Abstract
Various digital technologies, the internet, the web, information appliances, smart phones, and particularly, Web 2.0 enable us to review and interrogate how technologies, business, social, personal, and learning technologies can help reconfigure the organisational infrastructure of learning to better align with how human beings learn about the world around us and ourselves. Hazel Henderson said, “Technology is the essence of politics,” but perhaps “Technology is the essence of education,” which for 1000 years has been based on a content-scarcity model of resources and focused on a content-delivery model of learning to an elite who will benefit from access to these scarce resources, themselves based on a subject-based taxonomy that took root in the 19th century and has dominated the design of 20th and 21st century educational institutions. The Open Context Model of Learning argues that we need new models of teaching and learning (obuchenie) built around the PAH continuum of pedagogy, andragogy, and heutagogy and an underpinning belief in the co-creation of learning and education between “teachers” and “learners.”
TopEducation And Technology
Universities, as the central place for learning and defining the nature and purpose of learning in our societies, had slowly evolved from locations where scholars held discussions with great thinkers and wise men, to locations that had that great rarity 30 hand-written books (Oxford University 1093), which were once believed to be the source of all knowledge, and as a consequence were chained up in a library to restrict the access to knowledge only to those who were judged to be deserving of access. Getting to this wise stuff, written out laboriously in long sentences, could only gained by enrolling at the chartered educational institution (approved by the king, or ruling nobleman) which was wrapped around that library. The first educational filter of learning, access to resources, was in place. The advent of the printed book in Mainz (1500) allowed for a greater number of universities to develop, as libraries could be bought relatively cheaply instead of being hand-made laboriously. However, the later development of the encyclopaedia (1750) also meant that the primary source of knowledge was no longer confined solely to the University library. In the UK, following the Museums Act of 1845 libraries were opened that were accessible to the general public. Access to very limited resources need no longer be the critical determinant in getting a formal education, as proved by the exception to the rule, James Murray, the autodidact, (without a degree) who became the celebrated editor of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1879.