Group items tagged

6. Forget about organization — use technology.

Independence, freedom, and collaboration. Hierarchies are being flattened out. In fact, whole new forms of organization and collaboration are being created all the time.

Fears have been expressed that the bank will encourage teachers to skimp on planning, encouraging them to copy and paste material at the last minute like their more irresponsible students.

A star rating like that used by eBay will allow teachers to rank resources they have tried and approved, encouraging - as Iglesias puts it - "the cream to rise to the top".

Because the project is entirely open source, downloaded resources can be adapted and changed without fear of breaching copyright laws.

Developed with EU funding and pioneered in Spain, the bank's source code is free for other countries to use and copy.

To maintain quality assurance, all of the bank's resources will be vetted by local authorities and/or the national learning grid.

In the next academic year, all schools will have access to a new National Digital Resource Bank.

The idea is to pull together all the resources created by teachers, schools and public funding into one central location.

"We should be promoting tools rather than content," says Jenkins. "Students should be encouraged to be critical by remixing, commenting on and sharing the resources they are given. They should be creating their own content.

In many ways, amplified individuals, organizations and their practices are enabling pedagogies born in the early 20th century that have not been able to find expression in the current educational system.

Many educators venturing into the amplified world find that modes of learning using social and collaborative platforms are downright inspiring - encouraging the reasons that they chose to teach.

However, education decision-makers must work to close not just the digital divide - access and familiarity with digital technologies - but also the participation gap - comfort engaging in a culture of contribution, connectivity, sharing, and massive collaboration.

Open collaborative platforms enable distributed teams and loosely connected networks to self organize and form ad hoc structures to solve problems and implement strategies.  By circulating resources openly and broadly through social networks, information tends to find the right people at the right place at the right time that allows ad hoc leaders to emerge and apply relevant expertise more quickly.  Such an open, flexible structure facilitates collective sensemaking - a practice by which knowledge and expertise that may not have been visible can rise in response to critical issues. Tools ranging from Plazes (a system that lets your social contacts know where you are, what you’re doing and when) to Moodle (an open source courseware management system) allow knowledge workers, educators, learners to form their own smart mobs and self-led teams.  The transparency of these systems also helps support a culture of beta building - rapid innovation, in which participants of a social network, distributed team, or smart mob can see information, offer critique, and help iterate solutions and strategies.  Amplified organizations will be transliterate - capable of communicating across multiple media in ways that use specific media platforms and non mediated, face-to-face interactions to develop effective and creative messages.