Conole keynote edmedia

What would learning in an open world look like? A
vision for the future
Gráinne Conole

EdMedia 2010 keynote

The Open University, UK, Email: g.c.conole@open.ac.uk

Abstract
The pace of current technological advancement is phenomenal. In the last few
years we have seen the emergence of ever more sophisticated gaming
technologies, rich, immersive virtual worlds and new social networking services
that enable learners and teachers to connect and communicate in new ways. The
pace of change looks set to continue as annual Horizon reports testify
(http://www.nmc.org/horizon). Clearly new technologies offer much in an
educational context, with the promise of flexible, personalised and student-
centred learning. Indeed research over the past few years, looking at learners’
use of technologies, has given us a rich picture of how learners of all ages are
appropriating new tools within their own context, mixing different applications for
finding/managing information and for communicating with others (Sharpe and
Beetham, forthcoming).

This paper explores the question: “What is likely to be the impact of an
increasingly ‘open’ technologically mediated learning environment on learning
and teaching in the future? In a world where content and expertise is often free
and where services are shifting to the ‘cloud’, what are the implications for
education? The paper takes a particular position on the notion of “openness”;
considering it from a broad perspective covering four major phases of the
academic lifecycle: design, delivery, evaluation and research:

• “Open design”: what would a vision of a truly open approach to design

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mean; beyond open educational resources towards a more explicit
representation and sharing of the whole design process? A scenario of the
future might be as follows: “A newly formed course team brainstorm their
initial ideas for the course, using visual representations which make
conveying and sharing the essence of their ideas easy. They share this
opening with others, through appropriate web 2.0 technologies. They
invite comments – from other subject experts, from past students, from
potential students. They use the web 2.0 space to continue to develop and
refine their ideas, incorporating peer critique and leaving a visible audit
trail of their design decisions and development process.”
• “Open delivery”: what would adopting a more open approach to delivery
mean? What will be the impact of mixing institutional systems and freely
available services? How can a more dialogic engagement for learning and
teaching be fostered, starting as part of the design process described
above but then carried forward during the delivery process?
• “Open evaluation”: How can we harness and utilise the data we collect
about learners on our course? How can we build on the understanding
developed as part of the learner experience research work and the
associated new methodologies? What new methodologies and
approaches might we develop to gain new insights into the impact of a
changing technological context for learning?
• “Open research”: What will be the impact of the Open Access Movement for
learning? How can we capitalise on the rich research data, which is now
being made available on a global scale?

Introduction
This paper explores the question: “What is likely to be the impact of an
increasingly ‘open’ technologically mediated learning environment on learning
and teaching in the future? In a world where content and expertise is increasingly
free and where services are shifting to the ‘cloud’, what are the implications for

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education? The paper takes a particular position on the notion of “openness”;
considering it from a broad perspective covering four major phases of the
academic lifecycle: ‘open design’, ‘open delivery’, ‘open evaluation’ and ‘open
research’,

The paper will consider these four aspects of openness and will suggest some
underlying principles to adopting an “open” approach, reflecting on perceived
benefits and challenges. It will draw on research at the Open University, UK. In
particular, our work on:

• Learning Design (where we are developing tools and resources to help
teachers design better learning experiences).

• Open Educational Resources and in particular articulation of the associated
set of Open Educational Practices around the creation, use and management
of OER.

• Changing patterns of user behaviour and discourse through a new kind of
social networking space, Cloudworks.

Characteristics of new technologies
The pace of current technological advancement is phenomenal. In the last few
years we have seen the emergence of ever more sophisticated gaming
technologies, rich, immersive virtual worlds and new social networking services
that enable learners and teachers to connect and communicate in new ways. The
pace of change looks set to continue as annual Horizon reports testify
(http://www.nmc.org/horizon) and as encapsulated in the following quote from the
NSF-report on cyberlearning:

Imagine a high school student in the year 2015. She has grown up in a world where
learning is as accessible through technologies at home as it is in the classroom, and
digital content is as real to her as paper, lab equipment, or textbooks. At school, she
and her classmates engage in creative problem-solving activities by manipulating

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simulations in a virtual laboratory or by downloading and analyzing visualizations of
real- time data from remote sensors. Away from the classroom, she has seamless
access to school materials and homework assignments using inexpensive mobile
technologies. She continues to collaborate with her classmates in virtual
environments that allow not only social interaction with each other but also rich
connections with a wealth of supplementary content… (Borgeman et al., 2008: 7).

