle of this spectrum is a great deal of personal opinion. Students who use the Web for any serious learning purpose need to develop digital wisdom - the ability to discern between good and bad content. This is a new form of literacy. One of the important challenges for educators in the coming years is to help learners to develop digital literacy. Those who know the difference between good and bad content will be in a far better position to exploit the potential of the Web to its full.

Reference
Putnam, R. (2006) What are the affordances of technology?

Photo by Jacques Cousteau on Wikimedia Commons


Opening up learning by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.