Designing for Discontinuities

The Strength of Weak Ties

Learning Conversations; A key factor in the practical emergence of the current community of WikiSqolars has been the Everything Unplugged group who meetup every Wednesday for learning conversations. This exhibits the key quality of sociality, from which I see self-organised learning emerging, and have recently been having discussions about social learning, which Tony Hall is passionate about. The recent conversations have covered a range of topics which have, implicitly, helped me with my thinking about the post-institutional principles that inform the WikiQuals project. It has made me realise that what the current WikiQuals group needs to engage with, over our next cycle of activities, are the discontinuities of learning.

We are Rhizomatic; I recently took part in the excellent #fslt MOOC (first steps in learning and teaching) run by Oxford Brookes University, partly organised by Jenny Mackness who has been involved in organising and thinking about MOOCs for sometime. As I made clear in early discussions, I get the OO (Open Online) aspect but I don’t see the point of the MC (Massive Courses). I don’t think that learning scales like a product sells because learning is about engaging in social processes. I’m beyond being interested in the pedagogy of subject based-courses; subject-based study is not about learning it is all about *delivery*. However reflecting within the group on various MOOCs that we have been involved in recently has helped us at Everything Unplugged think about what appears to be the rhizomatic quality of (our) learning. Over the last few weeks I think we’ve come to an understanding that, as a group, we are rhizomatic in terms of our learning behaviours. The current global rush to MOOC everything is much more about extending the grip of institutionalised education.

Discontinuous Connections; 

WikiQuals 2011/12

The Wiki Quals proposition (August 2011)

Learning Model

WikiQuals is based on the Emergent Learning Model. This posits a 3-stage process of ‘learning’ built around the emergent and social properties of groups. In this model learning is built around a self-organised group that collaboratively identifies its learning needs and then both discovers and creates the resources it needs to meet their self-identified learning needs. We have identified a group willing to do this for the academic year 2011/12 and this blog will outline the issues we will be addressing in making the WikiQuals process work. More detailed information on the Emergent Learning Model is available in the outline table on slideshare and also in the blog post on Emergent Learning. I sometimes describe this as Smart Mobs + Everything is Miscellaneous means Here Comes Everybody

Post-hoc Accreditation

Building on the Emergent Learning Model the accreditation of learning itself will be a post-hoc process subsequent to the self-organisation and resource-creation carried out by the group. WikiQuals itself is an attempt to map out and test an agreed, negotiated post-hoc method of accreditation that will be completely visible and in the public domain. The proposed method of implementation during 2011/12, outlined here,