Learning

Learning

Sacrificing the joy of learning

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This week we had “take you child to work day” for our son in Grade 9. He wasn’t interested in seeing what a home-based consultant does, as he sees this every day. Instead, we arranged a day with a family member who is a helicopter pilot. We drove the 150 km to the hangar and on the way our son did his homework.

His math work had to do with exponentials and reducing equations to a less complex form; or something like that. I looked at the equations and realised that I did not have a clue how to do them. Not only that, but I couldn’t tell him where he might apply this later in his life. So here I am, unable to do Grade 9 math, even though I have two years of university-level calculus and algebra, as well as two years of physics [I went to a military college where even those majoring in History had to have a “well-rounded” education in the sciences].

My inability to do Grade 9 math got me thinking about the usefulness of the public education curriculum (again). I can see the requirement for having skills in mathematics. Of particular importance today would be understanding statistical analysis and how stats can be used to tell almost any lie.

A couple of days later, I came across this article by Roger Schank; blaming the laziness of college professors for the focus on arcane subjects:

“Universities dictate curricula to high schools to make professor’s lives easier. If everyone takes physics and calculus and most never use it, well, professors claim it was good for the students anyway when in fact it was only good for making sure professors didn’t have to teach it in college. As long as professors don’t have to teach the basics it is okay that high school students are forced to study stuff they will never use in their whole lives. We have ruined an entire generation of high school students who don’t like learning and think the subject matter is irrelevant because professors only want to teach the good stuff.

We sacrifice the joy of learning for an entire generation so professors can have an easier time teaching incoming students.”

I have 18 years of formal education, 25 years of work experience, have never used exponential equations outside of school, and don’t remember how to do them today. What are we teaching, and why?

Networked Work Needs Networked Learning

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In a recent discussion on informal learning I was asked how it could be integrated into formal work environments. What I have learned so far about informal learning is that it is more of a cultural issue than about process or technology improvements. The key factor is control. To foster informal learning, organisations have to give up control. We see this with social networking on the Internet and that organisations that let go of centralised control are able to adapt quicker. The Dean campaign was one example, as is viral marketing.

The fact that small, loose organisations can adapt quicker has been evident for a couple of centuries, when you examine guerrilla groups fighting against large hierarchical military organisations. Guerrillas proved their worth against Napoleon in Spain in the early 19th century as well as against the US in Vietnam in the latter part of the 20th century. Many military experts now talk about network warfare, or netwar.

If network warfare was possible years ago, as witnessed during the Peninsular War, why is netwar something new? I think that the original guerrillas showed what was possible, but it took the ubiquitous information and communication network, the Internet, to make it the default organisational model. As a retired soldier, I always considered the military to be a conservative-minded organisation. If the military is seriously considering network warfare, then it seems that the need to understand networked business & learning is pretty obvious.

One example of networked businesses is the animation field, where creatives live all over the world. With some companies, the creative team is physically separated from the production team by several time zones, so that work can go on 24 hours a day, as the day’s work moves back and forth between teams. Even when they’re spread out, excessive control is not necessary. Christopher Sessums reports on why Pixar is so successful as a creative force, citing the fact there are no studio execs to control the process. Control is the enemy of innovation and flexibility.

Effective work and learning networks are composed of unique individuals working on common challenges, together for a discrete period of time before the network begins to shift its focus again. This is like small groups of guerrillas joining for a raid, conducting it, and then going their separate ways to reform as a different set for a new mission. If armies and businesses organisations are changing to networked models, then the best learning support has to be informal, loose and networked as well. We are shifting from a “one size fits all” attitude on work and learning to an “everyone is unique” perspective. If everyone is unique then there are no generic work processes and no standard curricula.

If everyone is unique, we need to seriously reconsider our models for training and education. Brian Alger has shown the severe limitations of standard curricula and Bill and Julie at NineShift sum up the issue as:

The issue is also about the biggest educational struggle in this early century: the switch from making every student “normal” to understanding that every student is not normal, in other words, unique.

In warfare, work and learning we are witnessing a major change in command and control and we will have to shift with it or suffer the fate of several defeated armies.

Instruments of our success?

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I’ve just watched Reds, Whites and the Blues on CBC TV, described as “Four savvy teenagers from the Rez take us to their White high schools and show us why most native kids don’t graduate.” I watched four kids record video for several months as they go through school. What struck me was that these are intelligent and articulate kids but they don’t connect to the school. As one boy says, “I’m proud to be Chief Dan George’s great, great grandson … and he stood for education.” But the school system is not designed to encourage connections and there is no connection between this First Nation and the public school system; they are separate worlds.

