Week 5 Activity 17- Pedagogy in open learning - NOTES and Activity

Week 5 Activity 17 - Pedagogy in open learning

After studying this week, you should understand:

• the impact of abundant content
• connectivism as pedagogy for online courses
• rhizomatic learning
• how to take into account learner experience when designing a connectivist course
• the advantages and disadvantages of specified pedagogies.

Activity 17: The role of abundance

Timing: 4 hours

• Read Weller (2011), A pedagogy of abundance. In the conclusion two questions are posed: ‘The issue for educators is twofold I would suggest: firstly how can they best take advantage of abundance in their own teaching practice, and secondly how do we best equip learners to make use of it?’
• Post a comment to contribute an answer to one of these questions, drawing on your own context and experience. For example, you might suggest that we could best equip learners to make use of abundant content by developing their critical analysis skills.

Read Weller (2011), A pedagogy of abundance.

The shift to abundant content has as profound implications for education as it has for content industries

.

My ideas:

• Time spent finding the best
• Having found it and begun using it, only to have to disappear or get "updated" and changed so that it no matches how one used it
• Overload and then despondency
• Reliance on one single search engine results (i.e. Google) and then only from the first page
• How to teach the searching (Use the Google Power Search MOOC)

Work for a Uni then publish or die?

But when goods become digital and available online then scarcity disappears.
They are non-rivalrous in nature, so if you take a copy, it is still available for others.

Why non-rivalrous? - I think any digital artifact is in competition with others, unless its a first original.

ri·val·rous  

Prone to or subject to rivalry: "rivalrous presidential aspirants".
Characterized by or given to rivalry or competition

DRM is often backed up with strong legal enforcement, for example the recent case of torrent sharing site Pirate Bay being fined 30 Million Swedish Kronor and receiving a jail sentence for encouraging illegal file sharing.
How much did they pay?
How many of them are in jail?
Has the site been taken down?

Resource Based Learning
In a world of abundance the emphasis is less on the development of specific learning materials than on the selection, aggregation and interpretation of existing materials.

Problem based learning
(know by the rest of us as "solving a problem")
As with RBLit may need recasting to fully utilise the new found abundance of content, where there is greater stress on finding and evaluating resources from a wide range, and the utilisation of social networks as a resource.

The intention of this article is not to set out a guide for teaching with abundance or even to evaluate the effectiveness of these theories,
Clearly true.

The issue for educators is twofold I would suggest: firstly how can they best take advantage of abundance in their own teaching practice, and secondly how do we best equip learners to make use of it?
Yes, it's a pity this wasn't a paper addressing these issues.

Post a comment to contribute an answer to one of these questions, drawing on your own context and experience. For example, you might suggest that we could best equip learners to make use of abundant content by developing their critical analysis skills.

How can I best take advantage of abundance in my own teaching practice

Having read over the posts here, what I suggest is basically the same, namely filtering content for students. Only recently, in the last year or so, have we (my computing faculty and I) begun to give our KS3 students a choice, out of two options. For example, they could use a text based resource or a set of training videos. Or they may use either this web based tutorial or another different tutorial. In higher years KS4 and 5, they take on greater responsibility for their own learning and have a greater choice, presented by us and/or of their own choosing if we agree to their choice..

Context: A typical example is locating a resource to teach the Java programming language. Google "Learning Java Programming" gives 13,500,000 hits. Below, apart from point 1 which I haven't done yet, is my system for dealing with the abundance of Computer Science related resources available today.

1. Do the Google Power Searching and Advanced Power Searching MOOC  http://www.powersearchingwithgoogle.com/
2. Set a fixed amount of time to search for, find and obtain suitable resources using peer & student suggestions and top rated site (from your own experience) recommendations.
3. Gather 3 resources that might be suitable.
4. Examine them and pick the best in your opinion.
5. Change your mindset and understand you may not have selected the best or most perfect resources for your class and so will need to live with that fact.
6. Use the resource and stick with it through thick and thin. Do not dump it for another 1/3 or less the way through. Otherwise, you may form the habit and become one of those people who jump from one resource to the next and do not get anything done.
7. At the end of the course/learning with the resource used, evaluate it, re-use it or start again at point 2 and use one of the other resources short-listed

The above is my advice to myself.