How can tacit and explicit knowledge be communicated and experience online?
Reading review I am interested in exploring how students and staff perceive and engage with open learning in the arts and how tacit and explicit knowledge can be communicated and experience online. This reading review tries to examine and reflect on these processes with reference to the first chapters of the following sources: Communities of Practice Learning, meaning and Identity, Etienne wenger (1998) and Jean Lave & Etienne wenger (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation.
Legitimate peripheral participation
There are specific ways of understanding learning, Lave & Wenger describe ‘Legitimate Peripheral Participation’ (LPP) as an analytical viewpoint on learning, it questions how and where learning and teaching happens, and examines the informal approaches we take through everyday ‘sociocultural’ experience. In their book Lave & Wenger (1991) use historical instances of apprenticeship to illustrate the notion of legitimate peripheral participation and describe the framework of ‘situated learning’. LPP and the notion of apprenticeship provide a useful agenda to which I can analyse and reflect open learning in my own practice and the practices of others.
The apprenticeship model relates well to the formal framework of art education where artist practitioners ‘externalise' practice, pass on knowledge in often ‘replicated’ industry like environments such as studios and workshops etc, teachers deliver formal and informal presentations, demonstrations and tutorials mostly one-to-one, face-to-face or in groups. Art education has a long tradition of ‘learning in situ’or learning by doing’’ the University of the Arts is regarded as primarily a making university and has a traditional structure of ‘old timer’ (professional artist/practitioner) teaching the ‘newcomer’ (the student) the master and the apprentice, the level of participation could be regarded as full. Lave & Wenger describe LPP as a way of talking about these relationships. To analyse the traditional structure of the practice of the university as a whole would be too much for this review and Lave & Wenger suggest the same regarding traditional schooling and emphasize there point by describing legitimate peripheral participation as not being “an analytical viewpoint on learning” but a “way of understanding learning” (Lave & Wenger 1991: 40)
On reflection, its clear learning and teaching in this environment involves a continual exchange of tacit and explicit knowledge, I am particularly interested in how we utilise this tacit and explicit knowledge. Lave & Wenger argue learning is not centralised, LPP is ‘about being located in the social world’ and the same dynamic of learning is structured into everyday life and can be experienced in groups or alone ‘learning can happen on the periphery’. How can this notion be applied to art practice and open learning?
Where is meaning located and how is it constructed?
(Wenger 1998) argues ‘practice is about meaning as an experience of everyday life’ through the process of living a constant ‘negotiation of meaning’ is performed and through practice we experience life. We practice to create meaning by:
“Taking what we know through everyday ‘doing’ extend, redirect, dismiss, reinterpret, modify or confirm – in a word negotiate a new – the histories of meanings of which they are part. In this sense, living is a constant process of negotiation of meaning.”
(Wenger 1998: 52-3)
Wenger describes ‘participation’ and ‘reification’ as a duality of two constituent processes of the ‘negotiation of meaning’ fundamental to the human experience of meaning and thus to the nature of practice.
Negotiation of meaning
I would argue a ‘negotiation of meaning’ is taking place in the process of capturing and sharing tacit and explicit knowledge online, content is made open and accessible online where users comment, contribute, repurpose and reuse. Through participation the creator/s and the contributor/s become members of a community of practice, the ‘negotiation of meaning’ is taking place, through the process and convergence of participation (users) and reification the embodiment of the ‘the resource ’ (the online content).
Participation and Reification
I am interested in the different types of participation involved in open learning or ‘social learning’. Wenger describes participation as being both ‘personal and social’ (Wenger 1998: 56) its not collaboration or ‘ just engagement in practice’ that one can turn on and off as and when you feel like. Activate participation and negotiation of meaning can be achieved alone, a contributor of an online tutorial for example or as Wenger suggests, a child doing homework, a doctor making a decision, a traveller reading a book. “The concept of participation is meant to capture this profoundly social character of our experience of life.” (Wenger 1998: 57)
In a ‘teacher centred’ art school environment practical studio based learning is negotiated between staff and students through a process of formal and informal exchange. With the reduction of contact time and increasing class sizes, open online learning could prove essential as the dynamic of participation changes, for example tacit and explicit knowledge is structured in a new ways, peer learning is encouraged, less onus is placed on the teacher and the student becomes a lot more empowered in the community of practice. Open learning provides many new and expanded communities of practice by sharing the experience of ‘negotiation of meaning’.
