Session Information
06 SES 04, Virtual Communities
Paper Session
Contribution
Open courses have become a recent trend in education with a purpose to solve a number of educational problems. There are many initiatives ranging from largely self-directed/access-on-your-own types of learning to open-course-with-open-teaching (Morgan, 2009). Openness in education is understood in many different ways mainly referring to academic (open enrollment, free access, etc.) and technological arenas (open source, availability) (Iiyoshi & Kumar, 2008). There are two main reasons emphasized in the literature why education should move towards openness: 1. As technology is penetrating every societal process, people have started to use many digital technologies for supporting their goal achievements. Being tied to different digital technology in every day situations, higher education should provide this opportunity also to students i.e. to provide an opportunity to choose technologies, which they use outside of formal educational boundaries. 2. To create situations, in which additional dispositions can be fostered, for instance the ability to make efficient use of emerging digital technology. In addition to learning about something, more focus should be put on learning to be (Brown & Adler, 2008) - successfully participate in the practice of the field. We are in a world in which we have to acquire new knowledge and skill on an almost continuous basis (Brown & Adler, 2008) and to be ready for the ongoing creation of new ideas and skills in technologically mediated settings. Opening up courses brings along many design challenges. The emphasis of open courses is to build communities of learners and scholars around the subject of the course and facilitate the integration of various topics across diverse contexts (Morgan, 2009). The facilitator’s goal is to bring learners into full legitimate participation in the community and sustain their active participation. The challenge of the design is to provide activities that induce learners to the community i.e. to design forces that strengthen community gravity. Community gravity is used here as a metaphor for creating a participatory architecture for supporting communities of learners. Initially people join communities such as a course and learn at the periphery. According to Lave and Wenger (1991) rather than looking to learning as the acquisition of certain forms of knowledge they place it in social relationships – situations of co-participation. Thus, learning involves active participation in a community of practice. Instead of pushing knowledge to learners, the design challenge resides in pulling learners to a community and sustaining their active participation. It is important to note here that the centre of the community is not a facilitator, but it changes constantly according to the viability of the particular community. The design challenge is to create and facilitate the occurrence of community gravity. If the community manages to create a strong gravity then it draws in members in the peripheral area. Herewith, the purpose of the study is to explore what are the mechanisms for bringing and keeping together distributed groups; how to design sustainable community gravity; what are the tools and techniques that facilitate and support the emergence of strong community gravity?
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Brown, J.S. & Adler, R.P. (2008). Minds on fire: Open education, the long tail, and learning 2.0. EDUCAUSE Review, Vol. 43, No. 1. Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison, K. (2007). Research methods in education. New York: T & F Books UK. Creswell, J. W. (2002). Educational research. Planning, conducting and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research. New Jersey: Pearson Education Inc. Fidel, R. (1984). The case study method: A case study. Library & Information Science Research, 6(3), 273-288. Iiyoshi, T. & Kumar, M.S.V. (2008). Opening up education: The collective advancement of education through open technology, open content, and open knowledge. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning. Legitimate peripheral participation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Morgan, T. & Carey, S. (2009). From open content to open course models: Increasing access and enabling global participation in higher education. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Vol. 10, No. 5.
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