text:
Education and collaboration

< FLOSS and education

Abstract
to be added

Introduction
Open communities and technologies offer an opportunity to participate and use tools which are a good fit for constructivist, connectivist and student centred learning. There are structural tensions between industrial structures in education sector policy and the goals for constructivist or more participatory pedagogies. Education governance through systemic abstracted 'line of sight' defines formal structures and values which reduce flexibility and choice in a classroom context. These same tensions would scope the potential opportunities and benefits possible with use of open code and community practice in schools. This is an exploration of the underpinning ideas which might offer better foundations for innovation, collaboration and student leadership in Australian schools. Concepts which apply in Australia could easily apply in other nations. Specific structures and opportunities may vary.

The overall structure of the Australian education system is defined in an industrial model. Curriculum, learning objectives, standard testing all are optimised for an efficient path through known content. The national system defines what will be covered. Funding for education is tied to compliance with content and testing. A standardised competitive value or score as a final outcome. While an overview of Australia's skills based on summarising across all students in a given year does provide some useful competitive data there is much more that students have to offer in their individual hopes and experiences than can be reflected with this kind of view.

Education is optimised for improving that specific value which reduces possibilities for other kinds of opportunities and choices - for diversity in education, and therefore diversity in school graduate populations in terms of their perceptions about what might be possible for them personally.

Similarly approaches to copyright, insurance and overall timetabling for schools are structured for managing complexity at scale. These policies and patterns make up the organisational framework which shapes the class experience for both teacher and student. They could be re-oriented to support more open collaborative teaching and learning in schools. Unique outcomes based on niche interests or specialised skills developed through trial and error in a previously untried project could result in students who have more independent and adaptive skills. Reduced student participation in science and engineering could well be related to efficiencies of scale and risk averse approaches to education policy which reduce room to move in the school context.

Illich in Deschooling Society recognised the costs of reducing the spectrum of social activity to fit industrial systems and sought more distributed and participative models for learning: "The complement to a durable, repairable, and reusable bill of goods is not an increase of institutionally produced services, but rather an institutional framework which constantly educates to action, participation, and self-help. The movement of our society from the present — in which all institutions gravitate toward post-industrial bureaucracy — to a future of post-industrial conviviality — in which the intensity of action would prevail over production — must begin with a renewal of style in the service institutions — and, first of all, with a renewal of education. A future which is desirable and feasible depends on our willingness to invest our technological know-how into the growth of convivial institutions. In the field of educational research, this amounts to the request for a reversal of present trends."

It is possible with open distributed technologies and open collaboration that we can both refind our full potential and work responsibly with our natural context. To do this we need to examine the aspects of our current systems which reduce participant opportunities and choices.

Line of sight
The natural world is the real. A first generation photocopy of the real can be seen in many traditional indigenous cultures. Line of sight is expressed as a network of relationships between diverse species, seasons and people. People are identified as being diverse and each having value because of that diversity. Diverse elements are seen as required for the whole system. Specific local ecology and geography and regional focus.

A second generation copy could be seen as the humanist world view. This world view could include some of the humanist faith based world views. these brought more information about negotiating with people and less information about the natural ecology. The systems do not rely on or relate to specific natural ecologies. The structures are more about grouping the same kinds of people together. There is value in being the same. These groups have frequently conquested other competing groups. Value is inside with 'other' being somewhere which is yet to be converted into a valuable state.

Global economic rationalism is a third generation photocopy which uses only abstracted values, is hyper-mobile and orients around opportunities to accrue profit for a central entity. Data about ecological or humanist factors is only audible as it applies to central profit. Groups of same are expressed as physical and cultural monoculture. Economic rationalist policy is a very strong method of viewing the world because so many economists and decision makers are trained in these perspectives and methods, because it accrues value for powerful entities, and because the data is simple and does not include any of the diffuse contention which exists in addressing real needs and interests at a social or ecological level. Lessig describes this as listening for value as money would tell it. Lessig Required reading for the next 10 years 2007

Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide. In the US, listening to money is the only way to secure re-election. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars.

Our systems are tuned for listening to perspectives which aggregate signal centrally at the expense of listening to the real. This shift in understanding is described by Hoebeke, Against Scarcity In Science And Knowledge Management: Towards A New Enriching Empiricism 2003: Many times I heard the strange expression that “reality was wrong”, but the information was right. This was quite a shock for a scientist who had been trained in the empirical way of dealing with the world. If a work hypothesis is refuted by an experience, then the work hypothesis is labeled as wrong and “reality” is always right: this is the base of empiricism. In management literature and in economics one re ads now that realities are wrong: the people don’t like the latest management fad, politicians make economic policies impossible, external conditions are not favorable to proof the rightness of our strategies. And this also is called scientific: a strange reversal of empiricism!

While these methods do have 'efficiencies of scale' there are increasingly concerns about the way that real ecological and social costs are dropped out of the abstracted views which inform much global governance and economic thinking. We are also witnessing other kinds of efficiencies of scale made possible by open distributed systems and so there is an interest in finding fidelity of data, together with opportunities for effective distributed participation. Margaret Wheatley 2007:

People often comment that the new leadership models derived from living systems and complexity science couldn’t possibly work in “the real world.” I assume they are referring to their organization or government, which they experience as a pre-designed bureaucracy, governed by policies and laws, where people are expected to do what they’re told and wait for instructions. This “real world” of mechanistic organizations craves efficiency and obedience. It relies on standard operating procedures for every situation, even when chaos erupts and things are out of control. This is not the real world. This world is a man-made, dangerous fiction that destroys our capacity to deal well with what’s really going on. The real real world, not this fake one, demands that we learn to cope with chaos, that we know how to evoke human ingenuity and skills, that we adopt strategies and behaviors that lead to order, not to more chaos.

How do we change our line of sight?

Changing line of sight
Community groups are interesting because they do not inherently need an increase in market share, they often have a comfortable balance about how much time and cost they involve. The primary goal is to be useful to participants and to be sustainable as an opportunity.

The focal length of these groups includes information about people which is more subtle and individual than broader economic rationalist approaches. People may have different skills, abilities, interests and capacity overall. In a community context it is possible to view different kinds of contributions all as being useful. There is no reason to rank or exclude people who are slower or less efficient because the overall participation is valued on its own terms. The overall driver is much closer to the participants.

In an educational context an example of this kind of local value focus is practiced by Narayanan's Project Vision Learning project in Bangalore takes on a new structure and also is integrated with the wider community Nrarayanan describes the project in A Dangerous but Powerful Idea - Counter Acceleration and Speed with Slowness and Wholeness The Project Vision Learning System is dynamic and is made up of four distinct, distributed, interactive and inter-related components that work in coordination with one another.

 * The Community Learning Centres (Spokes-located within each slum community)
 * The Idea-Media Centres (Hubs or Workshops-which serve different purposes and are common and shared spaces)
 * The Expedition (Using the complexity of the real and the natural as sites for introspection, contemplation and active, participatory learning)
 * The Network (Wired/wireless- links that integrate the Drishya Community members with each other and with the outside world)

Narayanan in A Dangerous but Powerful Idea - Counter Acceleration and Speed with Slowness and Wholeness suggests there should be more learning opportunities in smaller groups, slower days, in mixing activities which combine subjects, in mentoring and connecting with students in other places. Essentially in stepping back from the industrial model and looking at what the older community based approaches have to offer and also to examine the way that peers are connecting in new technologies.

Narayanan in addition to specifically looking for socially sustainable ways to organise, is working with the local ecology as a resource, rhythm and context within which the learning and the community exists:

Building on and developing the ideas of Holt (2000), Fuad Luke (2002), Manzini (cited in Thackara 2005) and Capra (2002) and by consciously embracing the core value of slowness – both as way of being and as a way of learning - has created the real capability for substantive change.

