Minds on Fire

8/14/2019 Minds on Fire

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A C nv rsa n w Pr ss r J s Marq s s San sR i C h A R d N . K A t z a n t e d d o d d S

Ac n Ana y csd o N A l d N o R R i S , l i N d A B A e R , J o A N l e o N A R d , l o u i S P u g l i e S e , a n P A u l l e f R e R e

P LU S : t S c n d ca an B y nd i A N A g . o B l i N g e R

EDUCAUS E v i wJ a n u a r y / F e b r u a r y 2 0 0 8

W y i t M a r s h r e c a n

John Seely Brown and Open Education, the Long Tail

Minon


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J n ry /F eb r ry 2 0 0 8 EducauI l l u s t r a t i o n b y D u n g H o a n g , 2 0 0 8

By John seely Brown nd Rich rd P. adler

2 0 0 8 J o h n S e e l y B r o w n a n d R i c h a r d P. A d l e r

Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0

John Seely Brown is a Visiting Scholar and Advisor to the Provost at the University of SouthernCalifornia (USC) and Independent Co-Chairman of a New Deloitte Research Center. He is the former Chief Scientist of Xerox and Director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Many of his publica-tions and presentations are on his website (http://www.johnseelybrown.com). Richard P. Adler is aResearch Affiliate at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto and Principal of People & Technology, aresearch and consulting firm in Cupertino, California.

More than one-third of the worlds population is under 20. Thereare over 30 million people todayqualified to enter a universitywho have no place to go. During the next decade, this 30 millionwill grow to 100 million. To meetthis staggering demand, a major university needs to be createdeach week.

Sir John Daniel, 1996 The world has become increasingly flat, as Tom Friedmanhas shown. Thanks to massive improvements in communi-cations and transportation, virtually any place on earth canbe connected to markets anywhere else on earth and canbecome globally competitive.1 But at the same time that theworld has become flatter, it has also become spikier: theplaces that are globally competitive are those that have ro-

bust local ecosystems of resources supporting innovation and productive-ness.2 A key part of any such ecosystem is a well-educated workforce withthe requisite competitive skills. And in a rapidly changing world, these eco-systems must not only supply this workforce but also provide support forcontinuous learning and for the ongoing creation of new ideas and skills.

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Text i l lus t rat ions 2008 Susan E. Havi land


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18 EducausE r e v i e w J n ry /Feb r ry 2008

If access to higher education is a nec-essary element in expanding economicprosperity and improving the quality oflife, then we need to address the problemof the growing global demand for educa-tion, as identified by Sir John Daniel.3 Compounding this challenge of demandfrom college-age students is the fact thatthe world is changing at an ever-fasterpace. Few of us today will have a fixed,single career; instead, we are likely tofollow a trajectory that encompassesmultiple careers. As we move from ca-reer to career, much of what we will needto know will not be what we learned inschool decades earlier. We are entering aworld in which we all will have to acquirenew knowledge and skills on an almostcontinuous basis.

It is unlikely that sufficient resourceswill be available to build enough new campuses to meet the growing global de-mand for higher educationat least notthe sort of campuses that we have tradi-tionally built for colleges and universities.Nor is it likely that the current methods ofteaching and learning will suffice to pre-pare students for the lives that they will

lead in the twenty-first century.The Brewing Perfect Stormof OpportunityFortunately, various initiatives launchedover the past few years have createda series of building blocks that couldprovide the means for transforming theways in which we provide education andsupport learning. Much of this activity has been enabled and inspired by thegrowth and evolution of the Internet,which has created a global platform

that has vastly expanded access to allsorts of resources, including formal andinformal educational materials. The In-ternet has also fostered a new culture ofsharing, one in which content is freely contributed and distributed with few restrictions or costs.

Arguably, the most visible impact ofthe Internet on education to date hasbeen the Open Educational Resources(OER) movement, which has provided

free access to a wide range of coursesand other educational materials toanyone who wants to use them. Themovement began in 2001 when the Wil-liam and Flora Hewlett and the Andrew W. Mellon foundations jointly fundedMITs OpenCourseWare (OCW) initia-tive, which today provides open accessto undergraduate- and graduate-levelmaterials and modules from more than1,700 courses (covering virtually all ofMITs curriculum). MITs initiative hasinspired hundreds of other collegesand universities in the United Statesand abroad to join the movement andcontribute their own open educationalresources.4 The Internet has also beenused to provide students with directaccess to high-quality (and thereforescarce and expensive) tools like tele-scopes, scanning electron microscopes,and supercomputer simulation models,allowing students to engage personally in research.