Their stories once again reminded me of Roger Schank’s Student Bill of Rights. Almost everything that we see in this documentary by Duncan McCue breaks an article of the bill of rights, particularly these three:

Clarity of Goals: No student should be required to take a course, the results of which are not directly related to a goal held by the student, nor to engage in an activity without knowing what he can expect to gain from that activity.

Passivity: No student should be required to spend time passively watching or listening to anything unless there is a longer period of time devoted to allowing the student to participate in a corresponding active activity.

Arbitrary Standards: No student should be required to prepare his work in ways that are arbitrary or to jump through arbitrary hoops defined only by a particular teacher and not by the society at large.

Duncan says that teachers have no skills in how to teach native kids, but I think that part of the problem is that “One size fits nobody” and the system’s defects are just more evident here. The choice for these kids is to conform or else. With everything that we purport to know about pedagogy and neuro-science, can’t we create better learning environments than this? Do students have to write arbitrary exams to be certified as successful, and if they fail they’re branded as losers for life?

Chief Dan George said in 1967, “Oh, God! Like the Thunderbird of old I shall rise again out of the sea; I shall grab the instruments of the white man’s success—his education, his skills, and with these new tools I shall build my race into the proudest segment of your society.” However, I’m not sure if the instruments of our success are worth taking.

Six Words

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Mark Oehlert has set forth the following challenge:

“So here is the challenge – think of six word lesson plans. Use just six words to describe the objective(s) of a course, a unit, a module, a lesson, an entire college career – whatever your preferred length of instruction is -“

This made me think about my post on Story-based Curricula, so I’ve created these Six Word Lesson Plans based on my suggested curriculum for our community:

  • Year One – Scientific Reasoning
    • Observe, experiment, discuss, then observe anew.
  • Year Two – Life on the marshes
    • Four seasons of ebb and flow.
  • Year Three – Green Energy
    • Deconstruct the myths; construct the future.
  • Year Four – Natural Enterprises
    • Collaborate to make an honest living.

$50M Digital Media and Learning Initiative

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The MacArthur Foundation launched its five-year, $50 million digital media and learning initiative in 2006 to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. Answers are critical to developing educational and other social institutions that can meet the needs of this and future generations. The initiative is both marshaling what is already known about the field and seeding innovation for continued growth.

So reads the press release from the MacArthur Foundation. I followed various articles to find out more about the MacArthur Foundation, but what really got my attention was Spotlight: blogging the field of digital media and learning. There is a good variety of commentators on this group blog, and it looks like it could become an important voice on the topic. The launch itself took place live and in Second Life, adding to the buzz already created by the funding envelope.

Formal education needs more informal learning

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One of the reasons that I’m fascinated with informal learning is that it has not been studied anyway near as much as formal learning (education & training) and my experience with workplace performance has shown how important informal learning is in getting the job done. A ten year study of Japanese education methods by the University of Leicester has revealed, among other things, how important it is to link formal and informal learning as early as possible:

Dr. Jenny Rogers said: Moving between formal and informal situations causes major problems for learners as it demands transformations in the type of knowledge that they have already acquired. These transformations cause problems which are not only common but have proved intractable. They lie at the heart of difficulties with computation, performance and problem-solving that have dogged education, test results and employment over many years.

Our research here at the University of Leicester and nationally shows that these problems arise very early in children’s education and cause difficulties as much for the nursery as for education and employers. Children need to be helped to develop their talk and problem-solving to a far greater extent in informal, implicit situations during the formative years alongside the formal and explicit elements of lessons. This will enhance their flexibility and their ability to understand and deal with wide-ranging written texts as well as formal and real-life problems in the later years.

My own experience shows that some people who function very well in formal learning environments become rather disoriented in an informal environment, such as our series of online workshops on informal learning. In order to be successful learners, people need to be comfortable with their disorientation. According to Marilyn Taylor [PDF see page 51 for a reference to Taylor’s model], disorientation should be a natural state in formal education:

Stage 1 : Disorientation: The learner is presented with an unfamiliar experience or idea which involves new ideas that challenge the student to think critically about his/her beliefs and values. The learner reacts by becoming confused and anxious. Support from the educator at this point is crucial to the learner’s motivation, participation and self-esteem.

I believe that disorientation is an almost constant state in many workplaces today, so we had better prepare learners for it. Incorporating informal learning experiences in an ever widening variety of contexts could help prepare students to be better informal learners throughout their lives. In this study, formal education has been shown to foster dependent learners who have difficulty in the disorienting contexts that often accompany informal learning. If we truly want to foster lifelong learning, we need to create more informal learning opportunities in our entire educational system.

