http://www.elearnspace.org/blog learning, networks, knowledge, technology, community Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:45:13 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.4 http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2008/11/26/systems-for-supportive-open-teaching/ http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2008/11/26/systems-for-supportive-open-teaching/#comments Wed, 26 Nov 2008 20:17:16 +0000 gsiemens http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/?p=3628 We’ve experienced this in CCK08: Systems for Supportive Open Teaching: “I think it more valuable to think about how openness changes the basic praxis of teaching from an essentially individual activity to a shared activity.”
But, as we’ve discovered, openness may produced shared activity at some levels (students helping each other, taking on leadership roles, connecting to others outside of the course, etc). Open teaching is really best seen as open learning. When we learn in transparent ways, we become teachers. But not everyone wants to learn in open ways. In CCK08, we had numerous participants who did not contribute by posting or commenting. Instead, they observed/lurked. They did not contribute in the way we would have expected. Lack of direct participation does not mean they didn’t learn – at least that’s what some participants have expressed here. Open teaching, therefore, means also rethinking our expectations of engagement. We simply can’t control students the way we have done in classroom environments. Open teaching will become a rather shallow concept if we bring too much of closed-classrooms to the process.

]]> http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2008/11/26/systems-for-supportive-open-teaching/feed/ 1 http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2008/11/18/if-only-we-had-something-other-than-content-on-which-to-base-education/ http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2008/11/18/if-only-we-had-something-other-than-content-on-which-to-base-education/#comments Wed, 19 Nov 2008 05:43:55 +0000 gsiemens http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/?p=3607 The hype around open educational resources (OERs) is growing to the level that web 2.0 inhabited several years ago (I recently posted a short overview of openness in education). The problem with OERs is that they are too often focused on content. More recently, a few educators have been pushing the concept of openness through open teaching and open accreditation. But, as Brian Lamb notes, “if we live in an era of information abundance, why is the primary drive around OERs the publication of more content? And what other activities around the open education movement might be an effective use of our energies? What other needs have to be met?”

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