The concept of Slow emerged from the Slow Food and Slow Design movement in Europe and the United States and builds and develops on ideas of sustainable living as a desirable future. Slowness as a pedagogy allows students to learn not at the metronome of the school day or the school bell, but at the metronome of nature, giving them time to absorb, to introspect and contemplate, to argue and rebut and to enjoy.

Learning about metamorphosis and about the web of life in real time, by maintaining a butterfly garden, growing larval plants and simultaneously engaging in reflection, role play and scientific observation is powerful indeed. The short flash presentation that accompanies this article illustrates the power of slow pedagogy as a counter to the current culture of acceleration, which is necessitating the rapid learning of more content in less time.

Dee Hock in Birth of the Chaordic Age summarises the need for an ecological holistic perspective to underpin economic and community practice: "'We must seriously question the concepts underlying the current structure of organization and whether they are suitable to the management of accelerating societal and environmental problems - and, even beyond that, we must seriously consider whether they are the primary cause of those problems.'"

"In the years ahead we must get beyond numbers and the language of mathematics to understand, evaluate, and account for such intangibles as learning, intellectual capital, community, beliefs, and principles, or the stories we tell of our tribe's value and prospects will be increasingly false.

We must understand, evaluate, and account for wholly new, non monetary forms of ownership, assets, and liabilities of great value that have extraordinary effect but no tangible market price or mathematical means of measurement, such as participatory rights, alliances, systemic interdependence, and defined relationships, or the stories we tell of our tribe will be increasingly archaic and misleading.

We must understand, evaluate and account for the full cost of everything removed from or returned to the earth, the biosphere, or the atmosphere, including reversion to natural elements in the original proportions and balance, or our stories will result in increasing environmental catastrophe.

We must conceive of and help implement wholly new forms of ownership, financial systems, and measurements free of the attempt to monetize all values which bind tribes to next quarter's bottom line, gross maldistribution of wealth and power, degradation of people, and desolation of the ecosphere, or our stories will be increasingly immoral and destructive.

And we must interconnect our stories with those of all other tribal storytellers in order to integrate them into a new, intelligible, larger story to inform the global community now emerging, or our stories will continue to set tribe against tribe in ever accelerating economic, social and physical combat."

Students and teachers do often find ways to involve the ecological and community aspects of themselves in their learning and teaching, but the wider system and its values are optimised for industrial efficiencies and for aggregating the value into abstracted summaries of the students'  interactions with the school experience. (HSC/TER scores). In The Learning Curve Orr (2004) suggests that:

"All education is environmental education…by what is included or excluded we teach the young that they are part of, or apart from, the natural world."

The opportunity to view ourselves as constructive or destructive elements in our environment is a part of the data which is filtered out as noise in the wider economy. This omission is costing our ecologies. Sustainable ecological or social practice is not structurally built in to our systems for profit, tax, market share, except in opt in projects like organic farming or Fair Trade.

Exploring ways to understand real data in our wider educational and economic systems is a shift which could be more possible, even at the scale that we now function, if we recognise the strengths of distributed networks and communities to filter around ideas and connections which are of interest to specific people or communities.

The way we think about monoculture is fundamental. A group of sameness with a fence around which we define as value and use to conquest other(non value) things outside the fence. It applies in almost everything we do. We need to step back from that perspective and look at what might be possible if we value diversity and distributed networks.

Free software communities operate as a network of diverse elements in an unfenced context and memes are adopted as a pull process and not a push process according to local needs rather than central profit. Very different model at that level.

Boyle J., in his responses to 5 Questions to James Boyle made the same connection between ecology as an appreciation of diversity and access to knowledge groups and practices:

At its best, the environmental movement has worked because of the size of its big tent, and the diversity of the approaches being used within it. Greenpeace is very different from the Environmental Defense Fund, and both are different from the Audubon Society or a land trust. The combination of methods and perspectives is actually a strength not a weakness. The Access to Knowledge (A2K) movement strikes me as having many of the same virtues. As for business models and economic underpinnings, one of the interesting things about this movement is that a set of social justice movements (for example, those focused on Access to Medicines) and a set of groups who are interested in different business models based around distributed creativity (for example, open source software developers) have found common cause in criticizing aspects of the current "1 size fits all" model of intellectual property.

In an educational context our systems use the group approach. Age sorting, subject sorting, level sorting, content blocking, time slicing, grading, strong curriculum and key competency mappings all help to make systemic clarity but tend to support/prefer blocks of predefined monoculture experience at a local level.

There is some research predicting affective responses to different stages of learning and research. This involves collecting statistics and mapping students to expectations about how they will feel at certain phases of their project. For example Kort, Reilly, Picard in Affective Learning Companion External Representation of Learning Process and Domain Knowledge: Affective State as a Determinate of its Structure and Function:

"The student ideally begins in quadrant I or II: they might be curious and fascinated about a new topic of interest (quadrant I) or they might be puzzled and motivated to reduce confusion (quadrant II). In either case, they are in the top half of the space, if their focus is on constructing or testing knowledge. Movement happens in this space as learning proceeds. For example, when solving a puzzle in The Incredible Machine, a student gets an idea how to implement a solution and then builds i ts simulation. When she runs the simulation and it fails, she sees that her idea has some part that doesn't work - that needs to be deconstructed. At this point it is not uncommon for the student to move down into the lower half of the diagram (quadrant III) where emotions may be negative and the cognitive focus changes to eliminating some misconception. As she consolidates her knowledge - what works and what does not - with awareness of a sense of making progress, she may move to quadrant IV."

There is a risk that as with other kinds of abstraction the message of the medium can become more audible to our education systems than the voices of the people participating. If people feel differently are they contrary, anomalies, noise in a signal or is there room for a different conversation. We risk losing our capacity to relate to each other and our environment through only being able to hear predicted states or outcomes because the methods we use for validating input are tailored in ways which facilitate and understand majority, monocultural or group responses.

From Cape York Institute, Teach for Australia: A practical plan to get great teachers into remote schools:

There is an educational crisis in remote Australia that is not abating. On the key literacy and numeracy benchmark measures, remote students are well behind mainstream levels. Amongst Indigenous students in remote areas, educational results are at catastrophic levels: the most recent publicly available data shows that only 4 percent of remote, Indigenous students in the Northern Territory passed the basic minimum Year 3 reading benchmark. Students are leaving school functionally illiterate with little or no chance of properly engaging in the real economy.

This paragraph explicitly uses the national standards exclusively as the method of valuing the students in the community schools. There is no mention of language as a dimension, there is an implicit exclusion of skills which might exist beyond those standards as not being relevant to the 'real economy'. Indigenous families living in remote communities are likely to have real interest in skills, language and opportunities which have local value and application. Some remote school websites explicitly state that they work in community languages and that there is a traditional movement of students around a wide area which means that attendance is fluid.

We have technologies and ideas which could work to those realities and interests. We could support dictionary projects for indigenous languages and ways of sharing media which relate to their own concepts but it has to start with a choice about what 'real' value looks like and whether the conversation functions in more than one direction or dimension.

With more capacity to express ideas which are locally real it is likely that there would be a stronger interest in connecting using English to other people and other places. If the literacy can only be supported in English and only around urban concepts it is perhaps understandable that there is a disconnect.

Hoebeke 2003 explains this well:

The managerial tenet that before one can start to take cohesive action, one necessarily has to achieve beforehand a unity in understanding, in language and speech, is bound to fail. Only when one starts to act together with others, to create a common experience, a common language can be generated. This language may be called rich or abundant, because it gives to its users the freedom of interpretation: the experience of having done something together is a guarantee that misunderstandings due to these different interpretations can be dealt with upon a common ground. This ground keeps the system together in spite of the multiplicity of voices. Knowledge is fortunately scattered all over the place, because people are scattered all over the place. And this scattering, this richness and abundance is the prerequisite for meaningful and constructive interactions. Uniformity kills, diversity creates.

The participation and inclusion of the perspective of the student, the teacher, the specific learning experience and its context is enriching information which can change the value of the education itself. It can bring the value of the community to the educational process where providing incentives for more effective broadcast of a voice and story from elsewhere is not a guarantee of better value. Listening for mutual respect and learning might offer different opportunities for Australia to learn more about other ecological and social patterns which may help us to become more sustainable and inclusive.

