My Blog

How DIY learning is challenging existing institutions of higher education July 26, 2011

This message below was posted by David Theo Goldberg on the iDC mailing list.

I'm interested because I've been exploring aspects of learning in a DIY way (thanks to the Internet) ever since 2000 when I suddenly needed to start finding out about all kinds of stuff around the project I was involved in in Ago-Are.

Since then I've got increasingly interested in how that kind of DIY learning would impact on learners, teachers and the established education system. I'm hoping this book will have useful descriptions and analysis that I can refer people to when I'm trying to share ideas about aspects of life in 21st century.

Given it's describing a book he's written I'm assuming he'd be happy for the post to reach a wider audience. I'm not sure what conference he's referring to but it wouldn't be hard to find out. 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Theo Goldberg <dgoldberg@hri.uci.edu>


Over the past two decades, the way we learn has changed dramatically. We
have new sources of information and at least in principle and increasingly
in practice novel ways to exchange and to interact with information. But
our institutions of "higher" learning and the way we teach have remained
largely the same for years, one could say even centuries and across many
different national sites.

So it is increasingly crucial to ask, as Cathy Davidson and I did in The
Future of Learning,  what  happens to traditional educational institutions
when learning also takes place in the new ways now available,
participatorily, in genuinely transformative connected ways, peer-to-peer,
virtually and incessantly? In the book we investigate how traditional
learning institutions are challenged to become increasingly innovative,
flexible, robust, and collaborative as well as what this means for
reconceiving the very nature of the "institution" as a "mobilizing
network" and how it operates, what it affords us anew in terms of learning
engagements, practices, and possibilities.

The questions raised about existing institutional structures of "higher"
learning link directly to the possibilities and challenges as a
consequence of DIY learning, at all levels.  Learning is now being
challenged to be less hierarchical and authoritative or expert-driven.
More horizontal, shared, connected, participatory and peer-to-peer, the
conference DIY track will examine the variety of possibilities,
experiments, and practices now being unleashed to promote, assess, and
certify these new learning modalities.

David Theo Goldberg
Director and Professor
University of California
Humanities Research Institute/
Executive Director,
MacArthur Digital Media and Learning
Research Hub


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