Ashford EDU 651: Week 4

This week, we discussed an article called Minds on Fire: Open Education, The Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 . The article covered many different ways that Universities are helping to give open education opportunities. For example, MIT’s, “OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative, which today provides open access to undergraduate and graduate level materials and modules from more than seventeen hundred courses(covering virtually all of MIT’s curriculum)”(Brown & Adler, 2008). In addition, Harvard Law School and Harvard Extensions School conducted an interesting experiment using the Second Life network to launch a fall 2006 course called “Cyber One: Law in the Court of Public Opinion” (Brown & Adler, 2008). Although the course was offered to students enrolled in Harvard Law, non-law or just curious persons, “any participant in Second Life could review the lectures and other course materials online at no cost” (Brown & Adler, 2008). Ever since the “compelling evidence for the importance of social interaction to leaning (came) from the landmark study by Richard J. Light, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education” (Brown & Adler, 2008), the way course material seemed to evolve around this concept seemed to make more sense. In his study, “Light discovered that one of the strongest determinants of students’ success in higher education- more important than the details of their instructors’ teaching styles- was their ability to form or participate in small study groups”(Brown & Adler, 2008). Light highlighted the importance of the social learning concept and with his findings, altered the educational prophecy previously known as the Cartesian perspective “I think therefore, I am” to a new outlook of “we participate, therefore we are”, and brought “our attention from the content of a subject to the learning activities and human interactions around which that content is situated” (Brown & Adler, 2008).
The way we learn is so different, and the new innovations can not only update how we learn, what we learn and how much we learn, but how we learn it! :)
Very cool, please check out the article.