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A curator is an expert learner. Instead of dispensing knowledge, he creates spaces in which knowledge can be created, explored, and connected.

Learning is an eliminative process. By determining what doesn’t belong, a learner develops and focuses his understanding of a topic. The teacher assists in the process by providing one stream of filtered information. The student is then faced with making nuanced selections based on the multiple information streams he encounters. The singular filter of the teacher has morphed into numerous information streams, each filtered according to different perspectives and world views.

Course content is similarly fragmented. The textbook is now augmented with YouTube videos, online articles, simulations, Second Life builds, virtual museums, Diigo content trails, StumpleUpon reflections, and so on.

Fragmentation of content and conversation is about to disrupt this well-ordered view of learning. Educators and universities are beginning to realize that they no longer have the control they once (thought they) did.

However, in order for education to work within the larger structure of integrated societal systems, clear outcomes are still needed.

How can we achieve clear outcomes through distributed means? How can we achieve learning targets when the educator is no longer able to control the actions of learners?

Thoughts, ideas, or messages that the teacher amplifies will generally have a greater probability of being seen by course participants.

Each RT amplifies the message much like an electronic amplifier increases the amplitude of audio or video transmitters.

A curatorial teacher acknowledges the autonomy of learners, yet understands the frustration of exploring unknown territories without a map. A curator is an expert learner. Instead of dispensing knowledge, he creates spaces in which knowledge can be created, explored, and connected.

In CCK08/09, Stephen and I produced a daily newsletter where we highlighted discussions, concepts, and resources that we felt were important. As the course progressed, many students stated they found this to be a valuable resource -a centering point of sorts.

Today’s social web is no different – we find our way through active exploration. Designers can aid the wayfinding process through consistency of design and functionality across various tools, but ultimately, it is the responsibility of the individual to click/fail/recoup and continue.

Fortunately, the experience of wayfinding is now augmented by social systems. Social structures are filters. As a learner grows (and prunes) her personal networks, she also develops an effective means to filter abundance. The network becomes a cognitive agent in this instance – helping the learner to make sense of complex subject areas by relying not only on her own reading and resource exploration, but by permitting her social network to filter resources and draw attention to important topics. In order for these networks to work effectively, learners must be conscious of the need for diversity and should include nodes that offer critical or antagonistic perspectives on all topic areas. Sensemaking in complex environments is a social process.

After all, why should we do the heavy cognitive work when technology is uniquely suited to analyzing and generating patterns?

I’d like a learning system that functions along the lines of RescueTime – actively monitoring what I’m doing – but then offers suggestions of what I should (or could) be doing additionally. Or a system that is aware of my email exchanges over the last several years and can provide relevant information based on the development of my thinking and work. With the rise of social media, and with it the attention organizations pay to how their brand is being represented, monitoring services such as Viral Heat are promising. Imagine a course where the fragmented conversations and content are analyzed (monitored) through a similar service. Instead of creating a structure of the course in advance of the students starting (the current model), course structure emerges through numerous fragmented interactions. “Intelligence” is applied after the content and interactions start, not before. This is basically what Google did for the web – instead of fully defined and meta-described resources in a database, organized according to subject areas (i.e. Yahoo at the time), intelligence was applied at the point of search. Aggregation should do the same – reveal the content and conversation structure of the course as it unfolds, rather than defining it in advance.

Filtering resources is an important educator role, but as noted already, effective filtering can be done through a combination of wayfinding, social sensemaking, and aggregation. But expertise still matters. Educators often have years or decades of experience in a field. As such, they are familiar with many of the concepts, pitfalls, confusions, and distractions that learners are likely to encounter. As should be evident by now, the educator is an important agent in networked learning. Instead of being the sole or dominant filter of information, he now shares this task with other methods and individuals.

By determining what doesn’t belong, a learner develops and focuses his understanding of a topic. The teacher assists in the process by providing one stream of filtered information. The student is then faced with making nuanced selections based on the multiple information streams he encounters. The singular filter of the teacher has morphed into numerous information streams, each filtered according to different perspectives and world views.

Given that coherence and lucidity are key to understanding our world, how do educators teach in networks? For educators, control is being replaced with influence. Instead of controlling a classroom, a teacher now influences or shapes a network.

In formal learning, we should be presenting meaningful and authentic tasks, and asking learners to solve them, ideally collaboratively.

While individual is better than none, collaborative allows opportunity for meaning negotiation.  We need to allow failure, and support learning from it. We need to be able to ask questions, and make decisions and see the consequences.