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Story-centered Curricula

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I was introduced to Roger Schank through his book Engines for Education and still find his Student Bill of Rights an excellent reference point from which to discuss educational reform. In a recent article published in The Pulse, Schank talks about the implementation of story-centered curricula:

These are story-centered curricula. Students work in teams in virtual apprenticeships with experts producing deliverables that get increasingly complex throughout the year. No classes. No tests. One curriculum per year — complete four of them and you graduate. Ideally there would be hundreds of curricula to choose from but we have to start somewhere so I chose those four.

When I talk to people who might be interested in radical education reform I always ask what curricula their communities might need so we can think about how to produce those as well. The idea that every high school should be more or less the same offering of the same potpourri of algebra, American history, and Charles Dickens is just absurd, so I ask what they need in their world.

These types of curricula could be implemented in any community. For instance, here on the Tantramar Marshes, we have more biologists per capita than most communities. We could easily develop a four year program based on environmental stewardship. We have resources at the Atlantic Wildlife Institute, the Canadian Wildlife Service, Mount Allison University and various other small businesses and non-profit organisations. Other communities have their own strengths and should be able to use them for their children.

Schank has suggested these four, one-year each, learning experiences as a pilot project:

  1. Scientific Reasoning
  2. Health Sciences
  3. New Technology
  4. Engineering (aerospace focus)

He also gives this example for a Native-American community:

  1. scientific reasoning
  2. alternative energy issues
  3. land management and forestry
  4. casino management or entrepreneurship or tribal governance

I would suggest this as a starter for our community:

  1. scientific reasoning
  2. life on the marshes
  3. green energy
  4. natural enterprises

Roger Schank is presenting us with a viable alternative to the subject-based industrial school model that was designed 100 years ago.

Learning Quote of the Year

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Kathy Sierra sums up the problems with mass schooling that I’ve discussed over the year, with Knocking the Exuberance Out of Employees:

“If you knock out exuberance, you knock out curiosity, and curiosity is the single most important attribute in a world that requires continuous learning and unlearning just to keep up.”
– Kathy Sierra

Our work systems reflect our education systems and vice versa. As with kids, so with adults. Too many public school and university graduates already have the exuberance knocked out of them; the managerial corporation just finishes them off.

Let’s celebrate exuberance & curiosity in learning and work.

Schooling Up, Literacy Down

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At the time of the American Revolution (1775-83), literacy levels in the thirteen colonies were about 90%. This was in an era before mass schooling. It has now been almost 100 years since mass schooling was introduced in North America, but our literacy levels seem to have decreased significantly, according to this CBC news article:

Literacy groups estimate that up to nine million Canadians face some difficulties with reading and writing.

I am sure that there are many factors influencing these statistics, but it seems obvious that our school systems have not done a great job. Less obvious is how literacy is defined, as the same news article states that only 1% of Canadians are actually illiterate. Literacy groups have their own self-preservation agenda as does the industrial school system, so statistics can be thrown about by various parties for their own purposes.

Anyone who wants to think about literacy and schooling today should ask if our enormous public education system is really meeting the needs of our children and our society. As Churchill said, “First we shape our structures, then our structures shape us” [thanks Jon]

The Big Question

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Tony Karrer asks on the Learning Circuits Blog if all learning professionals should be blogging. Given my stand against “one size fits all” education, I’d have answer no. However, I would strongly recommend blogging to anyone in the learning profession, much as I would recommend keeping a journal or publishing an article. Blogging is just easier than the latter two. I also agree with dave lee that there are applications other than blogs that learning professionals can use to share and learn.

Stephen Downes has a well-thought response to this question:

What can you know about a profcessional who doesn’t blog his or her work? How do you know they are competent, that they have the respect of their peers, that they understand the issues, that they practice sound methodology, that they show consideration for their clients? You cannot know any of this without the openness blogging (or equivalent) provides. Which means, once a substantial number begin to share, there will be increasing pressure on all to share.

Stephen says that blogging is good for our field but perhaps the easiest sales pitch is that it has direct benefits to the individual. It is actually a time-saver in the long run. I’ve referred to blogging as a way of making implicit knowledge more explicit and as a way of personal knowledge management. Over the past few years I’ve tried to explain my own practice of PKM on this blog several times.

Finally, I would say that learning is conversation and that blogging lets you have more and better conversations.