Opening up #learning: new forms of knowledge

Opening up learning means creating opportunities for learners that were previously unattainable. Technology can do this. For those who are housebound for example, and cannot visit a library or classroom, the Web provides a storehouse of endless opportunities to learn just about any topic. The social web opens up channels to connect with other people around the world, either experts or fellow students.

But opening up learning comes with a price. Those whose livelihoods or reputations are built upon traditional forms of educational provision will suddenly find themselves redundant or sidelined.

One area under threat is the publishing industry. In the last decade, there has been a significant decline in paper based publications, and an upsurge in e-books and other forms of digital representation of knowledge. Publishers remain in business, but to be successful they now have to adapt to the new and trenchant demands of the digital economy.

In 2012, for the first time, the number of e-books sold over Amazon surpassed paper based books. The affordances of technology are many, but one of the key ones for those who work in education is the capability of the tools to represent knowledge and learning in so many new and engaging ways. Technology is opening up this kind of learning dramatically. Students or scholars who blog regularly will tell you that it clarifies their thinking, and when they decide to press the publish button, a waiting audience of readers will comment and challenge their thinking further.

Knowledge is now available in many different forms and formats, some of which are openly accessible and editable. The exponential growth of online repositories of knowledge (Wikipedia), media (Wikimedia Commons - the source of the image above), images (Flickr, Instagram) and video (YouTube, Vimeo) would not have been so dramatic if there was less demand. Yet people of all ages now avidly consume and create content on a regular basis, and the availability of social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook amplify these activities further. Arguably the most important aspect of this phenomena, however, is not the amount of content that is available, but the richness of the context within which it is available. The affordances of connecting, sharing, sorting, filtering and commenting on content are by far the most powerful attributes of the social web, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.

Photo by Tomomarusan on Wikimedia Commons


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