Teaching and learning through open source educative processes

This paper introduces some of the core ideas of an Open Source Educational Processes approach. Based in part on the practices of the Open Source communities of the late 20th and early 21st centuries such as the Linux community, along with the idea that human activity should be held as primary in human-Internet interactions, open source educational processes suggest that individuals will require new types of skills and self-efficacies in order to realize the potential of their Internet activities. Education for these skills is at least in part dependent on development of curricula that recognizes the dialectical relationship between individual agency and goal driven, online communities. It is the communities which drive individual motivations to search for new problem solving possibilities, create well-functioning communities that are capable of organizing and differentiating distributed sources of information, and act as inflection points in the flow of information, recognizing that knowledge is not an object but an ongoing activity. These types of communities are currently relatively rare, especially for distributed populations who do share an initial stake in its goals. One of the few places many students might be able to experience these types of communities and build their Internet skills and self-efficacies are in consciously designed communities provided in traditional education contexts. 21st century education should move (quickly) towards embracing the new types of thinking and intelligence made possible by the Internet through open source educative processes influenced curricula.