Broadcasters and consumers
Current education systems are largely based around industrial models which correlate with traditional publishing practices. Our wider economy is also optimised for central control and consumer culture of broadcast products. These approaches inherently use abstracted values to help with viewing and managing complex markets or communities with a centrally effective signal to noise ratio.

Some of the tensions between a broadcast education product and a distributed learning community are evident in the Ryerson University case against Chris Avenir. The computer engineering student has been charged with one count of academic misconduct for helping run the group – called Dungeons/Mastering Chemistry Solutions after the popular Ryerson basement study room engineering students dub The Dungeon – and another 146 counts, one for each classmate who used the site.

Avenir, 18, faces an expulsion hearing Tuesday before the engineering faculty appeals committee. If he loses that appeal, he can take his case to the university's senate. The incident has sent shock waves through student ranks, says Kim Neale, 26, the student union's advocacy co-ordinator, who will represent Avenir at the hearing. "All these students are scared s---less now about using Facebook to talk about schoolwork, when actually it's no different than any study group working together on homework in a library," said Neale.

"That's the worst part; it's creating this culture of fear, where if I post a question about physics homework on my friend's wall (a Facebook bulletin board) and ask if anyone has any ideas how to approach this – and my prof sees this, am I cheating?" said Neale, who has used Facebook study groups herself.

If the university is providing education as a social function, a public good, then the study group is a natural extension of the communities which form around the university hub. This action suggests the university is thinking only of the education product controlled by the university and viewing the student only as a consumer.

Makers
While economic rationalist approaches have been very pervasive, some people, communities and organisations do function with their focal length much closer to the actual. Not-for-profit and community projects do often have a balancing commitment to seeing specific value in individual human terms as a range of cultural and ecological practices which inform community practice. Makers are people who participate actively in the materials and culture around them. People who participate in hands on creative work, on making, recycling, helping others do often find their primary 'reality' in physical tactile interaction with their environment. The right to participate is explicitly valued:

Lakhani and Wolf, 2005 in Why Hackers Do What They Do: Understanding Motivation and Effort in Free/Open Source Software Projects: We used a Web-based survey, administered to 684 software developers in 287 F/OSS projects, to learn what lies behind the effort put into such projects. Academic theorizing on individual motivations for participating in F/OSS projects has posited that external motivational factors in the form of extrinsic benefits (e.g.; better jobs, career advancement) are the main drivers of effort. We find in contrast, that enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation, namely how creative a person feels when working on the project, is the strongest and most pervasive driver. We also find that user need, intellectual stimulation derived from writing code, and improving programming skills are top motivators for project participation. A majority of our respondents are skilled and experienced professionals working in IT-related jobs, with approximately 40 percent being paid to participate in the F/OSS project.

Make magazine manifesto: "If you can't open it, you don't own it: a Maker's Bill of Rights to accessible, extensive, and repairable hardware."

Jungnickel includes an ongoing review of the role of make culture in Australian society in her blog MakingWifi.

This contrasts with a consumer culture where the 'market for eyeballs (Moglen 1997) is explicitly scoped so that the audience is technically and legally discouraged from making. This is to ensure that, in a world where the distributed connected audience is very able to make, the broadcast based industries have their own mode of production protected from the competition of a new generation of active participants. Eben Moglen unpacks the way that people innovate using the resources that are lying around and the challenge for industrial broadcasters who are unable to do a better job of distributing music than 12 year olds can do.

Participative 'make' culture is oriented around opportunities for all people to have a go. Community wireless groups, crafts groups, vintage vehicle clubs, open source community technology projects, volunteer groups – all the myriad range of social and cultural dimensions are oriented around making it possible for people to participate with peers. These groups are optimised for a richness of experience and collaboration at the individual and community level. Participants learn skills, share ideas and opportunities, have fun, stretch what they are able to do with local peers, or with distributed communities of interest using digital networks.

Barcamp unconferences are also all about active audience.

Margaret Wheatley recognises self organising natural communities in Australian termite mounds.

Teachers and students could be viewed as partners in making. This kind of approach is consistent with constructivist thinking. There are teachers partnering with students in making and digital communities, but how does the wider education system appreciate this more diffuse kind of value and support time space and resources for experimentation and collaboration. The challenges in providing wider systems support and policy for collaboration and openness are largely around line of sight issues.

School technology systems are frequently broadcast structured. Read/write internet spaces are often blocked.

The MiniLegends are a recent example, but the underlying thinking is more systemic.

Alexander Hayes provided these links re: MiniLegends;

 * http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/South_Australian_educational_blog_shut_down
 * http://www.fullcirc.com/wp/2008/03/14/a-post-for-parents-and-educators-about-the-internet/
 * http://aquaculturepda.edublogs.org/2008/03/17/parental-consent-use-of-student-images-and-the-minilegends-closure/
 * http://aquaculturepda.wikispaces.com/Al+Upton
 * http://www.cegsa.sa.edu.au/awards/history/2005/al_upton.asp
 * http://www.edna.edu.au/edna/go/news/podcast/eli/ep15/cache/offonce;jsessionid=B76FAC59F62096165EF8D61BDEF6AD13

Alan Levine cites Al Upton's case and points also to the systemic change needed to better address those who choose to engage their learners using a read/write web.

In 2006, Kim Flintoff, Alexander Hayes, Bill Wade and Jacinta Gascoigne explored the effects that blocks on educational spaces are having with learners.

Risk and insurance are strong scoping factors for schools.

Unfortunately in online contexts the approaches to managing risk have been very top down restrictions on what is possible in schools. Because read/write spaces are editable and the content is variable, these spaces are often blocked. These writeable spaces are also the opportunities for student voice and leadership, for learning how to manage your identity online. In the case of the above blog, the voices are from students supervised by a teacher and the comments are encouraged from mentors chosen by the teacher to collaborate. This seems an effective way to facilitate student voice and literacy in sharing online spaces.

How can student voice and collaboration be empowered online? How do students learn the literacies about choosing what is useful and what is rubbish, what is sharable and what is not for online use. MySpace and Facebook are very commonly used at home by school students. These spaces are not scoped for education, but students are very likely to be using them and to be defining themsleves quite specifically online by the time they are in high school. Supervised blogging seems like a very sensible first step to learning about privacy, identity and voice online.

Bullying face to face and online or through mobile technologies is also a challenge for schools. It could be argued that approaches which define safety only in terms of fences around a cohort of students are missing the social aspects of the risking and skills required within the community itself. It is possible that an inverse duty of care is not being considered, in that while schools are safer by not participating in read write activities, the students themselves have one less avenue for safe and supported development in a facet of their lives which is becoming increasingly important. Neill includes a very useful comic in [his writing] on risk which suggests that a committee has examined all the potential risks apart from the risk of avoiding all risks.

Insurance risk profiles and fear of litigation play a very strong role in decision making. This sets a scene for this vvery kind of risk avoidance. It could be argued that this provides a safety for the systems and organisations but increases risk and reduces safety as a social phenomenon because there is reduced opportunity for dialogue, negotiation and practice of constructive participation skills in open community contexts.

If skill based safety is important to a healthy growing community then it will be important to develop processes whereby schools, parents and students share responsibility for the kinds of risks which enable development. In this kind of balanced context the commitment to provide reasonable care and clear processes for negotiation become the new methods for defining what is possible.

Student leadership
Constructivist and connectivist methods suggest that the students role in learning should include some responsibility for the direction of the journey and also can involve exchanges of literacy's between student peers and between students and teachers. These ideas are actively promoted but the structure of school from a systemic perspective does not appear to have changed in ways which reflect more distributed or networked approaches. Value is explicitly defined in a uniform manner and there is little room for recognition of student leadership in ways which are beyond the expected scope or experience of the education system itself.

