Networked Learning - MOOCs and more

"[..]  summing up, I believe that it is likely that we see a decreasing need of instructors as more knowledgeable others in order to learn something, but an increasing need of instructors as more knowledgeable others in order to learn how to learn something. With Personal Learning Environments to cover the ground of one’s Zone of Personal Development, learning how to learn, how to design one’s own learning process may be more relevant than ever and require more help from third parties. This is, I think, the most promising future of teaching today."

 

Comment: A highly insightful attempt to connect Vygotski's ideas with networked learning. Ismael compares the Vygotskian notion of a zone of proximal development - the things you are able to learn with the help of more knowledgeable others - with a personal learning environment. But significantly, they are not identical. In Vygotski's time, more knowledgeable others were people, teachers, masters of some trade. Etc. In the Internet age, we are not restricted anymore to recruiting them from the people with whom we maintain face-to-face contact. The entire Internet is at our disposal (in this connedtion, also think about the idea of turning weak links into strong links). In addition to this all sort of artefacts that are made available via the Internet and contain knowledge in explicit forms may be used (learning objects, OERs, videos, blogs, podcasts, etc.). And yet in addition to this, I might add, there is tooling, including content curation and search engines, that help learners access this explicit knowledge more efficiently and effectily. In short, a PLN serves as a vastly expanded and technologicallly enriched ZPD. A very useful conceptualisation! (peter sloep, @pbsloep, witht thanks to Steve Wheeler)