World is Open
Book: The World is Open. Curtis Bonk., introduction to Open Education trends: Anyone can now learn anything from anyone at anytime
URL = http://worldisopen.com/
Synopsis
"If this book could be shortened to its narrowest point, it would exist as a one line proclamation that states, "Anyone can now learn anything from anyone at anytime."
A few years back, Thomas Friedman (2005) argued that our world had been flattened by myriad technologies, most significant of which is the Internet and the ability to find nearly any piece of information one might seek in the exact moment of need. As he showed, the implications of this premise are enormous. However, Friedman focused on social and economic flatteners brought about by technology, changing organizational structures, and business practices. In contrast, this book explores territory which Friedman only touched upon a few times or left uncharted.
The basis of this book,and the model upon which it is built,concerns how such technology offers new hope for educating the citizens of this planet. It is the opening up of education that ultimately makes a flatter or a more robust economic world possible. In the twenty-first century, education trumps economy as the key card to participation in the world. It is education, after all, from which robust economies are built. So when there are momentous shifts occurring in education, they must be explored, documented, grasped, and exploited. This book will reveal and document 10 learning technology trends that are revolutionizing education and transforming life in the twenty-first century. Instead of Friedman.s .flatteners. or the highly touted .megatrends. mantra of John Naisbitt, however, Dr. Bonk calls these .openers,. as in the door opening to untold learning opportunities for billions of people. In education, we hear of open source software, open access journals, open educational resources, and open courseware from MIT and hundreds of other universities. .Open. is the buzzword in education today. Hence, this book.
Instead of emphasizing the new economic players, playing fields, and processes, as Friedman eloquently detailed, this triple convergence brings us a new set of .Ps.: namely, pages of free Web content and courses, pipes for accessing and searching such online content, and a participatory learning culture that freely shares and collaborates on the information and knowledge found there. With these three factors arising in unison, education is elevated to heights never before seen or even imagined. And with that arises a human spirit of optimism, opportunity, and hope.
Dr. Bonk starts the book off with the Summer Digs project from UCLA; a story of an archaeological dig field program in a dozen sites around the planet during the summer of 2008. Students in Chile, Peru, Albania, Canada, etc. rely on blogging to communicate daily events with anyone who is interested. Individuals involved in this project also use GPS to locate and archive what they find. Other stories included in the book are based on interviews with people from IBM, Sun Microsystems, and the WikiMedia Foundation (Wikipedia), as well as scholars from MIT, Oxford, Stanford, and many other places. In addition, Dr. Bonk has documented new forms of learning that occurs in ships, trains, subway cars, sailboats, and virtual worlds. He has stories from YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook, and many online learning programs, including the University of Phoenix, University of Maryland, and the African Virtual University. The YouTube section of the book, for example, presents the stories of people whose videos have attracted the attention of millions of viewers." (http://worldisopen.com/about.php)