Wenger describes reification as ‘making it into a thing’, for example the online tutorial is a thing an illustration of an action or process is objectified, ‘with this comes negotiation of meaning’. Studio experiences and actions are reordered, reshaped and experienced a new, with the potential to change the nature of the activity itself through ‘shared experience and interactive negotiation’, a new teaching dynamic is introduced.
The duality of meaning
Wenger argues participation and reification are complementary and mutually reliant on each other and one cannot function without the other, the correct balance of each is essential, for example by giving form to tacit and explicit knowledge a new tool is created, the two process must evolve along side each other for ‘negotiation of meaning’ to take place.
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References
Wenger, Etienne. (1998) Communities of Practice Learning, meaning and Identity. USA: Cambridge University Press
Lave, Jean & Wenger, Etienne. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. USA: Cambridge University Press
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Comments
Capturing Process? Practice Research within the Creative Arts - http://vads.ac.uk/kultivate/news/?p=101 and http://www.practiceresearchunit.co.uk/
OERs: the good, the bad and the ugly......So we do need content in education. However, content is not static, nor a commodity like coal. Modern research into learning shows that content is best learned within context (situated learning), when the learner is active, and that above all, when the learner can actively construct knowledge by developing meaning and ‘layered’ understanding. In other words, content is not effectively learned if it is thought of as shovelling coal into a truck. Learning is a dynamic process that requires questioning, adjustment of prior learning to incorporate new ideas, testing of understanding, and feedback. These ‘transactional’ processes require a combination of personal reflection, feedback from an expert (i.e. the teacher or instructor) and even more importantly, feedback from and interaction with friends, family and fellow learners. The weakness with open content is that by its nature, at its purest it is stripped of these developmental, contextual and ‘environmental’ components that are essential for effective learning. In other words, it is just like coal, sitting there waiting to be loaded.........
http://www.tonybates.ca/2011/02/06/oers-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/
Openness as Catalyst for an Educational Reformation - http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume45/OpennessasCatalystforanEducati/209246
2010 David Wiley. The text of this article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 45, no. 4 (July/August 2010): 14–20
David Wiley
David Wiley (david.wiley@byu.edu) is an Associate Professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology in the David O. McKay School of Education at Brigham Young University.
The word open is receiving a lot of attention in education circles. Openness in higher education has been discussed recently by writers in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, EDUCAUSE Review, and EQ, among other publications.1 In January 2010, The Horizon Report, produced by the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), declared that open content will "reach mainstream use" in higher education within the next twelve months.2 But what does that mean? What is this open we keep hearing about?
For over a decade, open has been used as an adjective to modify a variety of nouns that describe teaching and learning materials. For example, open content, open educational resources, open courseware, and open textbooks are all part of the current higher education discourse. In this context, the adjective open indicates that these textbooks and other teaching and learning resources are provided for free under a copyright license that grants a user permission to engage in the "4R" activities:
* Reuse: the right to reuse the content in its unaltered/verbatim form (e.g., make a backup copy of the content) * Revise: the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language) * Remix: the right to combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup) * Redistribute: the right to share copies of the original content, the revisions, or the remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)3
Although the modified nouns (content, resources, courseware, textbooks) differ from one another, the actions that operationalize the concept of openness are the same. They are acts of generosity, sharing, and giving. The Role of Openness
For the authors of content, resources, courseware, or textbooks, being open is about overcoming the inner two-year-old who constantly screams: "Mine! You can't have it! It's MINE!" Unfortunately, modern law and college/university policy tend to enable this bad behavior, allowing us to shout "Mine!" ever more loudly, to stomp our feet with ever less self-control, and to hit each other with ever harder and sharper toys. Throughout our tantrums, society soothingly whispers that unbridled selfishness is a natural and therefore appropriate feeling. Regrettably, some educators and administrators have allowed themselves to be swayed by the siren song: "It's OK. Be stingy with your lecture notes. Don't share your slides. They're yours. Sue those students who posted their class notes online. It's legal. Go ahead." By contrast, the idea of openness reminds us of what we knew intuitively before society gave us permission to act monstrously toward one another.
