About

I’m a member of the academic staff of the UK Open University, currently working on the OpenLearn Initiative. This is a project funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, one of the major supporters of the OER Movement.

My research interests revolve around broad questions that arise in the relationship between education, technology and politics – I think it’s fair to say that OERs raise lots of these. OER-related research is pretty much in its infancy, I think, and part of the work I’m doing at the moment is to explore ways of locating the OER-related questions of my interest within theoretically-informed frameworks. This means I should be working at intersections between already established (to different degrees, and often with considerable debate) areas: computer-mediated communication (CMC); eLearning/Web-based learning; informal learning; lifelong learning; open learning; distance learning.

Or does it?

In this blog I want to record thoughts around the idea of ‘online informal learning’. This is a broad area in which to locate my research as a Fellow of the COLMSCT, the OU’s Centre for Open Learning of Maths, Science, Computing and Technology. In particular, I’m looking into linking ‘my’ OER-related questions to the practices and uses of CMC in ‘informal’ yet institutionally-based contexts. This means that I’m adopting a broad conception of ‘OER’ to include not only ‘content’ but also tools and environments such as OpenLearn forums. Although access to these forums is not restricted to registered students (which is the case with some of the other spaces I want to look at in this project), the fact remains that these forums are located in an institutional space that is very clearly demarcated. Also, they are structured (at least at the moment) in very clearly academic-like ways (around ‘content’ structured in terms of topics and specific disciplines). I’m hoping to carry out a study using ethnographic methods to try and understand what is happening – or not – within these forums and identify relevant themes/issues for further research and, possibly, experimentation.

I find it interesting to hear and read repeatedly about how much learners profit from communicating and sharing ideas ‘informally’ outside the traditional classroom, which seems to be a ‘core value’, so to speak, implied by much of the rhetoric surrounding the Web 2.0. In my own life as a student, I was always intrigued by the apparent lack of relationship between what happened in the classroom and the exam results (often surprising against the background of my actual attendance record…). Everything that happened in-between (and, then, beyond) seemed to me more relevant – or just more interesting. So, I’m left wondering what all of this talk may mean in practice.

Enter new technologies, stage centre. But are we really talking about entirely new things when speaking of ‘social networking’ and ‘social learning’?

Another area of interest and, indeed, a significant part of my work on OpenLearn, is related to the re-purposing of the OERs. OpenLearn resources are re-purposed versions of extracts from current as well as discontinued (i.e. no longer available) OU courses. It’s fair to say that the ‘transformation’ of these course extracts into OpenLearn ‘units’, which is the OpenLearn term for re-purposing, is a fairly involved, time-consuming and challenging process. Some of the issues and themes that arise in this context have been documented (OpenLearn Research Outputs), but much work remains to be done to report, disseminate and further this knowledge. I’m hoping to be able to post some material related to this are here as well.

Comments, suggestions and questions will be all equally appreciated!