Session Information
06 SES 03, Learner and Content
Paper Session
Contribution
The research project, developed within a doctoral program, aims to build an understanding of how the informal experience of learning contributes to knowledge construction. By searching for which characteristics and meanings encompass participation in a distributed virtual community forged upon the use and development of Blender, a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), the project intends to produce a “thick description” (Geertz, 1973) of the Blender software learning ecosystem, articulating its socio-technical landscape, based on the trajectories of participation and learning of “blenderheads” and the researcher’s experience.
Understanding that “the Internet is the fabric of our lives” (Castells, 2004, p. 15) implies recognizing that there's a “new social structure based predominantly on networks” (p. 16) that sustains the present scenario where “Billions of people networked together can now actively participate in innovation, wealth creation and social development in a way never before imagined as feasible” (Tapscott & Williams, 2007, p. 11).
Present educational systems are heirs of a design closely related with an "Industrial information economy" (Benkler, 2006). However, “We are entering a world in which we all will have to acquire new knowledge and skills on an almost continuous basis” (Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 18) and the challenges posed require a redesign that fosters the building of skills that enable us "to acquire the intellectual capacity of learning to learn throughout one's whole life, retrieving the information that is digitally stored, recombining it, and using it to produce knowledge for whatever purpose we want" (Castells, 2004, p. 320).
The assumption that “The Internet has also fostered a new culture of sharing, one in which content is freely contributed and distributed with few restrictions or costs” (Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 18), the “participatory culture” (Jenkins, 2006) of “prosumers” (Toffler, 1984) shared by communities of “homo sapiens digital” (Prensky, 2009), present new needs and opportunities for education. The expansion of learner-centered opportunities brought by collaboration and social networking applications strengthens the need for an approach to learning as a social process that requires “learning to be”, that involves the learner in the building of an identity and in the participation in a practice and a socially constructed domain (Lave & Wenger, 1991). "It's these distributed and collaborative learning communities that shape the knowledge society” (Dias, 2004, p. 29).
The theoretical framework encompasses Situated Cognition (Brown, Collins & Duguid, 1989), Communities of Practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), Connectivism (Siemens, 2005), Personal Learning Environment (Attwell, 2007), Actor-Network Theory (Law, 1992) and Activity Theory (Engeström, 1987).
This study aims to contribute to a better understanding of the emerging open participatory learning ecosystem (Brown & Adler, 2008), finding in the virtual communities formed within FOSS movements a relevant landscape to help us uncover some of the nuances of learning in the near future, a better understanding of what learning is and might be in the 21st century. We will present preliminary findings of the first months of immersion in the field.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Attwell, G. (2007). Personal Learning Environments – the future of eLearning? eLearning Papers, 2(1). Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press. Brown, J. S., & Adler, R. P. (2008). Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0. EDUCAUSE Review, 43(1), 16-32. Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32-42. Castells, M. (2004). A Galáxia Internet. Lisboa: FCG. Dias, P. (2004). Processos de aprendizagem colaborativa nas comunidades online. In A. Dias & M. J. Gomes (Coord.), E-Learning para E-Formadores (pp. 21-31). Guimarães: TecMinho. Engeström, Y. (1987). Learning by Expanding: An Activity-Theoretical Approach to Developmental Research. Retrieved from http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Paper/Engestrom/expanding/toc.htm Gee, J. P. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Gee, J. P. (2007). Good video games + good learning. NY: Peter Lang Publishing. Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. NY: Basic Books. Jenkins, H. (2006). Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. NY: NYU Press. Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: legitimate peripheral participation. NY: Cambridge University Press. Law, J. (1992). Notes on the Theory of the Actor-Network: Ordering, Strategy and Heterogeneity for Science Studies. Lancaster: Lancaster University. Prensky, M. (2009). H. Sapiens Digital: From Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom. Innovate, 5(3). Schumacher, S., & McMillan, J. H. (1993). Research in Education – A conceptual introduction. NY: HarperCollins College Publishers. Siemens, G. (2005). Learning Development Cycle: bridging learning design and modern knowledge needs. elearnSpace. Retrieved from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/ldc.htm Tapscott, D., & Williams, A. (2007). Wikinomics. A Nova Economia das Multidões Inteligentes. Lisboa: Quidnova. Toffler, A. (1984). A Terceira Vaga. Lisboa: Livros Brasil.
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