This is a guest post by David White. David is an education & technology researcher based in the Technology Assisted Lifelong Learning (TALL) unit at the University of Oxford. He is keen to see beyond the technology to the larger underlying trends that are emerging as society moves online. His TALL posts live here while his moment-by-moment musings can be found under @daveowhite
Last week I gave a talk about what I call the Learning Black Market at a Guardian seminar on the uses of Social Media for learning and teaching in higher education. It’s something that I have seen emerging from the data we are collecting for the Visitors and Residents project and from interviewing students for our study on the use of Open Educational Resources. In simple terms students personal use of the internet is generally very effective for their education but they are nervous that their practices are not valid and don’t reveal them to their tutors. The messages or lack of messages from educational institutions on these practices is generating a learning black market which masks the sheer scale of these new modes of engagement.
