Learning

Jacques Cool summarizes (in French) the results of an 18 month laptop in the classroom initiative in northern New Brunswick, as told by the project director, Roberto Gauvin. [Here is my translation – any errors are mine alone]

The project brings people together (students, teachers, parents community).
Roberto’s approach changed over the past year from a focus on the technology to the pedagogy.
There were specific effects on learning, even if these were sometimes difficult to measure.
Even with access to some incredible resources, it was the teaching staff who made a difference, such as:

• The discovery of individual talents (not just technology related)
• The ability to surpass the constraints of the existing education system
• The ability to seek out the timid students as well as the boys [read more about Smart Boys, Bad Grades]

The teachers moved from an initial phase of fear and apprehension to management of the tools and then to reflection on their teaching practices

I think that we’re starting to get beyond, “you don’t need any computers in school ’cause we didn’t have any”, to an understanding that portable computers open up a variety of pedagogical options not available in the industrial-age classroom.

Other posts on this site referring to laptops in school.

In response to Elliott Masie’s recent Learning Trends newsletter, Albert Ip asks a similar question to what came to my mind when I first read it:

Can anyone show me some concrete proof that any learning technology standard has made a difference in learning?

Elliott is a great champion for advancing good technology-based learning and he has the ability to simplify a complex field. He showed me the potential of the Internet for learning in early 1997 and I haven’t looked back since. That said, I disagree with his analogy of the shipping container as learning object:

As I celebrate my birthday and look out the window of our New York apartment I see stacks of shipping containers on the edge of the Hudson. I see the connection between the work that is underway in content packaging for the learning space. As we adopt XLM, core learning standards and systems, it is possible for us to achieve some of the same benefits as the shipping container brought to transportation …

In a recent project where I reviewed the business case for SCORM implementation, I found no evidence of a market for digital learning objects. There were several vendors offering SCORM conversion or SCORM implementation assistance, but no one was actually buying and selling objects. The bet seems to be that standards will create the market, as shipping containers enabled the free flow of goods over various forms of transportation. Here I disagree, because learning cannot be “containerised”.

In theory, reusable digital learning objects make sense, but in practice they don’t work. The problem is that learning objects cannot be separated from their context.

In the drive to make money in the learning business, too many people are trying to find a way to codify pieces of the messy, personal process known as learning. The learning content market is based on the premise that these pieces can be quantified and therefore owned by someone. So far, all we are seeing is the devaluation of learning content.

The popular belief used to be that 12 years in a standardised classroom created a learned individual, even though many workers called this “book learning” and knew that it didn’t equate to competence. Today we have the belief that standardised content packaging will equate to better learning. As Albert asks, where’s the evidence?

I’ve said before that you need content and context in order to foster learning, and content is just a minor player.

The Université de Moncton’s technology-based learning group has received $2.9M from the Atlantic Innovation Fund to further develop its Synergic3 technology. Synergic3 is designed to reduce large-scale elearning production and development costs [disclosure: I was involved in the initial business and marketing analysis for this product].

The university has partnered with Desire2Learn and the National Research Council for this project which is estimated to cost $5.5M.