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Dennison y sus compañeras establecen el Primer colegio callejero en un barrio neoyorquino con alta tasa de inmigración, principalmente puertorriqueña. «Cuatro características diferencian este colegio de otros: con un coste por alumno semejante al de cualquier escuela pública, el colegio callejero, de pequeño tamaño, ofrece una relación maestro/alumno extraordinariamente alta; la vida en el colegio se vertebra en torno a dos elementos fundamentales: la libertad individual de alumnos y profesores y el convencimiento de que, frente a la mera instrucción y el sitio físico, el corazón de esta escuela reside en su carácter como caldo de cultivo de relaciones entre personas [...] entre niños y adultos, adultos y adultos, niños y otros niños».

Los niños, personas, son los verdaderos protagonistas de la vida de este lugar. «Aprender es algo fácil cuando tienes preguntas y los sentidos afinados. De forma convencional, aceptamos, sin embargo, que aprender es una tarea dura y sacrificada». Dennison está convencido de que las preferencias de los chicos se encuentran muy cerca de sus verdaderas necesidades, por tanto, la tarea educativa se convierte principalmente en una tarea de escucha y de disponibilidad.

Sobre la escuela convencional Dennison explica lo siguiente: «lo que llamamos orden, en este contexto, no merece ese nombre; no contribuye a la relación coherente entre las partes y el todo sino a la simple supresión de las diferencias vitales [...] no podemos educar a los niños en la libertad tratándoles como pequeños robots; no podemos producir adultos democráticos encorsetándoles y colocando todas las decisiones en manos de las autoridades. Tampoco podemos construir el prestigio moral del colegio basando toda la institución en un acto de fuerza como el que supone la asistencia obligatoria».

social interactive potential of large-scale peer-based learning

Each node that joins the network amplifies the network’s potential for peer learning and participation.

Content duplication, scaling, and reproduction are far better managed by technology. One recorded lecture can be seen a thousand times online without significant increase in expense. The content broadcast of any course can be opened and shared online fairly easily, using simple tools like Skype, ustream, or Elluminate. Duplicating content – where we are now with open educational resources is easy and cheap. The exciting and fascinating potential available to educators around the world today is to engage in social, participative, and networked learning with students and colleagues. Technology can facilitate this, but the social dimensions of learning are still best managed by humans. This is the exact model Stephen Downes, Dave Cormier and I are utilizing in open courses (we are hosting an upcoming open course on personal learning environments and networks …if you’re interested, you can sign up here). Open courses offer a model of learning that enables educators to utilize existing learning activities and distribute them across a network. Sugata Mitra has demonstrated the value of peer and self-directed learning in India. In online learning, I think my work with Cormier and Downes has similarly demonstrated how people in networks can help each other to learn, even when more that 2300 learners are involved (our CCK08 course).

While there might be a few people who can (and should) take advantage of open-source learning models, there are, I suspect, far more who can’t.

More important, I think, is the fact that concepts of open teaching and MOOCs marginalize the role of the teacher and the importance of the act – the art – of teaching.

teaching, for better or worse, is a corporeal activity that can’t be replicated with the suite of technologies to which we have access today. Until we find the tools that allow us to replicate the classroom experience in an online environment, MOOCs will remain simulacra, hollow and atonal echoes of what the educational process is really about

George Siemens, an open education theorist, author and professor thinks that the very fabric of what we understand as education needs to be pulled apart. “What if we completely altered the structure of what learning is?” Siemens asks. “And what if you started to challenge the notion of what a course is? How would a course be different if we were to design a course today.”

“The idea hasn’t really penetrated the mass mind yet. Universities aren’t calling me up to teach these classes, they’re asking him to come and talk about them because they’re curious,” says Downes. “The model has a core of people taking the class for credit but that core is working openly with a much larger body of people who are taking it out of interest.”

Are students and teachers better off when they open up the learning process and allow interested parties to participate? Can classrooms turn into a place where the contributions of all learners are mashed up into something that is greater than the whole? With our society becoming a more open and transparent one, why keep what happens within a classroom stuck within those walls?

"We have to get away from this whole idea that universities own learning," says Alec V. Couros, who teaches his own open class as an associate professor of education at Regina, in Saskatchewan. "They own education in some sense. But they don't own learning."

But the difficult questions remain. Start with privacy. How do professors protect students who feel uncomfortable—or unsafe—communicating in a classroom on the open Web? How do they deal with learning content that isn't licensed for open use? What about informal students who want course credit? And, most basically, if professors offer the masses a chance to pull up a virtual seat in class, how do they make sure the crowd behaves?

"This is a very different way to learn," Ms. Drexler says. "I as a learner had to take responsibility. I had to take control of that learning process way more than I've had to do in any traditional type of course, whether it's face-to-face or online."