Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0

I felt this was a very good and informative article. Authors Brown and Adler stated that we live in a global world where we all need to “acquire new knowledge and skills on an almost continuous basis.” I agree with this perception. I worry that my children will go to school for a career that seems to have a future and after they graduate that career or job will be obsolete or have less demand.

The authors talks about the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement which encourages sharing and collaboration, and content which could be free, inexpensive, or have few limitations. Through Web 2.0 people are participating and collaborating through wikis, blogs, social networking, and virtual communities. The authors mention that the Web 2.0 supports “multiple modes of learning.” This is consistent with other articles I have read. These articles say that the internet supports different learning styles. As we all know, students learn in different ways, whether it is auditory, visual, kinesthetic, etc.

I especially found the “Closing the Loop” section of the article interesting. The authors mention that libraries, museums, and archives all store information, but are they reflective? Are they ongoing? Are they shared? Are they up to date? At one meeting at my school last week, one teaching mentioned the difficulty of finding books that everyone needed for children’s picture writing topics such as “Time of Day”, “Animals”, etc. I suggested a google docs document where teachers could input the title of the book they had used for a specific topic. The list would continue to grow as teachers shared their titles and information. Teachers could refer to the google docs list whenever they needed a book and continue updating the titles.