What we do not know about quality vs accesibility
I have been, by chance, in the education arena almost 20 years and have always believed in the strange "exploration" attitude towards knowledge. In other words, I do not believe in the old one-to-many format of teaching, but have always preferred a "participatory-horizontal" approach to knowledge, where both students and lecturers learn from each other as they discover or better, create knowledge day by day. I also believe that access is much more important than quality. And do not get me wrong, but the possibility of accesing the web to do a simple knowledge exchange is, in my humble opinion, much more greater than the guarantee that the concepts enclosed in the British Enciclopedia have all being corroborated and proved right. Even more so, when knowledge is there, open and available, then it becomes the property of the community who is responsible of veryfing it content (like in Wikipedia) but is even more reponsible in allowing access to others to consult, read, share in one word. I am definitely in favour of open sources for course development and would rather have a creative and unique approach to resources, accesible to all, than a proper- pseudointelectual-rigid format. I, for example, would rather have and provide access to a video link in Youtube, than defend the copyright of the piece in question, or the art behind the visual expresion. I think that, somehow, this is what our students in the Net Gen believe: share it, its valuable because it has been shared.
Probably a mechanism that could be adopted to assure quality of educational content development resides in the combination of several (score cards) elements such as: 1.Does it encourages student's engagement in learning? 2. Does it facilitate an exploratory approach to content? 3. Does it promote inquiry among students? 4. Is the content further developed by students in a constructivist approach to learning? 5. Is knowledge captured and enclosed or is it open to discovery and further exploration?
Okey, too many words.. hope I have been able to make some sense..
Martha
