In this authorative report on Open Educational Resources, education, and other related issues, skills for knowledge workers are discussed (amongst other things). Professional skills needed in a knowledge economy are acquired by using interactive, collaborative, and constructive tools as weblogs and wikis. The reason I am now blogging, and more or less used to it, is because of a course given by David Wiley (http://opencontent.org). Not because of my university, where not a single course mandated or suggested any of these technologies. (BTW. I assisted in setting up a wiki for a course, which was one of the first wikis to be used for a course on the uni :: evaluation on my blog next week)
If students have their own Weblog they engage in a self-directed, constructive practice. As authors of postings they must make their minds up about a topic, gather, evaluate and interpret information, take a position, come up with convincing arguments and evidence, and find the right means and style of expression. And this practice is inherently social and conversational, because the students themselves experience being part of a distributed community of interest and refer to ideas and writings of others. The same is true if students work collaboratively on a thematic Wiki, where each of them can add information, edit and rework texts of others, etc. They engage in collaborative knowledge creation, which will include discussing certain assumptions, statements, information sources, etc.
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