Prelude

• The new millennium requires new vision and understanding of learning.
• Transition from Industrial Society to Information and Knowledge Society has its impacts on social, economic and cultural aspects of life.
• What are the impacts of the transition to Information Age regarding:
• personal fulfillment
• citizenship
• employability
• What are the implications of this transition on learning?
• What is the vision of future learning?
• How can we be prepared for an Information Age and a Knowledge Society?
• In a technology-enabled, lifelong learning environment, digital literacy (e-skills), scientific literacy, cultural literacy, in addition to key competencies, are the critical perquisites for access, participation, and learning to live together in peace.
• With the advent of “e-learning,” some believed that the panacea for learning had been discovered. But without a holistic approach to learning, technology by itself can’t bring any change.
• In a world of active lifelong learning, an individual’s skills portfolio will be built and documented based on a mix of real-life experiences, achievements, and formal learning certifications.
• While classroom-based learning will continue, especially with early phases of education, it will play a decreased role during an individual lifetime.
• In knowledge society, individuals of every age and background are invited to join in logical analysis, technical dissertations, rich and wide knowledge of diverse subject matters. “Intellectual activity is anywhere and everywhere, whether at the frontier of knowledge or in a third-grade class-room.” (Jerome Brunner)

Definition of Key Concepts

Lifelong Learning

A cradle to grave process designed to provide any citizen with a constantly updated personal and professional development. A tool which enables him/her to face change, to adapt to the requirements of the labor market, to take responsibility for his or her own life, to attain personal fulfillment and to assume the responsiveness of an active citizen.

Knowledge Society

1. Is a society that creates, shares, and uses knowledge for the prosperity and well-being of its people.
2. Is what we should be seeking to build in the 21st century through networking, and acquisition of higher level cognitive skills.

New Approaches to Knowledge

1. The new approach will strike a better balance between purely formal knowledge, applied knowledge and meta-knowledge.
2. At the present time knowledge is conveyed through speech and the written word. In the future, there will be an extraordinary diversification of its representations, particularly through the new information and communications technology (ICT).
3. Cross-cutting themes, interdisciplinary approach will become more important than disciplinary one.
4. Knowledge will be inclusive and it will involve “higher-level” of cognitive domain:
• analyses
• synthesis
• evaluation
5. Learners will be more closely associated with the creation of knowledge and more involved in the learning process.

Learning in Knowledge Society

Implies to differentiate between:

1. superficial learning (reception/understanding/application)
2. deep learning (analysis/synthesis/evaluation)

Implies to construct knowledge, to make meaning, and continuous improvement of mental representation.

Constructivist’s definition of learning

• Learning is the process of adjusting our mental models to accommodate new experiences.
• Learning is a search for meaning.
• Meaning making requires wholes as well as parts.
• Parts must be understood in the context of wholes.
• Therefore, the learning process focuses on primary concepts not isolated facts.

Four pillars of lifelong learning in 21st century

• Learning to know
• Learning to do
• Learning to be
• Learning to live together

Learning to know by mastering cognitive skills & collaboration.
Learning to do by mastering skills & production.
Learning to be by admitting multiple intelligent (MI) and sustainable human development.
Learning to live together by dialogue and tolerance.

Main objectives of lifelong learning

• Personal fulfillment and development throughout life (cultural capital)
• Active citizenship and inclusion (social capital)
• Employability (human capital)

Lifelong learning and Competencies

There are three broad types of competencies to be acquired through lifelong learning process:

1. Communicative competencies: the ability to speak, listen, write, negotiate, and mediate.
2. Analytical competencies: the ability to operate within systems of formal logic, to create models, and to display a sociological imagination.
3. Personal competencies - the ability to display “emotional balance,” to accept diversity, to tolerate.

Key competencies

The key competencies mentioned above are neither school nor university topics, but are acquired in social groups or in the family. These competencies could be considered as tangible contribution to the lifelong learning process and to the construction of a knowledge–based society.

