rip-mix-and-learn
The rip-mix-and-learn project was launched as a hands-on research intervention at the University of the Western Cape in June 2007. It is supported by the Shuttleworth Foundation, and investigates what happens when students use Web 2.0 applications to become producers of their own knowledge, rather than consumers of information prepared for them.
Effective education demands creativity, but today's elearning environments focus primarily on distribution of information to students, rather than on creation and construction of knowledge by students. Textbooks are written, educational television programs are produced, multimedia learning materials are created for students to learn from them. Educational resources are seen, implicitly, as something produced by so-called experts for use by learners.
In such a model, there is little room for active participation by the learner. The system is designed based on the implicit assumption that learners have little to contribute to the creation of teaching and learning resources and therefore need resources to be created for them.
The rip-mix-and-learn project investigates what happens when we place the learner in the centre rather then at periphery of instruction; embedded in social communities of peers, and learning through interaction with resources and people.
Rip-mix-learn describes a process in which students collaboratively identify, evaluate, adapt, synthesize and create electronic content. Learners become producers of a significant part of the materials and activities in their courses.
The research looks in detail at different rip-mix-learn practices currently in use at UWC, including:
- students producing podcasts,
- using blogs to publish their assignments,
- reviewing and assessing each others' work,
- participating in online discussion lists,
- or authoring content collaboratively in wikis.
In all of these courses we ask two broad questions:
- How and what are students learning when given more responsibility and opportunity to create their own learning experiences?
- What is the role of peer assessment, both for providing support to the learners, and evaluating their work?
The project continues to kick at the boundaries created by conventional learning material design and explores the possibilities created by implementing a remix culture in the education environment.