Steve Carson, who does a lot of great instructional technology writing on a blog deceptively titled OpenFiction, finishes a recent post on producer culture with this great quote:
In other words, learning objects may ultimately be a consumer culture approach misapplied to a producer culture environment.
I guess it is a matter of one’s pedagogy and philosophy of learning object design and reuse. Steve suggests, “Even the idea of learners as consumers of learning objects (even if they “custom-tailor” their learning experience) may be misguided.” He’s much kinder in his statement of it than I would be. In the vast majority of domains I would say that the idea of learners as consumers is outright stupidity. I won’t repeat or rederive Freire’s critque of “banking education” here, but the notion of “learners as consumers” seems to be the same idea expressed in modern lingo.
If we don’t conceptualize learning objects as edit-able primitives designed for learners to use in the construction of new artifacts, what are we doing? Steve repeats the popular notion that he learns more by teaching than by learning. Guess why? Because teaching is a construction process in which a person adapts parts of many existing components to create a new artifact (whether they create a tangible expression of the artifact or not). Learning is generally, as Steve says, consuming. So guess why we always learn more when we teach? And guess how we should think about learning objects?
Published on
August 9, 2005 in
Uncategorized.
Tags: meta.
Welcome everyone! You’ve found the new home of “iterating toward openness.” The transition has gone surprisingly well. Much more coming very soon.
Stephen Downes takes a look at my recent piece regarding CC license selection behavior and says “the data don’t support [Wiley's] hypothesis” that the proportion of creators choosing the license is directly proportional to the rights reserved in the license.” Toward the end of my paper I claim that:
While WiSH holds up when licenses are aggregated according to the number of conditions comprising them, there appears to be very little support for WiSH at the grain size of individual licenses.
The data actually support the hypothesis quite well when licenses and selection behavior are looked at in the aggregate. In fact, the prediction and the behavior match perfectly. It is only at a more fine grained level when the predictions fail to match user behavior.
So, the big question is, what is the value of the proposed prediction mechanism (WiSH)? I’m not sure I know. But I’m not ready to throw it out yet because it only works at certain levels of aggregation. Thoughts?
UPDATE: Here’s Stephen’s comment which was made during the blog’s transition to its new home.
I’ve put up a new paper draft exploring the patterns in CC license selection behavior by users on Flickr. You can access it here:
Understanding the CC License Selection Behavior of Flickr Users
I’d love to hear what you think. I mean to clean it up for “formal publication” after I get your feedback…
Saw a very cool item today called the Freedom Toaster. Basically a kiosk that allows people to burn CDs and DVDs of OSS for free. Now, if only they would put up more info and the software they’re using so that *we* could build one… 