The Artichoke blog suggests "This relentless referencing of constructivistic pedagogies (learning_theory) and associated jargon in the conference presentations by New Zealand schools is not matched by an equally relentless unpacking of what these terms might mean to students - nor by any clarity of how we can design learning activities to achieve them in school."

For example a student who participates in wikipedia as a bureaucrat will have extensive experience in working in open collaboration and in resolving conflict by using 'fit for project' criteria. These same skills can be used in other kinds of collaborative practice. How do students and teachers find room to explore those kinds of social spaces where the student might have answers to contribute which are new to the educational context. How can a school take on board the 'Chewbacca defence', NPOV, disambiguation. These are useful skills.

As Rushkoff states in Open Source Democracy: "The very survival of democracy as a functional reality may be dependent upon our acceptance, as individuals, of adult roles in conceiving and stewarding the shape and direction of society. And we may get our best rehearsal for these roles online."

Similarly students working in open code communities may again be developing skills in contributing bugs, code or community support in contexts where all participants may be volunteers. The kinds of ways that communities structure or work through contention in volunteer communities is weighted towards an appreciation of the value of community momentum, the costs of forking or losing participants, and the value of contributors who may initially have a high level of contention but may either find a way to contribute to existing thinking or to bring something new to the project. These kinds of balances are not inherent in a class context because participants are generally participating in compulsory education and there is a clear source of authority which works to criteria which are not generated in partnership with the participants.

Said Hamideh made a suggestion in the wiki research email list: "As someone who has worked with Jewish and Muslim school children for a conflict resolution NGO, I had always envisioned extending our collaborative writing projects into Second Life. For one, I always thought that a group of Israelis and Palestinians could attempt to build a state entity of some sort within Second Life. With documents, such as national constitutions and civil codes being critical to a collaborative nation building project, this is where a wiki would mesh perfectly into the scheme."

This suggestion is interesting as an example of shift of focal length and locus of control. If students are able to participate in defining the goals and criteria for participation the learning becomes an environment and a structure they are participating in engineering. The Australian project Beyond beliefs tackled similar issues by encouraging people to meet and work through from starting perspectives towards a new day, or a new possibility.

The Reclaiming Youth Network similarly uses ways of valuing youth perspective which situate them as participants in making the cultural fabric. Belonging, mastery, independence and generosity are starting points for their approach to learning.

Mistakes and assessment
Working in a way which is teacher led and which follows a known path provides a low contention way to manage a larger group of students and to progress reliably through pre-planned curriculum. This approach can be matched readily against quantitive criteria for success and which also fits readily into a tight timetable. There is a low level of risk because the path is planned and has possibly been run successfully for previous cohorts. It is a very 'system friendly' way to engage in education. The success rate is clearly visible in a simply expressed manner which aggregates into standard measures and statistics. This provides a scalable way to manage through normalisation.

Student independence, choice, negotiation skills are not necessarily easy to accommodate in this context. Teachers and students are likely to face resistance for new ideas because the system is optimised for sameness rather than for a 'preference for yes'. A considered approach to constructive risk would enable teachers and students to innovate more readily at the school level. The systems around the school may need to reconsider assessing mistakes as a negative outcome. In an experimental context the learning experience includes trying new things and making mistakes as well as making a successful experiment. This requires a different kind of appreciation of the effort the student has contributed.

A mistake might include an experiment to see if volume of water flow has an impact on local frog populations. It might be a low rainfall year or the frogs might not respond as expected. The unsuccessful result might provide useful data to the community and to the student. These outcomes do happen in research and higher education projects and dealing with them is a part of the process of scientific enquiry. If students are able to access those wider scientific communities it is perhaps possible to participate in authentic questions about their local environment and to contribute information to other researchers. Designing and participating in distributed computing projects is another way that students could find connected value in what they are learning.

Insurance
No fault insurance models as used in New Zealand provide better foundations for innovative practice because there is less focus on seeking blame and more of an understanding of the requirement for constructive risk as well as prudence and coverage.

Content blocking
There are proposals in Australia to use a one size fits all content blocking model to filter out unsavoury sites. This approach has been tried in China and Finland with contentious results. It is a clear example of finding a top down broadcast(or censor) approach to an issue which has a complex local impact.

Peer review and book marking communities which are emerging on sites including del.icio.us could be used to structure school based search around materials which teachers and students have ranked for themselves. If rubbish drifts to the bottom of a search because the education community has not selected it there is more effort required to find it. If traffic is traceable then activity is likely to be less noisy. It also means that results which are interesting or useful are likely to be more readily found. In contexts where some teachers, students, university researchers, need access to materials that others would not look for they would be able to rank it for their local purposes. This is a natural process of selection which engages communities in making their own quality information spaces. A skill which would be useful in later careers and in any nation.

Similar cross comparisons of material and development of ways of grouping information into families which represent equivalent resources in different formats would also help make educational researches more available for adaptive use and more accessible for people who need specific formats.

Architecture
School spaces express the same kinds of assumptions about numbers of students and structure of learning in physical form. How might they be adapted for more flexible use. How do students and teachers mashup their architecture for informal purposes in schools now?

Again the formalism of school space reflects similar practice in our wider community. There are few social spaces in a modern city which are designed for community collaboration and making with the inherent expectation of mess and experiment. By comparison there is a great emphasis in physical expression and in law of sales and consumer spaces and visual information. We are optimised for efficient consumption at the expense of opportunities for participative practice. For schools this means that public art and space for making could be a challenge which is tackled in partnership with other organisations.

Copyright and access to knowledge
LeGuin 1974 "It was a revelation, a liberation. Physicists, mathematicians, astronomers, logicians, biologists, all were here at the University, and they came to him or he went to them, and they talked, and new worlds were born of their talking. It is of the nature of idea to be communicated, written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on cross-breeding, grows better for being stepped on."

If students and teachers as creators are able to license their works with personal attribution it would provide a connection between the originators of the idea and other people who might be interested in the same kinds of works and ideas. If there is recognition of individual participants there is also a need for agreed ways to share. Sharing of ideas and information in an educational context is pivotal. Collaborative work is especially dependent on copyleft approaches which are specifically designed for community participation in information and technology.

The NEALS approach to Australian education licensing has been a step forward however it relates specific material from specific institutions in written and image formats for use in education in Australia only and defined around the user's relationship with an institution which participates in education rather than including home-schooling or lifelong learning. ie It is an approach which works with the existing industrial entities and provides efficiencies in licensing between them. For teachers and students an approach matched to the social function of information and ideas in education would be more useful. Access to knowledge and copyleft models provide more coherent room to move with information regardless of format, nation, institution, item.

Technology and connectivity
Locus of control for technology choices and for copyright licensing define the degree of flexibility for opportunities. Currently the technology options are frequently systemic choices and copyright is largely institutionally defined. In the education systems in Australia there has been a tendency to view software and network policies as systems which are scoped, defined and purchased once centrally with minimal adjustment in a school context. This is an approach which strongly re-inforces the broadcast industrial approach and directly works against students and teachers exploring adaptive and locally interesting technologies and communities.

Teachers and students are exploring computer recycling, international blogging, learning about currencies, contributing to images, media, and coding competitions online, but technology, timetable, copyright and valuing policies could support that kind of curiosity and participative practice more effectively. Some people see this as doing away with formal standards like taxonomies.

Jenny Ambrozek Just do it!!

I worked with a wonderful colleague at PRODIGY whose mantra was “don’t overbake it”. As I watch the explosion of today’s easy to use collaboration tools, and work with them, I increasingly believe the “not overbaking” wisdom.

It’s my sense, and I’m interested in reader reactions to this, that using 21st century social tools requires a mindset change. With centralized enterprise technologies like knowledge & learning management systems control lies in the hands of programmers and administrators who determine structures and taxonomies and how the system can be used. With the low overhead, easy to install and use generation of social tools Andrew McAfee calls “Enterprise 2.0″ increasingly control, much to the chagrin of enterprise IT groups, is increasingly in user hands.

