Past and future ODCE keynoters had information to share this past week on the changing nature of education. George Siemens blogged on "net pedagogy" i.e. "what's changing with teaching now that we have significantly different tools."
He shared a link to the Net Pedagogy Portal, "...a resource whose purpose is to increase understanding,
knowledge,and awareness of the changing landscape of teaching and
learning online."
One of our 2006 keynote speakers, John Seeley Brown, spoke at MIT about how education is undergoing "a large-scale transformation toward a more participatory form of learning."
We are learning in and through our interactions with others while doing real things," Seely Brown said. "I'm not saying that knowledge is socially constructed, but our understanding of that knowledge is socially constructed.
But what struck me the most this week was listening to a year-old presentation by Yochai Benkler who spoke at PopTech 2005 about the "Participation Revolution" in which "decentralization and collaboration are shifting the balance of power to the people in the production of knowledge, goods and services. As new motivational structures and behaviors evolve, an economy in which resources are not owned and outputs are shared is becoming a revolutionary source of new value."
His talk about the revolutionary affordances of digital networking for business, culture and civil society really crystalizes for me the need to look at education to see if:
- We are preparing students to thrive in the networked society, and
- Does the process of eduction itself need to change along the lines of, say, the open source software community.
Reinvention? Revolution? Evolution? Is this a detour or is there no turning back for education?
--- Rich James
Technorati Tags: ODCE07, John Seely Brown, George Siemens, Yochai Benkler
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