26.1 Evolution to education 3.0  (Page 2/19)

Personal learning environments (PLEs) as an approach to technology for learning are also emerging, and include specialized technologies as well as established ones such as blogs. What PLEs do is to create the possibility for individuals to aggregate their own learning opportunities. In addition, new standards for interchange of learning materials and activities are creating much more scope for collaborative cross-institutional virtual classrooms that do not rely on institutions sharing the same underlying technology.

Recognition of learning achieved by institutions that are aligned to a framework of Freedom and Openness should be the new way to provide assertions of quality, not accreditation of the resources used. This can be built on the base of ‘recognition of prior learning’ which is already in place in many institutions, including the University of the Western Cape where I work.

This is a possible brave new world of education 3.0, one in which the organizational constraints and boundaries are removed, the need for aggregation is not the only model for accredited learning, and the long-tail reaches into higher education at last. I do not see it as a replacement for institutional learning as it happens currently, but as another layer on top of it that extend the value of higher education into new spaces and that enable synergy among different individuals and institutions to be created.

Is this a desirable world? Is it a world that we will see in our lifetimes? Or is it the ranting of a digitally-disturbed, hyperlinked lunatic?

Comments

1. patrick masson - june 1st, 2008 at 8:28 am

Derek,

Quite a timely post for me. I just came back from the SUNY Conference on Instructional Technologies (CIT). The session topics focused primarily on “Web 2.0″ technologies and techniques; wikis, blogs and of course the now ubiquitous LMS.

In all of these sessions, Derek’s model for content development and delivery was evident. Many contributors using disparate tools generate content then pass the finished product through to an institutionally managed tool where it is aggregated and managed by faculty. The focus was on many contributing to a single interface: student generated content, distributed content, etc.

Derek’s model of the Personal Learning Environment would appear to provide multiple aggregation environments (equal to the number of students–potentially more) that host the independently developed content.

Only one session at CIT touched on this, “Whose technology is it anyway?” presented by Steven Zucker, Beth Harris and Eric Feinblatt of the Fashion Institute of Technology. The session description asked, “Why haven’t we, as educators, been asking this question of ourselves? Why is technology exempt from the lessons we’ve learned about involving students in their own education? Why is technology something that an institution ‘delivers’ without significant input from the students themselves?

In the presentation they displayed two screen shots, one of the campus portal that included announcements, calendar events, email, etc., what the campus felt the students needed, and the other, a student generated PLE built in their own instance of Wordpress. The idea I took away from this was that students are not only better suited to identify and organize their own content, they are better suited to define the tools to do so.