09.29.07
Posted in Überleg./Riflessioni, Didaktik/didattica, LTEver, OpenEd at 15:57 di Alessandro
In the context of open education projects, what does “quality” mean?
Quality is not only measurable through quantity: not through the quantity of objects, or modules, or videos, or courses given/offered by an institution or internet platform (whatever you may mean under this definition).
I tried to access the different sites “watching” at them from two different points of view
a) the one of a casual websurfer, without big experience with e-learning, seeking for some personal improvement
b) the one of a teacher who is usually digging the net for ideas and professional self-improvement.
At the end of my Doppelgänger path, I found that a course (or a platform, or a place) where I can’t get in touch with other persons, collegues, peers, in order to get answers to my questions or to help others get their answers, isn’t of big quality to me.
I think that the presented sites differ in their structure, going from a bottom social level to a top social level, as I saw them some don’t even offer fora or social exchange instruments; but even those (like connections or http://openlearn.open.ac.uk) which stress more this aspects, don’t have an intense social exchange.
Quality is, in my opinion, constituted by/through/thanks to social interaction.
Social interaction can run through informal paths, like skype, emails, sms…. or through formal paths. like dedicate fora or mailing lists.
This is - as I consider it - the vital juice of any community.
Another way of making is through the chance of being able to give personal contribution to a project.
It’s more or less like in a traditional classroom: if pupils can’t do each one their own part “play the role”, and are instead pushed into the static role of mere listeners, they will be as soon as possible demotivated and give their attention to something else.
Quality is for me the capacity to attract and keep “magnetised” attention and motivation.
In this regard I can only agree with emanuela’s post:
at the other side of the network must be people who help, facilitate, guide, value and support the learners. Unfortunatly I didn’t find these quality indicators into the viewed courses
At the end, from teacher to teacher, David: why didn’t you put in the list this resource? –> http://www.oercommons.org
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09.21.07
Posted in Didaktik/didattica, LTEver, OpenEd at 18:42 di Alessandro
As Elisa clearly states and reports:
I also tried to experiment Second Life (defined in report of week 4 as another “thread of activity that will empower the OPLI initiative”) with the idea of using it in my teaching practice. I have to say that, as far as my limited personal experience is concerned, I did not find any experiential learning environments, but just the repetition of the traditional teacher-centred lesson where the teacher explains and the students listen and try to learn… The virtual class was an exact copy of a traditional frontal lesson, with the difference that we hided behind the masks of avatars.
the risk of just repeating in a virtual learning environment the patterns of the teacher-centered teaching model is far too great. This is another aspect I saw clearly once more, while I was reading the papers and tried to visit some sites quoted in them, I found nothing more than a carbon-copy of traditional, f2f courses held in a classroom, and this not taking in consideration the mess og courses or “open” courses where the course itself is only made of a list of pdf files to download and read.
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09.02.07
Posted in LTEver, OpenEd at 20:09 di Alessandro
At the beginning of the three weeks, I wanted to read all the papers and then “answer the questions” given by Wiley.
But then, I decided to share my thoughts about the papers while doing the reading, the “homeworks”.
Thus I will put here my Idea, and what the papers “awake” in me as a teacher, and then summurize the all in order to give a coherent answer to the course’s provocation.
The paper Giving knowledge for free has a captive title. Up to now I’ve read part one and two. Part one is a sort of review of the present situation, depicting an image of what is happening more or less worldwide, although it is strongly focussed upon western countries, rich countries, and so on.
It is not astonishing, as the introduction itself states the adressees of the paper: managers of higher education, institutions, stragists and decision makers.
The paper works around the concept of OER, open educational resource(s).
In the second part, it tries to define nearly the meaning of open, educational and resource.
It is openly said that the definition field concerns digital resources.
Up to now I find it too much limited to define OER, which in their very sense may or might have a broader meaning, only referring to digital and to computer based/delivered.
It is true that the paper puts it in clear as starting point, but I think that open educational resources should be defined starting from another point of view, that is wondering how to dismantle the idea of ©, changing it to copyleft or somethingelse.
The paper talks also about some experiments where creative commons licences where limited to a certain regione (e.g. BC of Columbia). It highlights the limitation given by password-and-registration systems (I think it is referred to the whole mass of LSM or PHP-based sites)
It would be interesting to try and see how to make these resources really open, where open is meant as something else rather than only 24h available and usable”.
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08.31.07
Posted in OpenEd at 13:26 di Alessandro
OpenEd:
I’m beginning the papers for week 2, 3, and 4.
I hope I’ll cope with that mountain of texts, now that school is beginning again!
Anyway, I try reading and re-reading the questions, so that they become clear in my mind and I can make “the sponge effect” (not Sponge-Bob!!!!) during the reading itself…:
“QUESTIONS: What do these overviews of the field have in common? What do they emphasize differently? What are the aims of the authors of each report? Do you see a bias toward or against any ideas, organizations, or approaches in any of the reports? Which report spoke the most clearly to you, and why do you think it did? Based on where the field is now, and these initial ideas about where it might go, what part of the open education movement is most interesting to you? Why?”
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08.26.07
Posted in OpenEd at 12:08 di Alessandro
OpenEd:
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?
Well,
I’ve read at the present time only the paper Panel on Innovative Teaching and Learning strategies, it may happen, that I won’t have much more time this week for any other paper.
My opinion is that the right to education is a basic human right, because it is nowaday sure that education in a broad meaning is essential to the development of one person and of the society in general: access to education is a key passage to the access to learning how to manage information, relating to people, and so on.
This, from the point of view of western society.
I think that open access to education is not enough: the digital divide is still a real problem, even in countries like Italy and some other european ones; at a certain age it is useful, if not necessary at all, to give advice and help younger people to learn how to use the instruments (open access is also an instrument for education, I suppose), because knowledge is not good enough without wisdom - meaning this last one related to a good use and practice of the instruments.
At least, the paper I read is focussed upon the idea and assumption that anyone is stronlgy interested in participation and highly commetted to take part to education.
I think it’s not so widespread true, for the present time.
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