I'm frequently asked: "What is the appropriate role of openness in education?" I find the question to be deeply troubling and insidious. The question implies that openness might play any of several roles in the educational enterprise—a core or a peripheral role, a large or a small role. The question subtly distracts people from seeing that openness is the sole means by which education is effected. If a teacher is not sharing what he or she knows, there is no education happening.
In fact, those educators who share the most thoroughly of themselves with the greatest proportion of their students are the ones we deem successful. Does every single student come out of a class in possession of the knowledge and skills the teacher tried to share? In other words, is the teacher a successful sharer? If so, then the teacher is a successful educator. If attempts at sharing fail, then the teacher is a poor educator. Education is sharing. Education is about being open. How Sharing Is Changed by New Technology
Knowledge has the magical property of being nonrivalrous—meaning that teachers can share their expertise without losing it. As Thomas Jefferson stated in his famous comparison of knowledge and fire: "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me." If teachers had to make the sacrifice of unlearning an idea in order to share it with their students, the progress of society would be slow indeed.
However, whereas knowledge can be given without being given away, external expressions of knowledge cannot. When the book I need is missing from the university library shelves, I can't read it until someone returns it. When my wife gets to the newspaper in the morning before I do, I have to wait. At least that's the way the world worked until a few years ago. The Internet now makes it possible for digital expressions of knowledge to have the same magical, nonrivalrous quality as knowledge itself. While I'm waiting for that book to be put back on the shelf, a hundred thousand people are reading the online version of the book simultaneously. While I'm waiting for my wife to finish reading the newspaper, a million people are reading the CNN.com website simultaneously. For the first time in the history of humanity, external expressions of what we know are on an equal footing with knowledge itself. Like the flame of Franklin's candle, both ideas and their expressions can now be given without being given away.
This ability to give expressions of knowledge without giving them away provides us with an unprecedented capacity to share—and thus an unprecedented ability to educate.4 A Lesson from History
Technology never appears on stage alone. Technology always plays opposite its nemesis: policy. And the pair have quite the stormy history.
The 15th century saw what many have argued to be the greatest technological advance of the millennium: Gutenberg's combination of metallic movable type with the printing press. In contrast to this new capability to produce books, leaflets, and other expressions quickly and inexpensively, the 15th century also saw restrictions on the distribution of information—restrictions that make a global DMCA (or even the pending ACTA) seem like a parade of rainbow sparkle ponies.
Gutenberg's masterwork was a 42-line-per-page edition of the Bible in Latin, yet the common people of the time remained desperate for access to a vernacular edition of the scriptures they could actually read. Rather than utilize the new capabilities afforded by the printing press to provide meaningful access to the word of God, the church instead used the efficiencies of the press to ramp up production of indulgences (papers that could be purchased in order to have one's sins or the sins of a deceased ancestor forgiven), while effecting policies outlawing the possession or memorization of the scriptures in the vernacular. For example, 15th-century English law read: "Whosoever reads the Scriptures in the mother tongue, shall forfeit land, cattle, life, and goods from their heirs forever, and so be condemned for heretics to God, enemies to the crown, and most arrant traitors to the land." Thirty-nine people were hanged for violation of this law during the first year it was in force.5 Capability plus demand had produced a thriving underground market—in this case, a market for pirated Bibles. Applying the Lesson to Today
The collision of powerful new information technology, outdated policy, and overwhelming demand in the 15th century contributed significantly to the series of major historical events we now call the Reformation. Today, even as new media and technology provide mind-boggling capabilities for sharing and education, we occasionally still run into outdated policies and ways of thinking. Information technology is sometimes turned against itself and is made to conceal, restrict, withhold, and delete. For example, a course management system like Blackboard theoretically has the potential to greatly improve educators' capacity to share. Instead, many CMSs take the approach of hiding educational materials behind passwords and regularly deleting all student-contributed course content at the end of the term. If Facebook worked like Blackboard, every fifteen weeks it would delete all your friends, delete all your photographs, and unsubscribe you from all your groups. The conceal-restrict-withhold-delete strategy is not a way to build a thriving community of learning.