So if you use good judgement about the content you post and respect with which you treat readers and fellow participants, how much damage can you do? It’s my sense that the current generation growing up online believes sharing online is simply the way the world works and has no fear of the technology. I think that is the mindset required to embrace tools like wikis, blogs and social networking platforms like Facebook. Just do it.

I think that systemic thinking and standards are important, but that they need to be openly expressed, negotiated and to be structured to facilitate collaboration rather than broadcast control.Standards as infrastructure can be the underlying conduits which make it possible to make adaptable and flexible choices at a local level.

It is possible to use taxonomies, folksonomies, technology and document standards to provide an explicit information web which makes it possible for people to just do it and to still be able to share their works with others, for them to be able to find their peers in ideas effectively, to be able to understand what projects are freely licensed.

The shift is not from systemic thinking to individualist thinking, it is about finding ways to best make connections and infrastructure which 'gets out of the way'(mbauwen) of collaboration and which makes the kind of standards which are needed a part of the negotiated space which defines the community. Accessibility standards are a good example, copyleft, open document format, CSS and html, svg, XML, TCP/IP, are all standards which make it possible for people to just do it.

There are always aspects of exclusion or contention about agreeing to a standard eg. IPv4 provides far greater internet access to USA entities than to entities in other nations. IPv6 is emerging with a different emphasis.

Criteria regarding which standards make it possible for *all* people to have the opportunity to just do it are likely to be increasingly important. Open and effective standards processes are vital for quality inclusive and safe standards.

title: Education and collaboration


text:
Comparative Axiology: Aesthetics & Ethics

Comparative Religion CORE 120

textbooks: Yoga Sutras Egyptian Book of The Dead Torah Dhammapada Plato's works any other philosophical/sacred text(s)

also examine: Earth's cultural/religious art

Definition of Axiology
Axiology, i.e. aesthetics plus ethics, studies value: of beauty plus virtue, respectively. Aesthetics may be easier, but can show ethics' value: ethics are aesthetic. The 'great' religions (monotheisms and henotheisms) and even most pagan ones involve axiology.

Introductory Philosophical (Platonic) Axiology
Read the following Platonic dialogues. The 1st ones listed are a good introduction; reasons to read the rest are given. It would be good to read some neo-Platonism afterwards.

Aesthetics: Symposium, beauty: Greater Hippias.

Ethics: Lysis; courage: Laches; moderation: Charmides; piety: Euthyphro; virtue: Republic (definition,) Symposium (benefits,) Meno (acquiring,) Gorgias (rhetorical,) Protagoras, Laws (society.)

Republic and Laws are long, but it is good to read them entirely; maybe just Republic's cardinal virtues section and as much of Laws as you want (at least skim through both.)

Comparative Aesthetics
After familiarizing yourself with aesthetics, perhaps peruse Jungian psychology archetypes--or just compare some religious art.

Look at cultural and religious art: that of African, Australian, Amerindian, Middle Eastern, Semitic, Far Eastern cultures, Hellenismos, Slavianstvo, Celtic, Forn Siðr cultures and religions. A significant archetype in pagan religions is the world-tree, and in Hellenismos: Hermes' caduceus.

Look at religious art in the great religions: Sanatana/Hindu & Jain Dharma, Taoism (and Confucianism if applicable,) Mazdaism/Zoroastrianism, Amenism-Raism-Atenism, Judaism/Nazar(ean)s, Buddha Dharma, Nazar(ean)s/Christianity, Islam, Druze, Sikh Dharma, Bahai. Significant archetypes in Dharma are the Shaktis, and in Judaism are various Tree of Life ideas.

Recall your philosophical aesthetic knowledge; perhaps peruse Pythagorean and [neo-]Platonic mathematical images; postulate ethics' aesthetics; sum up your aesthetics ideas.

Comparative Ethics
After familiarizing yourself with ethics, perhaps peruse (near) modern deist philosophy and compare it to ancient theism. Such as, read Egyptian Book of The Dead (Oaths/Commandments to/from Osiris,) Yoga Sutra (precepts,) Genesis (Edenic Laws, 10 Commandments,) Lao-tze's biography, Dhammapada (precepts.)

Compare the Eastern/Brahmic-Dharma precept ahimsa with Western/A-brah(a)mic Edenic Laws and Exodus & Deuteronomy (& Egyptian) harmlessness Commandments. Manichaenism, Sikhism, Bahai use those. Compare the Philosophy/Hellenismos Republic text sections on the guardians (philosopher-rulers of a Republic.) Many philosophers in those (and other) faiths consider ahimsa primary in ethics, which causes aesthetic life and society; consider it and sum up your ethics ideas.

Comparative Axiology
Integrate aesthetics and ethics axiologically, and consider what episteme (knowledge, particularly scientific) this could lead to; prepare for epistemology.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
User:Chloelogic

if i were here by mistake, well, that'd just be a continuation of the grand ol' scheme of all things. wouldn' it? or izzat wouldn'it? woul'n'it?

title: User:Chloelogic


text:
User:Eroka

Home page: Facebook:

Courses I am taking

 * None

Courses I am teaching

 * None

Skills, Knowledge, Competencies (0-3)

 * None

Wikimania paper

title: User:Eroka


text:
User:Historybuff/oerblog

Missing earlier entry
I'm actually blogging in several spots and then doing a cut and paste to this public page. It seems like one of my earlier sessions didn't get in here, so now I'll have to go look for it. If it does make an appearance, I'll take out this explaining entry and make sure they line up by date properly.

Of licences and copyrights
Well, having been at Wikiversity for over a year I've managed to involve myself in several Licence and Copyright debates. While interesting from a technical perspective as insight into the legal side of things, they are entirely unproductive and wasteful to the idea of producing learning products of any sort. We have to try and cross pollinate as much as possible, while being both legal and pragmatic. I hope that is where FSF and CC are going with newer versions of their licences.

I was quite interested to see the perspective of Copyright actually limiting, rather then expanding, the original rights that were granted when a piece was created. Lawrence Lessing's talk about how culture grows and is "controlled" by existing elements is an interesting reflection.

I have been an avid supporter of Open Source for quite some time. I'm a supporter of "Free" software, paticularly the Free as in Free speech kind. I'm not opposed to the Free as in beer kind, but I do feel that developers should be able to make money at that which they love, if they choose. The one thing that concerns me about OER and other open activities is -- who pays for the resources? I do think that by networking we can increase the value of resources, and that the sum is greater then its parts. Maybe I don't understand the professional side of the educational spectrum well enough, and those composing content are well paid, and it's just a matter of getting it out there. Maybe there are no content freelancers, or it doesn't make sense.

I think the message to take out of this weeks exercise is that copyright is for our benefit, and we have to use it as such. We shouldn't sit on the sidelines while self-interested parties lobby to limit and eliminate our rights for their best interest. We have to express _our_ self interest, which is to allow our culture to allow future generations to benefit from what has gone before them -- without publishers trying to gently extend their franchises into perpetuity. From and OER perspective, it is important to work together -- on copyright, as well as general technological models. It's important to have systems that will work together, and content that is easily moved from system to system.

LeMill and Wikiversity - Week 2's musings
Having been a pretty regular contributor, and having it been the reason I got involved with the course, I figured it might be good to explore LeMill a bit. My impressions of LeMill: All of the resources I probed were pretty short, and the linking wasn't as strong as it could have been. There are quite a number of resources, but one must really explore to find things. I really like the themes and the simple layout, which is functional and attractive to the eye without distracting from the core content. It was a little non-intuitive for a newcomer. I had to guess clicking on my name behaved similarly to MediaWiki, taking me to my config area. I was able to fiddle with stuff, but I'm still not sure what is publicly displayed and what is privaate. LeMill seems a bit more community oriented, as they have spots for IM and SMS, as well as a community section and a spot for chatting. This is in contrast to Wikiversity, where live communication is done in an IRC channel not related to the wiki directly. I'm sure I'll be back at LeMill a bit more through the course, but I'm leaning more towards learner focused communications, and for some reason Wikiversity still "feels" more of the approach I want to be principally involved with. But LeMill does have some very interesting features, and I'm always big on collaboration.