• Key competencies enable people to pursue individual objectives in a life driven by personal interests, aspirations, and the desire to continue learning throughout life (cultural capital).
• Key competencies allow everybody to participate as an active citizen in society (social capital).
• Key competencies upraise the capacity of each and every person to obtain a decent job in the labor market (human capital).

Dimensions of a Knowledge Society

The three specific dimensions of knowledge society are:

1. The political dimension
2. The operational dimension
3. The dimension related to the development of Human Beings

The political dimension implies developing a “learning culture” & “learning spaces” in civil society and in a work place.

The operational dimension implies all players in the lifelong learning process (institutions, NGO’s, companies, trade- unions, education and training authorities, practitioners, municipalities, local communities, museums,…) in order to build strategic lifelong learning partnerships and networks to analyze learning requirements and remove barriers to access to learning.

The dimension related to the development of human beings is the heart of the matter, since it implies a focus on people and citizens rather than abstract terms, such as “human resources” or “end-users.”

Best GLOBAL practices in lifelong learning

The best innovative practices in a European community are categorized under the following factors:

• Process-oriented innovation
• Goal-oriented innovation
• Context-oriented innovation

Implications of best innovative practices in lifelong learning

• Process-oriented innovation implies development of new methods, tools, or approaches, or improvement of existing methods.
• Goal-oriented innovation implies formulation of new objectives. For example, active involvement of local communities in the development of basic competencies.
• Context-oriented innovation are concerned with system(s) development and implies political and institutional structures and holistic approaches to integrate to sustainable human development.

Priorities for Action

1. Valuing learning
2. Information guidance & counseling
3. Investing time & money in learning
4. Bringing together learners and learning opportunities
5. Applying innovative pedagogy

Valuing learning by, for example, developing tools for assessing competencies and methodologies.

Information guidance and counseling by orienting people to manage their knowledge.

Investing time and money in learning by collaboration between public & private bodies.

Bringing together learners and learning opportunities by showing how “normal” instruments such as TV, popular music and theater, rituals, arts, books and reading can be used as powerful levers for inclusion through lifelong learning.

Innovative and critical pedagogy by adaptability to contexts and constructing knowledge through Constructive socio-cultural and holistic approaches to learning.

Epilogue

A knowledge–based society is a promising and challenging Global scenario with the advent of ICT in the 21st century. It carries both opportunities for personal advancement and the threat of being ‘left behind.” Opportunities provided to citizens through lifelong learning are a potential tool for empowerment. As pro-active lifelong learners we need to be equipped with new competencies as we construct knowledge personally through social processes and culture. To be equipped with the key competencies for lifelong learning in a knowledge society could be considered as a right and obligation of every human being.

Concluding point

It is high time to consider lifelong learning as a moral duty and/or ethical value of the Citizen of the world.

References

1. Binde, Jerome. (2001). Keys to the 21st century. Unesco, Paris.
2. Delors, Jacques. (1996).Learning: treasur within. Unesco, Paris.
3. European Civil Society. (2004).Developing key competences: report of 25 best practices. Directorate General of Education and Culture.
4. Bransford,John D.& others. (2000). How people learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and school. National Academy Press. Washington, D.C.
5. Architecture for Implementation of a Lifelong Online Learning Environment (LOLE) - Caron, P., Beaudoin, G., Leblanc, F. & Grant, A. - International Journal on E-Learning. 6 (3), 2007, pp. 313-332, Chesapeake, VA: AACE. Online: [PDF]
6. http://www.pedagogy.ir : Lifelong Learning - Pedagogy.ir - Pedagogy, Lifelong learning, Learning Environment & Performance & More

I want to welcome Dr. Farideh Mashayekh and thank her for agreeing to contribute to the Impact of Open Source Software on Education series. Farideh’s post will appear on Terra Incognita on May 30, 2007 (eastern U.S.). Farideh will share some of her thoughts about the importance and nature of adult learning in a knowledge society, opening ample opportunities for the rest of us to connect these topics with open source software and open educational resources.

