What about with the use of social software - does learning change? Can it lead to better alignment of teaching and learning? (Gurmit).
Gurmit, your contribution arrived as I had just emailed a series of questions to a small group of friends with whom I will meet this coming Sunday for a discussion on "collective intelligence." I copy from this email to my friends: A. While I see the obvious benefits to community building through collaboration in the production of knowledge, there are problems with the use of the outputs of such processes by those who did not participate in the production process. I foresee such problems for instance in the use of collaboratively elaborated open educational resources (OER) through such initiatives as the WikiEducator ( <http://www.wikieducator.org/> www.wikieducator.org) as well as in the use of the Wikipedia for reference purposes by university students. 1) How can such users be sure of the validity of what they use? 2) What is needed to prepare users to self-validate what they read? 3) Would self-validation be sufficient? If not, what more is needed? 4) What bridges could possibly be constructed between traditional validation systems (peer review, etc) and the current movement towards 'everything goes'? 5) What may be the impact of anonymity of sources on how users interact with these sources? I'm particularly thinking here about what happens in the affective domain when you do no longer see a human being of flesh and blood with a known intellectual history behind a given source. B. As I have a particular interest in processes of building and nurturing the scientific mind, I wonder if we can create an outline of benefits and drawbacks for Building the Scientific Mind of the emergence of collective intelligence alongside good old individual intelligence. I am sure many more questions can be raised and perhaps there are answers already to some of them. But I am certainly interested in a discussion on these issues. So, thanks, Gurmit, for suggesting it. Incidentally, I was the principal editor of a book that came out last year on Learners in a Changing Learning Landscape: Reflections from a Dialogue on New Roles and Expectations. The publisher Springer serves the library market in the first place and has thus not yet come out with an affordable commercial soft cover edition. I hope I can convince them to do so soon. The "changing learning landscape" that the book reflects on is wider than the questions raised by the use of social software, which I believe is one of multiple factors that foment the change we are seeing and are going to see. Jan --- Jan Visser, Ph.D. President and Sr. Researcher, Learning Development Institute http://www.learndev.org http://www.wikieducator.org/User:Jvisser.ldi --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