OER websites
Browsing through the various websites, what comes through is the differences between sites which are trying to foster strong community interaction (like Open U and LeMill) and ones that are providing access simply to their resources (MIT). The difference in cultures and approaches is somewhat stark, and reflects the different philosophies and approaches that communities bringing OER's have.

MIT's approach is very typical of a modern University. The courses are there, and the onus is on the learner to figure out where they are and what to do, much like how an Undergrad student would be typically treated. Some of the other sites have collaborative tools of various ways for participants to communicate and collaborate. These sites expect repeat learners to sign up and work through outcomes, perhaps with the help of other site participants. This reflects more closely the "Web 2.0" social-type networking that is the buzz of the Internet.

Ilkka Tuomi Commentary
Having spent about a year working with Wikiversity, this article was a bit of a breath of fresh air on theories and motivations around Open Educational resources. While Tuomi spends much of the time trying to be precise in the definition of resources, he is forced to admit that resources mean different things to people with different perspectives, and that his definition will need to be adopted from a particular perspective.

Tuomi's approach is fairly high level, looking at the field of OER, and the perceived good that it (and education in general) might provide in both economic and policy perspectives. I agree that this is a good approach, but it seems the piece is satisfied that "access" to educational resources is available, and doesn't advocate strongly enough for redistribution ability or being able to receive certification on the material. This may be partly my past experience with Wikiversity influencing my opinion, but I feel strongly that these elements are important.

About me
Hi, my name is Gerald. I became involved in Wikiversity about a year ago, and that has motivated me to try my hand at real world teaching and to start a course at College to become a certified teacher. I have a vast technical background, and I have always had a knack for teaching.

I want to take this course because I am interested in Open Resources, and I am trying to practice the Wikiversity policy of "Learn by doing".

title: User:Historybuff/oerblog


text:
Schools and FLOSS

< FLOSS and education

Examples
Please feel free to post examples of FLOSS and distributed and open practice in schools, particularly where they are supported by policies designed for open practice.

ALL
 * The Google Highly Open Participation Contest Google's first contest to introduce pre-university students to the many contributions that make open source software development possible, concluded on February 4, 2008. We had nearly 400 students worldwide to produce a variety of open source code, documentation, training materials and user experience research for the ten participating organizations listed here. You can check out actual work submitted by student contestants by clicking on the results link next to a project's name on the right.

 * Educating Tux: case studies of Linux deployments in high schools around the world by David M Williams 2008
 * http://opencontent.org/wiki/index.php?title=Intro_Open_Ed_Syllabus --Alexanderhayes 23:34, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
 * http://mscofino.edublogs.org/ --Alexanderhayes 23:42, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Social and Cultural Foundations of American Education - Student authored book
 * Wikiversity: Composing free and open online educational resources
 * Wikiversity: Networked learning
 * P2P foundation Category:education http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Education

AU
 * 4 years of Linux at Lorien Novalis http://www.lorien.nsw.edu.au/joomla/images/pdfs/linuxschoolweb.pdf
 * Open Content syllabus http://opencontent.org/wiki/index.php?title=Intro_Open_Ed_Syllabus (alexanderhayes)
 * Elliot M., Creative Projects Dissertation http://mark-elliott.net/view/Dissertation/CreativeProjectsDissertation
 * Australian Bill of rights website http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=142
 * Wiki work http://bookrap.pbwiki.com/ and http://penrithpslibrary.pbwiki.com/ ian.mclean7@det.nsw.edu.au

CA "I applied the framework retroactively to Nicola Valley Institute of Technology, a small Aboriginal college where we began using Moodle in 2003." Here is the summary of why Moodle worked for NVIT: courses for reuse and refining Although this was done several years ago, much of it still seems relevant. Downes, S., 2008 Options and opportunities National Proponents of public-school education will have to embrace not only new technologies that support learning and new pedagogies that leverage those technologies, but also new forms of organization suggested by those technologies and pedagogies. Where in the past we have relied on standardization as our guarantor of quality and access, we will in the future be looking toward more flexible measures — measures rooted in the needs expressed and pursued by an increasingly diverse population. We will be able, in ways we haven’t previously, to enable each person to pursue his or her own educational objectives in his or her own way. And as the economic imperatives that demand a standardized curriculum fade, the educational, social, and economic benefits of diversity not only will become clearer, they will become imperative. USA
 * Fisher, C., Blog: Remote access:OS and Education http://web.archive.org/20080723122710/remoteaccess.typepad.com/remote_access/2008/03/os-and-educatio.html
 * via TALO Googlegroup. WCET conference website where Sylvia Currie participated in a round table discussion here: https://conference.wcet.info/2005/presentations/Currie_Sylvia.swf
 * Willingness is key in our circumstances. Skill level low, motivation high. We have grown with the project, gradually increasing capacity.
 * Management style and character of institution a good match for open source - many voices, listen well, equality of input into decision-making.
 * Instructors and students have been innovative in their use of Moodle. Elders have also become involved.
 * Support is distributed - a culture of experimentation, research & sharing
 * No licensing fee has meant more resources devoted to implementation, unlimited users/courses has allowed for easy experimentation, and easy access to past iterations of
 * Flexible and customizable - can use a course management system for NVIT community activities, everyone has input into customization, synergy in group innovation
 * New partnerships and opportunities - have developed because of community presence and ability to respond. Involved in software development projects, an interest that was not apparent in the past.
 * Chose our projects and partners wisely: stable and widely supported OS project. Community around Moodle use an asset. Faculty are motivated by the responsiveness, constant improvements
 * NVIT is involved in a unique project that other institutions are noticing.
 * Timing was right -- since initial implementation several institutions in province have begun using Moodle. This has helped maintain momentum in our project.
 * OLPC at school High school students working with the olpc project on Maths and Science (mchua)
 * Jeff Elkner http://openbookproject.net/ and other projects at http://www.elkner.net/ (mchua)

Local thinking
Australian schools and FLOSS

title: Schools and FLOSS


text:
Schools and FLOSS/Australian schools and FLOSS

Challenges with using technology in schools

 * School technology systems are frequently broadcast structured.
 * Read/write internet spaces are often blocked. It can be difficult for teachers to use resources which may then be blocked.
 * Bandwidth and technology purchases are often delivered from a centralised source. Despite this bandwidth costs can be high in schools. Costs of uploading can be passed on to specific students/parents and connections can be for restricted lengths of time. The choices are made centrally but costs are experienced locally.
 * There is little room for teacher or student responsibility or ability to pull value for specific learning at the fingertip end of the system.
 * It has been difficult to secure support staff in schools and to find opportunities for professional development.
 * Buildings may not be designed for adaptive work with technology.
 * Timetables may not be structured for experimentation.
 * Assessments are ultimately geared for standardised testing.
 * What kinds of assessment encourage and record excellence in constructivist education and student leadership.

Opportunities with free software
Some aspects of the openness of free software may help directly with these issues.

 * If technology in schools can be supported in ways which enable local choice, experimentation, and constructivist or connectivist pedagogy would fit better. eg. It is legal to 'look under the bonnet' of open source software.
 * If students and teachers are able to make their own choices and experiments with choosing technologies they can be more adaptive. Some schools do these things now.
 * Offline storage of software and resources. Software can be taken home and shared with friends legally.
 * burning runs of OpenCD(OpenDisc) software
 * recycling computers as a community service and learning project
 * building networks with student participation
 * Education systems development could be a part of the shared responsibility and development process which applies to other aspects of education.
 * Teachers, curriculum, students and increasingly parents and other education providers are potential partners in these systems.
 * Software which complies to open standards makes it possible to share information between a range of tools.
 * Open source tools can be adapted to suit specific requirements.

Curiosity
Stallman suggests open source technology offers particular opportunities in education contexts.

