What I most like about David Wiley’s ambitions to promote openness in education is his great talent to bring arguments to the bottom line. In presentation like this, he clearly points out the role of openness in education. Despite other implicit meanings of that, David Wiley goes on to postulate that openness is the only means of doing education. That means without being open towards sharing my thoughts and materials there will be no education.
This leads me to a classical construct in education and pedagogy, the didactic triangle. Most of you are familiar with that as it describes the basic relationships between teacher, student and content. Now throughout the advancement of Openness which is reflected in many writings such as here by Michael Peters new insight into the specific meanings and benefits for educational processes have emerged.
With reference to the didactic triangle, openness has several impacts which can be elaborated on as illustrated in the following figure.
First, access to content is no longer a big deal for teachers as well as for learners. Thus, a much more diverse body of information is available for learning and teaching.
Second, support can be received in broader forms such as peer support via new technologies like ResearchGate and can so enhance the quality of the research process.
Third, we are currently witnessing new forms of open teaching such as this MOOC #change11. Despite the classical teaching approach with a fixed and pre-defined curriculum, Open Courses do not require you to cover and process all the materials and subjects and to pass an exam after a certain period. In fact, it is totally up to you what you make out of it.
Surely there a many more options around the classic triangle triggered by Openness. And in keeping with David Wiley, the open didactic triangle can be a tool to communicate the core meanings of Openness in Education as it is directed to the bottom line.
Hi Markus,
Thanks for sharing this post to the #ioe12 group. I appreciate your effort in linking theory and practice.
As quality content become more readily available, my interpretation is that the center of focus shifts from the Teacher – Content side to the Student itself, the relationships he/she establishes, and the content he/she finds and uses. The quest to create value has to become internalized in order to trigger learning, something that has always been true, but that open learning puts at the forefront as a critical component.