Toward Personal Learning: Summer Book Club Post 6
I’m still at it! Reading Stephen Downes’ book Toward Personal Learning. This series of posts began as a ‘summer book club‘ and at this rate I might just finish before next summer! This segment covers pp. 428-487 because there was a lot in this section that I had comments on. Below you will find the nuggets that went ‘ping!’ in my mind and a few thoughts on each of them. Quotes from the book are in a different colour so you can easily distinguish my thoughts.
The first bit that really stood out to me was a line in the section summarising Howard Rheingold’s talk in Berlin in 2014. Howard spoke about how learning has changed over the years:
“It’s also more collaborative – this used to be called cheating. It’s also cooperative – I talk about co-learning, being responsible for each other’s learning.”
I like that collaboration used to be called ‘cheating’ – and he’s right! I remember being told do you own work! Of course you do need to understand the basics of whatever concept for yourself, but the application, the generation of going beyond- that feeds on ideas and we need each other for stimulus, perspective, and simply for the multiplied brainpower and experience that coming together brings. It’s obvious really. Two candles together makes a bigger fire.
Howard puts it well:
“It’s about the group being more than the sum of its parts.” p435
Then there is one sentence that merits just copying and pasting here:
“Learning content required a more flexible model, which was provided first by David Wiley, with the Open Content License, and then by Lawrence Lessig, with Creative Commons. Both of these licenses allowed for the free reuse and redistribution of the resource, but with conditions.” p.422
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