New design approaches to repurposing open educational resources for collaborative learning using mediating artefacts

In spite of high expectations and the support given by prestigious funding and educational institutions, Open Educational Resources (OER) have not been adopted widely by teachers and learners in practice. From a cultural historical activity theory perspective, we argue that Mediating Artefacts (MA) such as OER learning design visual representations and rich narrative pedagogical patterns may enable a more effective OER cycle of creation, design, use and evaluation. More specifically, two main arguments are analysed in this paper: first, that making the inherent design of OER more explicit will make them more understandable and hence reusable; second, that offering a small set of simple patterns will encourage new ways to interpret OER and inspire re-purposing in new challenging contexts. A series of successful workshops was carried out and qualitative data gathered which provide initial evidence that a set of CSCL pedagogical patterns were found very suitable in order to repurpose resources intended for individual use and adjust the focus to make them suit new collaborative learning contexts. Interpretation of the data will form the basis for further workshops that aim to extend the idea of using targeted mediating artefacts to guide the design and repurposing of OER

iSpot Analysed: Participatory Learning and Reputation

We present an analysis of activity on iSpot, a website supporting participatory learning about wildlife through social networking. A sophisticated and novel reputation system provides feedback on the scientific expertise of users, allowing users to track their own learning and that of others, in an informal learning context. We find steeply unequal long-tail distributions of activity, characteristic of social networks, and evidence of the reputation system functioning to amplify the contribution of accredited experts. We argue that there is considerable potential to apply such a reputation system in other participatory learning contexts

Intelligent systems for modelling economic policies

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

New design approaches to repurposing open educational resources for collaborative learning using mediating artefacts. In Same places, different spaces. Proceedings ascilite Auckland 2009. Available d.d. 1-2-2012 at: http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/

In spite of high expectations and the support given by prestigious funding and educational institutions, Open Educational Resources (OER) have not been adopted widely by teachers and learners in practice. From a cultural historical activity theory perspective, we argue that Mediating Artefacts (MA) such as OER learning design visual representations and rich narrative pedagogical patterns may enable a more effective OER cycle of creation, design, use and evaluation. More specifically, two main arguments are analysed in this paper: first, that making the inherent design of OER more explicit will make them more understandable and hence reusable; second, that offering a small set of simple patterns will encourage new ways to interpret OER and inspire re-purposing in new challenging contexts. A series of successful workshops was carried out and qualitative data gathered which provide initial evidence that a set of CSCL pedagogical patterns were found very suitable in order to repurpose resources intended for individual use and adjust the focus to make them suit new collaborative learning contexts. Interpretation of the data will form the basis for further workshops that aim to extend the idea of using targeted mediating artefacts to guide the design and repurposing of OER