The Ed Techie

Innovating Pedagogy report

Here at IET in the OU, a bunch of us, led by Mike Sharples, were asked to produce an annual report on how changes in teaching and learning (related to technology) were changing the current landscape. The initial idea was to do this for senior OU management, but I'm pleased to say that everyone involved wanted to make it wider than that and create a publicly available report. Think of it as like a Horizon's report with more focus on pedagogy. We adopted the same methodology as the Horizon report also.

It does have a bit of an OU bias, but I think it's a very good read (and I should know as I had to read through it multiple times for editing) for anyone in higher ed (a lot of it is applicable across other sectors, but we're upfront in saying these are not our areas of expertise). It's meant to do so in a short, accessible format, so for instance the (inevitable) coverage of MOOCs probably won't add much to you if you've been following them in detail, but then again you may find the stuff on Personal Inquiry Learning is new to you.

It's billed as a "New report from the Open University on ten innovations in teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world". It covers ten such innovations, some of which won't be a surprise to readers of this blog. They are:

• Assessment for learning
• Badges to accredit learning
• Learning analytics
• MOOCs
• New pedagogy for e-books
• Personal inquiry learning
• Publisher led mini-courses
• Rebirth of academic publishing
• Rhizomatic learning
• Seamless learning

You can read the full, nicely formatted, pretty pictured, report here, and make comments on any of the topics on the accompanying blog.

The intention is that it is an annual report, so we'll revisit next year. In the meantime, I hope you find something useful in it, and it might be the type of thing you can leave lying around on the desk of a senior management type person.

 

A pedagogy of abundance - the paper

I've given a couple of talks (and blogged) around a pedagogy of abundance. In these I was exploring what abundance in terms of content might mean for education, and whether we had appropriate pedagogies, when most of our learning theories have been built on an assumption of content-scarcity.

For my digital scholarship book I made this the chapter that looks at the teaching element of Boyer's scholarly functions. I have now redone that chapter and published it as an article in the Spanish Journal of Pedagogy

Note - the journal isn't open access, but I'm trying to explore the green, or self-archiving route of OA, so I got agreement to release it myself under a CC license. So you can download it from the OU repository.

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

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A pedagogy of abundance

It has been said that previous economic models were based on scarcity. In a physical world one has to deal with the basic principle that once you give something away you no longer have it. Resources are finite. Making them, sharing them, moving them, storing them – it all eats up resource. But in a digital world these considerations disappear, or drop to near zero (there is still a cost in storing say, but nowhere near as much as a physical item if we compared a digital book with a real one for example). We thus need a new form of economics that accommodates this – an economy of abundance.

As an aside, this is why the attempts by Lily Allen and Peter Mandelson to control filesharing are fundamentally wrong – they are still grounded in the assumption of scarcity.

It strikes me that a similar argument could be made for pedagogy. We have developed pedagogies of scarcity – when resources were difficult to access and locate. These could be content in the form of books or articles (thus we carefully select these for the students), or in the form of an individual (thus we create the lecture system where people can get access to them in a physical space). But even more than this we know that collaboration is time consuming so we develop pedagogy around structuring this difficult task.

But in a digital world many of these assumptions again disappear. We have access to all the content we need and we can be part of an individual’s network without that taking extra time from them – if I start reading someone’s blog it doesn’t cost them anything for me to be added to the readership. And sharing has become a much simpler action, almost a by-product of just existing online. And while sharing is not the same as collaboration, it is also more than just working alone.

So what is the pedagogy of abundance? Resource based learning and Problem based learning are reasonable contenders since one could argue they set about providing a framework for interpreting and working with content. George Siemens connectivism is probably the main contender as it puts the emphasis on connections in the network. I also heard Rosemary Luckin talk recently about participatory science and the model they have developed at London Knowledge Labs. This again is a contender because it places the individual at the centre of a network of resources, environment and tools, with a set of filters inbetween.
But I still feel that we haven’t really developed a pedagogy that has some of the following basic assumptions:

• Content is free and abundant
• Sharing is frictionless
• Social interaction is key
• Complexity resides in the network
• Complexity arises because people don’t explicitly collaborate
• The filter is significant

So, I’d be interested to hear if you think there are other contenders for a pedagogy of abundance and also other characteristics it should embody.