The years 2002 to 2011 traced in these chapters cover the rise of tools meant to centralize, standardize, and open up education, the LMS, OER, PLEs, and more. Listening to them alongside the accompanying podcast conversations, two lessons stood out to me as directly relevant to my own life and work: one about what actually makes a learning environment work, and one about where the promise of open access still falls short.
A lesson with immediate relevance
Chapter 18’s discussion of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) led to a debate among the podcast’s guests that named something I already knew: the tools matter less than the connections they make possible. Maha Bali argued that Weller’s focus on PLEs, the tools, platforms, and technologies learners use, missed the more important point: personal learning networks (PLNs), the people we connect with, are what actually make learning happen (Pasquini, 2021b). Rebecca Hogue put it plainly: “The technology wasn’t the purpose. The purpose was the connection and the people” (as cited in Pasquini, 2021b). This distinction feels immediately relevant to me. In this very course, we are given a choice between reading chapters or listening to the podcast, but what has made the biggest difference is not the format, it is the network built through blog comments and classmate replies. I see the same principle in my personal life. My son communicates more easily through tools like Marco Polo and voice texting than through traditional writing, so we use these platforms daily to stay connected when we are apart. I also rely on email and phone calls to stay in touch with his medical and school teams. None of these tools matter on their own, what matters is that each one keeps me connected to a specific person who is part of his support network. I think the lesson here is that autonomy in learning, or in life, is less about which platform we are handed and more about which people we are able to reach through it.
A lesson that conflicts with current practice
A second lesson from this era conflicts with current practice in a way I find genuinely troubling. Chapter 11 traces the emergence of Open Educational Resources (OER) in 2004, built on the idea that knowledge should be freely accessible and reusable. Yet current practice often contradicts this vision, even within a single health authority. My own team, working in Prehabilitation with the thoracic and cardiac surgical programs at Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary, developed a series of live pre-surgical teaching webinars to replace a rushed, all-at-once teaching session previously delivered close to surgery. The program was successful enough that it became mandatory for all thoracic and cardiac surgery patients at that site, and patients now arrive at surgery with fewer modifiable risk factors than before. Yet cardiac and thoracic programs in Edmonton, within the same health authority, developed an entirely separate program called My Heart Coach, and the two initiatives do not share resources or confer with one another. This is not a technology problem, both programs use similar tools to deliver similar content, it is a systems problem: there is no shared policy, infrastructure, or expectation across the health authority that would prompt two sites to collaborate rather than duplicate each other’s work. Listening to a Between the Chapters conversation on this chapter, Kenyan OER researcher Judith Pete raised a related point that sharpened my thinking: many institutions remain consumers of educational content produced elsewhere without yet building the culture or infrastructure to share their own work in turn (Pasquini, 2021a). The specific barriers differ, resource inequity in one case, institutional silos in the other, but the outcome is the same: valuable content stays locked away instead of being shared. The lesson from OER is that increasing access to knowledge remains an important goal, but current practice still struggles to balance openness with institutional silos and commercial interests.
References
Pasquini, L. (Host). (2021a, January 21). Between the chapters #11: Sharing about OER & our open practices with @judyphalet, @catherinecronin, @vrodes, & @marendeepwell [Audio podcast episode]. In 25 years of ed tech. https://open.spotify.com/episode/48FQL1KK7ALq3W7ngAW1Nq
Pasquini, L. (Host). (2021b, March 11). Between the chapters #18: @vconnecting with @rjhogue, @bali_maha, @autumm, @friedelitis & @hj_dewaard [Audio podcast episode]. In 25 years of ed tech. https://open.spotify.com/episode/2CO9mOKe3fXLau4fEFzzjY
Weller, M. (2020). 25 years of ed tech. Athabasca University Press. https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771993050.01
7 September 2026 at 8:55 pm
Hi Kelly,
Your “learning lab” provided me with an important notion to sit with. I connected deeply with the citation you provided of Rebecca Hogue discussing that the purpose is connection and the people rather than the technology. Your additional examples of our learning in LRNT523 and your son’s learning team embody this idea. Your framing has pushed my thinking further because in the final chapter of the book Weller discusses that technologies are most successful when grounded within an educational frame rather than “technology seeking an application” (Weller, 2020, Conclusion). I would like to challenge this even more, thanks to your post, by adding that even more foundational, is that the educational frame needs to hold up and serve the people (students and teachers) involved.
Thank you for providing the example that current practice in your field does not align with the philosophies of Open Educational Resources. I remember reading a blog post of one of our peers who was surprised that this open sharing was also not happening between instructors at the same post secondary institution. Your example really makes the case that we have a far way to go to make education more open. If producing educational resources is happening in isolation within provincial hospitals, sharing resources between competing educational companies seems even more far-fetched. I can imagine that within a hospital setting that sharing resources would absolutely free up valuable time to focus on the myriad other things that could be accomplished (perhaps the creation of even more important resources!) This truly begs the question, what system changes would allow us to make education more open?