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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A lesson with immediate relevance<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A lesson that conflicts with current practice<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n References<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/em>. https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/episode\/48FQL1KK7ALq3W7ngAW1Nq<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/em>. https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/episode\/2CO9mOKe3fXLau4fEFzzjY<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Weller, M. (2020). 25 years of ed tech<\/em>. Athabasca University Press. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.15215\/aupress\/9781771993050.01<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. 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