Potential and Potential Wasted

Waste is potential unrealised, untapped, unexplored.

Potential is..."inherent capacity".

I really liked Jacob Kestner’s blog post about Potential. He hits the nail on the head, that only by "providing the most motivating circumstances" can we truly help people achieve their potential.

Empowerment and social inclusion are tremendous motivating circumstances.

Read about LASSIE. The Libraries and Social Software in Education project (March 2008) was funded by the University of London Centre for Distance Education to explore the role of information literacy in lifelong learning and social inclusion.

It's key message is that there is an imperative to seriously develop information literacy in order to enable lifelong learners to find and access the magnificent resources available to education today. Without information literacy there can be no lifelong learning.

In my last post, I suggested a reading of Michael Feldstein’s discussion on the History of OE. In case you didn’t click the link, this comment about MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative really got the gongs sounding for me: "….enormous, multi-million-dollar effort has made large quantities of high quality educational materials from one of the world’s most elite technical institutes available to anyone with a web browser. Ironically, by doing so MIT made clear the distinction between OER and open education. They could afford to make all course content available for free, they argued, because the MIT course materials (even the lectures themselves!) are not the same thing as an MIT education. The locus of value from an MIT education comes from gathering smart people, teachers and students, to discuss those materials. It is in the free exchange of ideas in the classroom..."

Today, social networking technologies have dissolved the territorial boundaries of the classroom. There is much to be gained from global exchange. And Open Education cannot be just about parking mountains of resources on the Web. It is also about building communities of learners and developing routes for win-win exchanges. I can't see how global discussion and inclusion can diminish the worth of brick and mortar institutions.

Some institutions have already recognised this and are seriously launching initiatives through blogs, on Facebook and through whispers on Twitter. Here is just one example.

LASSIE found that librarians have become keen bloggers and in the US (and to a lesser extent in the UK) libraries are using blogs and RSS feeds to reach out to their users. They are also allowing ‘user generated content’ (such as ratings, book reviews and user comments) to enrich their catalogues.

Social networks are also the key mechanism for peer driven learning. Read more about this phenomenon here.

We are however in the very early part of our journey to realising the true potential of Open Education. And until many more people come onto the bandwagon, we risk serious waste. Remember, waste is potential unrealised, untapped, unexplored. It is a global issue.