Further to the last post, Sustaining Communities, the tension in higher education is between: open educational dialogue and institutional pragmatics (a 1000 mile question?).
Open educational dialogue is concerned with networks or communities for information sharing, which take a user-centred approach to learning and design for learning on all scales. These networks make use of user-generated content for learning resources, including novel audio & video resources. Assessment, feedback and feed forward is conceived dialogically for learning. Among the benefits of open educational dialogue should be improved student induction and retention in situated learning communities. Among the technical enabling practices by which open educational dialogue might be supported, projects are working on systems mapping, business analysis (BA) and work flows. Information aggregation practice and content syndication (RSS) are being implemented using increasingly open web services and service oriented architectures (SOA). While institutions are traditionally seen as being located in physical space, mobility and location-based services are increasingly re-articulating the relationships between people, space and institutions: domestic, commercial, cultural, civic, language, faith, education, state and their various concrete reflections in houses, offices, systems, stores, transport ways, networks, authorities, maps, corridors and campuses.
Innovation themes supporting open education dialogue appear to be:
- Portals and personal portals (programmes, eportfolios and PLEs) to CPD aligned with
- Flexible frameworks for accreditation, underpinned by
- Multimedia epistemologies, the semantic web and a peer-to-peer participatory culture in disciplines
Sustaining participation as principal, agent, volunteer, affiliate, staff for:
- natural and built environments
- food, water, energy
- economies
- polities and communities
Managing participatory identity
- learning (peripheral participation)
- authentication
- trust (accreditation)
- access (privileges)
- openness
The innovative potential of these themes depends on and is set against an enabling apparatus of social institutions – institutional pragmatics. These are the means by which order is brought to, or structures educational practice along rational lines. Institutional pragmatics may be resolved to nine categories:
- Learning teaching and assessment
- Research and development
- Business and community engagement
- Learning resources
- eAdmin
- Institutional ICT services
- Physical estates and learning spaces
- Mobile, location aware and pervasive computing
- Green ICT
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