Saturday, January 29, 2011

Wikis for Open Education

Greetings from the second day of Recent Changes Camp 2011: Canberra at the University of Canberra. This afternoon's second session on "Wikis for Open Education" is being podcast by "Talking VTE".

Wikipedia defines Open education as ".. a collective term that refers to educational organisations that seek to eliminate barriers to entry". The barriers can be formal academic admission requirements. Open University UK and Athabasca University in Canada are given as examples. E-learning is commonly used for this (a version of my Green ICT Strategies course is offered by Athabasca).

Leigh Blackall suggested using the term "open networked education" so I did a search for this and found "Workshop for Australian education policy" which is described as "An experiment in pulling the materials together to work on open networked education policy...".

Mentioned in discussion was the "Khan Academy", a not-for-profit US based educational body. Perhaps another to mention is the Lalit Kala Akademi (Kala National Academy of Arts India).

It seems to me that Montessori approach to school design can be applied across the educational school, vocational and university sectors.

The discussion then got onto the professionalism and certification of teaching. I don't see this as a bad thing. A technology based society needs competnet people to keep things working. Despite romantic notions of the apprentice learning at the feet of the master, teaching is a skill which needs to be learnt.

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