Dr. Farideh Mashayekh serves as a Strategic Consultant in Educational Planning and Pedagogy with Pedagogy.ir. Much of her teaching, research, and other work have focused on systems approaches to planning adult education and lifelong learning and the application of cognitive and constructivist schools of thought in teaching-learning processes. In addition to being a prime mover behind Pedagogy.ir, she is a thought leader in the adult education community in Iran.

I am very much looking forward to Farideh’s posting. Although I have never met Farideh in person, I feel a connection though her commitment to adult learning, which I feel is an excellent point of departure for a dialog about OSS and OER and its impact on education. Please feel free to comment, ask questions, build on the conversation, and enjoy.

“Learning Design and Open Source Teaching,” the sixth installment of the Impact of Open Source Software Series, was posted on May 16, 2007, by James Dalziel, Director of the Macquarie E-Learning Centre Of Excellence (MELCOE) and prime mover behind LAMS. Thanks James!

James’ posting was organized into two related sections. The first provided some definition for Learning Design as treated in his posting, and the second pointed to the potential of “Open Source Teaching.” James’ treatment of Learning Design suggests that Learning Design seeks to describe learning processes along with content, which takes the form of sequences of activities. Although the activities could be of a mixed online and offline nature, much dialog around Learning Design is focused on the technology to automatically run activity sequences. James then points to the potential benefits of Learning Design in terms of collaborative and social learning and activity sequence sharing, which leads into the second section on Open Source Teaching.

James starts the second section of his posting with,

If Learning Designs capture the heart of the education process, then could we, by analogy, call them the “source code” of teaching? And if teachers then share their Learning Designs with each other under open content licenses, then does this represent the birth of open source teaching?

He then makes a reference to an article that fleshes out the concept, and quickly dives into the important topic of licensing, particularly around the Non-Commercial (NC) restriction, which had been treated in some previous postings in “FLOSS, OER, Equality and Digital Inclusion” and “WikiEducator: Memoirs, myths, misrepresentations and the magic.”

Comments
The comments for this posting were extensive and centered on the themes of a) licensing and sharing Learning Designs and b) the nature of Learning Design and the relatively slow uptake of Learning Design in the United States. The comments, questions, and responses in the posting where quite detailed and deserve to be read in their original form. The sub-texts within the comments included:

• Concerns about the appropriation and commercialization of Learning Designs, which was discussed in terms of protections offered through the creative comments licensing agreements.
• Questions about the most effective ways of licensing that will best serve the public good promise of OSS, OER and “Open Source Teaching,” which was discussed in terms of the trade-off between the NC restriction and the willingness among academics to contribute open resources.
• Assertions and considerations about the impact that the NC restriction has on the freedom culture.
• Questions about the uptake of Learning Design in the United States, which resulted in the refinement of what James refers to as Learning Design, and some thoughts about why Learning Design might be less enthusiastically embraced in the United States than elsewhere.
• Questions about collaborative authoring of Learning Designs and the potential to realize some of the benefits of Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP).

Thanks again to James, Simon, Wayne, and all of the other folks who have been reading along. Our next posting will be by Dr. Farideh Mashayekh (Bazargan), who serves as a Strategic Consultant in Educational Planning & Pedagogy with Pedagogy.ir on May 30, 2007. The schedule for the series can be found on WikiEducator.

Learning Design: The missing component of e-learning

The field of Learning Design seeks to describe the “process” of education - the sequences of activities facilitated by an educator that are often at the heart of small group teaching. Consider this example:

An educator decides to break their seminar/tutorial class into small groups to debate an idea. Then each group reports back to the whole class. Then the whole class debates the different group ideas. Then the educator presents an article from the literature with a new perspective. Finally, the whole class discusses how their initial debate compares to the ideas of the article.

This example is typical of small group teaching around the world, and yet this dimension of education is notably missing from most of the e-learning technology field to date.

