Eco-Resources: A New Metaphor for Open Educational Resources

The new challenges of the information society led to a new competences’ teachers profile: teachers have to interact with a knowledge that is accelerated, globalized and complex and with students having new features. Despite the new challenges required from the information society, the teachers’ activity seems to continue to rely on traditional methods: transmission of knowledge, disciplinary isolation, and a vision of the new technologies like a simple tool to solve problems, instead of a thing that changes deeply the learning process. This is the reason why, during the last years, a lot of efforts have been done in the teachers’ role, to transform them in reflective practitioners and active actors of the innovation process, to increase the quality of education (Goodson, 2003; Hargreaves, 2003; Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005). To promote a new way of learning and in particular the ability to learn in relation with the others, it is important to connect all the environments where the learning takes place (formal, non formal and informal). This is a great challenge for the educational system: integrate into the institutional learning the social networks of the students, to produce a significant knowledge (Olimpo, 2010). In addition to this, it is also important to develop a connection between different teachers and disciplines, building an integrated curriculum, in order to create an educational practice that is sustainable, where the result obtained in a particular area leads to significant results also in others areas. For all these reasons, and in particular to address the constant changes and the complexity of the information society, the teachers should develop new skills: creativity, ability to survey, and ability to learn in relation with peers (Olimpo, op.cit), to be able to manage their knowledge as a process. Internet seems to be a good training environment to develop these skills (Caviglia & Ferraris, 2008; Jakes, Pennington, Knodle, 2002), but we cannot hope that this process happens with a spontaneous use of the Web; it is necessary to design and implement specific learning situations.