All entries for Sunday 31 October 2010

Conference proposal on Open–space Learning in Real World Contexts

Open-space Learning in Real World Contexts

An Embodied, Mobile and Ubiquitous Challenge to the Reproduction of the Same

Open-space Learning (OSL) is a theatre-inspired approach to collaborative learning and working, more appropriate to 21^st Century lives.

The most pressing problems today (e.g. the banking crisis) are rapidly evolving, complex, and distributed. They unleash unforeseeable waves of chaos, spreading-out and feeding-back with an immediacy accelerated by networks of data, goods, people and capital.

Such problems are best addressed with agile acts of creativity, invention and enterprise, undertaken by teams that bring together the necessary diversity of interests and capabilities with immediacy and urgency. However, fast intellectual action tends to reproduce well-established assumptions and stereotypes, as participants fall back upon hierarchies, patterns and disciplines, throwing us back into the past and its repetition (our first and most familiar space).

OSL is a powerful means by which learners and collaborative agents can force themselves to “break the discipline”, to “bracket-out” assumptions and representations, envisaging different futures (the second, radically unfamiliar space). It provides a pared-down open third space in which to confront the affordances and constraints of the now, virtual futures and our embodied singularity.

In order to fulfil its revolutionary potential, OSL must become more open and mobile, capable of enactment and adaption whenever and wherever required. Combining new technologies with the context-sensitive power of a “ubiquitous” approach makes this happen.

Find out more on the Open-space Learning web site.

Robert O'Toole : 31 Oct 2010 18:24 |  Tags: Ideation |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem