Education’s Three Conflicting Pillars

by

I participated in the EdTech Talk today that featured Jay Cross and George Siemens. The conversation flowed and the chat room stayed active with Stephen Downes and many others adding additional perspectives. The initial conversation centered on Connectivism and Informal Learning but meandered to many other corners of the learning field.

Some of George’s comments about learning and education and the conflict around what a good education should be, got me thinking about the work of Kieran Egan. His book, The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape our Understanding, begins with the statement that Western education is based on three conflicting premises which compete for dominance. These three premises are:

  • education as socialization
  • education as a quest for truth (Plato)
  • education as the realization of individual potential (Rousseau)

Since no one premise can dominate without precluding the others, we continue to have conflict in our education system. Our public education system was created to give equal access to all (a good thing) and to prepare workers for industrial jobs (a self-serving thing for the corporations). Public education was embraced by reformers as well as factory owners.

The problem is that education has become all things to all people, and this conflict is clear in Egan’s book. You cannot socialize, seek the truth and realize individual potential all at the same time — within a single, enclosed system.

This lack of agreement on what our education system should be, is also muddying the waters in our discussions about learning. My experience is that few people disagree with any one of these premises on its own. So which one is the primary premise? Should there even be a primary premise? Without one, we keep bouncing around like pinballs, addressing symptoms but not root causes.

When reduced to the basic process, I believe that learning is an individual and personal activity. Learning has social aspects and can be helped or hindered in many ways. How we build systems to nurture, support or coerce it, are the issues that we can address as a community. First though, we have to have a common understanding of what we’re trying to achieve.

How the death of curriculum could mean the rebirth of learning

by

Brian Alger [dead link] has an excellent article on the key role that curriculum plays in the development of education. Anyone involved in learning, whether as a designer, teacher, faciliator or administrator, should read this article which describes in clear terms that education is not learning and that curriculum is a constraining force that must be understood if we wish to foster learning. I found the link between curriculum and bullying especially enlightening, as my wife has been studying, writing, and presenting on bullying in schools for the past several years:

One of the effects of curriculum design of any kind is confinement. And the confinement of human experience is an act of violence. A common example of this confinement via curriculum leading to violence is bullying.

On the question of, “Do we need curriculum?”, these additional questions show its mind-numbing effects:

When we ask the question we are also asking if we need the concept of the prerequisite, imposed forms of content, sterile classrooms as a primary location, fragmented schedules of time, as well as impersonal and ineffective forms of testing and evaluation.

Curriculum development is an enormous industry in our public education systems, and moving away from curriculum design and on to the greater task of fostering learning will be a huge, but worthwhile task.

Challenging the validity of curriculum in any form means to challenge people’s jobs whether they are political officials, school administrators, consultants, teachers, students or parents. Part of the immense control and authority that curriculum has is that it provides careers and therefore sources of income. This, in my own experience, is where I have found the most significant roadblock to change and innovation.

Congrès CSTD Toronto

by

Le 9 novembre je serai conférencier au CSTD Toronto, au sujet de l’apprentissage et communautique en services de santé. Nous serons un groupe très intime, (7 personnes à  date).

Cet étude de cas est à  propos un projet fait par l’équipe Mancomm Performance de Montréal. Nous avons collaboré avec le Centre de santé et services sociaux (CSSS) du Sud-Lanaudière à  la mise en place d’un cours en ligne pour les infirmières portant sur l’approche McGill, ainsi que  la création de communautés de praticiens pour les travailleurs sociaux et les professionnels en santé mentale.

Depuis l’analyse de la performance au travail jusqu’à  la livraison sur des plateformes MOODLE et ELGG (logiciels gratuits et libres), l’équipe a travailé étroitement avec le personnel hospitalier au moyen d’ontologies de domaine et la co-construction d’une base de connaissances.

Cette session sera ciblé vers les méthodologies utilisé par l’équipe et les bénéfices des logiciels libres en apprentissage.

CSTD Knowledge Exchange – Toronto

by

One week from today I’ll be presenting at the CSTD Knowledge Exchange conference in Toronto. Tuesday’s presentation will be in English and Wednesday’s in French. In case you’re one of the 32 people (25 English, 7 French) who’ve booked my session, here are some of the specifics.
I’ll discuss how we analysed the work needs of nursing staff and developed a job aid linked to an online learning environment (Moodle).
I’ll show the process that we used to develop an online community of practice for mental health and social workers, including various systems that we tested until we settled on elgg.
Screen captures of all of the online environments will be shown but the focus will be more on the processes that we developed and what we have learned so far.
With the small numbers in attendance, there will be plenty of time for questions and discussion, and my intention is to let the audience drive the agenda. I promise that this will not be “death by PowerPoint”, (I’m using OpenOffice anyway) and you will not have suffer bulleted lists being read to you. If you’re planning on attending and have any questions, please feel free to make a comment here or contact me.