Learning Design seeks to describe educational processes like the example above. In particular, it has a special focus on processes that involve group tasks, not merely individual students interacting with content on a screen - rather, students interact with each other over a series of structured tasks.

Much of the work on Learning Design focuses on technology to automatically “run” the sequence of student activities (facilitated by the educator via computers), but an activity in a Learning Design could be conducted without technology. Hence, a particular Learning Design may be a mixture of online and face-to-face tasks (”blended learning”) or it could be conducted entirely face-to-face with no computers (in this case, the particular Learning Design acts as a standardised written description of the educational process - like a K-12 lesson plan). One way to think of a Learning Design system is as a workflow engine for collaborative activities. A particular Learning Design is like an educational recipe for a teacher - it describes ingredients (content) and instructions (process).

Educators can share Learning Designs in the same way they can share content; but with the added benefit is that they are now sharing the teaching process, not just teaching content. The two main Learning Design initiatives globally (Coppercore and related projects; and LAMS) are both are freely available as open source software, and both have online communities sharing Learning Designs as open content (Learning Networks for Learning Design at OUNL - and the LAMS Community.

The vision of how Learning Design could contribute to improving education was, for me, best articulated by Diana Laurillard in the UK Government e-learning strategy in 2005. Point 89 says:

“We want to stimulate greater innovation in e-learning design to accelerate the development of the next generation of e-learning. The focus should be on design flexibility for teachers and engaging activity for learners. Flexible learning design packages would enable teachers in all sectors to build their own individual and collaborative learning activities around digital resources. This would help them engage in designing and discussing new kinds of pedagogy, which is essential if we are to succeed in innovating and transforming teaching and learning.”

The benefit of Learning Design is that it provides educators with a way to describe and share the educational process (not just content). By fostering sharing, we not only improve education through open dissemination, but as educators can adapt and improve the Learning Designs they receive, and share the improved version back with a global audience of educators. This could lead to improved educational outcomes while at the same time reducing preparation time.

Open Source Teaching?

If Learning Designs capture the heart of the education process, then could we, by analogy, call them the “source code” of teaching? And if teachers then share their Learning Designs with each other under open content licenses, then does this represent the birth of open source teaching?

I put forward this idea in a keynote presentation for ED-MEDIA in 2006.

The emphasis, for me, is on Learning Design as the “Source (code of) Teaching”, and then applying an open content license makes it Open (Source (code of) Teaching) - rather than the emphasis being “Open Source” for/of Teaching. As ugly as this close textual analysis is, it turns out to be important.

I am happy to call the Creative Commons BY-SA-NC (Attribution, Share Alike, Non-commercial) license (the typical license used in the LAMS Community) an “open” license. But when I ran the terms “open” “source” and “teaching” together, some colleagues took exception to this phrase being applied to Learning Designs that are licensed in a way that is incompatible with the Open Source Definition and the Free Software Definition (ie, no restriction on fields of endeavour, including commercial endeavours).

On the other hand, I’ve spoken to many educators who are comfortable with open sharing of their educational work for non-commercial purposes, but would be uncomfortable with a blanket license that permits any kind of commercial use as well (in passing, I should note that the issue here is rarely that users of the non-commercial clause are against any kind of commercial use; rather, they would like to be asked first, and have the option to negotiate terms on a case-by-case basis, typically with the implication that if someone else makes money from their work, they’d like a cut).

So I remain uncertain how to address this challenge: if most of my colleagues only feel comfortable to share their work on a non-commercial basis, then is it better to encourage them to share their work (and hence ultimately improve education) rather than trying to persuade them to change their mind about allowing commercial use (and run the risk of them not sharing if they are not persuaded)?

I still really like the phrase “open source teaching”, primarily because of the image of Learning Design as the “source code” of teaching. But I’ve held off using this term any further because I don’t feel that the issues above have been resolved. Regardless of the term, I see great potential in the open sharing of Learning Designs to foster improved education for a better world.