The 2010 Horizon Report (NMC, 2010) identifies four trends as key drivers of
technology adoption for the period 2010 through 2015 pointing to:

• The abundance of online resources and relationships inviting a rethink of
the educators’ role in sense-making, coaching and credentialing.
• An increased emphasis on, and expectation of, ubiquitous, just-in-time,
augmented, personalised and informal learning.
• The increased use of cloud computing challenges existing institutional IT
infrastructures and leading to notions of IT support becoming more
decentralised.
• The work of students being seen as more collaborative in nature and
therefore there is potential for more intra- and inter- institutional
collaboration.

Clearly new technologies offer much in an educational context, with the promise
of flexible, personalised and student-centred learning. Indeed research over the
past few years, looking at learners’ use of technologies, has given us a rich
picture of how learners of all ages are appropriating new tools within their own
context, mixing different applications for finding/managing information and for
communicating with others (Sharpe and Beetham, forthcoming).

Pea et al. (Cited in Borgeman et al. 2010) have identified a number of phases of
technological development. The first was early communication mechanisms. The
second was the emergence of symbolic representations such as language and
mathematical notation. The third was the first wave of technological media – such
as radio and television. The fourth was the emergence of networked and

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Internet-based technologies. And finally they argue that we are entering a fifth
phase, which they term ‘cyberinfastructure’ which refers to the distributed, global
power of today’s technologies. What is evident is that users and tools co-evolve
overtime, as users become more confident at using the tools and begin to
appropriate them more and more into their daily practice. Think back for example
to early use of email and compare that with today’s use. Many users use email
not just for sending and responding to messages, but as a form of online filing.

As a way of exemplifying the potential impact of new technologies I am going to
concentrate on the so called ‘Web 2.0’ technologies (O’Reilly, 2005) that have
emerged in recent years. However the central argument I want to make, i.e. that
new technologies have a set of unique affordances that have the potential to
impact on and change practice could equally be applied to other new
technologies – such as mobile devices, smart technologies virtual worlds or
gaming technologies.

We have recently completed an extensive review of Web 2.0 technologies and
their use in Higher Education (Conole and Alevizou, 2010). The term Web 2.0
indicates a shift from the Web as a static medium, to the Web as a dynamic,
interactive and participatory medium. Web 2.0 technologies enable users to
easily share images, videos and documents, provides mechanisms for new forms
of content production, communication and collaboration and offers new forms of
interaction through rich immersive virtual worlds. Key characteristics are evident
(See Conole, 2010a for a more detailed discussion), such as:

• User participation – Web 2.0 technologies means that anyone can easy
publish and share information.

• Openness and sharing – the power of Web 2.0 technologies comes through
adopting open approaches, connecting at scale and sharing across different
communities. It encourages serendipitous encounters and transfer of
knowledge across traditional boundaries.

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• Multi-modal and distributed content – content and information can be
distributed and representing in a multitude of ways.

• Peer critiquing – many Web 2.0 technologies enable commenting and indeed
peer critiquing has become a standard feature of the blogosphere.

• Collective aggregation - hierarchy and controlled structures make little sense
in an environment that consists of a constantly expanding body of content that
can be connected in a multitude of ways. Collective aggregation refers both to
the ways in which individuals can collate and order content to suit their
individual needs and personal preferences, as well as the ways individual
content can be enriched collectively (via tagging, multiple distribution, etc.).

• Community formation - the connectivity and rich communicative channels now
available on the web provide an environment for supporting a rich diversity of
digital communities.

• Digital personas - each of us has to define our own digital identity and how we
present ourselves across these spaces.

We identified ten types of Web 2.0 technologies:

• Media sharing. Creating and exchanging media with peers or wider
audiences.

• Media manipulation and data/web mash ups. Using web-accessible tools to
design and edit digital media files and combining data from multiple sources
to create a new application, tool or service.

• Instant messaging, chat and conversational arenas. One-to-one or one-to-
many conversations between Internet users.

• Online games and virtual worlds. Rule-governed games or themed
environments that invite live interaction with other Internet users.

• Social networking. Websites that structure social interaction between

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members who form subgroups of 'friends'.

