Category:Inquiry

The category collects learning materials and procedural pages in support of a project on Peer Educational Resources (PERs). This project addresses a host of problems that I've observed arising in numerous projects devoted to developing Open Educational Resources (OERs) in one fashion or another.

In connection with this idea, I envisioned a way organizing materials that uses the concepts of Focal Nodes and Peer Nodes.

• Focal nodes serve as hubs for collections of related resources, in particular, activities and articles.

• Peer nodes are roughly parallel pages on different sites that are not necessarily identical in content — especially as they develop in time through interaction with diverse populations — but they should preserve enough information to reproduce each other, more or less, in case of damage or loss.

I'll try to articulate a more detailed rationale on this and other pages later on, but this project is somewhat more experimental than thoroughly worked out ahead of time — as I'll be looking for new ways to break out of developmental ruts that I've observed over the last decade.

First Readings

Though I don't recall being fully aware of it at the time — we were focused on the issues of integrative education and the potential of "transversities", not the active geometry of the Web — many of these developments were already anticipated in a paper that Susan Awbrey and I wrote for a conference on Re-Organizing Knowledge, Trans-Forming Institutions and later reworked for the journal Organization.

• Awbrey, S.M., and Awbrey, J.L. (May 2001), "Conceptual Barriers to Creating Integrative Universities", Organization : The Interdisciplinary Journal of Organization, Theory, and Society 8(2), Sage Publications, London, UK, pp. 269–284. Abstract.

• Awbrey, S.M., and Awbrey, J.L. (September 1999), "Organizations of Learning or Learning Organizations : The Challenge of Creating Integrative Universities for the Next Century", Second International Conference of the Journal Organization , Re-Organizing Knowledge, Trans-Forming Institutions : Knowing, Knowledge, and the University in the 21st Century, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. Online.

— Jon Awbrey