The latest evolution of the Internet,the so-called Web 2.0, has blurred theline between producers and consumersof content and has shifted attention from

access to information toward access toother people. New kinds of online re-sourcessuch as social networking sites,blogs, wikis, and virtual communitieshave allowed people with common in-terests to meet, share ideas, and collabo-rate in innovative ways. Indeed, the Web2.0 is creating a new kind of participatory medium that is ideal for supporting mul-tiple modes of learning.

Social LearningThe most profound impact of the Inter-

net, an impact that has yet to be fully real-ized, is its ability to support and expandthe various aspects of social learning. What do we mean by social learning?Perhaps the simplest way to explain thisconcept is to note that social learning isbased on the premise that ourunderstand-ing of content is socially constructedthrough conversations about that con-tent and through grounded interactions,especially with others, around problems

or actions. The focus is not so much owhatwe are learning but onhowwe arelearning.5

Compelling evidence for the importance of social interaction to learning comes from the landmark study bRichard J. Light, of the Harvard GraduaSchool of Education, of students colleguniversity experience. Light discoverethat one of the strongest determinants ostudents success in higher educationmore important than the details of theiinstructors teaching styleswas theability to form or participate in smastudy groups. Students who studied igroups, even only once a week, wemore engaged in their studies, were betteprepared for class, and learned signifcantly more than students who workeon their own.6

The emphasis on social learning standin sharp contrast to the traditional Cartesian view of knowledge and learning view that has largely dominated the weducation has been structured for oveone hundred years. The Cartesian perspective assumes that knowledge is a kinof substance and that pedagogy concern

the best way to transfer this substance froteachers to students. By contrast, instead starting from the Cartesian premise ofI think, therefore I am,and from the assump-tion that knowledge is something that transferred to the student via various pedagogical strategies, the social view of leaing says,We participate, therefore we are

This perspective shifts the focus oour attention from the content of a subject to the learning activities and humainteractions around which that contenis situated. This perspective also help

to explain the effectiveness of studgroups. Students in these groups can asquestions to clarify areas of uncertaintor confusion, can improve their grasp othe material by hearing the answers tquestions from fellow students, and pehaps most powerfully, can take on the roof teacher to help other group memberbenefit from their understanding (one othe best ways to learn something is, aftall, to teach it to others).

The most profound impact of the Internet is its ability to support aexpand the various aspects of social learning.


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J n ry /Feb r ry 2008 EducausE r e v i e w

ing is provided by the distributed virtuacommunities of practice in which peoplwork together voluntarily to develop anmaintain open source software. The opesource movement has produced softwarsuch as the Linux operating system anthe Apache web server, which have ofered surprisingly robust alternatives tcommercial products. These resourceare typically made available at no cost potential users, who are also invited tchange or improve the resources as lonas they agree to freely share their contrbutions with others.

Open source communities have de veloped a well-established path by whicnewcomers can learn the ropes anbecome trusted members of the community through a process of legitimatperipheral participation. New membertypically begin participating in an opesource community by working on relatively simple, noncritical developmenprojects such as building or improvinsoftware drivers (e.g., print drivers). they demonstrate their ability to makuseful contributions and to work in thdistinctive style and sensibilities/taste othat community, they are invited to takon more central projects. Those who become the most proficient may be asketo join the inner circle of people workin

on the critical kernel code of the systemToday, there are about one million peoplengaged in developing and refininopen source products, and nearly all arimproving their skills by participatinin and contributing to these networkecommunities of practice.

