Open has become a buzz word, and engaging is something many seek in new education ideas. First question is “What are they?” Second question is, “Is it good to add them to education?” Third question is “How can we add them to education?” To be honest, attempts have been made to add them to education, but most of the time the tools and semblance of them are added, not them.
NOTE: I haven’t forgotten about the summary posts, but I’m not sure when I’ll be writing them. This whole thing is an experiment, and part of the beauty of doing these as blog posts is that all the content is in one place to start with. Thank you for your patience. If anybody would like to write a summary, you are welcome to have a go. Just let me know when you post it so I can link to it.
“What are open and engagement?”
Recently I came across a wonderful post on what openness really is, but can’t find it at the time of writing this. It’s not just about availability and sharing, though they are big parts. In fact the post I’m thinking about said that open resources should always be available and always be accessible, but that isn’t all there is to being open. It’s also about being willing to adapt and adjust as needed. Sharing is like talking. Being creative gives you more to say than just the things you’ve heard. Listening and considering what you hear gives you more to share, more ideas to be creative with and a better idea how to go about sharing to add value.
Engagement isn’t just physical, it’s mental, emotional, temporal and much more. There needs to be a sense of DOING in the activity for most people to be fully engaged. When listening, it’s being an active listener who critically thinks about what is said. If you’re not mentally there, you aren’t engaged. It’s fully being a part of the here and now, but to get somebody to do that usually requires some motivation.
“Is it good to add them to education?”
Yes, but my opinion isn’t the reason. Openness increases the reach of educational efforts while engagement increases the effectiveness to those reached. If you can’t access learning materials, you can’t use them to learn. Play and practice are both forms of engagement. Both are proven to help retention and creativity.
Some say that it will cause problems financially, and I don’t disagree. However, I think not being open with basic education needed by the masses could cause far more financial problems. Illiteracy has been noted as a rising problem, as are several others publicly noted. Math and science have been a big deal for a while. Now we also have digital skills to be added to the already large list of generally daily skills we need to function productively in society.
“How can we add them to education?”
Many counter ideas to add things to education with the notion that openness, engagement and other ideas are just good teacher. I agree, but as others have pointed out in discussions, it’s not the standard level of teaching. These thing need to be added back into education. Without them students and learners are basically told that learning, personal growth and work are all as boring as a textbook and listening to a boring lecture. So, let’s bring back quality teaching.
Games and technology are just tools to add openness and engagement. If used in the same old ways, they will be as transformative as e-learning has been on the whole. In other words, not much. The content isn’t the problem so much as the delivery and the expectations. The points brought up about motivation and assessment correlate to delivery and expectations. So, we need to figure out ways to integrate open engagement into the daily educational activities if we really want to see the benefits, rather than just using the tools and bairly getting ours collective toes wet with our efforts. Just look at the efforts and results of 826 Valencia ( http://www.826valencia.org/ ).
Bring on the Links
I know that there is a plethora of good posts and articles related to openness and engagement in education. If you know of some, please make a comment on this post sharing those links. I’m sure that some of the social bookmarking sites will have some good links as well, but I don’t have the time to go through them all. I’m mean that seriously, since I haven’t got around to the summary posts. This isn’t just about me, or you, but the entire populace who have some connection to education and learning, that is, every single person on this planet. Maybe we can’t positively effect everybody’s lives right away, but if we don’t start rolling snow balls down the hill we won’t be affecting very many lives later either.
I think an important part of “open” is that teachers and students should share what they are doing with people outside their classroom. An open lesson is one that outsiders can follow along with or review in the archives (and the “inside” students can go back to later as well). Most classrooms don’t consider how the lessons could be opened. Teachers focus on the students in front of them to the exclusion of those who are not.
I like a model of a class where the teacher and students collaboratively build up a record of what has been learned. I tried this from a student’s perspective when I was in college, building collaborative study guides on Google Docs with my classmates. It worked well to study for a test, and when the classes were over, everybody who participated has a record of the completed study guides if they want to go back and reexamine some of the same questions later on. The number of people who participated in actually creating the content in these docs was about 10% of the people who viewed them, so there is a bit of a free-riding problem, but I think participation could be improved if it were the teacher who instigated the process and integrated it with the class.
I have not encountered any teachers who facilitated this approach from the get-go, but I think it could be a good way to encourage openness in education. (Can’t wait for the Google Wave to make this even nicer. Embedding Google Docs in a blog is alright, but could be improved.)
I agree with you Nate. There is a lot of potential in those directions. The one thing I think should be included in teacher efforts in open engagement in that direction is keeping the private channels of communication open. I’ve noticed that some people go too far when they try this direction. It’s not a matter of open vs closed, but rather including open engagement like you described. Though I have seen teachers try to encourage this kind of effort only to have the students not participate.
Stephen Downes linked to this post and the blog in his newsletter OLDaily ( http://www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.htm , http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=49431 ).
Also, there was an interesting article ( http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/article1014663.ece ) mentioned in the same issue of the newsletter by Stephen Downes. It talks about how engagement was used to improve the quality of a school’s education and results.
are you mixing up education with schooling?
Do you see them as the same thing?
Personally, I think schooling is a form of education and that education is a part of what schools do.
“the education a person receives at school” – http://www.thefreedictionary.com/schooling
I truly mean education, inside and outside of school. Schools just happen to be the obvious target. From what I’ve seen there have been plenty of education efforts that fall into the same pitfalls most schools do. As always though, there are plenty of pockets of good to great teaching.
Something I came across today that I no longer remember how it came to be in my path, another talk, but not a TED talk, though it is fitting to be one.
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=0D91DA11499ADCD9
Another interesting thing on open engagement, but this time it’s a project and tool: http://scratch.mit.edu/