How Is Education Like Junk Art?

Have you ever seen Junk Art? A quick Google search turns up millions of images so I know some of your have. Junk Art is where you take discarded junk and put it together in creative ways. It’s very low cost but can actually be sold for a decent price.

(cc) Tinkerbots

The point here is a creative person can take a whole bunch of components and make something that is greater than the sum of it’s parts. Being able to take pieces of things and put them together in such a way that it adds value is a critical skill to have in this new information age.

Audrey Watters at Hack Education (you really should be following that blog) posted this story about independent education provider startups banding together to create a curriculum to learn a computer language based on nothing but open resources. It’s just a lesson plan with a bunch of links. There is no testing or assessments, just learning. It is extremely low cost and the only people who will take it will be students who are serious to learn. It also leads me to my Friday post which will be What Comes After Disaggregation?

• The Mechanical MOOCA MOOC based on just gathering open resources.

  tags: education mooc opensource nell

  • MIT OpenCourseware, OpenStudy, Peer to Peer University, and Codecademy are teaming up to launch a “Mechanical MOOC” – a free and open introductory course in the programming language Python that weaves together existing resources (content, Web-based study groups, quizzes and so on).
  • Unlike some of the other MOOCs that have launched in recent months – particularly those headline-grabbing efforts from Stanford (and Coursera and Udacity) – this “Mechanical MOOC” will not force learners into a centralized website that recreates the LMS experience, where all the official lessons, lectures, discussions and assignments are supposed to take place. Instead, the content for this MOOC is linked from the original sources and distributed via an email list managed by P2PU.
  • There’s no official instructor involvement here (paging Jonathan Rees!). No institution (and none of the participating organizations here) is in charge. No degrees or credits or certificates or letters of achievement will be awarded (you can, of course, get badges for your Codecademy achievements and for your helpfulness on OpenStudy).
  • Lisa Lane recently argued that there are 3 types of MOOCs: network-based (e.g. the connectivist MOOCs), task-based (e.g. DS106) , and content-based (edX, Coursera, Udacity). By creating an open source tool for this “mechanical MOOC,” hopefuly this effort will help others take the best of all of those models, create their own open online courses (massive or not), and optimize for learning and community (and not just investors or institutions).

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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