Imagining open source learning- will Skype hack the system?

Last month has been one of unusually frequent traveling for me. Which means spending a lot of time in airplanes and on Skype. A productive thing I guess, since I am writing this blog post during a flight back to NYC and I want to write about Skype’s new teacher social network that launched last Thursday and the possibilities it opens for using open source models to design learning.

So it looks like Skype acknowledged the high number of teachers using the platform in their classroom and decided to launch a new social network, called Education- Skype targeted specifically to educators.  One can use the network to connect with other teachers that have similar interests, create open calls for collaborative projects and most importantly co-create and edit a library of shared resources. Hopefully Skype’s easy to use interface as well as it’s credibility amongst teachers, will lead to a participatory model for designing learning, lending itself to open source dynamics.

The question of “how can we use open source dynamics when we design learning” was first seeded in my mind during a panel in the last DML conference, were Marc Surman from Mozilla, Joi Ito from Creative Commons and Sue Gardner from Wikipedia, talked about the structures, strategies and challenges that exist within the sphere of open source media. Most notably I recall Surman underlining the importance of co-creating, beyond just sharing resources, in an online community. He described this mechanic as “peer to peer doing”.

That line stuck in my head, especially as I was looking at the most popular online tools we have been using in schools, such as Google Docs & Sites, Wikis, Etherpad and Content Management Systems like Moodle. Even though these systems make it relatively easy to share materials, write together curriculum and edit each other’s pieces, they are closed feedback loops in my opinion, since usually they function within a school or a district community. As a result, it is hard for them to do what open source does best, which is to introduce you to new communities, new interests, new opportunities for “peer to peer doing”.

In that realm, Ben Williamson suggests designing learning in the form of a “wikirriculum”, were teachers and learners would take on editorial responsibilities in a dynamic, always on-the-making, curriculum design process. He calls for “cooperation in different networks on a variety of projects”, as it happens in other professional spheres such as software development and design. Enquiring minds, on the other hand, is a UK based program that involves students and their ideas and interests to inform the content of what is taught in school in an open platform. And then there is P2PU that offers the opportunity for anyone to run an online course, making all their materials available on the web and using a badge system for leveling up in a community of experts and certify 21st century skill-sets.

Will Skype’s new platform, make the cut and open the door to a new open source model of designing learning? Will it manage to facilitate mechanics like sharing, doing, remixing and hacking, that have made open source structures innovation incubators? Maybe that is asking too much but at least it is introducing a space for teachers and learners to take on the roles of creators, hackers and most importantly “do-ers”.