Reading this article by Weller (2011) made me re-engage again with some online materials which I had come across before e.g. Welsch's YouTube offerings on 'how can we encourage learners to like learning (in a university setting)? This video really hits home for HE lecturers such as me. However, with one exception, this is perhaps beside the point of this post - he 2 questions raised by Weller: 1) How educators can best take advantage of abundance in our own teaching practice? 2) How can we as educators best equip learners to make use of abundance?
What needs to be said is that, despite Weller's enthusiasm, that abundance is not necessarily an unmitigated blessing. Much as in the 'old' days of scarcity, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing - in the case of contemporary education this abundance means that digital literacy is the problem. A key problem for HE is t how both educators and learners might use it to effect i.e. with discrimination, and how they might avoid being swamped by this very abundance. Indeed, it is not just learners who are likely to have some problems with abundance. The issue of networks, and PLNs are surely of relevance here (watching Welsch brought up some interesting points on how he built up his PLN - see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4yApagnr0s) If educator struggle with this independence what hope is there for learners? Again Welsch had an interesting observation about getting students to engage with Wikipedia in a manner which gets them to analyse the history of a home page. Anything which could get students to go beyond taking that dratted home page - or indeed their own Google home page - would be a good thing! That in itself would be one step in taking advantage of a digital culture of abundance. However, to encourage this, involves being a facilitator who inculcate the learners in how to be a critical user of digital technologies and the (abundant) content they discover via these means. At my institution we have been introduced to the SCONUL '7 Pillars' of Digital Literacy, and these seem to have some potential for educators to think about (see http://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/SCONUL%20digital_literacy_lens_v4_0.doc