Since the open source movement ibased on the development of computesoftware, participation is effectively limited to people with programming skillBut its principles have been adopted bcommunities dedicated to the creation o

other, more widely accessible types of rsources. Perhaps the best known examplis Wikipedia, the online open sourceencyclopedia that has challenged thsupremacy of commercial encyclopediaBecoming a trusted contributor to Wikpedia involves a process of legitimaperipheral participation that is similar tothe process in open source software communities. Any reader can modify the texof an entry or contribute new entries. B

eye of a master, through a process that hasbeen described as legitimate peripheralparticipation;7 they then progress to moredemanding tasks as their skills improve.The studio system in architecture repre-

sents another example of social learningunder the guidance of an establishedpractitioner. In this system, students work together in a common space and periph-erally participate in each others designprocess; hence they can benefit from theirinstructors comments on and critiques ofother students projects and not just fromcomments on their own work.

A contemporary model that exempli-fies the power of this type of social learn-

Learning to BeThere is a second, perhaps even moresignificant, aspect of social learning. Mas-tering a field of knowledge involves notonly learning about the subject matter

but also learning to be a full participantin the field. This involves acquiring thepractices and the norms of establishedpractitioners in that field or acculturatinginto a community of practice. Historically,apprenticeship programs and supervisedgraduate research have provided studentswith opportunities to observe and thento emulate how experts function. Ap-prentices traditionally begin learning by taking on simple tasks, under the watchful

vs.


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only more experienced and more trustedindividuals are invited to become admin-istrators who have access to higher-levelediting tools.8

The openness of Wikipedia is in-structive in another way: by clicking ontabs that appear on every page, a user caneasily review the history of any article aswell as contributors ongoing discussionof and sometimes fierce debates aroundits content, which offer useful insightsinto the practices and standards of thecommunity that is responsible for cre-ating that entry in Wikipedia. (In somecases, Wikipedia articles start with initialcontributions by passionate amateurs,followed by contributions from profes-sional scholars/researchers who weigh inon the final versions. Here is where thecontested part of the material becomesmost usefully evident.) In this openenvironment, both the content and theprocess by which it is created are equally visible, thereby enabling a new kind ofcritical readingalmost a new form ofliteracythat invites the reader to join inthe consideration of what information isreliable and/or important.

In a traditional Cartesian educationalsystem, students may spend years learn-ing about a subject; only after amassingsufficient (explicit) knowledge are they expected to start acquiring the (tacit)knowledge or practice of how to be an ac-tive practitioner/professional in a field.9 But viewing learning as the process ofjoining a community of practice reversesthis pattern and allows new students toengage in learning to be even as they aremastering the content of a field. This en-courages the practice of what John Dewey

called productive inquirythat is, theprocess of seeking the knowledge when itis needed in order to carry out a particularsituated task.

New Tools for Extending Education:Social Learning OnlineNow lets look at some of the ways inwhich technology has begun to changethe game in education by leveraging thepotential of social learningand lets try

to identify some of the ways in whichtechnology could bring about even morefar-reaching changes that can betterserve the needs of twenty-first century students.

A current example of an attempt toharness the power of study groups in a virtual environment is the Terra Incog-nita project of the University of Southern

Queensland (Australia), which has buia classroom in Second Life, the onlin virtual world that has attracted millionof users.10 In addition to supportinglecture-style teaching, Terra Incognitincludes the capability for small groupof students who want to work together easily break off from the central claroom before rejoining the entire clas

In this open environment, both the content and the process by which icreated are equally visible, thereby enabling a new kind of critical read


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Instructors can visit or send messagesto any of the breakout groups and cansummon them to rejoin the larger group.

Another interesting experiment inSecond Life was the Harvard Law Schooland Harvard Extension School fall 2006

course called CyberOne: Law in theCourt of Public Opinion. The course wasoffered at three levels of participation.First, students enrolled in Harvard Law

School were able to attend the class inperson. Second, nonlaw school studentscould enroll in the class through the Har- vard Extension School and could attendlectures, participate in discussions, andinteract with faculty members during

their office hours within Second Life. And at the third level, any participant inSecond Life could review the lectures andother course materials online at no cost.

This experiment suggests one way ththe social life of Internet-based virtuaeducation can coexist with and extentraditional education.

