I get the same thing when thinking and learning about openness in education.
As I search through the vast collections of OERs I keep returning to thoughts about what openness in education actually means for teaching. While I appreciated the practicality of the availability of these resources, I'm really intrigued by and drawn to the theory behind the movement. (I'll review some of my favourite OERs in my next post.) What excites me is that I think open education plays a large role in the revolution in education which Ken Robinson has called for since his first TEDTalk in 2006.
I've noticed that the online education world likes to put things in lists: 10 Apps for the Tech Savvy Educator, 80 Ways to Use Google Forms in the Classroom, 25 Ways Social Media has Changed Life As We Know It...and so on. I can appreciate the succinctness of a good list so I've included the following from a my blog travels this week. These lists relate to what I'm learning about openness in education and how to navigate its vastness. They also help me alter my response to the amount of information I'm connecting to from TMI (Too Much Information!) to SMI (So Much Information!!) WOW!
@cogdog (Alan Levine) Strategies for Survival and Effectiveness the Open World of Education
- Start small
- Make it useful
- Be yourself
- Find your comfort level and go beyond
- Participate with others
7 Things About Connectedness I learned from 7 Things @verenanz (Verena Roberts) Learned from Chris Hatfield
- A sense of connection is essential
- People learn when part of F2F and digital communities
- Your digital identity is essential and not separate from you
- Personalized, self-directed learning engages, motivates and inspires curiosity
- Free and valuable learning resources can be found, remixed, created and shared on the internet
- Meaningful digital connections expand learning networks
- Curiosity drives learning
5 Quotes on Remixing
- “Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete.” Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
- "The words are the important thing. Don't worry about tunes. Take a tune, sing high when they sing low, sing fast when they sing slow, and you've got a new tune." -Woodie Guthrie, as quoted in Kirby Ferguson's TEDTalk Embrace the Remix
- "Everything must come from something." -I might be mistaken but I think this is a principle of quantum physics
- "I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work...Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable." Henry Ford, as quoted in Kirby Ferguson's TEDTalk Embrace the Remix
- “We are not self-made. We are dependent on one another. Admitting this to ourselves isn't an embrace of mediocrity and derivativeness, it's a liberation from our misconceptions.” -Kirby Ferguson, TEDTalk: Embrace the Remix
And Just for Fun...3 Remixed Playlists from Songza Perfect for Reading, Writing and Thinking About Open Education
Sources:
Ken Robinson, Schools Kill Creativity, TEDTalk posted June 2006
Alan Levine (@cogdog) True Stories of Openness at Yavapai College
Verena Roberts Creating an Open Classroom
Kirby Ferguson's TEDTalk Embrace the Remix
This work by Laura Mann is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://elearninglauramann.weebly.com/6/post/2013/05/into-openness.html.