eduFutureBlog

John Seely Brown und Richard P. Adler fassen in einem wunderbaren Educause-Artikel ‘Minds On Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0‘ die Überlegungen rund um Learning 2.0 zusammen. Ich erlaube mir, hier sehr umfassend die wesentlichen Abschnitte kommentierend zu kopieren, um auch Schnellleser/innen einen kurzen Überblick zu gewähren …

Von der Open Educational Resources (OER) Bewegung über die Prosumer-Qualitäten des Web 2.0 zum Social Learning:

Arguably, the most visible impact of the Internet on education to date has been the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, which has provided free access to a wide range of courses and other educational materials to anyone who wants to use them.

The latest evolution of the Internet, the so-called Web 2.0, has blurred the line between producers and consumers of content and has shifted attention from access to information toward access to other people.

The most profound impact of the Internet, an impact that has yet to be fully realized, is its ability to support and expand the various aspects of social learning. (…) The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning.

Der Lernfokus verschiebt sich vom WAS (Descartes: Ich denke, also bin ich) zum WIE (Wir beteiligen uns, also sind wir):

The Cartesian perspective assumes that knowledge is a kind of substance and that pedagogy concerns the best way to transfer this substance from teachers to students.

By contrast, instead of starting from the Cartesian premise of “I think, therefore I am,” and from the assumption that knowledge is something that is transferred to the student via various pedagogical strategies, the social view of learning says, “We participate, therefore we are.”

This perspective shifts the focus of our attention from the content of a subject to the learning activities and human interactions around which that content is situated.

Zweiter Aspekt des sozialen Lernens: Der Gegenstand wird nicht erst abstrakt gelernt, um sich dann den sozialen Praktiken der Weiterentwicklung des Gegenstandes zu widmen – die aktive Aneignung eines Wissensgegenstandes beinhaltet bereits die soziale Teilhabe (mit all den vom Establishment gefürchteten Einschränkungen: die Hierarchien verflachen sich – der Kult des Amateurs setzt sog. Expert/innen unter Druck).

Mastering a field of knowledge involves not only “learning about” the subject matter but also “learning to be” a full participant in the field. This involves acquiring the practices and the norms of established practitioners in that field or acculturating into a community of practice.

Examples:

• Open Source Movement
• Wikipedia

In a traditional Cartesian educational system, students may spend years learning about a subject; only after amassing sufficient (explicit) knowledge are they expected to start acquiring the (tacit) knowledge or practice of how to be an active practitioner/professional in a field. But viewing learning as the process of joining a community of practice reverses this pattern and allows new students to engage in “learning to be” even as they are mastering the content of a field.

Chris Anderson hat es im eCommerce-Bereich bereits vorgerechnet. Nischenprodukte rechnen sich über den sog. langen Schwanz (The Long Tail) der Einkommensgenerierung. BROWN und ADLER übertragen diese Analysen auf den Lernsektor. Während (Hoch-)Schulen nur einen begrenzten Themenkatalog vermitteln können, stehen im Internet eine unendliche Vielzahl an Materialien zum ständigen Abruf bereit. Die Kunst besteht nun darin, diese Wissensnischen zu finden, um sich dort zu informieren und einzubringen.

As more of learning becomes Internet-based, a similar pattern seems to be occurring. Whereas traditional schools offer a finite number of courses of study, the “catalog” of subjects that can be learned online is almost unlimited. There are already several thousand sets of course materials and modules online, and more are being added regularly. Furthermore, for any topic that a student is passionate about, there is likely to be an online niche community of practice of others who share that passion.

Finding and joining a community that ignites a student’s passion can set the stage for the student to acquire both deep knowledge about a subject (“learning about”) and the ability to participate in the practice of a field through productive inquiry and peer-based learning (“learning to be”). These communities are harbingers of the emergence of a new form of technology-enhanced learning—Learning 2.0—which goes beyond providing free access to traditional course materials and educational tools and creates a participatory architecture for supporting communities of learners.

Genau diese Kompetenz gilt es zu begleiten bzw. zu vermitteln. Als Vorschlag führen die beiden Autoren sog. reflektierende Praktika an.

We need to construct shared, distributed, reflective practicums in which experiences are collected, vetted, clustered, commented on, and tried out in new contexts. One might call this “learning about learning,” a bootstrapping operation in which educators, along with students, are learning among and between themselves. This can become a living or dynamic infrastructure—itself a reflective practicum.

Der neue nachfrageorientierte Lernansatz bemüht sich, Leidenschaften bei Lernenden zu provozieren, die sie in die Lage versetzen, Begehrlichkeiten zu entwickeln, Teil einer bestehenden Community of Practice zu werden. Genau dabei sollten Bildungseinrichtungen mitwirken – diese Kompetenzen zu entwickeln.

We now need a new approach to learning—one characterized by a demand-pull rather than the traditional supply-push mode of building up an inventory of knowledge in students’ heads. Demand-pull learning shifts the focus to enabling participation in flows of action, where the focus is both on “learning to be” through enculturation into a practice as well as on collateral learning.

The demand-pull approach is based on providing students with access to rich (sometimes virtual) learning communities built around a practice. It is passion-based learning, motivated by the student either wanting to become a member of a particular community of practice or just wanting to learn about, make, or perform something.

Und so klingt dann die Zusammenfassung von BROWN/ADLER:

The building blocks provided by the OER movement, along with e-Science and e-Humanities and the resources of the Web 2.0, are creating the conditions for the emergence of new kinds of open participatory learning ecosystems that will support active, passion-based learning: Learning 2.0.

Mein Fazit:
Charmanter, personenorientierter Ansatz, wenngleich die durchschimmernde protestantische Ethik hier den Versuch startet, Arbeit als Beruf(ung) in das nächste Zeitalter zu tragen. Aber vielleicht gar kein so unkluger Weg …

via Stephen’s Web

[tags]eLearning 2.0, oer, lll, education[/tags]

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