Education ecologies
In our open course we introduced Open Education from the perspective of "learning ecologies" asking folks to create small mind maps to show the reach of the resources (people, things, institutions, etc.) that help them learn. I think the activity worked well to show how we learn more openly than we usually think (as we tend to think of formal opportunities) and we see these "potential" learning opportunities that are latent. It then leads nicely to think (from their own contextualized experience) what in their "ecology" is open - that do they do to make it more open? And (through this course) what can they do?
I like Barron's on learning ecologies: "the accessed set of contexts, comprised of configurations of activities, material resources and rela- tionships, found in co-located physical or virtual spaces that provide opportunities for learning." It is not an OER focus, but its similar to the Atkins et. al. OLPI (open participatory learning infrastructure) which is based on OER: "The proposed OPLI seeks to enable a decentralized learning environment that: (1) permits distributed participatory learning; (2) provides incentives for participation (provisioning of open resources, creating specific learning environments, evaluation) at all levels; and (3) encourages cross-boundary and cross cultural learning.".
