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.