Openness in Education

Get comfortable with the technology

Look around

Set up a blog if you don’t have one and use the Blog Aggregator with #H817open tag

There are badges in Cloudworks if you like this kind of thing

Think about the priorities.

This is how I start a post in my Open University Student blog which I have posted to most days since 6th February 2010. I put in bullet points and notes. I just get the thing started then add to it. My own private wiki. It isn’t a fixed thing. Months even years later I may add to it – there are no rules on blogging, no guidelines worth following. Anything goes today as it did in the 1990s.

Learning Objects: Resources for distance education worldwide

Need
Theoretical
Practice
Shared education as courses
Traditionally through text books, wall maps and charts, videos and DVDs.

Save money, improve content.

Objects and object–orientated design

Hand rolled bread or a supermarket loaf? Are you a connoisseur or simply hungry?

Martin Weller

Open scholar – shaped by digital and networked.
Positive feedback loop between openness and creativity.
Alongside more learning at uni, lifelong and flexible learning.

I may try to write a piece that is journalistic, or more like an academic paper, or just record an event, jot down an idea. Rough rather than smooth, where other can tread and find traction, if only to correct, add to or develop the thinking here and take it somewhere esle.

After a paper and a SlideShare and generally following the conversation asynchronously as it occurs I then do the first activity. I should originate a mind map or spider map, but having dwelt on this so often over the last few years in particular I find myself recreating the same kinds of things: the water cycle, Engestroms fungi as an ecosystem, swirling ink or Catherine-wheel like fireworks all in an effort to visualise what open learning looks like.

I use Picasa Web Albums and have some 135 folders.

Each folder tops out at 1000 images. I am onto e-learning II and have 1250 images across the two – this is my e-learning world as much as 1500+ blog posts here and perhaps 2000+ in my OU student blog. When I get a good scanner and Mac in a few weeks time I will digitize some thirty years of diaries and fiction writing too – and ‘stick it out there’ so that it can compost in cyberspace rather than a lock-up garage.

For now here are a set of images that I have used in the past to describe or illustrate e-learning and for the purposes of this activity ‘Open Learning’ as a subset, or overlapping beast of e-learning, contained by the universe of ‘Learning’.

This last one from Dion Hinchcliffe

More from Hinchcliffe.

Related articles

• Openness in Education WK1 MOOC (mymindbursts.com)
• Martin Weller and the MOOCers (mymindbursts.com)
• Me, openness and education (egrommet.net)
• Olds Mooc Narratives (mymindbursts.com)
• Who Needs Harvard When There Is Always a MOOC? (clarissasblog.com)
• Lost in the clouds in an OLDS MOOC 2013 (mymindbursts.com)