UNESCO Open Educational Resources Conference

by

Like Stephen Downes, I have had difficulty getting into this UNESCO conference on Open Educational Resources (open content for higher education) – lterally and figuratively.

Because of this rather large number, participants have been split into two groups:

* one group can send and receive messages (members selected to balance geographic participation);

* the other group will receive daily digests of the messages to read.

I am in the second group, so I get to receive the e-mails, which after the first week are about a dozen and some of these include an additional dozen attachments. All of the comments take a lot of time to sift through and I thought that I’d be able to summarize them and put them on this blog. Unfortunately I haven’t had the time or the discipline to do this, but Joe Hart has, so you can read his summary instead. Here’s one of his summary comments after week one:

It is important in our forum to recognize that online universal higher education is not a utopia, that it is not a threat to established education, that it is a great opportunity for producers and users alike, and that these messages should be conveyed to governments, universities, and other organizations.

Free Blogs for Schools

by

Well, James Farmer is true to his word and has created Learner Blogs for students to start their own free blogs. The subject of what was a good blogging platform for K-12 students was raised during our EdTech Talk brainstorm last night, and James jumped right in and offered to create a safe blogging environment for students. Learner Blogs is on Word Press MU and offers a more restricted environment, and better features, than the publicly available Blogger. Having a password-protected site that is not open to the entire Web is a necessary feature when introducing young students to blogging.
If you want to learn more about how to use blogs in schools, Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed News is a good place to start.

Multi-user Blog Review

by

James Farmer has a review of multi-user blogs, including Drupal, WordPress Multi-user, elgg, Movable Type, Manila and pLog. So what kind of real-world applications are there for multi-user blogs?
As I’ve mentioned before, we’re using elgg with a healthcare community of practice and one of the tools is a professional journal (blog). These journals are used to keep other community members up to date on training issues and are used to track committee minutes and agendas. Nothing fancy but it’s a practical application within a corporate intranet.
We like elgg so much at Mancomm that we’re going to move away from eGroupware and switch to elgg for document sharing and internal communications.
I can see multi-user blogs as useful applications for distributed communities (e.g. educators within a school system) who want to share their knowledge and need more functions than a free service like Blogger offers. With multi-user blogs you only need one administrator and the community uses a common platform which fosters peer-to-peer support.

Informal Learning for a Flat World

by

A flattened world is one where skilled workers compete with each other, no matter where they live. With the opening of China, India and Russia to the world economy, the world is becoming flatter. Thomas Friedman, in The World is Flat says that there are four categories of workers who will prosper in a flattened global economy – special workers, specialized workers, anchored workers and really adaptable workers. Learning how to learn will be the critical skill for this last group; who in my opinion will be the largest. In 1998 I noted in my thesis that learning how to learn would be the critical job skill for the future. It’s now becoming reality.

Given the huge diversity of learning needs for these adaptable workers, we need to move away from a one size fits all educational approach. One of the answers is informal learning (see Jay Cross), which can be likened to mass customisation. It allows the learner to co-design the learning process.

This means that informal learning environments have to be loose structures that can accommodate as many different learning needs as possible. Instructional systems design (ISD) was developed to train soldiers for war so that everyone would have the same skills. In a global, networked world the last thing you want are the same skills as everyone else, as you will then be an interchangeable commodity.

Therefore in an economy that needs adaptable learners, the type of learning environment that they will demand will be an adaptable one as well. A single course, with established learning objectives that all students must achieve, just won’t cut it.

The Web for learning – from stock to flow

by

Will Richardson talks about the changing needs of learners in a networked world:

For instance, now that we have access to people and knowledge, learning is “network creation” and that we can learn through “collaborative meaning making.” And the idea the we no longer need to learn everything in “advance of need” resonates strongly with Brown and Hagel’s idea of push vs. pull learning, that we can pull information from a source when we need it, not have it pushed upon us in case we need it.

I have always felt that the Web was an environment more suited to just-in-time learning (e.g. performance support) than for the more pervasive course model. Learning on the web is moving from stock to flow. It also seems that in true McLuhanesque fashion the medium of the Web is having measurable effects on those who use the technology, specifically  – obsolescing, enhancing, retrieving and reversing. For instance:

  • Courses are being obsolesced on the connected Web.
  • Access to knowledge is enhanced.
  • Storytelling is being retrieved, especially through podcasting.
  • Learning on the Web may also reverse into mere grazing, instead of in-depth learning.

Now that the Web is becoming ubiquitous, we are moving away from a horseless carriage type of metaphor and using the medium for what it can really do. I see a rapid decline in online course development as better models of collaboration and just-in-time knowledge are developed. We also will need more metaphors, models & technologies to facilitate 24/7/365 learning in a connected world.