A very different sort of initiative thatusing technology to leverage social learing is Digital StudyHall (DSH), whichdesigned to improve education fostudents in schools in rural areas anurban slums in India. The project is described by its developers as the eductional equivalent of Netflix + YouTube Kazaa.11 Lectures from model teacherare recorded on video and are then physically distributed via DVD to schools thtypically lack well-trained instructors (well as Internet connections). While thlectures are being played on a monito(which is often powered by a battery, sinmany participating schools also lack relable electricity), a mediator, who coube a local teacher or simply a bright stdent, periodically pauses the video anencourages engagement among the students by asking questions or initiatindiscussions about the material they arwatching. The recorded lectures providthe educational content, and the loca

mediators stimulate the interaction thaactively engages the students and increases the likelihood that they will de velop a real understanding of the lecturmaterial through focused conversation.12

Whereas these examples are usintechnology to enhance social learninwithin formal education, it also seemlikely that a great deal of informal learing is taking place both on and off campus via the online social networks thahave attracted millions of young peoplIn fact, many students in the United Stat

and in many other parts of the worlare already involved with online socinetworks that include their friends. JohKing, the associate provost of the Univesity of Michigan, has attempted to brinattention to this phenomenon by askinhow many students are being taught eac year by his institution. Although abo40,000 students are enrolled in classeon the universitys campus in Ann ArboKing believes that the actual number o

CyberOne Classroom in Second LifeSource:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/vvvv/files/2006/09/CyberOne_2006-09-21.png

It seems likely that a great deal of informal learning is taking place on and off campus via the online social networks.

Terra IncognitaSource:http://www.usq.edu.au/newsevents/events/onlinelearning.htm


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students being reached by the schooltoday is closer to 250,000.13 For the pastfew years, he points out, incoming stu-dents have been bringing along their on-line social networks, allowing them to stay in touch with their old friends and formerclassmates through tools like SMS, IM,Facebook, and MySpace. Through thesecontinuing connections, the University ofMichigan students can extend the discus-sions, debates, bull sessions, and study groups that naturally arise on campusto include their broader networks. Eventhough these extended connections werenot developed to serve educational pur-poses, they amplify the impact that theuniversity is having while also benefitingstudents on campus.14 If King is right, itmakes sense for colleges and universitiesto consider how they can leverage thesenew connections through the variety ofsocial software platforms that are beingestablished for other reasons.

Adding Community to Content:Learning to Be throughe-Science and e-HumanitiesThe e-Science movement is providing

students with access to expensive andscarce high-level tools, giving them theopportunity to engage in the kinds of re-search conducted by professional scien-tists.15By enabling students to collaboratewith working scientists, this movementprovides a platform for the learning tobe aspect of social learning. For example,the Faulkes Telescope Project, sponsoredby the Las Cumbres Observatory GlobalTelescope Network, provides studentsin the United Kingdom with free accessto two high-powered robotic telescopes,

one in Hawaii and the other in Austra-lia, which the students are able to useremotely to carry out their own scientificinvestigations (http://faulkes-telescope.com/). The project also operates the Faul-kes Telescope Student Academy, whichprovides training in astronomy andsupports collaborative projects betweenstudents and expert astronomers. Theprojects website includes reports of how students, under the guidance of profes-

sional astronomers, are using the Faulkestelescopes to make small but meaningfulcontributions to astronomy.

Hands-On Universe (HOU) is alsodesigned to promote collaborative learn-ing in astronomy (http://www.handsonuniverse.org). Based at the LawrenceHall of Science, University of Califor-nia, Berkeley, HOU invites students torequest observations from professionalobservatories and provides them withimage-processing software to visualizeand analyze their data, encouraging in-

teraction between the students and sci-entists. According to Kyle Cudworth, thescience director at Yerkes Observatory,which is part of the HOU network: Thisis not education in which people come inand lecture in a classroom. Were helpingstudents work with real data.16

Another, simpler example is the Bug-scope project, which gives K12 students

access to a scanning electron microscoplocated at the Beckman Institute for Ad vanced Science and Technology at tUniversity of Illinois. Students can sento Illinois any insects (or other smacreatures) that they have captured, thelog on with their computers to control thmicroscope in real time and view thespecimens (http://bug scope.beckman.uiuc.edu/).