• Blogging. An Internet-based journal or diary in which a user can post text and
digital material while others can comment.

• Social bookmarking. Users submit their bookmarked web pages to a central
site where they can be tagged and found by other users.

• Recommender systems. Websites that aggregate and tag user preferences
for items in some domain and thereby make novel recommendations.

• Wikis and collaborative editing tools. Web-based services that allow users
unrestricted access to create, edit and link pages.

• Syndication. Users can ‘subscribe’ to RSS feed enabled websites so that they
are automatically notified of any changes or updates in content via an
aggregator.

As the table below shows, there appears to be a good match between the
characteristics of Web 2.0 technologies and what is considered ‘good pedagogy.
Table 1: Mapping Web 2.0 technologies to pedagogical approaches

Pedagogical approaches Web 2.0 technologies

Personalised and Ability to personalise your digital environment, use of
contexualised learning RSS feeds and mash ups
Situated, experiential, Location aware devices, virtual worlds, online games
problem-based learning, role
play
Inquiry or resource based Google, media sharing repositories, tools to support
learning user generated content
Reflective learning Blogs and e-portfolios
Collaborative learning, project- Wikis, social networking tools
based learning, dialogic
learning, vicarious learning
Research-based learning Distributed collection of data, access to distributed data

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sets, new ways of organising and representing multiple
data sets, new tools for organising and interrogating
data
Creativity New forms of co-creation and publication, new means
of presenting ideas, use of rich multi-media

However, Web 2.0 technologies also give rise to a set of associated paradoxes
and hence dilemmas for educators. So for each listed characteristic or potential
benefit of new technologies there is an associated effect. For example, the open,
distributed nature of the Internet means that we now have access to vast
quantities of information at the click of a button. But this has given rise to some
arguing that it means we no longer need individual expertise. In an educational
context, where the teacher is traditional the ‘expert’/keeper of knowledge, this
therefore has an impact on the teacher role within this new context. Conole (2010
provides more details and discussions about each of these factors.
Table 2: The paradoxes created by Web 2.0 technologies

Cause Effect Educational dilemmas

Expansive knowledge Death of expertise/everyone Challenges the traditional
domain an expert role of the teacher
No hierarchy or control, Multiple (co-) locations/loss Need to rethink the design
content distributed in of content integrity process and provide guided
different ways learning pathways for
learners
Increasingly complex Beyond ‘digital space’/New There is a widening skills
digital landscape metaphors needed gap between the ‘tech savy’
and those without the
necessary digital literacy
skills
Power of the collective, Social collective/digital Potential for new forms of
collective intelligence individualism social learning and
interaction

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Free content & tools, open Issues re: ownership, value, Little evidence of uptake of
APIs and mash ups business models free tools or use/reuse of
free resources

Case studies in openness
Having provided an overview of the digital landscape and some of its
characteristics I now want to return to the question posed at the beginning of the
paper. Namely what would adopting more ‘open’ approaches mean? I will
consider this by describing some of the projects we are currently involved with
that are exploring these issues.

Open Design
The “Open design” strand of our research considers the question: what would a
vision of a truly open approach to design mean; beyond open educational
resources towards a more explicit representation and sharing of the whole design
process? A scenario of the future might be as follows: “A newly formed course
team brainstorm their initial ideas for the course, using visual representations
which make conveying and sharing the essence of their ideas easy. They share
this opening with others, through appropriate web 2.0 technologies. They invite
comments – from other subject experts, from past students, from potential
students. They use the web 2.0 space to continue to develop and refine their
ideas, incorporating peer critique and leaving a visible audit trail of their design
decisions and development process.” We have been exploring this in particular
through our work on Learning Design, through two projects – the OU Learning
Design Initiative and Design Practice.

OULDI aims to bridge the gap between the potential and actual use of
technologies outlined in the introduction, through the development of a set of
tools, methods and approaches to learning design, which enables teachers to
making better use of technologies that are pedagogically informed. Conole
(2009) provides a reflection on the origins of OULDI and the benefits of adopting
this approach. The aim is to provide a design-based approach to the creation and

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support of learning and teaching, and to encourage a shift away from the
traditional implicit, belief-based approaches to design-based, explicit approaches.
This will encourage sharing and reflection. The tools and resources are designed
to help guide decision making. The work is underpinned by an ongoing
programme of empirical evidence which aims to gain a better understanding of
the design process and associated barriers and enablers, as well as an ongoing
evaluation of the tools, methods and approaches we are developing and using
and in particular to what extent they are effective. There are three main aspects
to the work we are doing:

1. Conceptualisation – the development of a range of conceptual tools to help
guide the design decision making process and to provide a shared language
to enable comparisons to be made between different designs.

