Stephen Downes

Here's a quite worthwhile conversation hosed by Lou McGill with Allison Littlejohn, who is contributing to this week's #chnage11 MOOC. The core of Littlejohn's contribution revolves around the idea of collective learning, which relates to the way people connect to, and make sense of, the contributions made by the community around them. The talk covers four major topics: collective learning in general, the role of social objects in collective learning, openness, and 'charting', or making sense of the collective contributions, through a four-part process: collecting, consuming, creating, contributing. Obviously there is significant overlap between Littlejohn's formulation and my own, and it is interesting to look at the differences - what does it mean, for example, to 'consume' these contributions. The whole thing runs about 20 minutes. See also this post by Littlejohn on the learning ecosystem.