The Internet has also inspired similar innovations in the humanities. ThDecameronWeb, developed by the Italian

Studies Department at Brown Univesity, is an impressive example of hothe web can not only provide access scholarly materials but also give studenthe opportunity to observe and emulatscholars at work (http://www.brow.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/dweb.shtml). The site is designed to be thub for the study of one important literar

By enabling students to collaborate with working scientists, this movemprovides a platform for the learning to be aspect of social learning.

The Faulkes Telescope ProjectSource:http://faulkes-telescope.com/

The Decameron WebSource:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/dweb.shtml


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work, theDecameron, as well as of the timeand culture in which it was produced. Inaddition to providing the full text of theDecameronin Italian and in English trans-lation, the site provides source materials,annotations and commentaries, bibliogra-phies, critical and interpretive essays, andaudio and visual materials.

Here too, the emphasis is on buildinga community of students and scholars asmuch as on providing access to educa-tional content. The sites developers note:We fundamentally believe that the new electronic environment and its tools en-able us to revive the humanistic spirit ofcommunal and collaboratively playfullearning of which theDecameronitselfis the utmost expression. The site is in-tended to serve as an open forum forworldwide discussions on theDecameron and related topics. Both scholars andstudents are invited to submit their owncontributions as well as to access the exist-ing resources on the site. The site serves asan apprenticeship platform for studentsby allowing them to observe how scholarsin the field argue with each other and alsoto publish their own contributions, which

can be relatively smallan example of thelegitimate peripheral participation thatis characteristic of open source communi-ties. This allows students to learn to be, inthis instance by participating in the kind ofrigorous argumentation that is generatedaround a particular form of deep schol-arship. A community like this, in whichstudents can acculturate into a particularscholarly practice, can be seen as a virtualspike: a highly specialized site that canserve as a global resource for its field.

An example of how the power of par-

ticipation can be harnessed within a singlecourse comes from David Wiley at UtahState University. In the fall of 2004, Wiley taught a graduate seminar, Understand-ing Online Interaction. He describes whathappened when his students were re-quired to share their coursework publicly:

Because my goal as a teacher is tobring my students into full legitimateparticipation in the community of in-

structional technologists as quickly aspossible, all student writing was doneon public blogs. The writing studentsdid in the first few weeks was interest-ing but average. In the fourth week,however, I posted a list of links to all thestudent blogs and mentioned the liston my own blog. I also encouraged thestudents to start reading one anotherswriting. The difference in the writingthat next week was startling. Each stu-dent wrote significantly more than they had previously. Each piece was morethoughtful. Students commented oneach others writing and interlinkedtheir pieces to show related or con-tradicting thoughts. Then one of thestudent assignments was commentedon and linked to from a very prominentblogger. Many people read the studentblogs and subscribed to some of them. When these outside comments showedup, indicating that the students really were plugging into the internationalcommunitys discourse, the quality ofthe writing improved again. The powerof peer review had been brought tobear on the assignments.17

The Long Tail in LearningChris Anderson, the editor ofWired, hasshown that Internet-based e-commercediffers from commerce in the physicaworld.18In the world of physical retailinand particularly in areas of selling goodlike books, music, and movies, sales ausually dominated by best-sellers. Typcally, 20 percent of titles generate 80 pecent of all sales, which means that morevenue comes from the fat part of thtail and that most of the costs of operatiocome from maintaining the inventory ithe long part of the tail.

But Anderson notes that e-commercsites such as Amazon.com, Netflix, anRhapsody dont follow this patternThey are able to maintain inventories oproductsbooks, movies, and musicthat are many times greater than can boffered by any conventional store. Thresult is an economic equation very diferent from what has prevailed in thphysical world: these online stores stihave best-sellers, but the bulk of thesales comes from their vast catalogs less-popular titles, which collectivelsell more than the most popular item

The emphasis is on building a community of students and scholarsmuch as on providing access to educational content.


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(or as Anderson sums up the concept by quoting an Amazon.com employee: Wesold more books today that didnt sell atall yesterday than we sold today of all thebooks that did sell yesterday.19 From thecustomers standpoint, online enterprisesoffering unprecedented choice are able tocater much more efficiently to individualtastes and interests than any brick-and-mortar store. (Amazon.com and Netflixare able to gain economies by operatinga few large, highly efficient fulfillmentcenters where their inventories of booksor movies are stored; in the case of digitalmusic services like Rhapsody, their inventories are entirely virtual, stored asbits on servers.)