Free software permits students to learn how software works. When students reach their teens, some of them want to learn everything there is to know about their computer system and its software. That is the age when people who will be good programmers should learn it. To learn to write software well, students need to read a lot of code and write a lot of code. They need to read and understand real programs that people really use. They will be intensely curious to read the source code of the programs that they use every day.

Proprietary software rejects their thirst for knowledge: it says, “The knowledge you want is a secret—learning is forbidden!” Free software encourages everyone to learn.

Hall J has also written and spoken about the way that open code adds dimension to tools in education. "Free Software teaches you twice; once when you use it as a tool, and once when you view the source code to see how the tool works."

Open licences permit software users to look under the bonnet, to find out how things work: Their curiosity is not scoped by concerns about whether it is legal to know how something works. Open source software can be used in contexts where the learning is student led because there is no question they may not ask. As a result FOSS people engage with information and technology as makers and participants rather than consumers. This difference in relationship creates opportunities for teachng and learning. Students and teachers are able to choose between using a tool or engaging with the tool and its community as participants in the project community.

Free access to the tools for learning beyond educational institutions encourages learners to see that learning at school is a starting point. The ideal is that homework is not set but students want to do 'homework' because they are inspired and have a need to master. FOSS provides them with the freedom to take their learning further and explore and customise the tools they use.

Multiple perspectives
Tools like wikis can be structured to enable parallel truths and negotiated outcomes. Some topics in the campaigns wikia were structured this way to try and explore the wiki as an expression of contrasting perspectives around an idea. An example of the structure (but not the process at this stage) is at the Digital Rights topic. http://campaigns.wikia.com/wiki/Digital_Rights

Tools that grow with you
The olpc project has been working towards a fully open source laptop. Their reasons for choosing open source solutions are described by Mako Hill

"The Laptop will bring children technology as means to freedom and empowerment. The success of the project in the face of overwhelming global diversity will only be possible by embracing openness and by providing the laptop's users and developers a profound level of freedom. As the children grow and pursue new ideas, the software and the tools should be able to grow with them and provide a gateway to other technology."

Technology for innovation
In a classroom context a community of students engaging in contention and negotiation in diverse activities without precedent or finite scope is less system friendly. It does offer opportunities for students to learn by trying and to be inquisitive and experiment freely. Making technical and social mistakes is possible. Learning from them is also possible. The systems which support and govern a classroom engaged in experimental or participative practice may need to think differently about kinds of space, time and ways of valuing which scope the opportunity if they are to keep the flexibility which makes it possible for students to be innovative.

If there are different needs in a class context, there are also different opportunities when the student is at home. If open software used and the technology projects or communities are open online it is possible for them to participate when they are at home, in hospital, or relocating interstate.

This poses different questions about access which relate more to whether students have access to facilities outside of school which make open participation possible. Again our education systems are more closely tied to the industrial entity of school and do not generally think of learning as something which a student might need independent access to regardless of institutional affiliation. These questions all pivot around being able to see what is valuable from the student's perspective and what is valuable from the wider community perspective and having some connection between those two conversations.

OReilly 2000 describes the negotiation and innovation which are a part of the challenge and reward of open source participation:

"I'd like to argue that open source is the 'natural language' of a networked community, that the growth of the Internet and the growth of open source are interconnected by more than happenstance. As individuals found ways to communicate through highly leveraged network channels, they were able to share information at a new pace and a new level. Just as the spread of literacy in the late middle ages disenfranchised old power structures and led to the flowering of the Renaissance, it's been the ability of individuals to share knowledge outside the normal channels that has led to our current explosion of innovation. Just as ease of travel helped new ideas to spread, wide area networking has allowed ideas to spread and take root in new ways. Open source is ultimately about communication."

System wide tools
There may be some aspects of school technologies which need to be systemic in approach. There are many good free open source technologies which are built on the system wide model. Many of the underlying internet technologies are open source. Free open source software customisation can occur in Australia, in a state or to suit the needs of a school or region. Open licences ensure the technology will always be accessible and editable.

Saving bandwidth and finding local value
Bandwidth costs are often a scoping factor for schools. Internet costs are often experienced in a classroom context as an intermittent connection, limited access to some kinds of services eg video or sound, or as a pay to play cost for the school or for parents. Australia's decision to manage internet access in this way in a school context has a very strong message that students are consumers who must pay to access centrally held knowledge. Australia's high bandwidth costs are based around traffic over a connection. Other nations structure their connections around the provision of connectivity as the traffic component is an artificial cost. It would be useful to review bandwidth cost models and to assess whether there may be better ways to provide good connectivity.

Perhaps schools could peer or mirror information to reduce bandwidth costs. School networks could share information between schools directly as peer nodes on a network to reduce bandwidth costs. This kind of local WAN information sharing could also encourage opportunities to promote local content and collaboration. Students and teachers are the primary creators of information directly related to their curriculum. Our ability to see value in our own Australian participation could be reflected in the ways that we structure these networks for student and teacher content as well as for connections with wider communities of interest.

For example a teacher may use a podcast to enable students to call in with questions around a biology program. The questions could relate to the course or to local community experience. Other students might call and ask too. That podcast might be useful in other schools. How can those kinds of connections be effectively sponsored in the wider system.

Taking on board the implications of distribtued publishing provides very different opportunities and also suggests that we should choose to reconsider the ways that we structure internet connectivity both in a logical routing sense and as a financial tollway on learning.

Local choice
It is also important to look for ways to support choice in the classroom wherever possible because the 'room to move' provided to teachers and students is important for initiative and creativity and responding to individual opportunities and challenges.

Building support capacity with student partners
Local adaptation and maintenance are important for flexibility in the school context. Students/cadets studying part time in VET or highered could be employed as trainee technical support on school networks. Mentoring from VET/highered courses and from internal mentors as well as from external open communities would be a nice way for students to find their feet in networking technologies. As with many of the other student led processes there would need to be a different overall philosophy operating around the network. A section of network which is not critical and which is able to be used as a testing ground would be useful. Sometimes breaking things might be a part of the process of making the network and the students more useful/skilled.

Standards based technologies
Real open standards for protocols and document formats are frequently a priority in FOSS projects because the open standards are a meeting point for the diverse community of different tools. These standards also make it possible for software to be integrated with other solutions and for the school communities to have data security into the future. Choosing tools which use open standards so that data can be imported and exported makes the choice of tool a softer decision because the data will be accessible regardless of the prior choices made.

Working offline
Some kinds of information would be more accessible on local cd drives or usb sticks for take home use. Making sure that materials and tools are able to e used in situations where students or schools may not have a working connection provides better resilience.

Free and open source software fostering careers
Use of FOSS in education sectors means that;

 * the projects can become opportunities for further community participation, education, research or employment.
 * skills in negotiation around project criteria are vital in innovative practice where there may not be an existing correct answer.
 * long term participation in FOSS projects provides a public record of dialogue and contributions which technology companies are increasingly using as indicators of skill and commitment when looking for new hires.

Resources
Resources


text:
User talk:Opu

Welcome
Hello Opu, and welcome to Wikiversity! If you need help, feel free to visit my talk page, or contact us and ask questions. After you leave a comment on a talk page, remember to sign and date; it helps everyone follow the threads of the discussion. The signature icon in the edit window makes it simple. To get started, you may
 * Take a guided tour and learn to edit;
 * Explore our learning projects;
 * Browse our portals, schools, and research activities;
 * Read and help develop our community policies；or
 * Chat with other Wikiversitans on #wikiversity-en.

And don't forget to explore Wikiversity with the links to your left. Be bold, and see you around Wikiversity! Erkan Yilmaz Wikiversity:Chat  07:22, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Hello Tanvir, here is some more info about how to contact people. Erkan Yilmaz Wikiversity:Chat  07:27, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Is it really you?
Hi Tanvir, this is Cormac - are you Tanvir in Manchester uni? Welcome!! Can I help you in any way? What were you interested in doing here? We don't have anything here on Wikiversity on the subjects of our social theories course - perhaps we could work on these collaboratively? (By the way, if all this means nothing to you, and I've got the wrong Tanvir - please accept my apologies!) Cormaggio talk 23:11, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

title: User talk:Opu


text:
Epistemology: Agnosticism or Gnosticism?

