#ioe12 OpenCourseWare

The next section of the Openness in Education course I have completed is OpenCourseWare. I watched the press conference from MIT when they first announced their OpenCourseWare initiative and read about the OpenCourseWare Consortium and the Open High school of Utah. The video was interesting because of the groundbreaking nature of what MIT did. The field of Adult Education is about social change. Both my Masters and Doctoral programs were deigned to foster a  commitment to social change in the students. Listening to the MIT OpenCourseWare press conference I couldn’t help but to feel the full weight of this idea. Charles Vest stated that they wanted to “influence the world” and Steve Lerman asked “how do you disseminate and create human knowledge?” OpenCourseWare is about social change. It is one answer to Steve Lerman’s question and one way to influence the world. The more I am learning about open everything, the more I am convinced that human learning is not only grounded in social interactions and constructivism, but that our growth as a society would be stunted without having the ability to create new knowledge based on what others have done. In the video a great deal of emphasis was made by Charles Vest on the difference between OpenCourseWare and taking a course at MIT; human interaction between the students and the professors. Vygostky’s zone of proximal development says we can learn more, attain more when working with someone more knowledgeable. I think this is the key. While learning from MIT professors is certainly one way to go about it, I believe that OpenCourseWare in general can have the same ability to foster learning when social aspects are brought in. Give people a space to talk with peers and colleagues, share ideas, push each other to see things in new ways, and make meaning from their experiences with each other and lifelong learning and professional development takes on a new life and new meaning. Without the social aspects of learning, OpenCourseWare is just content sitting on a web page, but how wonderful that it is there.