2. Visualisation – use of a range of tools to help visualise and represent designs.

3. Collaboration – mechanisms to encourage the sharing and discussing of
learning and teaching ideas.

In terms of conceptualisation we have developed a range of tools to help guide
the design process. One of the key aspirations is to enable teachers to shift away
from a focus on content and subject matter to thinking more holistically and
laterally about the design process. The conceptual tools are also designed to
promoting thinking on adopting different pedagogical approaches and using
technologies effectively. To illustrate this five conceptual tools are described
here:

• The Course View

• The Course Dimensions view

• The Pedagogy Profile

• The Learning Outcomes view

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• The task swimlane view

The course view map provides an overview of a course at a glance and enables

teachers to think about the design of the course from four meta aspects; namely
‘Guidance and Support’, ‘Content and Activities’, ‘Communication and
Collaboration’ and ‘Reflection and Demonstration’.

Figure 1: The Course view

The second is a refinement of the course map. The Course dimensions views

gives a better indication of the nature of the course and how it is supported. For
example, it indicates to what extent the course is online, how much it is tutor-
guided and the amount of collaborative or activity-based activities are included.

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Figure 2: The Course Dimensions view

The third view, the Pedagogy Profile, looks at the balance of the types of student
activities (See Conole, 2008 for the full learning activity taxonomy this is based
on). These are:

• Assimilative (attending and understanding content)

• Information handling (gathering and classifying resources or manipulating

data)
• Adaptive (use of modelling or simulation software)

• Communicative (dialogic activities, e.g. pair dialogues or group-based

discussions)
• Productive (construction of an artefact such as a written essay, new chemical

compound or a sculpture)
• Experiential (practising skills in a particular context or undertaking an

investigation).
• In addition the tool looks at the spread of assessment across the course

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Figure 3: The Pedagogy Profile

The Learning Outcomes view enables the teacher to judge to what extent there is
constructive alignment (Biggs, 1999) with the course, i.e. it looks at how the
learning outcomes map to the student activities and to the assessment tasks.

Figure 4: The Learning Outcomes view

Finally, the task swimlane view enables a teacher to map out the details on an
individual learning activity; indicating what the student is doing when and what
tools and resources they are using.

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Figure 5: The Task swimlane view

As part of our work on representing pedagogy we have developed a visualisation
tool (CompendiumLD) for designing learning activities (Conole et al. 2008).
CompendiumLD is a type of mindmapping or concept mapping tool that can be
used to design a learning activity. In addition we have been using an Excel
spreadsheet as a means of capturing and representing these conceptual views.
However the power of the conceptual tools is that they work equally well as
discussion points or as simple pen and paper exercises. In essence they are
Mediating Artefacts to guide thinking and foster dialogue.

We have also developed a social networking site (http://cloudworks.ac.uk) for
sharing and discussing learning and teaching ideas. Cloudworks is a powerful
new form of social networking tool: particularly suited for sharing, debating and
co-creation of idea (Conole and Culver, 2010). The site combines a mix of Web
2.0 functionality and enables new forms of communication and collaboration and

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cross-boundary interactions between different communities of users. The core
object in the site is a ‘cloud’, which can be aggregated into community spaces
called ‘cloudscapes’. In the Cloudworks site a cloud can be anything to do with
learning and teaching (a description of a learning and teaching practice, an
outline about a particular tool or resource, a discussion point).