As more of learning becomes Internet-based, a similar pattern seems to be oc-curring. Whereas traditional schools offera finite number of courses of study, thecatalog of subjects that can be learnedonline is almost unlimited. There arealready several thousand sets of coursematerials and modules online, and moreare being added regularly. Furthermore,for any topic that a student is passionateabout, there is likely to be an online niche

community of practice of others whoshare that passion.The Faulkes Telescope Project and the

DecameronWeb are just two of scores ofresearch and scholarly portals that provide access to both educational resourcesand a community of experts in a givendomain. The web offers innumerableopportunities for students to find andjoin niche communities where they canbenefit from the opportunities for dis-tributed cognitive apprenticeship. Find-ing and joining a community that ignites a

students passion can set the stage for thestudent to acquire both deep knowledgeabout a subject (learning about) andthe ability to participate in the practiceof a field through productive inquiry andpeer-based learning (learning to be).These communities are harbingers of theemergence of a new form of technology-enhanced learningLearning 2.0whichgoes beyond providing free access totraditional course materials and educa-

tional tools and creates a participatory architecture for supporting communitiesof learners.

Closing the LoopThere are thousands of colleges anduniversities worldwide, as well as many other institutions of learning, includingtraining centers and technical schools.In addition, there are tens of thousandsof institutions that support informallearning: libraries, museums, sciencecenters, archives. All of these institutionsare practicumsplaces where knowl-edge is created and stored and transmit-ted. But are they reflective practicums? Are they evaluating what they do andengaging in anything resembling cyclesof continuous improvement? Are theirreflections being systematically cap-tured and shared?

We need to construct shared, distrib-uted, reflective practicums in which ex-periences are collected, vetted, clustered,commented on, and tried out in new con-texts. One might call this learning aboutlearning, a bootstrapping operation inwhich educators, along with students, are

learning among and between themselves.

This can become a living or dynamic infrstructureitself a reflective practicum.

An example of such a practicum the online Teaching and LearningCommons (http://commons.carnegifoundation.org/) launched earlier thi year by the Carnegie Foundation fthe Advancement of Teaching. ThCommons is essentially an open ver-sion of the Foundations Gallery oTeaching and Learning (http://gallerycarnegiefoundation.org/), which habeen operating for the past nine yearThe Gallery provides an online showcase for case studies of successfteaching and learning projects thahave been supported by the Foundation, along with a set of web-basetools (the KEEP Toolkit) for creatithese case studies (http://www.cfkeeporg). The Commons is an open foruwhere instructors at all levels (and froaround the world) can post their owexamples and can participate in anongoing conversation about effectivteaching practices, as a means osupporting a process of creatingusing/re-mixing (or creating/sharing

using).20

These communities are harbingers of the emergence of a new formtechnology-enhanced learningLearning 2.0.


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From the Web 2.0 to Learning 2.0The original World Wide Webthe Web1.0 that emerged in the mid-1990svastly expanded access to information. TheOpen Educational Resources movementis an example of the impact that the Web1.0 has had on education. But the Web

2.0, which has emerged in just the pastfew years, is sparking an even more far-reaching revolution. Tools such as blogs,

wikis, social networks, tagging systems,mashups, and content-sharing sites areexamples of a new user-centric infor-mation infrastructure that emphasizesparticipation (e.g., creating, re-mixing)over presentation, that encouragesfocused conversation and short briefs

(often written in a less technical, public vernacular) rather than traditional pub-lication, and that facilitates innovative

explorations, experimentations, andpurposeful tinkerings that often form thbasis of a situated understanding emerging from action, not passivity.

