{"id":819,"date":"2016-09-12T14:36:29","date_gmt":"2016-09-12T14:36:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rachel.we-are-low-profile.com\/blog\/?p=819"},"modified":"2017-12-07T12:07:00","modified_gmt":"2017-12-07T12:07:00","slug":"empowered-communities-online-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rachel.we-are-low-profile.com\/blog\/empowered-communities-online-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"Building more empowered local communities through local global online learning"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lat week, I was an invited speaker at the inaugural Digital Plymouth Conference<\/a> (Plymouth, UK). The event was really well attended (200+ audience) and #DigiPlymConf<\/a> trended on twitter many times throughout the day. For those of you who missed the event, the videos of all the presentations should be posted online at some point soon, and in the meantime, I thought it might be useful to publish the text of my talk here, introducing some ideas about how we could build more empowered local communities through global online learning.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\"to-share-rachel-dobbs-building-more-empowered-local-communities-through-global-online-learning\"<\/p>\n

I’m a freelance artist & educator (based in Plymouth, UK), interested in how digital platforms can enable improved community learning and development.<\/p>\n

In this talk, I’d like to explore how the shift in digital technologies over the last 20 years has irrevocably changed education and our ideas around learning, opening up potential new spaces and opportunities that could be used by individuals and groups in local communities to build skills, take greater ownership and improve their situation.<\/p>\n

\"rachel-dobbs-building-more-empowered-local-communities-through-global-online-learning\"Alongside my work in the arts and education, I am also a committed, curious autodidact and learning addict. Being an autodidact used to be a relative oddity, but I\u2019d like to argue here that with the complete integration of digital technologies in our everyday lives that has happened over the last 10 years, that WE ARE ALL AUTODIDACTS NOW.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\"to-share-rachel-dobbs-building-more-empowered-local-communities-through-global-online-learning-1\"Currently, you would be hard-pressed to go through a day in your life without learning something new –\u00a0but you might be unlikely to think of what you are involved in as education in a strict formal sense.\u00a0<\/span>This is partly due to the way we think about \u201ceducation\u201d itself – as something that happens in schools, colleges or universities – as something formal, where a teacher teaches and learners learn. Something that happens \u2018outside\u2019 of our daily lives.<\/span><\/p>\n

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From distance learning to micro learning…<\/h2>\n

\"to-share-rachel-dobbs-building-more-empowered-local-communities-through-global-online-learning-2\"<\/h2>\n

This\u00a0timeline shows the recent\/current period of rapid change in what we think of as learning and autodidacticsm – or self-teaching. I\u2019ve started here in 1969 with the establishment of the Open University<\/a> – a dedicated distance learning provider, although they are by no means the first in that field (that mantle is held by a correspondence course in shorthand from the 1700s). <\/span><\/p>\n

You can see that the timeline follows through to the mid-90s, where online learning, then virtual learning environments start to provide formal e-learning frameworks, and then through the 2000s where the mainstream adoption of online video and smartphones introduces a whole new layer of informal mobile learning.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"to-share-rachel-dobbs-building-more-empowered-local-communities-through-global-online-learning-3\"This represents a massive shift – from the classroom, or carefully prepared distance learning materials to the phone in your pocket. In 2016, CONTENT IS EVERYWHERE. We can access an unparalleled amount of information, and learning is only ever a quick google search away. <\/span><\/p>\n

Learning is no longer divorced from our lives – and the information networks we access on a daily basis are our new classrooms.<\/span><\/p>\n

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This has come about through a kind of perfect storm:<\/span><\/p>\n