It isn't possible to compose an OER that provides all possible and desirable pathways through a topic, but it is possible to provide an entrance into the real-world set of pathways, using the resources available in Free Software, Creative Commons, OERs, the Internet, and even reality itself. There are some excellent teachers who give no lessons, but only present questions for the students to investigate, each in their own way, and then share their results.
If you would like to try out this idea, I recommend that you go to the Gapminders Web site and experiment with it. http://www.gapminder.org/ Allow yourself plenty of time. This site provides visualization tools for mapping a wide range of economic and social factors by country over time for the whole world. You should quickly discover a wealth of questions that conventional accounts do not raise for you. Which are the most informative views I can generate? Which variables seem to have more explanatory power than others? What information is missing? Why is this country an outlier, with better health than the economic statistics would suggest? Why is this country a laggard, with worse outcomes on some points than some other indicators would suggest? Why did development go awry at certain times for so many countries? When did it go right, and why? Now, how do we get answers to those questions? Mere supposition will not do. It is essential to understand that good questions are better than good answers. You cannot advance by giving the best possible answers to the wrong questions, but you can advance by raising a question that has no answers at all yet. There is no shortage of open-ended questions. For example, although most people know almost nothing about this quest, mathematicians have not finished answering the question, What is a number? in the most practical sense of the problem. Conway numbers and games are the biggest recent advance in this area, as explained in On Numbers and Games, and in Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays, and books on particular games of particular depth. The biggest and most consequential questions, and the most neglected in conventional pre-programmed education, are among the simplest to state. Among them are What is real? How do you know? What should we do next? Applying this way of thinking to civics, for example, gives rise to these questions: How are governments supposed to work? How do they work, or fail to work, in practice? What can we do about that? Thus a useful starting point for any school subject, or any other, is to begin with the key set of questions for exploration: What questions are asked in this subject? What counts as an answer? How can you tell? What do we think we know? What do we think we don't know? How are we going to find out more? What don't we even have any idea that we don't know? That last is a tough one, inherently unanswerable. Well, we occasionally do get part of an answer to it, but when that happens, that new question immediately gets transferred to what we think we don't know. But it is useful to consider such an unanswerable question, even if only as a reminder of how little we do know. Dark matter was in that category fairly recently, and dark energy even more recently. The notion of human rights was once unimaginable. Before writing was invented, and much later ink and then paper, and indeed for long after, the notion of a printing press was unthinkable. What have we not thought to ask about yet? "Only two things are infinite, the Universe and human ignorance, and I'm not sure about the Universe."--Albert Einstein On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 1:38 AM, Dr R C Sharma <[email protected]> wrote: > Dear Folks, > > Course design should incorporate a number of OER on different pathways to > best suit each learner’s own choices and level. While Derntl, Parrish & > Botturi (2010) simply entangle themselves in Figure 4 (p.197) trying to show > a route from start to end with either zero, one, two, or three waystations, > there are available platforms that we could utilise for the desirable > complexity we want for OER pathways and interactive courses. > > These multimedia platforms now available can be used to create interactive > narratives with choices that appear depending on the user’s activity, eg > inklewriter at http://www.inklestudios.com/inklewriter, varytale at > http://varytale.com/books/ or storify at http://storify.com among others. If > an end-user has difficulty in an interactive task, the text / platform can > raise options for remedial study, or to other tasks or routes. The platform > could perhaps host a whole course involving multiple intersecting pathways. > > The inklewriter platform was the topic of a blog posting by Anastasia Salter > yesterday, and I think the application of this technique to OER could be > tremendous. What do you think ? > > All best wishes > > Paul Kawachi > > Derntl, M., Parrish, P., & Botturi, I. (2010). Beauty and precision : > Weaving complex educational technology projects with visual instructional > design languages. International Journal on e-learning, 9 (2), 185-202. > Retrieved February 3, 2013, from > http://dbis.rwth-aachen.de/~derntl/papers/preprints/ijel2010-vidl-preprint.pdf > > Salter, A. (2013). Choose your own classroom adventure with inklewriter. > Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 February. Retrieved February 8, 2013, from > http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/classroom-adventure-with-inklewriter/45873 > > > -- > -- 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] > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "WikiEducator" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > -- Edward Mokurai (默雷/निशब्दगर्ज/نشبدگرج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks -- -- 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] --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
