This is how education was predicted to advance by the year 2000, as seen from 1910.
Villemard, 1910
À l’ École
from visions de l’an 2000, via photozz
Turn that crank! Absorb those LORs! OERs for everyone!
9 thoughts on “the future of education, ca 1910”
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I don’t understand why OER has suddenly become such a bad word in open education. Is it really that bad that people want to make some content openly available? I don’t think OER is the same as lecture-based learning. Some might use it that way, and some might consume it that way. But that’s true of many tools in ed tech. This photo you’ve posted probably could been photoshopped to apply to ds106 radio.
I just don’t get it.
I have issues with OER because they’re often framed as being sufficient for learning. They’re not. It’s just content. Share it. But it’s not an education. There are other issues, but OER is no more an education than ground up textbooks.
DS106 Radio is also not education. It is a social component of DS106. It’s fun for some, not for others. That’s OK. It’s neither necessary nor sufficient for education (or learning in general).
I have a long, sad history with “learning objects” and projects that felt entirely too much like what is illustrated in the picture above.
I love open educational resources, but I’ve come to loathe Open Educational Resources. I love open teaching and learning, but am getting fed up with Open Education.
But the real reason I’m writing here is to thank you for sharing an image that comes at a very timely moment (meaning: I am going to steal it for a presentation).
Thank you for your reply, D’Arcy. I think your concerns about OER being conflated with an education as a whole are valid. I don’t know that the field of education has done a good job of explaining what the education experience really means. Given that vacuum, there is a tendency to cling to the tangible.
I won’t say more, I don’t want to abuse the recently reinstated ability to comment.
@Chris
I guess we hang out at the same blogs. I don’t know that the line you are presenting between open teaching and learning and Open Education are quite as distinct as your comment would suggest. I’m not even quite clear on where you draw the line.
Seth: I’ve defined the importance of content-centric OER initiatives plenty of times in the past, but I’ve lost patience with the ability of most to move beyond a vision of “content sharing” and toward a more comprehensive vision of open teaching and learning.
The two things are quite distinct, in my experience, and the terminology goes a long way to explaining how. OER is overwhelmingly about content, open teaching and learning takes care of the content problem as an incidental while devoting effort to much more subtle, difficult, and important problems of the actual practices, context, process, and artifacts of which OER is only a small– and ultimately all that important– part.
Again, I don’t know who you are or what you do, but I can speak for myself: I’ve spent a LONG time pushing this stuff. I’ve done my time and I’ve earned my right to call it as I see it.
PS. DS 106 radio is at the exact opposite end of the process and has the exact opposite meaning of OER. Which isn’t to defend it as a learning object or a piece of content– it doesn’t need that defense because it is neither of those things.
I can think of 1/2 dozen “problems” with DS 106 where clarification would be useful and any possibility of replication (in a very loose sense, even) made more useful, but this kind of confusion between apples and oranges is exactly what I mean when I say that OER folks are too often looking through the wrong end of the telescope.
I find the class size depicted to be interesting – it is a generic enough image to be viewed from any sector perspective as well.