Learner Generated Contexts

While I remember: I was at an event at the London Knowledge Lab last week about Learner Generated Contexts, which was organised by my wee academic pal Rose Luckin. What, you might wonder, is a learner generated context? I have often wondered myself. Learner generated content I get - it's about students learning through creating materials, whether it be writing on a blog or contributing to a wiki, or recording a podcast. But what does context mean here? I think it means that learners not only get to make stuff, but to choose how they want to learn too. The context could be where they want to learn (home, school) or the medium they want to learn with (book, video, online articles), or the topics they want to learn in depth. Context seems to be a placeholder for a whole lot at the moment, and the LGC group are working on defining a framework to make this clearer. A question raised after the event was related to issues I am familiar with from learner centred software design. How can learners know the best way to learn? I mean, by definition, they don't know the topic. Teachers do, and they have experience in effective ways of teaching it. Wouldn't my students who have paid a fortune to study on our MSc programmes be miffed if I told them to work out how to teach themselves? (Almost certainly yes). This is an extreme position of course, but points to a real concern. How can teachers switch from being content providers to helping learners to be providers of their own contexts? Luckily, I don't have to answer that, as Rose and co. will. All this jargon makes my head spin.