(2011-11-07) Downes Open Education Personal Learning

Stephen Downes relates Open Education to Personal Learning (PLN). *Learning and cognition happen in a network (Connectivism)... The second thing is, networks need to be open in order to function.

What I want to propose to you is that on the internet now the new media that people use - and there’s a whole range, everything from little cartoons to videos to animations to those Flash games to the memes that go around to Twitter hashtags and all of that – all of these new media constitute a vocabulary, and that when people create artifacts in this new media they are, quite literally, “speaking in LOLcats” (ReMix)... The picture that I presented top you earlier of open educational resources as things that are published, things that are presented by publishers in a very formal manner, probably charged-for and commercial, that’s the old static coherent linear picture of the world. It’s not the model that we want to use for open educational resources. We need to think about open educational resources not as content but as language. We need to stop treating open educational resources or online resources generally as though they were content like books, magazines, articles, etc., because the people who actually use them – the students and very often the creators – have moved far beyond that. Each one of these things is a word, if you will, in this very large post-linguistic vocabulary. They are now language. They are not composed of language, they are language. And that’s why they need to be open.

Any of the things that we’re trying to teach people, any of the things – science, mathematics, social studies, Egyptian philosophy, whatever – should be understood as one of these languages and should be understood in these six dimensions (Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics, Cognition, Context, Change).

This reaches the third and final thesis: fluency in these languages constitutes 21st century learning. Being able to speak and write and perform and act and share and whatever these different languages constitutes learning in the 21st century. We use to think there was just acquiring content and we use to think there was just acquiring skill but it’s much more involved than that. Actually being fluent in these languages, where being fluent means mastering or being capable in the semantics, the syntax, the pragmatics, the context etc., of these different languages.

That’s the basis that George Siemens and I used to create the massive open online courses (MOOC). The idea of these courses was that, and is that, we provide as much material for conversation as possible and set up this conversational network where the exchange of this material can take place. So the course itself becomes a network, the open educational resources are the concepts, the words, the vocabulary that people in this network use to communicate with each other. And that’s in fact exactly what happens.

There’s the whole way of representing information from the Semantic Web – RSS, geography, Friend-of-a-Friend, so on, a whole open learning ecosystem and not just a smallish network, still waiting to be grown. People are using more and more complex ‘words’ in this new language and we’re finding that we don’t need the publishers, we don’t even need the academics in many cases, to create these resources. And insofar as the academics and the publishers create these resources in the old linear static linguistic traditional manner they’re speaking at cross-purposes in any case to the new form of learning that’s happening now. The idea of using these resources to learn has as much to do with creating these resources as consuming these resources (Co-Creation) and it’s in the creation of these resources that we acquire the greater capacities and skills that we need in order to function in this environment.*