8.1 Learning design and open source teaching  (Page 15/18)

11. wayne mackintosh - may 23rd, 2007 at 11:46 am

Hi James -

One or two thoughts about restricting commercial activity associated with free content. There are numerous uncomfortable paradoxes that we educators need to unpack. Admittedly - my views are informed by much of my work, which is focused on expanding access to education as a common good - particularly in the developing world. Consider for example the following rationales:

We believe in the principles of “freedom of speech” (eg sharing knowledge and educational resources) as long as you’re not engaged in commercial activity.

We academics - have no problem prescribing a text-book with all rights reserved, and expecting the students to pay for the text commercially (i.e. accepting commercial activity around knowledge) but when it comes to copyright of an “open resource” under a CC license, folk become uneasy with the commercial activity.”

Isn’t this double standards?

Those of us working towards the development of a free education curriculum, have no problems with commercial activity associated with free content resources. In fact we encourage this!

As an educator - I don’t feel that I have a right to deny someone the right to earn a living. This challenge is emphasised when we start thinking about the achievement of the millennium development goals - especially the eradication of abject poverty. I encourage entrepreneurs all over the world to add value and services to free content - in so doing, widening access and distribution channels to knowledge for the common good of society.

Some things deserve to be in the commons - education is one of them in my view. We need to rethink our business and educational models in a world where mass-collaboration and self-organisation can make a real difference.

I’m not offering these view in opposition to closed content development approaches. We should respect the freedom of individuals to choose.

In my view the adoption of the non-commercial restriction in so-called “open source teaching” is a red herring. It looks more like an excuse not to participate in the real access challenges to education on our planet.

Have enjoyed reading the debates - good stuff, Wayne

12. wayne mackintosh - may 23rd, 2007 at 12:08 pm

Hi friends -

One or two reflections on the technical and pedagogical challenges of Learning Design.

The notion of technology enhanced learning design is in its infancy, and am not convinced that we have succeeded in achieving a scalable and usable model yet.

The separation of content (what to teach) and form (how to teach it) is a neat idea at a theoretical level, yet in my view - the technologies have failed to crack this nut. We may get it right in the future - but we still have a long way to go in my view.

The problem is that a learning resource is an aggregation of content and form. Any technology that deals with learning design must grapple with a very difficult challenge, namely the inverse relationship between pedagogy and reusability. Education is always contextual and the more pedagogy you build into an asynchronous learning resource - the less reusable it becomes in different contexts.