ICE3 conference

Beyond Difference: Reconfiguring Education for the User-Led Age

• 23 March 2007 - ICE3 conference, Loch Lomond, Scotland

If produsage is an increasingly significant element of intellectual, economic, legal and political processes within society, then educational institutions must pay more attention to developing produser capabilities in their graduates - focussing on learners' collaborative, creative, critical, and communicative capabilities (or C4C, for short). Indeed, they must lead by example and base more of their teaching and learning frameworks on produsage models. Social constructivist approaches to education already call for a greater role for learners in the educational process, but even pedagogies based on this framework often still retain a strong role for the teacher, and standard tertiary education practices continue to allow for innovation only within the confines of otherwise persistent and immutable institutional structures.

Beyond this, however, there is a potential for more wide-ranging changes which reposition learners as co-produsers not only of knowledge, but also of course and institutional structures. Applying a systematic understanding of current cyberspace trends towards produsage in Web2.0 environments to tertiary teaching practice in the 'real world', this paper outlines potential avenues for such pedagogical approaches, and investigates the extent to which they address the needs of what Trendwatching.com describes as 'Generation C'.