The Ed Techie

A Pedagogy of Abundance take 2

I gave a presentation for George Siemens CCK09 course last night, which explored an idea I had proposed in this blog a while back, on the pedagogy of abundance. I wanted to explore the idea, so talked for half an hour and then we had a good discussion. You can see the recording of the session in Elluminate here.

Below is a slidecast of the presentation. My main argument was that in economics previous models were based on an assumption of scarcity. In a digital world we have abundance and many of these models do not apply. There are two types of response to this, the abundance response which assumes it and the scarcity response which tries to recreate scarcity models in a digital format. Freemium is an example of the former and DRM an example of the latter. I then explore whether there are similar arguments to be made for pedagogy based on the following assumptions:

• Content is free
• Content is abundant
• Content is varied
• Sharing is easy
• Social based
• Connections are lite
• Organisation is cheap
• Based on a generative system
• Crowdsourcing
• Network is valuable

A pedagogy of abundance

View more presentations from mweller.

What I hope to learn from CCK08

I've signed up for George Siemens and Stephen Downes massive online open course "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge" which starts next week. I have a kind of meta-interest in it (as I suspect a lot of participants do), in that I'm not just interested in what the course is about, but also in how it works. So, as much as I am interested in the content, I'd have signed up if it was 'Shakespearean Tragedies' or 'George and Stephen play the banjo'.

So here's what I hope to find out over the coming months:

• To get a better appreciation of connectivism and particularly how people are applying it.
• To see how people participate in an open course
• To get a feel from George and Stephen as to how many people are doing the paid for version and whether this is a good business model (don't tell Stephen I said that)
• To see whether the absence of formal creditation for myself significantly reduces motivation (ie will I drop out?)
• How the distributed dialogue model works

It's great to see George and Stephen doing this. If we get some good research answers from it, who knows maybe it's a model for the OU in general?