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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.

citation levels of articles that are published online versus those that are in closed access journals. Hajjem, Harnad and Gingras (2005) compared 1,307,038 articles across a range of disciplines and found that open access articles have a higher citation impact of between 36 and 172 per cent. So publishing in an online, open manner aids in the traditional measures of citation.

This section will look at the most concrete realisation of the open education movement, namely that of open education resources. In particular I want to revisit the notion of granularity and how changes in this, afforded by new technologies, are changing scholarly behaviour.

Zittrain (2008) terms ‘generativity’, which he defines as ‘a system's capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences’. Little OERs are high in generativity because they can easily be used in different contexts, whereas the context is embedded within big OERs, which in turn means they are better at meeting a specific learning aim.

Big OER projects have a variety of models of funding, and Wiley highlights three of these demonstrating a range of centralisation: a centralised team funded by donors and grants (such as MIT), linking it into teaching responsibilities (as practised at Utah State University) and a decentralised collaborative authoring approach (e.g. Rice Connexions, http://cnx.org).

The reasons for this are varied, including technical complexity and motivation. One other reason which the OpenLearn team suggest is that the ‘content provided on the site was of high quality and so discouraged alteration’.

We see that we learn by being engaged in meaningful activity, and working with others.

I like Collins, Brown, & Holum’s Cognitive Apprenticeship as a model for thinking more richly about learning.  Other learning models are not static

I’m really arguing for the need to come up with a broader perspective on learning

I’m looking to start matching our technology more closely to our brains

meaningfulness, activation and reactivation, not separate but wrapped around our lives

I think this framework will need to start with considering the experience design, what is the flow of information and activity that will help develop the learner

I don’t need or want an LMS and I often don’t need a ‘teacher’ in the traditional sense, though I welcome the wisdom of coaches and mentors.

In self regulated learning, evaluation is a metacognitive event

. Much of what my students discussed is similar to my ideal. Briefly, here are some elements, organized under the four categories of appreciative inquiry: 1) Discovery-the best of what we have previously experienced: sense of accomplishment, respect, sharing ideas, supportive atmosphere to enable taking risks. 2) Dream-best of what might be: have real life application, synergy and energy, flexible and fun, open discussions, clear direction, ideas flying around, taking on complex ideas, confidentiality in that “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”. After these discussions, we went on to 3) Design-what it might truly look like and 4) Delivery-what will we commit to, an individual ranking of items central to creating a best learning experience.

The majority of us cannot live on the farm or in the bush; but can we design learning experiences along a similar model where learners contribute something of value to the community?

Blogs are also the epitome of the type of technology that can lead to rapid innovation. They can be free to set up, are easy to use and because they are at the user's control, they represent a liberated form for expression. There is no word limit or publication schedule for a blog

Are they central or peripheral to practice?

How do we recognise quality?

Should bloggers use institutional systems or separate out their blogging and formal identities?

the advent of social networks that is having an influence on scholarly practice.

Prior to the Internet, but particularly prior to social networks, this kind of network was limited to those with whom you interacted regularly.

Dunbar's (1992) research on friends and group size suggests that it has a capacity of around 150. It necessitates keeping in touch with a lot of people, often reinforcing that contact with physical interaction.

for those who have taken the step to establishing an online identity, these networks are undoubtedly of significant value in their everyday practice.

openness

Tim O'Reilly (2004) calls ‘an architecture of participation’, an infrastructure and set of tools that allow anyone to contribute.

It is this democratisation and removal of previous filters that has characterised the tools which have formed the second wave of web popularity, such as YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, blogs, Facebook and Twitter.

Openness then refers not only to the technology but also to the practice of sharing content as a default.

Fast – technology that is easy to learn and quick to set up. The academic does not need to attend a training course to use it or submit a request to their central IT services to set it up. This means they can experiment quickly.

Cheap – tools that are usually free or at least have a freemium model so the individual can fund any extension themselves. This means that it is not necessary to gain authorisation to use them from a budget holder. It also means the user doesn't need to be concerned about the size of audience or return on investment, which is liberating.

Out of control – these technologies are outside of formal institutional control structures, so they have a more personal element and are more flexible. They are also democratised tools, so the control of them is as much in the hands of students as it is that of the educator.

Overall, this tends to encourage experimentation and innovation in terms of both what people produce for content services and the uses they put technology to in education.

‘the good enough revolution’

This reflects a move away from expensive, sophisticated software and hardware to using tools which are easy to use, lightweight and which tie in with the digital, networked, open culture.

there seems to be such an anxiety about being labelled a ‘technological determinist’ that many people in education seek to deny the significance of technology in any discussion. ‘Technology isn't important’, ‘pedagogy comes first’, ‘we should be talking about learning, not the technology’ are all common refrains in conferences and workshops.

While there is undoubtedly some truth in these, the suggestion that technology isn't playing a significant role in how people are communicating, working, constructing knowledge and socialising is to ignore a major influencing factor in a complex equation.

entirely unpredicted, what is often termed ‘emergent use’, which arises from a community taking a system and using it for purposes the creators never envisaged.

Brown (2009) reports, Recently, the Nielsen Norman Group study of teenagers using the web noted: ‘We measured a success rate of only 55 percent for the teenage users in this study, which is substantially lower than the 66 percent success rate we found for adult users’. The report added: ‘Teens’ poor performance is caused by three factors: insufficient reading skills, less sophisticated research strategies, and a dramatically lower patience level’.

