The Open Context Model of Learning

Abstract

Various digital technologies, the internet, the web, information appliances, smart phones, and particularly, Web 2.0 enable us to review and interrogate how technologies, business, social, personal, and learning technologies can help reconfigure the organisational infrastructure of learning to better align with how human beings learn about the world around us and ourselves. Hazel Henderson said, “Technology is the essence of politics,” but perhaps “Technology is the essence of education,” which for 1000 years has been based on a content-scarcity model of resources and focused on a content-delivery model of learning to an elite who will benefit from access to these scarce resources, themselves based on a subject-based taxonomy that took root in the 19th century and has dominated the design of 20th and 21st century educational institutions. The Open Context Model of Learning argues that we need new models of teaching and learning (obuchenie) built around the PAH continuum of pedagogy, andragogy, and heutagogy and an underpinning belief in the co-creation of learning and education between “teachers” and “learners.”