Figure 6: The Cloudworks homepage

Clouds combine a number of features of other Web 2.0 technologies. Firstly, they
are like collective blogs, i.e. additional material can be added to the cloud, which
appears as series of sequential entries under the first contribution. Secondly,
they are like discussion forums, there is a column under the main cloud where
users can post comments. Thirdly, they are like social bookmarking sites, i.e.
links and academic references can be added. Finally they have a range of other
functionalities common on Web 2.0 sites, such as ‘tagging’, ‘favouriting’, RSS
feeds, the concept of following, and activity streams. Collectively these features
provide a range of routes through the site and enable users to collectively
improve clouds in a number of ways. The homepage of the site, in addition to
providing standard navigation routes (such as browsing of clouds, cloudscapes
and people and searching), lists currently active Clouds and five featured

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Cloudscapes. All recent activities on the site (newly created clouds and
cloudscapes, comments, additions, etc) are listing in a site cloudstream.
Although the first use of the tool has been to support educators, it can be used to
support any communities where sharing and discussing of issues and ideas is
valuable. The site was launched in July 2009 and now has had more than 60,000
unique hits from 165 countries. One of the most power features of the site is that
it facilitates boundary crossings between communities, enabling different
stakeholders (policy makers, researchers, teachers, learners, etc.) to interact in
unanticipated ways.

One of the key distinctive features of cloudworks and its advantage over other
social networking sites is the way it enables and facilitates not only connections
within communities but between them. It enables crossing of boundaries between
communities. There is something distinctive about the general layout/functionality
of clouds – which in essence are a kind of mix of collective blog, discussion
forum, social bookmarking, addition of links and embeds. This mixed functionality
seems to be promoting new and interesting forms of social interaction. It has a
genuine global reach with different kinds of stakeholders. For example in the
current site researchers are interacting with teachers, policy makers, learners,
etc. A core principle of the site is that it is totally open, anyone can see anything
in the site. This means it has genuine global reach and ensures that it harnesses
the best of web 2.0 practices and affordances. Serendipity has been built into the
site in a variety of ways, this enables individual’s to cross community boundaries
and make unexpected connections. The site offers powerful mechanisms for
supporting social networks in a range of ways and at different levels.

The site already has a rich set of web 2.0 functionality; such as collective
improvement of clouds via additional content, tagging, links and academic
references, embedding of different types of content (such as blogs, video clips,
voxpops etc), sequential discussion space, activity streams called cloudstreams
(for the whole site, individual cloudscapes, and individual users), functionality to
‘follow’ people – their activities on the site then appear in a personalised

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cloudstream, voting and recommender tools, a personalised bookmarking feature
‘My Favourites’, and automatic embedding of Twitter streams on cloudscapes.
There are multiple routes through and ways of connecting, so that individuals can
personalise the use of the site to their own preferred ways of working. We now
have a dynamic and self-sustaining community, with the emergence of individual
champions and local colonisation of sections of the site. We have a lot of
experience now as to how to foster and build this form of self-sustainablity. One
of the rich features of Cloudworks is the way in which there is a mixture of
different types of activities occurring in the same space – events, reading groups,
flash debates, online consultations, online research reviews.

An open source version of the site will be available this Summer, which means it
can be customised and the benefits of being part of the wider cloudworks
development community. We have a proof of concept working in terms of
embedding Google gadgets, two have been developed so far: People
recommender and a Cloud recommender. An Applications Profile Interface is
currently being developed, which will mean that data can be passed between the
Cloudworks site and other social network sites.

Figure 7: The approach to development and evaluation of Cloudworks

The site has been developed through a process of socio-technical co-evolution.

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In essence two parallel strands of intervention are ongoing – one technical and
one social. Along side this we have put in place a reach virtual ethnographic
approach to evaluation of the use of the site and identification of emerging user
behaviours.

Use and development of the site is being monitored in a number of ways (Conole
and Culver, 2010). Data collection has included web stats and Google analytics,
analysis of site activities and discussions, collation of references to Cloudworks
elsewhere (such as in the blogosphere and Twitter), and use and evaluation of
the site at numerous workshops and conferences. A Cloudworks questionnaire is
also available online. This multi-faceted evaluation strategy has gathered data
that has then been used to inform the next design phase, thus ensuring an
alignment between technical developments and user needs. The data, and
particularly the user feedback, has given us a rich understanding of how the site
has evolved and how it is being used. At key points we have commission an
expert review of the site and have to date undergone three site redesigns,
commissioning an expert external designer.