I want to welcome James Dalziel and thank him for agreeing to contribute to the Impact of Open Source Software on Education series. James’ post will appear on Terra Incognita on May 16, 2007 (eastern U.S.). James will be using experiences with LAMS (Learning Activity Management System) to tie together some thoughts about pedagogy, technology and open source software. LAMS is an open source Learning Design system. It provides tools to author, run, and manage Learning Designs (also known as digital lesson plans). The LAMS Community supports sharing of Learning Designs as open educational resources.

James Dalziel is Professor of Learning Technology and Director of the Macquarie E-Learning Centre Of Excellence (MELCOE) at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. James leads a number of projects including:

• LAMS (Learning Activity Management System) - a tool for designing, managing and delivering online collaborative learning activities
• MAMS (Meta Access Management System) - a national identity and access infrastructure project for the Australian higher education sector
• RAMP (Research Activityflow and Middleware Priorities) - a project investigating open standards authorization and e-Research workflows
• ASK-OSS (the Australian Service for Knowledge of Open Source Software) - a national advisory service on open source issues for the Australia higher education and research sector

Prior to his current roles, James helped lead the COLIS (Collaborative Online Learning and Information Services) project, was a Director of WebMCQ Pty Ltd, an e-learning and assessment company, and was a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Sydney.
I am very much looking forward to James’ posting. I first met James in 2003 while serving in New Zealand. He was a guest of the NZ Ministry of Education and National Library and was addressing a mixed group of eLearning Managers and Librarians about metadata standards. He managed to keep both groups happy and well entertained, which I think was quite a feat. Since then I have grown to appreciate James’ passion for teaching and learning and commitment to learning design. I have always enjoyed hearing what James has to say, and am confident that his posting will be no exception. Please feel free to comment, ask questions, build on the conversation, and enjoy.

In an earlier posting I suggested that one way we could start approaching the Online Global Land Grant would be to think about goals, structure, and finance and economics. In my last posting I identified some ways that we could think about structure and provided a number of potential reference organizations. Now I will start by outlining considerations for finance and economics.

It seems clear that the structure and financing of an online global land grant will be closely tied. Traditional centralized funding through a state, heavy student fees, and funding through a single source (sponsor) such as a church might play a role, but are unlikely to be sustainable. I believe that the structure will have to support an economy in which value and resources are exchanged efficiently. Organizations whose mission is to distribute knowledge and engage in educational activities must be identified and aligned, while the efforts and goodwill of independent teachers and learners must be leveraged, and the interests of governments, universities, and NGO’s and philanthropic organizations must also be aligned and their commitment enlisted.

At the beginning, it might be worth simply identifying existing organizations that operate in research, instruction, and cooperative extension, that could potentially contribute directly to the global land grant university. For example, there are research organizations such as International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) that could potentially become active research partners in the global land grant. There are universities and other organizations that receive funding to engage in teaching and learning activities such as ASEDA and Aga Khan University whose impact could be magnified by partnership with an online global land grant. Many governments and communities have field-based education operations, some traditional land grants, such as the University of Wisconsin, have established international extension programs throughout the globe, and NGOs such as IREX and OSI, could partner to enhance their extension agenda.

Because the global land grant will likely build its economy on knowledge and resource exchange, across the globe, its infrastructure and resources will have to be easily and openly exchanged and adapted to local purposes. This is where Free and Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) and Open Educational Resources (OER) are absolutely critical. The impact the FLOSS and OER is having on education is a topic of discussion on Terra Incognita, while the topic is being treated by numerous projects including the Center for Open Sustainable Learning (COSL), the OER Commons, and others. FLOSS and OER set the tone for a culture that values development and mission over protection and profit, creating the foundation of a open market for global knowledge and education, which I believe will be a critically important feature of the online global land grant university.

During the coming months I will continue to teas out some of the themes that have been included in the past few posting on this topic. I welcome comments and suggestions for directions this could take and for resources to explore.