Harold Jarche

It seems that this is the real me; that is, if you think that five questions can determine your essence:

You’re Siddhartha!

by Hermann Hesse

You simply don’t know what to believe, but you’re willing to try anything once. Western values, Eastern values, hedonism and minimalism, you’ve spent some time in every camp. But you still don’t have any idea what camp you belong in. This makes you an individualist of the highest order, but also really lonely. It’s time to chill out under a tree. And realize that at least you believe in fairies.

Take the Book Quiz  at the Blue Pyramid.

An article in The Pulse [offline] shatters some stereotypes about the military and those who serve. The author teaches at a university where military personnel are enrolled in education programs to become teachers. In speaking with these soldiers, Etta Kralovec finds out that the military culture can be much more inclusive than academia, “My experiences with these students has changed fundamentally my views about the military and who serves in it and what these folks can offer to students in our public schools.”

I learned early as a military instructor that everyone is teachable. Our training organisations worked on the premise that if a trainee failed, it was probably the fault of the instructor. This put the pressure on the instructors to find the best way to help soldiers to perform while the the trainees learned to work together. Kralovec observed that military students were more focused on supporting learning:

These students understand the notion of community in a very personal way. As soldiers, they learned to watch each others’ backs as well as work as a team member. These will not be teachers who close their doors and don’t share their websites. They are comfortable working in groups, bringing along everyone in their group as they complete projects. Unlike most other students, TTT [troops to teachers] students never say, “I don’t want to work in a group on this project.” They pitch in, divide up the tasks and get to it. Rather than try to negotiate an assignment, these folks just do it.

Sometimes we can learn from the most unexpected sources.

Since the turn of the century [1900], literacy rates in the US have declined from 90% to 35% [are there Canadian stats?]. Rob Paterson explains that this may be due in part to the rise of competitors (such as the records, movies, TV) to the print medium. Rob also shows that much more money put into the US public education system has had no effect on literacy.

Another perspective on the drop in literacy is from Mark Federman, in “Why Johnny and Janey Can’t Read, and Why Mr. and Ms. Smith Can’t Teach: The challenge of multiple media literacies in tumultuous times“. Mark puts forth that we are in a similar situation as when the written word replaced the spoken word (ancient Greece) or when the printed word replaced the written word (the Reformation & Enlightenment). Each of these technologies changed the way that society valued and understood knowledge. Mark concludes in his paper [pdf] that literacy is no longer our critical educational issue:

Have no fear – Johnny and Janey will, in all probability, learn to read, just as they learned to speak. But orality has not structured society since ancient Greece, and literacy no longer structures society today. The challenge for all the Mr. and Ms. Smiths throughout the academy, and eventually in the secondary and primary classrooms throughout the world, is to recognize that the exclusive focus and predominance given to the pedagogical artefacts of a literate world is inconsistent with the skills necessary to participate in the discovery and production of knowledge in a ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate world.

Our efforts that focus on print literacy may be for naught. Do linear literacy skills really prepare us for life in an electronically connected world? I don’t believe that we have done enough research on this issue, but if Mark is correct, then we are wasting a huge amount of time and effort on the wrong skills. We can use technologies such as fMRI to see what is going on in our brains, but we may be asking the wrong questions.

… and I have to add this quote from Alvin Toffler: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. “

Great conversation with Hugh McLeod looking at the difference between enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and social media (SM). According to Hamish, with SM, “All interpretation of the message is done by the human receiver”, whereas “In ERP by contrast we have a whole load more stuff to do, as all interpretation is done by the software, or more accurately by rules written in software by a designer who is not in situ to intervene in any ambiguous situations. ”

Learning management systems (LMS) are the ERP’s of the education and training world. They try to take into account all of the factors necessary to control the experience, whether it be the “right” content or the most “appropriate” evaluation. Automating teaching and learning in order to be like ERP’s is the holy grail in some edtech business circles.

Learning is not a business process. Learning is the interpretation of messages by a human receiver, whether these messages be information or experiences. That means that a dumb network, like SM, with human interpreters at the ends, makes for better learning than a smart network, with its limited (by design) number of constraints.

The best LMS is the Web, because it allows any message to be received by anyone, without adding a pre-defined learning wrapper. In a world of ever expanding information and knowledge, the key to “managing” learning is helping individuals to develop their own message interpretation processes and skills.