Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, May 31, 2006

More on OA for lay readers

John Udell, Re-imagining education, John Udell's Weblog, May 30, 2006. Excerpt:

I've been thinking a lot about how ascendant uses of the Internet -- including blogging, podcasting, screencasting, and social software -- could transform education in the way that television was supposed to but of course never did....[W]e're approaching a dual inflection point: widespread access to existing knowledge, coupled with a widespread ability to publish new knowledge.  A compelling analysis of how these trends can improve education, and why that improved educational system will be the right one for the 21st century, comes from John Willinsky, whose podcast talk on these subjects I found by way of Brian Lamb.

Among his themes, Willinsky talks about how he, as a reading specialist, would never have predicted what has now become routine. Patients with no ability to read specialized medical literature are, nonetheless, doing so, and then arriving in their doctors’ offices asking well-informed questions. Willinsky (only semi-jokingly) says the Canadian Medical Association decided this shouldn’t be called "patient intimidation" but, rather, "shared decision-making."

How can level 8 readers absorb level 14 material? There are only two factors that govern reading success, Willinsky says: motivation, and context. When you're sick, or when a loved one is sick, your motivation is a given. As for context:

They don't have a context? They build a context. The first time they get a medical article, duh, I don't know what's going on here, I can't read the title. But what happened when I did that search? I got 20 other articles on the same topic. And of those 20, one of them, I got a start on. It was from the New York Times, or the Globe and Mail, and when I take that explanation back to the medical research, I've got a context. And then when I go into the doctor's office...and actually, one of the interesting things...is that a study showed that 65% of the doctors who had had this experience of patient intimidation shared decision-making said the research was new to them, and they were kind of grateful, because they don't have time to check every new development.

...Access to knowledge, access to publishing. Motivation and context. If an educational system embraced these principles, what would it look like? Willinsky challenges us to figure it out, and anyone with a stake in education -- which is to say, everyone -- should be asking and trying to answer that question.