Open Source Learning Foundation [1128] Home : #OER16

Public Group Active 8 years ago

Tue, Apr 19 2016, 2:00pm – 3:30pm

Authors: Laura Ritchie, and David Preston

Room: Pentland (West)

Theme: Hacking, making and sharing

Type: Presentation

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Description

Open Source Learning is a term coined by American educator David Preston over ten years ago when he hacked traditional classroom learning and began using the public Internet as a way to support learners’ curiosities and passions. As the practice evolved, Preston discarded traditional curricula in favor of co-creating interdisciplinary paths of inquiry around learners’ Big Questions (see Quillen, 2013; Preston, 2015). Liberated from the textbook, his English Literature students explored topics ranging from aviation to zoology in ways that were personally meaningful to them. These learning journeys galvanized communities of expert mentors, critics, engaged peers, and the media. As more educators and learners began amplifying and accelerating their growth online, attention was focused on collaboration and growing the Open Source Learning network. Throughout the autumn of 2014 weekly ‘blue-sky’ sandbox-type brainstorming sessions happened across disciplines and continents with Laura Ritchie (music), Jonathan Worth (photography), David Preston (English), and Mark Cabrinha (architecture). All have partnered with their students to create transcendent learning experiences and in May, 2015 students from the University of Chichester, UCLA, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and Righetti High School created an improvisational concert space in Yosemite National Park.

This first self-funded Open Source Learning event became a physical encounter between teachers and students from university, high school, and elementary school. The nature of the event was organic, and all participants were active in forming, sourcing, and leading activities and creating meaningful outcomes. This inspired a co-authored and presented session on “The Musiquality Project” by a university student, a graduate, and a lecturer at the 2015 RAISE (Researching, Advancing, and Inspiring Student Engagement) conference in Nottingham. The Open Source Learning Foundation (OSLF) was formally established in the summer of 2015 to provide an online home for innovative learning, along with a theoretical framework and research agenda. Since then, recent projects taken forward by the OSLF include working with students and staff in schools and communities from LA to the central coast of California to San Francisco in February 2016, with workshops that use different disciplines to hack a learning experience to develops creative agency. In the UK in March 2016 the OSLF hosts a Musical BEST (Build Engage Solve Think) hack event open to all ages across the community where participants enter into the world of music making through a flash-mob orchestral experience.

These events underpin the OSLF and its work to create a network of thinkers and doers. The Open Source Learning community is expanding and the goal for the future is to develop and establish a wider network that can connect people and enable learners of all ages to develop and grow. Conference presentations, publications, and other less formal outputs resulting from engagement with Open Source Learning have propelled students toward their professional lives. The ongoing challenge in education is how to spread and scale learner-centered innovation in an environment dominated by dogmatic policy and corporate products. The next steps for the Open Source Learning Foundation are to create a research agenda and an international community of practitioners. This presentation will outline the framework of the Open Source Learning Foundation, provide delegates the opportunity to validate their practices with Open Source Learning principles, connect with educators in the field, and set foundations to propagate this educational movement for the Information Age.

Preston, D (2015) Case study: 5PH1NX, In J. Corneli, C.J. Danoff, C. Pierce P. Ricuarte, and L. Snow MacDonald, Eds. The peeragogy handbook. 3^rd ed. Chicago, IL./Somerville, MA.: PubDomEd/Pierce Press, 2016. Downloaded From http://peeragogy.org

Quillen, I., (2013) How to fuel student’s learning through their interests. Retrieved February 8, 2016, from http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/02/14/how-to-fuel-students-learning-through-their-interests/

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