From Socio-Technical Approach to Open Education: MIS and ICT for the Definition of New Educational Paradigms

The paper reports first of all the author’s hypothesis for the revision of the socio-technical approach when special MIS (Management Information System) are introduced in corporate, organizations and in more general contexts. The above idea emerges from the results of some experiences described in the text, where the introduction of Information Systems (supported by ICT) both for the creation of communities of practices and professional communities and for their growth and evolution are discussed. The experiences reported in the paper are based on the planning and carrying out of web sites having the features of online information systems. They are concerned with two special situations, students attending palaeography university courses and teachers involved in an after degree master course. Notwithstanding the different contexts the two situations have a common feature which can be summarized as follows: ICT and especially web technologies have been used to implement working and/or studying processes, people had to follow the new procedures to accomplish their work. All the discussed situations have other common features but, for the importance they have in the finding of a new teaching paradigm, only the common effects they induced on the individuals and on the communities involved in the experiences will be analyzed here in a greater detail. The description of the main ideas in the most relevant educational philosophies and the comparison of their features with those from the new income, the ”implementation of practices by means of the ICT”, lets the author state that a new educational paradigm has been found. Like augmented reality and simulation in virtual environments the new paradigm is based on the use of the ICT; differently from the other ones, which produce an increment of the data from reality or model reality to create learning situations, the new paradigm strongly involves people and communities in the analysis of the processes and in the development of Learning strategies. At last the definition of open education is proposed. It is the consequence of the adoption of the open source software for the systems the author used in the different experiences, but it is also a paraphrase of the already accredited definitions like open source, open learning etc. The open appellation in open education is derived from the features of the TETIS platform (i.e., one of the systems described in the experiences) and means that every actor in an educational process can access and manage his/her personal data, but can also access synthetic data (when authorized) from the other actors. The students in open educational procedures can better understand processes’ evolution, can compare different processes to define learning and studying strategies and have more chances to become the right citizen in the knowledge society.