Activity 4: Reading an article and searching for relevant references

We were asked to read Seely Brown and Adler (2008), Minds on fire: open education, the long tail and learning 2.0, and then follow through on some of projects mentioned. This article, despite it's very cool title, has the feel of being a quite out of date and a couple of broken links leading presumably to dead or wound down projects only help reinforce that impression. I was interested in the KEEP Toolkit and though some parts seem to still exist (this link goes to a page containing links to papers written about the project) unfortunately the main repository is offline. When teaching I found a number of similar projects, perhaps too many? It was difficult to decide which to contribute to, if any. Some of the other projects I had already heard of and even explored, like the Decameron web (include "web" in the search term or one is likely to be whisked off to a holiday resort).

However, I was attracted by the term "Learning 2.0" and soon found that Steve Wheeler, someone I already "follow", had written an interesting blog about it. He develops some thoughts about Felderman's 4 Cs (Connection, Context, Complexity and Connotation). I particularly liked his retort to Bill Gate's statement that content is king, with the proposal that in  education context is king. Although there is a tremendous amount of learning content available, it is the educators role, to put this content into context.