A pedagogy of abundance
These notes are part of a series for the book.
This article looks at the abundance of educational resources and then reviews five pedagogies to see how they fit with this new abundance. Although that sounds promising, the article was not as robust as I’d hoped.
Outline
- Introduction
- Economics of abundance and scarcity
- Education and abundance
- Resource based learning
- Problem based learning
- Constructivism
- Communities of practice
- Connectivism
- Conclusion
Notes
University professors do 4 things:
- Discovery (research)
- Integration (cross-disciplinary connections)
- Application (with the public, in committees, doing peer reviews, etc.)
- Teaching
Teaching is the part that may be most changed by technology.
Responses to a change in scarcity
In economics, price is based on scarcity. This model if affected by web technologies — for examples, see the music industry and journalism. What happens when content is not physical or difficult to find or manufacture, and finding and getting it is easy? There are two types of responses to this change:
- Abundance response: Tries to use abundance to their advantage
- Freemium pricing model
- Long Tail sales
- Free digital content, with physical goods and services at a cost
- Scarcity response: Tries to re-introduce scarcity into digital models
- DRM
- Paywalls and subscription models
Universities also work with scarcity because expertise (in the form of professors) is scarce. Experts are grouped around other expensive resources such as libraries and laboratories, and this is the university. The lecture makes best use of this scarcity of experts.
Experts are still rare, but resources are not. Does an abundance response to this change require new pedagogy, or does it fit within existing teaching practices? Weller looks at 5 pedagogies. He finds that:
- Resource- and problem-based learning fit somewhat but not exactly.
- He was unclear about how constructivism fits (or it was unclear to me).
- Communities of practice can be a good pedagogical model for an abundance response, but they are hard to create and sustain.
- Connectivism might be a good fit, but it is too new to know for sure.