In the twentieth century, the dominant approach to education focusedon helping students to build stocks oknowledge and cognitive skills that coube deployed later in appropriate situations. This approach to education workewell in a relatively stable, slowly changiworld in which careers typically lastedlifetime. But the twenty-first century quite different. The world is evolving an increasing pace. When jobs changas they are likely to do, we can no longexpect to send someone back to schooto be retrained. By the time that happenthe domain of inquiry is likely to havmorphed yet again.21

We now need a new approach tlearningone characterized by ademand pullrather than the traditionalsupply-pus mode of building up an inventory oknowledge in students heads. Demandpull learning shifts the focus to enablinparticipation in flows of action, where thfocus is both on learning to be throug

enculturation into a practice as well as ocollateral learning.The demand-pull approach is based

on providing students with access trich (sometimes virtual) learning communities built around a practice. It ipassion-based learning, motivated bthe student either wanting to become member of a particular community opractice or just wanting to learn aboumake, or perform something. Often thlearning that transpires is informal rathethan formally conducted in a structure

setting. Learning occurs in part througa form of reflective practicum, but in thcase the reflection comes from being embedded in a community of practice thamay be supported by both a physical ana virtual presence and by collaboratiobetween newcomers and professionapractitioners/scholars.

The demand-pull approach to learningmight appear to be extremely resourceintensive. But the Internet is becoming

The demand-pull approach is based on providing students with accesrich (sometimes virtual) learning communities built around a practice


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vast resource for supporting this style oflearning. Its resources include the rapidly growing amount of open courseware, ac-cess to powerful instruments and simu-lation models, and scholarly websites,which already number in the hundreds,as well as thousands of niche communi-ties based around specific areas of inter-est in virtually every field of endeavor.22

The building blocks provided by theOER movement, along with e-Scienceand e-Humanities and the resourcesof the Web 2.0, are creating the condi-tions for the emergence of new kinds ofopen participatory learning ecosystems23 that will support active, passion-basedlearning: Learning 2.0. This new form oflearning begins with the knowledge andpractices acquired in school but is equally suited for continuous, lifelong learningthat extends beyond formal schooling.Indeed, such an environment might en-courage students to readily and happily pick up new knowledge and skills as theworld shifts beneath them. If they do, wecould be taking a major step toward creat-ing a twenty-first-century, global cultureof learning to meet Sir John Daniels chal-lenge and the demands of our constantly changing world.e

Notes1. Thomas L. Friedman,The World Is Flat: A Brief His-

tory of the Twenty-first Century(New York: Farrar,Straus and Giroux, 2005).

2. See Richard Florida, The World Is Spiky, AtlanticMonthly, October 2005, pp. 4851, .

3. John S. Daniel,Mega-Universities and KnowledgeMedia: Technology Strategies for Higher Education(Lon-don: Kogan Page, 1996).

4. For a useful overview of the OER movementby two staff members of the William and FloraHewlett Foundation, which has been a major sup-porter of the movement, see Marshall S. Smithand Catherine M. Casserly, The Promise of OpenEducational Resources,Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning , vol. 38, no. 5 (September/October2006), pp. 817. For a recent report on the OERmovement prepared for Hewlett, see Daniel E. Atkins, John Seely Brown, and Allen L. Hammond, A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER)Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Op- portunities, February 2007, .

5. We are interpreting social as meaning participat-ing with others and the world. This is a bit non-standard, since (following Donald Schn) beingsituated and trying to design or do something,skilled practitioners learn to listen to and interpretthe back-talk of the situation. In a sense, one ishaving a conversation with the material (material-

ity), and it is talking back to you. Schn general-izes this to include his key notion of becominga reflective practitioner. For a more thoroughdiscussion of this concept, see John Seely Brown, Allan Collins, and Paul Duguid, Situated Cogni-tion and the Culture of Learning,EducationalResearcher,vol. 18, no. 1 (January-February 1989),pp. 3242, .

6. Richard J. Light,Making the Most of College: StudentsSpeak Their Minds(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). For a summary of Lights research, seeRichard Light, The College Experience: A Blue-print for Success, . An earlier, thoughmore focused, contribution to our appreciation ofthe power of group study was provided by Uri Tre-isman more than twenty years ago. As a graduatestudent at UC-Berkeley in the late 1970s, Treismanworked on the poor performance of African- Americans and Latinos in undergraduate calculusclasses. He discovered the problem was not thesestudents lack of motivation or inadequate prepa-ration but rather their approach to studying. Incontrast to Asian students, who, Treisman found,naturally formed academic communities in

which they studied and learned together, African- Americans tended to separate their academic andsocial lives and studied completely on their own.Treisman developed a program that engaged thesestudents in workshop-style study groups in whichthey collaborated on solving particularly challeng-ing calculus problems. The program was so suc-cessful that it was adopted by many other colleges.See Uri Treisman, Studying Students StudyingCalculus: A Look at the Lives of Minority Math-ematics Students in College,College MathematicsJournal, vol. 23, no. 5 (November 1992), pp. 36272,.

7. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger,Situated Learning:Legitimate Peripheral Participation(Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1991).

8. Katie Hafner, Growing Wikipedia Refines ItsAnyone Can Edit Policy,New York Times, June17, 2006, .

9. Michael Polanyi,The Tacit Dimension(Garden City,N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966).

10. According to Linden Labs, the developer of Sec-ond Life, as of November 6, 2007, more than 10.5million people had signed up for accounts in the virtual world. In the thirty days prior to that date,just over 980,000 unique individuals had loggedin to Second Life, and nearly 500,000 peoplehad logged in during the previous week: .

11. See .12. In the early 1970s, Stanford University Professor

James Gibbons developed a similar technique,which he called Tutored Videotape Instruction(TVI). Like DSH, TVI was based on showing re-corded classroom lectures to groups of students,accompanied by a tutor whose job was to stopthe tape periodically and ask questions. Evalua-tions of TVI showed that students learning fromTVI was as good as or better than in-classroomlearning and that the weakest students academi-cally learned more from participating in TVI in-struction than from attending lectures in person.See J. F. Gibbons, W. R. Kincheloe, and S. K. Down,Tutored Video-tape Instruction: A New Use ofElectronics Media in Education,Science,vol. 195(1977), pp. 113649.

13. Personal communication from John King to JoSeely Brown.

14. For a provocative view of the clash between ditional educational structures (i.e., classroomlectures and blackboards) and the electronicallmediated world that young people now live isee the video created by students in a digitethnography program at Kansas State Universit

The video includes the results of a survey thfound that each year, KSU students read an averaof 8 books but also read 2,300 web pages and 1,Facebook profiles.

15. The National Science Foundation, through iOffice of Cyberinfrastructure (http://www.ns.gov/dir/index.jsp?org=OCI), supports projecthat offer students opportunities to engage iadvanced research online under the guidance oworking scientists.

16. Cudworth quoted at .

17. Personal communication from David Wiley, Ocber 15, 2007.

18. Chris Anderson,The Long Tail: Why the Fuof Business Is Selling Less of More(New York: Hy-perion, 2006). A shorter version of Anderson

long tail thesis appeared inWired, issue 12.10October 2004, .

19. Josh Peterson, Definitions: Final RoundThe Long Tail, January 9, 2005, .

20. For more about these web-based resources, sToru Iiyoshi and Cheryl Richardson (in pressPromoting Technology-Enabled KnowledgBuilding and Sharing to Promote SustainablOpen Educational Innovations, in Toru Iiyoshand M. S. Vijay Kumar, eds.,Opening Up EducatiThe Collective Advancement of Education throTechnology, Open Content, and Open Knowled(Cam-bridge: MIT Press, 2008).

21. R. Natarajan, the former director of the Indi

Institute of Technology-Madras, recently notethat the half life of knowledge in many techcal areas is now less than four years. If thistrue, then 50 percent of what students learn aundergraduates will be obsolete by the time thegraduate and begin seeking employment. SeRichard P. Adler,Minds on Fire: Enhancing InKnowledge Workforce(Gurgaon, India: AspenInstitute India, 2007), .

22. Although not discussed here, an additional set resources consists of the thousands of technicaonline forums that are emerging around nearlyany product or product category, such as digitcameras and computer games, as well as forumemerging around topics related to personal interests such as health or travel.

23. Atkins, Brown, and Hammond, A Review of Open Educational Resources (OER) Movemusethe phrase open participatory learning infrastructure (OPLI) instead of open participatolearning ecosystem, which we use here. We hachosen to use ecosystem instead of infrastruture to emphasize the emergent interconnectionof these resources. To some, the term infrastruture suggests a heavyweight, top-down, totaldesigned artifact. That was not what we had mind. We envision instead a lightweight, bottomup, emergent socio-technical structure.

Minds on Fire

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