I think there are 8 elements!! I miss Collate, this is not the same as Choose, it is about organising anbd structuring what we learn, (constructing our emergent uderstanding) as opposed to the selection of a direction.

in informal learning, we need to create ways for people to develop their understandings, work together, to put out opinions and get feedback, ask for help, and find people to use as models.  By using tools like blogs for recording and sharing personal learning and information updates, wikis to collaborate, discussion forums to converse, and blogs and microblogs to track what others think are important, we provide ways to naturally learn together.

the intersection of 1) self-organized learning and 2) online collaboration is what I consider should be a primary focus of organizational learning professionals

Common web 2.0 practice is to link back to what has been copied, a form of collaboration or perhaps cooperation.

However, real learning involves research, design, problem-solving, creativity, innovation, experimentation, etc

informal learning is NOT, by definition, manageable

just trying to raise awareness that what we typically do formally is not well aligned with how people really learn, and that supporting some of these activities is the key to unlocking organizational innovation.

but instead to provide a conducive environment and encourage them

Novices can best be supported through a series of activities that are structured on connectivist learning principles with a goal to enhance autonomy and the building of personal learning networks.

If your company is looking for ways to expand its client base and position itself as a thought leader, consider hosting a MOOC.

For our purposes, consider a MOOC to be a free, open-ended, online course involving potentially thousands of participants using all kinds of social tools like websites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, discussion forums — you name it — to discuss and learn about a topic from every angle and generate a body of knowledge that all can share.

I usually ask clients what they can give away for free that will increase their brand recognition or status. A MOOC is a great example.

the necessary ingredients for a MOOC: Knowledge or the opposite of knowledge: a question to which you don’t have an answer, but that you’d like to have answered. People to serve as facilitators. A digital infrastructure.

Anyone can open their own diploma mill, err I mean badge-selling operation? Of course not. Badges would have to be accredited by someone.

If you want to get a badge though, that's going to cost.

I think the presence of a badge could actually be a detriment to an otherwise genuine learning experience.

]The whole point of education organisations adopting elearning is to cut costs. They are not doing it to improve education standards. They say it's to educate more. But we know this is a smoke screen. Bean-counters run universities and colleges just like they run commercial companies.For example, The Briish Council is planning to move into distance learning big time. 10,000s of new students. Their reasons (am I #cynic) won't be to improve educational outcomes (mostly English language teaching) but to get more qualifed teachers for for their bucks.

Any pedagogy of abundance would then, I suggest, be based on the following assumptions:

Jonassen (1991) describes it thus: Constructivism … claims that reality is constructed by the knower based upon mental activity. Humans are perceivers and interpreters who construct their own reality through engaging in those mental activities … What the mind produces are mental models that explain to the knower what he or she has perceived … We all conceive of the external reality somewhat differently, based on our unique set of experiences with the world.

Given that it has a loose definition, it is hard to pin down a constructivist approach exactly. Mayer (2004) suggests that such discovery-based approaches are less effective than guided ones, arguing that the ‘debate about discovery has been replayed many times in education but each time, the evidence has favoured a guided approach to learning’.

When Kirschner, Sweller and Clark (2006) claim, with some justification, that ‘the epistemology of a discipline should not be confused with a pedagogy for teaching/learning it’ that only highlights that the epistemology of a discipline is now being constructed by all, so learning how to participate in this is as significant as learning the subject matter of the discipline itself.

However, the number of successful open source communities is relatively small compared with the number of unsuccessful ones, and thus the rather tenuous success factors for generating and sustaining an effective community may prove to be a barrier across all subject areas. Where they thrive, however, it offers a significant model which higher education can learn much from in terms of motivation and retention (Meiszner 2010).

Abundance does not apply to all aspects of learning; indeed the opposite may be true, for example, an individual's attention is not abundant and is time limited. The abundance of content puts increasing pressure on this scarce resource, and so finding effective ways of dealing with this may be the key element in any pedagogy. However, I would contend that the abundance of content and connections is as fundamental shift in education as any we are likely to encounter, and there has, to date, been little attempt to really place this at the centre of a model of teaching.

In this chapter I have argued that we can view higher education as a long-tail content production environment. Much of what we currently aim to achieve through specific public engagement projects can be realised by producing digital artefacts as a by-product of typical scholarly activity. My intention is not to suggest that this is the only means of performing public engagement; for example, engaging with local schools works well by providing face-to-face contact with inspiring figures. As with other scholarly functions, some will remain, but the digital alternative not only allows for new ways of realising the same goals but also opens up new possibilities.