A few minutes ago, I heard a comment at a session at the OpenEd conference about content providers’ push vs. learners’ pull. Oh…learners. I’d almost forgotten about them.
With a few exceptions, I have not heard a lot of discussion about learners (or learning) at this conference. There has been a lot of talk about systems, repositories, consortia, alliances, standards, barriers, and theoretical frameworks.
It’s not just this conference — this seems indicative of the OER “movement” as a whole. If OER is going to be successful in changing the world, learners and learning need to be at the center.
Learners…remember them?
You bring up a good point. One reason for this may be because when you post an OER on the web, your learner suddenly becomes very ill-defined. Is it a student at a local high school? Is it a college student across the country? Is it a user in a developing country? A professor? An expert in the field?
It’s hard to wrap your brain around the idea of who the learner is, so it’s easier to focus on the content, the distribution means, the standards, etc. But I don’t think this is a bad thing. The theme of the conference is localization. I don’t know the best way to take the content I put on the web and make it affective for each of the thousands of users that will come across it. But by looking at ways to adapt, remix, mashup the content, maybe somebody who DOES know how to adapt it, will be better able to do so. A high school teacher can adapt my material to be better suited for their student.
But yes, it is very easy to get focused on other things, and forget that at the end of the day, the only thing that really matters is the learner.
The libre perspective is learner centric:
http://communities.libre.org/philosophy/saylibre
– discuss: http://wikieducator.org/Say_Libre