A new generation is behaving fundamentally differently – there seems little real evidence beyond the rhetoric that the net generation is in some way different from its predecessors as a result of having been exposed to digital technologies. There is some moderate evidence that they may have different attitudes. There is a general change in society which has relevance for learning – certainly the overall context is an ICT-rich one, and people are using the Internet for a variety of learning-related activities. People are learning in different ways – although firm evidence of informal learning is difficult to gather, there is much by the way of proxy activity that indicates this is the case. There is growing dissatisfaction with current practice in higher education – there seems little strong evidence for this. Probably more significant to the culture of education has been the shift to perceiving the student as a customer. There is certainly little evidence that the dissatisfaction is greater than it used to be, but what may be significant is that there are now viable alternatives for learners. Universities have lost their monopoly on learning, which reinforces the next point.

Higher education will undergo similar change to that in other sectors – there are some similarities between higher education and other sectors, such as the newspaper and music industries, but the differences are probably more significant. However, the blurring of boundaries between sectors and the viability of self-directed, community-based learning means that the competition is now more complex.

The first is that there is lag between society's acceptance of a technology and then its adoption in higher education. Brown (2009) suggests that in society the stages of technology diffusion can be defined as critical mass (ownership by 20–30 per cent of the population), ubiquity (30–70 per cent) and finally invisibility (more than 70 per cent). If higher education were to wait for the invisibility stage to be reached before it engaged with a technology, then given the time it takes to implement policies and technology, it really will look outdated. For example, in 2007, those using social networks might have been in the minority; now they will be in the majority. This is the problem with waiting for data to determine decisions – if you made a decision based on 2007 data that social networks were largely unused, it would look out of date in 2010. What is significant is the direction of travel, not the absolute percentages at any given time.

However as education in the developed world moves in new directions, we must be cognizant of how this move impacts the learners in the developing world. How will learners in these areas access, explore and contribute to the creation of knowledge? Will social networking technologies, and the emergence of next generation technologies further exclude the greatest number of undergraduate learners. Will this new reality result in too few voices connecting and validating knowledge? How can non-Eurocentric voices be heard? One must ensure that there is some democracy in this new model.

Educators and leaders in academia are confronted with important questions. How should institutions of learning be designed to serve the needs participative, social, and global information cycle? What assumptions about the system of higher education need to be abandoned due to technological advancements? How can the vital roles of research and teaching and learning be addressed through distributed means? How can accreditation be broadened to include the full spectrum of formal and informal learning activities?

Failure to recognize the pivotal role of digital technologies will result in institutions at odds with the world in which they operate.

The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers (Schuster & Finkelstein, 2006) propose that universities are experiencing a revolution—with tremendous consequences. They write, Everything is in play, as nearly every aspect of academic life is being driven by a host of inter-related developments: dazzling technological advances, globalization that permeates academic boundaries, rapid increase of tertiary students worldwide, expansion of proprietary higher education, a blurring of (the) public/private distinction, and entrepreneurial initiatives on and off campus. (p. xvii)

Technological innovations in bandwidth, storage, processing speed, and software directly impact education (Downes, 2009), creating new opportunities for learner-learner/educator and learner-information interactions.

ome researchers have turned to complexity theory to advance education, suggesting that emphasis be placed on the whole system rather than reductionist views often found in "mainstream science" (Mason, 2008). Increased collaboration in a model of "interlocking partnerships among researchers, among universities, and across international borders” (McFadden Allen, 2007, p. 3) promises a new model of not only what it means to be an academic, but also what it means to be an academic institution.

As neuroscientist Joshua Greene puts it, ‘the Internet hasn't changed the way we think anymore than the microwave oven has changed the way we digest food. The Internet has provided us with unprecedented access to information, but it hasn't changed what we do with it once it's made it into our heads’ (Gerschenfeld 2010).

Whether there are social and behavioural impacts of operating online is a serious question, however. Just as the television had serious social impacts, we must accept that computers and Internet will also have consequences. These will undoubtedly be a mixture of positive and negative, but I would argue that using pseudo-scientific explanations to back up prejudices will not help us address these issues.

For educators there are two main issues; the first is the extent to which they help students manage their online identity, and the second is how they manage their own boundary between personal and professional life.

The over-adoption of tools can lead to what has been termed ‘creepy tree house’ syndrome (Stein 2008) when authority is seen to try and invade a young person's social space.

There is strong resistance from students to universities and lecturers making formal use of social networks as this is seen as an invasion of their social space (e.g. Madge 2009).

For the teaching function of scholarship then the question is ‘How can educators utilise the potential of these tools without destroying what makes them valuable to students?’

I would suggest the following as the most challenging for digital scholarship: Moving beyond the superficial – many successful Web 2.0 services essentially allow a very simple function, for example, sharing a photograph. Can we use the same techniques for deeper, more difficult tasks?

Understanding quality – this is not just about maintaining current quality, as this may not be appropriate in many forms, but appreciating when different levels of quality can be used.

Managing online identity – there is a tension for scholars and their students in gaining the benefits of a social network, which thrives on personal interactions, while not compromising professional identity.

Ownership of scholarly functions – there is also a dilemma regarding how much of scholarly discourse and activity we give over to cloud computing services and whether the benefits in terms of widespread use and (often) superior tools outweigh the potential risks.