Comparative Religion CORE 130

textbooks:
 * Plato's works
 * Yoga Sutras
 * any other philosophical/sacred text(s)

Introductory quotes
'Wisdom [sic] crieth in the chief place of concourse, in the opening of the gates: in the city she uttereth her words saying: ... the fools hate knowledge. ... Happy is the man that findeth wisdom.... When ... prepared the heavens, I was there. Wisdom [sic] hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars: ... she hath mingled her wine; she hath also furnished her table. She hath sent forth her maidens: she crieth upon the highest places of the city. ... For she sitteth at the door of her house, on a seat....'--Proverbs 1:21-22 - 9:1.

'Σοφιαν ζηλου ('Sofian zelou,' 'Long for wisdom,') 'Φιλοσοφος γινου' ('Filosofos ginou.' Be a seeker of wisdom,') 'Γνῶθι σεαυτόν' ('gnothi seauton,' 'know thyself,') 'Γνῶθι μαθων' ('Gnothi mathon,' 'Know what you have learned.')--Apollo; Delphic maxims.

'An unexamined life is not worth living for the human being.'--Socrates.

'It is said that there is an imperishable banyan tree that has its roots upward and its branches down.... The twigs are the objects of the senses. The real form of this tree cannot be perceived in this world. ... But with determination one must cut down this strongly rooted tree with the weapon of detachment.'--Bhagavad-Gita 15:1-4.

'[... Whoever] knows [himself will] find this. '...Seek, and ye shall find....'--Matthew 7:7. '...I might speak to you about the precise nature of the truth.'--The Sophia of Jesus Christ. [But if] you will [not] know yourselves, [you are] in [poverty....']--Thomas (Oxyrhynchus) 654:1-5.

Definition of Philosophic (Platonic) Epistemology
Epistemology is the study of science and knowledge. We will discuss epistemological theology. Read the following Platonic dialogues: Meno, Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, Republic, Parmenides, Timaeus. Republic is long, though it is good to read entirely, maybe just read the parables of the cave, divided line, and sun. The scientific method is applicable to epistemological theology, so you should read about that in the Philosophy (of science) dept.. More than intellect and five senses are said to exist, though it is common to ignore or stop investigating the idea (which just as learning from gross senses and mentation, can take years, decades,....)

Patanjali's Yoga Sutra is another good epistemological text. It is philosophical and less religious than Plato--so should not bother average Western religious people. It can be considered Platonic; Plato can be considered Yogic.

Agnosticism or gnosticism?
Agnosticism is the idea (or philosophy) that something (such as the Deity) cannot or should not be known. Gnosticism (from 'gnosis:' knowledge) is the idea (or philosophy) that something (such as human or even divine spirit) can and should be known: it is a synonym for epistemology. In mathematics, ideas can be proven to be neither knowable nor unknowable, but that nature of ideas is knowable. Agnostics/atheists who think Divinity is undefinable/unknowable are not completely reasonable, yet neither may be theists who think a language's description of Divinity can be eternal.

Religions have views on the material and spiritual worlds. Under close study they usually say (and never disprove) spiritual reality is knowable--they have ideas about it, such as Divinity, human consciousness (including part of spirit,) before-/after-life. Where religions may differ is dogma/rules, the truth of which is often unknowable, but often more similar than usually thought, and misunderstood and corrupted. Great religious founders did not come to make religions; they did not demand worship, but re-established and continued ancient universal spiritual philosophy.

Universal spiritual truths cause religion (a synonym for Philosophy.) The great religious founders desribe ethics and pneumatology similarly; most that mention other religions even say (s)he is there to continue and reform/synthesize it. If someone says only their religion is true, they are probably a(nti-)gnostic about spiritual truth and the intelligence of other humans to conceive of and define Divinity. (Anti-gnosticism, including exoteric empiricism of some (a)deism, is fundamentalist and sometimes aggressive.)

Gnosticism (the idea of knowing, from Greek/Latin 'gnosis/gnostikus: knowing') is involved in mysticism (feeling-centered gnosis of spirit, from 'mystes/mysticus: initiate/mystery') esoterism/occultism (logic-centered gnosis of spirit, from 'eso(terikos)/occultus: within/hidden') and esoteric mysticism (logic-centered knowing of spirit, with compassion.) The 1st and 3rd can be termed spirituality: ecumenism.

Consider whether priests should have monopoly on religious knowledge that they avoid/conceal, or if one should investigate it. If you think it should be studied, prepare to get into epistemology.

Gnosticisms
Hermetism, Orphism, Pythagoreanism, (pre-)Socratics (some,) (neo-)Platonism, Essenes from Jews to Christians (to Manichaeans, Sufism, Rosicrucianism, Theosophy) are Gnostic (capitalized.) However, gnosticism/epistemology is in most 'great' and pagan religions. Capitalization (of the Western term) refers to Western Philosophy. In the East (viz., India) it may be a word with root 'vidya' (knowledge.) Some Quabala (Judaist spirituality) and Sufism (Islamic and some Sikh spirituality) is Gnostic, but all are partly Eastern with their own 'gnosis' word.

Consider whether you should know these; try to answer:
 * What is (temporal) life (and ether? Is being disincarnate death, or is materiality not life?)
 * What is the nature of emotions & mind? (Does mind only think, or mentate: sense, emote, even mentate independant of thought?)
 * what, of all the latter are the form(lessnes)s, and is the answer to the following completely separate and formless?
 * What is soul & spirit? (What form(lessness) do they have; do they only either mentate/think or psychose/ideate? ('Psychose' is 'do (a) soul process(es'))  Is there anything beyond humanity, and how do those relate to Deity?)
 * Are there ways to define/know these, and ethics & methods to live by that help do so?

Gnosticism/epistemology requires ethics (including what is not harmful to 'oneself') and (as in Yoga Sutra) further healthy self-development practices. Patanjali's method that helps with gnosticism, besides both the latter, is control of one's lifeforce (discipline,) sense-withdrawl (or paying only careful attention to sensation,) concentration-meditation-contemplation. The latter 5 are his consciousness methods, and he goes beyond the latter 3 (unifying them.)

Gnosticism, and arguably epistemology, are also synonyms for esoteric mysticism, which has other synonyms. Sum up what you did (or will) investigate  and prepare for metaphysics.

Proverbs quote note
The Proverbs quote may be fascinating, but 'sic' is added until a place can be shown in Israel where after a concourse to gates high in a city where once 7 pillars were part of a building of feminine 'wisdom' who was at the door of it on a seat and had maidens there and in the city, etc.. 'Seven pillars' symbolizes good, but women rabbis (implied in that Proverbs section) were mostly forbidden, especially in most towns big enough to have such buildings. Since this was not necessarily so outside of Israel, this Proverbs section was/is considered biased.


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Psychological statistics

In professional psychology, evidence based practices are quite popular. The history of psychology predates clinical research involving deeply analyzed statistics and trials. Often, psychiatry is the dominant approach in treating psychological/emotional problems. How research is conducted and analyzed has many implications for society and human beings within society. Here you can learn about psychological statistics. You can learn what they are, how they are utilized, and how to analyze them.

Univariate

 * Data
 * Variable
 * Levels of measurement

Bivariate

 * Linear correlation

Multivariate

 * Multiple linear regression
 * ANOVA

Statistical software

 * Comparison of statistical packages

Wikipedia

 * Publication bias

External

 * Multiple Researchers Examining the Same Data Find Very Different Results
 * Publication Bias: Does Unpublished Data Make Science Pseudo?

title: Psychological statistics


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You can also find me at these projects:

 * Wikipedia
 * Wiktionary
 * Wikibooks
 * Wikiquote
 * Wikimedia Commons

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