In another example of outdated thinking, in 2008 a Florida professor began legal proceedings against the owner of a company that sells students' notes, claiming that students' notes taken during his lecture were derivative works that infringed on his copyright.6 If we continue down this path, faculty will soon be asking students to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) before registering for classes—as if the contents of the periodic table, the rules of choral arranging, or the law of supply and demand were some kind of trade secrets. What is the impact on learning when teachers knowingly withhold, conceal, and restrict access to knowledge or its representations? Conversely, what is the comparative impact on learning when teachers share, give, and are generous with access to knowledge and its representations? Perhaps most important, what is our primary interest as educators: facilitating student learning or commercializing what we know? If our primary interest is facilitating student learning, then education is our field. If commercializing what we know is our primary interest, then we shouldn't be educators.
Even though evidence of outdated thinking is all around us in higher education, demand for education continues to grow at an unbelievable rate. There are currently around 120 million students in higher education worldwide. In the coming decades, experts estimate an increase of an additional 150 million students in the world's poorest countries—more than doubling the number of students seeking higher education worldwide. In India alone, two new universities would have to be built and opened each week over the next twenty-five years to meet demand.7 And while this demand is growing, higher education's funding is shrinking.
In short, higher education finds itself using radical new technology in backward ways, reinforcing outdated ways of thinking with law and institutional policy, and remaining unable to satisfy rapidly increasing popular demand. Sound familiar? Higher education appears to be pitched on the edge of its own Reformation.
Which brings us back to openness. To some degree, higher education has lost its way. As institutions and as individuals, we seem to have forgotten the core values of education: sharing, giving, and generosity. Like the frog in the famous parable, we have unwittingly allowed the water around us to be brought slowly to a boil while we sit in a pot of selfishness, restriction, concealment, and withholding. And to the degree that we have deserted the principle of openness, learning has suffered.
New media and technology have a critical role to play in the future of education. But regardless of the potential they may show in their audition, new media and technology will get to act only those parts in which we cast them. From my perspective, the only legitimate role for new media and technology in education is to increase our capacity to be generous with one another. Because the more open we are, the better education will be. Notes
1. Marc Parry, "Free Online Courses Don't Hurt Paid Enrollment, Study Suggests," Wired Campus blog, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 2, 2010, ; Katie Hafner, "An Open Mind," New York Times, April 8, 2010, ; John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler, "Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0," EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 43, no. 1 (January/February 2008), pp. 16–32, ; Colin Currie, "Openness in Delivering Education and Content," EQ (EDUCAUSE Quarterly), vol. 32, no. 2 (2009), . 2. L. Johnson, A. Levine, R. Smith, and S. Stone, The 2010 Horizon Report (Austin, Tex.: New Media Consortium, 2010), p. 6, . 3. See David Wiley, "Defining the 'Open' in Open Content," n.d., ; John Hilton III, David Wiley, Jared Stein, and Aaron Johnson, "The Four R's of Openness and ALMS Analysis: Frameworks for Open Educational Resources," Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning, vol. 25, no. 1 (February 2010), pp. 37–44, . 4. Beyond sharing external expressions of knowledge, education involves debate, discourse, discussion, and other types of communication. New technologies are pretty good at facilitating these as well. But I'm restricting this discussion to openness in the context of teaching and learning resources. 5. Law quoted in Robert Green Ingersoll, The Ghosts (1877), . 6. Ryan Singel, "Lawsuit Claim: Students' Lecture Notes Infringe on Professor's Copyright," Wired, April 4, 2008, . 7. John Daniel, Asha Kanwar, and Stamenka Uvalić-Trumbić, "Mass Tertiary Education in the Developing World: Distant Prospect or Distinct Possibility?" June 15, 2007, .//www.col.org/resources/speeches/2007presentations/pages/2007-masstertiaryed.aspx>//www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/04/prof-sues-note/>//www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/ghosts.html>//www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a918784703>//opencontent.org/definition/>//www.nmc.org/pdf/2010-horizon-report.pdf>//www.educause.edu/educause+quarterly/opennessindeliveringeducationa/174587>//www.educause.edu/library/erm0811>//www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/education/edlife/18open-t.html>//chronicle.com/blogpost/free-online-courses-dont-hurt/21017/>
OER Impact study
Who is using Open Educational Resources? - http://oerblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/?p=1
OER reuse landscape - http://oerblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/?p=32