A range of standard statistics is gathered routinely, along with an administrative
Cloudstream, which in addition to listing activities on the site chronologically (in
the way that the main site Cloudstream does), it also documents when new users
register with the site (the site is open, but users need to register if they wish to
post anything or create Clouds or Cloudscapes) and when users choose to
‘follow’ others. We will also be capturing on a 6 monthly basis: the number of
users who have posted clouds, the number of users who have posted comments,
and the number of unique users posting a cloud or comment in last 60 days. To
measure sustainability and longevity of contribution, we are also capturing: the
number of registered users who have posted a cloud or comment at least one
month after registration (this way we don’t count the initial use of the site for say
a conference or workshop) and the number of registered users who have posted
a cloud or comment at least a year after registration.

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Table 3: Statistics

Aspect Everyone Team Non-team
Cloudscapes 289 100 189
Clouds 2408 1214 1194
Comments 3414 1012 2402
Links 3268 1678 1590

The site is also linked to Google analytics, which shows the growth of the site
since its launch in July 2009. As is evident with other Web 2.0 sites, the number
of active contributors to the site (currently 2376 registered) is less than the
number of unique visitors (63, 118 visits from 165 countries). The top five
countries are UK, United States, Canada, Australia and Italy).

Figure 8: Google Analytics

We have also undertaken a number of qualitative studies of the use of the site;
including explorations around how the site is being used by a particular
community or theme and through a series of interviews with users. Alevizou et al.
(2010) describe the range of theoretical frameworks that are being used to guide
the design and analysis of the site. Galley has developed a Community of

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Indicators framework as a mechanism of analysis interactions on the site and has
used this as the basis for undertaking a series of case study evaluations of the
site (Galley et al, 2010).

The EU-funded Design-Practice project is applying the tools and resources
created as part of OULDI to two different contexts: teachers in Greece and
Cyprus. We have now mapped out a detailed Learning Design Taxonomy
(Conole, 2010b), mapping all the tools, resources and activities we have
produced to date. We have identified a number of guided pathways through this
space, depending on users interests and levels of expertise, these include:

• An LD-lite workshop (for example ‘Using technology to support learning and
teaching’) – where a selection of tools, resources and activities are used but
there is no explicit mention of Learning Design. We are planning to run
something like this with our Design-Practice colleagues.

• Design challenges – using a range of the tools, resources and activities to
support teams as they work through creating a course in a day. We have run
a number of these both within the OU and externally with our partners on the
JISC OULDI project.

• A masters level unit including materials on the theoretical underpinnings for
the Learning Design work

• A free format – where the user choose what they want to use and in what
order.

Open Delivery
The question associated with the “Open delivery” strand of work is: what would
adopting a more open approach to delivery mean? What will be the impact of
mixing institutional systems and freely available services? How can a more
dialogic engagement for learning and teaching be fostered, starting as part of the
design process described above but then carried forward during the delivery
process?

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Core to this work is our research on Open Educational Resources (OER). This
has included the development of a repository of free educational materials from
the OU, OpenLearn (http://openlearn.ac.uk) and a global support network for
users and researchers of OER, Olnet (http://olnet.org). The OPAL project is
exploring the notion of Open Educational Practices (OEP), which are defined by
the set of practices around the creation, use and management of OER. The
hypothesis is that better articulation and use of the notion of OEP will lead to
improvements in both the quality and innovation of OER. Recently, as part of the
OPAL project we have gathered over 60 case studies of OER initiatives and from
this abstracted a set of OEP dimensions. At the time of writing there is a major
online consultation activity around this work (http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/
view/2105)

We think this work is important because despite the considerable momentum
generated by the OER movement, teachers or learners are not extensively used
OER. This is in part because taking someone else’s OER, understanding it,
deconstructing it and then recontexualising it is a complex cognitive process
(Conole, McAndrew and Dimitridis, 2010). Add to this potential technical and
organisational barriers and perhaps the lack of uptake is not so surprising. Would
shifting away from a focus on the resources to the associated surrounding
practices help? i.e. if we can better understand how teachers and learners are
creating and using OER perhaps we can get a better idea of what the associated
barriers and issues might be and hence put in place mechanisms to address
these. The eight OEP dimensions we have identified are:

• Strategies and policies: Opening institutional, national and regional policies to
promote the use of OER to result into better and improve quality.

• Quality Assurance models: Open forms of assessment, open quality
assurance frameworks.

• Partnership models: Sharing experiences and content in order to learn and
improve institutional practices.

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• Tools and tool practices: Employing tools, repositories and building
competencies to easily integrate OER in practice.

