Bananas Foster Anyone?

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Last week I was cutting up strawberries for breakfast in my sister-in-law's kitchen. She was searching for a recipe for Bananas Foster. Unhappy with the recipes in her cookbooks, Heather asked her husband to go online for a recipe. She said, Find a recipe easy enough for you to make. He came back with a recipe as well as a crazy accent as he told us how to "kook" this dish. In the end, he made the Bananas Foster for us following the You Tube video by Chef Jean-Pierre.

Yesterday, once I realized that the next topic was video sharing, I began to search for interesting You Tube videos. Three that I found were related to current news items (United Breaks Guitars, Dave Carroll's response to United's offer of compensation, and a video to provide context to the still photo of Obama in France). Besides the Bananas Foster recipe, there were many other How-To videos: Watermelon nails, Make a Kappa Maki roll, and a tutvid on using Photoshop to create an I-Tunes picture. This guy is an amazing teacher. I wish I had Photoshop just to try to do what he taught. I could see this video used in a high school or technical college to teach students to use all the drawing tools at their disposal. Tutvid also has many other tutorials on photography and drawing. I have subscribed to his blog posts because he seems like a very interesting guy. He's so willing to share what he kno

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ws. He even polls his readers to see what they want to learn next. My brother-in-law calls this informal learning. Teach people what they need when they want it rather than making them sit through a day long workshop in which only one hour is relevant to their specific needs. Maybe this could also be called "Just in time" learning. I have heard that for the assembly lines for trucks or automobiles, many parts are delivered from nearby warehouses or factories, just in time--exactly when they are needed and not any sooner. Otherwise they would need to be stored or would gather dust until needed. If the parts were not stored properly, they could be rusty or somehow defective when it was time to use them--to install in that new vehicle.

Could it be the same thing with our computer or technological knowledge? What if we could get the information we needed Just in Time, exactly when we needed it. Just as my brother-in-law found and used a Bananas Foster recipe within a half-hour time period, what if we had collections of You Tube videos which provided Just in Time, informal learning, very specific subject matter assistance to our students when they needed it? Obviously, we would need lots of computers to provide that access. I continue to be concerned for those living outside of the wired world--the half of my students with no computer at home. As the rest of us zip forward, what kind of dust are they eating?

This morning I was looking at a publication from a technology conference in Prague.

(Piedra, N., Chicaiza, J., Lopez, J., Tovar, E., & Martinez, O. (2009). Open educational practices and resources based on social software, UTPL experience. American Conference On Telematics and Information Systems: Proceedings of the 2009 Euro American Conference on Telematics and Information Systems: New Opportunities to increase Digital Citizenship, Prague, Czech Republic, Article 34, DOI: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1551722.1551756)

I have the PDF file (I had to go through my University library to get to it) if you would like it. Here are some quotes from the article:

The role of education in knowledge society requires that teachers transform their roles from instructors and knowledge dispensers to facilitators and mentors of open educational practices.

The development of competences, knowledge and abilities requires that students assume an active, constructive, and collaborative role instead of a passive role in which they receive, assimilate and reproduce the knowledge.

The alternative to learning materials repositories, descendent and teacher-centered, is the promotion of open educational practices that give teachers and students the capacity, based on their efforts, to create repositories OER where they can be cocreators of open contents. The access to educational resources is not a solution itself and requires practices that encourage a culture that promotes collaboration.

To improve the re- usability of contents and services, either for creation or provision, it must take into account the utilization of standards and open content formats, use of open licenses such as Creative Commons or GNU GPL, open APIs and use of specifications/open technical standards for educational software systems.

There is a web or semantic map of OER (Open Educational Resources) presented in that article. I was trying to paste it here but can't do it. For me

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their entire vision of collaboratively constructing knowledge fits with Paulo Friere's thought of the anti-banking model of schools. (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970)) The banking model of schools says: You (the student) are empty. I (the teacher) must fill you. Students were the repositories of knowledge. Paulo opposed this model. He (and his followers like Peter McLaren) said that the students had their own funds of knowledge and cultural capital which should be called upon. Then the teacher and students would together build their understandings of knowledge. For my way of thinking, this fits so well with the Open Educational Resources concept. As we each share what we know (just like the helpful stranger who told me to use a period rather than an@ in my blog address), we will build new understandings and personal connections with that knowledge.

I guess that was my little detour from purely looking at video sharing as part of educational practice. I will post more later.