Towards a social learning space for open educational resources

This chapter examines the meaning of ‘open’ in terms of tools, resources and education, and goes on to explore the association between open approaches to education and the development of online social learning. It considers why this form of learning is emerging so strongly at this point, what its underlying principles are, and how it can be defined. Openness is identified as one of the motivating rationales for a social media space tuned for learning, called SocialLearn, which is currently being trialed at The Open University in the UK. SocialLearn has been designed to support online social learning by helping users to clarify their intention, ground their learning and engage in learning conversations. The emerging design concept and implementation are described here, with a focus on what personalization means in this context, and on how learning analytics could be used to provide different types of recommendation that support learning

A Critical Systems Metamethodology for Problem Situation Structuring

The increasing complexity and diversity of management problem situations in organizations, as well as the increasing variety of theories, methodologies, methods, techniques, and models that can be employed in problem situation structuring and solving, must be considered as relevant aspects of management process in contemporary circumstances. Creative holism in management problem situations in organizations is enabled by means of Critical Systems Thinking (CST) as well as Critical Systems Practice (CSP), as the resulting metamethodology. In other words, through CST and CSP, it can be significantly contributed to the management of the increasing diversity and variety of methodologies, methods, techniques, and models, with the aim of improving the management of problem situations in organizations. Copyright © 2012, IGI Global