• Innovations: What innovations are evident with OER?

• Skills development and support: Opening educational practices demand for
certain pedagogical and learning skills and competencies.

• Business models/sustainability strategies: Are open educational practices
economic viable - and if so: how?

• Barriers and success factors: What can we learn from past initiatives and
cases throughout the world?

Open Research
The “Open research” strand focuses on the question: What will be the impact of
the Open Access Movement for learning? How can we capitalise on the rich
research data, which is now being made available on a global scale?

Work on this area is still relatively new, but includes the iSpot initiative
(http://ispot.org.uk/), which is an online site where users can share and discuss
nature findings. The site is an excellent example of collective intelligence and
harnessing the power of the masses, as it enables the capture of sighting on
changing’s in patterns of nature that can then feed into ongoing research
activities. Once registered, a user can add an observation to the website,
suggest an identification, or see if anyone else can identify the species. Users
can also contribute to existing observations and there is a forum to stimulate
debate. Despite the overall look and feel of the site being focussed on ‘fun’ it
feeds directly into real research activities and also enables users to transfer their
informal learning/interests into more formal educational offerings if they wish.

Open Evaluation
The “Open evaluation” strand focuses on: How can we harness and utilise the
data on our projects and working practices? How can we promote and support
more interdisciplinary approaches to research? How can we adopt more

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scholarly and reflective practices? What new methodologies and approaches
might we develop to gain new insights into the impact of a changing
technological context for learning?

As part of the X-Delia project we have developed a Design and Evaluation
framework (Clough et al., 2010). The framework is designed to provide an
ongoing, critical reflective lens on project activities and aims to support
interdisciplinary approaches to research.

Figure 9: The Design and Evaluation Framework

The D&E Framework consists of two layers – a Design layer and an Evaluation
layer. The design layer represents the research questions, interventions and
analysis from the perspective of the research activity, for example, a workshop to
brainstorm methods preliminary research interventions. The evaluation layer
represents these same aspects from the evaluative perspective. An evaluation
layer intervention might include video of the workshop activities, interviews with
the participations, pre and post questionnaires and debriefing sessions. Both
design and evaluation activities formulate their research questions in the left
most box, with the evaluation research questions guided, to some extent, by

23

those of the design layer. The intervention is then implemented in the centre box.
Data is collected and analysed and the analysis then feeds back into the
interventions and research questions. The D&E Framework represents an
iterative process, in which the evaluation findings feed back into the project over
time.

Theory and methodology
Overall the approach we are adopting is social-cultural in nature, drawing on a
range of theoretical insights to both guide our development activities and
structure our analysis. In particular, Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT)
(see the following edited collections (Engeström et al. 1999) (Cole et al. 1997)
(Daniels et al. 2007) has been used extensively in Networked Learning
particularly as a descriptive lens. A key idea in CHAT is the notion of mediation by
artifacts, which are broadly defined ‘to include instruments, signs, language, and
machines’ (Nardi, 1995). In my own work I have drawn on this extensively in
terms of exploration of the range of mediating artefacts that can be used to
support the learning design process (Conole, 2008). Engestrom’s so-called
‘triangle’ representation (Engestrom 2001) has been used extensively to
described particular instances of networked learning interventions, as it helps
consider a focus on subject-object with associated outcome supported through
mediating tools in the context of a wider community context and associated rules
and divisions of labour (Joyes 2008) (Waycott et al. 2005).

Conole (2010c) provides a more detailed discussion on theory and methodology
in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) research and Conole et al., (2010)
describe a series of interviews with key TEL researchers focusing in particular on
their perspectives on the nature of interdisciplinarity in the field.

Conclusion
The paper has attempted to give a broadbrush overview of a new research
programme, Learning in an Open World. It has described the vision behind the

24

programme and provided examples of some of the research sub-themes.
Findings from the research to date are promising, indicating that this is a fruitful
area for development. However it is clear that there are also a number of
challenges associated with this work. More needs to be done to consolidate the
theoretical basis for the work and to identify which methodological approaches
are going to be most fruitful.

References
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Biggs, J. (1999) Teaching for quality learning at university. Buckingham: Society for
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learning as a site for interdisciplinary research, report for the TLRP TEL programme,
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invited hotseat discussion, online forum associated with the Networked Learning
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