[iDC] Can DIY education be crowdsourced?

John Bell john at novomancy.org
Wed Sep 7 15:21:14 UTC 2011


I agree with Phillip, I think it's less a grab at ownership than (in my case, at least) an attempt to take what exists and see how it can be used in new ways.  I'm certainly not an expert on the self-directed learning literature you're talking about but choosing one article at random* from the link you gave ( http://bit.ly/qa6MUm ) seems to indicate that many of the ideas from SDL are taken as assumptions in the systems I'm talking about-things like motivations for study and goals are definitely in common.  So how would you use that research to create a large-scale system or infrastructure to support learning (DIY, self-directed, or otherwise)?

*random, in this case, being the first article I clicked on that wasn't behind a paywall (8th overall).  But that's a different topic that needs to be dealt with in DIY education.

- John

On Sep 7, 2011, at 9:34 AM, George Siemens wrote:

> Knowles is well-cited, but, any of these would be good to consider as a starting point: http://scholar.google.co.za/scholar?q=self-directed+learning&hl=en&btnG=Search&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp=on
> 
> George
> 
> On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 7:28 AM, Philipp Schmidt <philipp at p2pu.org> wrote:
> On 7 September 2011 05:22, George Siemens <gsiemens at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > I'm somewhat perplexed to see this discussion ignore the entire field of
> > self-directed learning. What is now flying under the DIY name has been
> > extensively researched by distance (and more recently, online) educators.
> > Self-directed learning is not new and it was not invented by the internet.
> > Why is this existing research ignored? I could enter a rant about the power
> > of renaming a concept to claim ownership, but that would likely not be very
> > helpful in foster discussion.
> > George
> 
> Could you share a good starting point to that literature? Would be
> super useful for someone like me, who is more of an implementer.
> 
> I didn't come up with the term DIY learning, but I don't think it's an
> attempt to claim ownership as much as an attempt to find an
> interesting name for the current rise in technology enabled
> self-directed learning (TESDL?).
> 
> P
> 



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