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open learning and language
An interesting (old) quote from geolinguist and sociolinguist extraordinaire, William Mackey. I’m parking it here because it’s related to discussions on open learning, and in line with my last post on language and the open access movement. “The combined impact of this accelerating mobility, globalization of instant information and uniformization of mass media has lessened the contact between neighbours while increasing the impact of dominant cultures whose massive loudspeakers silence the small voices of local speech and minority cultures. In sum, the far erodes the near and eventually drives it out.” Mackey, W.F. (1992). Mother tongues, other tongues and link languages: What they mean in a changing world. Prospects, 22,…
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Higher ed hacks–the other elephant in the room
Metapizza kindly pointed to the second option that I offered up as a higher ed hack, noting that it was more of a distributed learning system than a truly open system. I think the point is that distributed learning systems can, and perhaps should be open. The models I put out there in my last post are really addressing the accreditation problem by working within existing (and seemingly impenetrable) higher ed structures – they are essentially parasitic models, although I would argue that all parties benefit. So maybe they are actually complementary. There was obviously an international bent to the second model, which was an attempt to address 2…
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Higher Ed hacks #1–open models
I’ll borrow the phrase from David Wiley’s recent post and offer my own hack on addressing the accreditation conundrum with OERs. I’m fairly new to the interesting conversations around open learning, open teaching, open content and open courseware, but as a instructional developer with two feet firmly planted in the distance education world I see these worlds as colliding quite nicely, especially since distance education in Canada has traditionally been driven by a social agenda that sought to provide access to non-traditional learners (of course, it’s up for argument whether this is still the case…). Accreditation is undeniably the big problem remaining to be solved if open learning is going…
