Learning

This is a remix and update of some previous posts.

Let’s start with the Cluetrain Manifesto (1999), and update it for training & education (my previous post).

We are online learners …

• We are not seats or audiences or users or target populations, we are human beings and OUR reach exceeds YOUR grasp.
• Networked learners are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, learners are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most education and training organizations.
• To traditional educational institutions, networked conversations may appear confused, may even sound confusing. But we, the learners, are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, and no rules to slow us down.

Thesis #1: Learning is conversation.

Stock & Flow

If learning is conversation, then online conversations are the essential component of online learning. Online communication can be divided into two parts (Lee Lefever):

Flows = Timely & Engaging (e.g. radio, speeches, e-mail, blogs)

Stocks = Archived, Organized for Reference (e.g. web site, database, book, voice mail)

One reason that blogs are so engaging is because they allow flow. On the other hand, stock on the Net is everywhere. In the case of digital learning content, fewer people are willing to pay for plain old stock, such as self-paced online courses. Learning content is now a commodity and over time the price of commodities tends to zero.

You need flow to provide real value for learners (remember that they’re becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding), as flow provides the essential element of context. Social interactions help to put it all together for each learner. For instance, MIT’s open courseware initiative makes the stock available for free, but you have to pay to participate in the flow (class membership, MIT degree). Without the stock, there is little to guide the flow, so you need both but stock alone is almost worthless.

Networks Enable Connections

Will Richardson made this statement about the changing needs of learners in a networked world, “ … now that we have access to people and knowledge, learning is ‘network creation’ and we can learn through ‘collaborative meaning making’.” The web enables connections (constant flow) as well as instant access to information (infinite stock).

Because of this connectivity, the Web is an environment more suited to just-in-time learning than the current and all-pervasive course model. Learning on the web is moving from stock to flow, and devaluing all content out there. For web-savvy learners, entering an online course and then losing access to the system, notes and connections after the “course” is seen as ridiculous. These learners are what Mark Federman, Chief Strategist of The McLuhan Institute calls UCaPP:

“The UCaPP world – ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate – is a world of relationships and connections. It is a world of entangled, complex processes, not content. It is a world in which the greatest skill is that of making sense and discovering emergent meaning among contexts that are continually in flux. It is a world in which truth, and therefore authority, is never static, never absolute, and not always true.”

Now that the Web is nearly ubiquitous, we are moving away from a ‘horseless carriage’ metaphor for the web. Online courses and curricula are old metaphors posing on the new medium. Tagging, folksonomies, wikis and social bookmarks are new metaphors designed within the new medium. Tech savvy learners are exploiting the inherent capabilities of the Internet and creating new social tools. Hence the rise of Web 2.0 – the web being built by the digital natives. These same natives are the new, discerning, and well-informed, customers for training & education organisations.

There’s a lot of hype around Web 2.0 (AKA the social or two-way web). Some see it as the next business opportunity while others view it as the answer to all of our problems. Certainly there is a communications revolution happening right now. Educators, businesses and yes even consultants, are floundering about. Many of us, in a McLuhanesque way, are driving into the future while looking in the rear view mirror. How many people in positions of authority, power, management and consultation are acting as gatekeepers rather than guides?
These thoughts were triggered by Leigh Blackall’s photographs that have been mixed with Web 2.0 themes. If you don’t get this stuff, then watch the slideshow and let the right side of your brain absorb it.
Sometime in the next few years, it will become obvious which way we should have turned. Our schools will be different, or non-existent, and our economies and environments will have gone through enormous changes. In the near future, younger generations are going to make things happen that many of us cannot fathom at this time. How will they view us then? Will we be remembered for our vision and support or for our near-sightedness and stubbornness?

Stephen Downes recently referred to a paper written by Kelvin Tan and Cynthia Lim Ai Ming, entitled No Subjects, No teachers, No Schools, No Peers – Just problems: Arguments for a minimalist approach for maximising the scope of problem-based learning (PDF). This paper is a good review of why the process of learning, especially problem solving, should be separated from subject-based curricula, teacher-assessors and peer pressure in education.

My only criticism is that the authors have not referred to the excellent work conducted by Dave Jonassen, author of Learning to Solve problems: An Instructional Design Guide. One of Dave’s remarks that has stuck with me is that as adults, most people are paid to do only one thing – solve problems. Neither our school systems nor most of our training programs prepare people to solve problems.

Tan and Lim Ai Ming make some very strong comments in favour of the separation of content (subject & disciplines) and process (learning & problem solving). They begin by stating that, “The authors of this paper suggest that the retention of subjects or disciplines in PBL is an unnecessary obstacle to students’ learning”. The paper is then structured around these premises:

• Learning should be based on problems, not subjects.
• Subjects stress content rather than process
• Individual learning is authentic [and group work may hinder this learning]
• When the teacher is also the assessor, then the power to fail students may be detrimental to self-directed learning
• Teachers as content experts (such as at a university) may be detrimental to self-directed learning.
• Scheduled class times, as in any regulated school, are not supportive of problem-based learning.

In a recent interview on EdTech Talk, David Warlick talks about how the web has greatly increased the amount of available information. No one can master any content field any more. Now we see students having better access to information as well as access to more people than many of their teachers. I am referring to students who may be using IM and VoIP to chat with their friends in Asia, while the teacher is covering Asian social studies in class. The student just checks with the online friend and gets the information in context. Which information is correct – the textbook or the online peer? It doesn’t matter. What really matters, for their lifelong needs, is that students are learning how to learn and how to solve problems. However, mastery of the curriculum (content) is what the school administration assesses.

A similar content focus is seen in corporate e-learning. “Let us put your content online” some vendor may cry. We also have industry shoot-outs; to see who can convert PowerPoint content into e-learning courseware. It’s all about content because it’s easy to build a course based on defined content since there are no messy, individual, radical learners to get in the way. Only a fictional, generalized target population. My experience is that neither the public educational system, higher education nor the corporate training business have made any great achievements in facilitating learning. In many cases learning occurs in spite of the obstacles presented by formal training and education.

A shift in emphasis away from content delivery changes the role of the teacher/trainer. As Tan and Lim Ai Ming note, teacher as assessor and teacher as facilitator may be conflicting roles. The same goes for teacher as expert and teacher as guide. The separation of trainers and assessors is common practice in the Canadian military, where the trainer is responsible for assisting each learner, and a separate group (the Standards Section), confirms that operational standards are met through summative evaluation. When properly implemented, it is a good training system.

Today there is no shortage of information on most subjects. However, many graduates lack critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Facilitating the development of these skills, not mastery of a defined subject area, should be the role of educators and trainers. I believe that this will only happen when they abandon the roles of assessor and expert and become true learning facilitators.

Via Will Richardson is this post from Dave Weinberger on the State of Maine’s laptop in schools initiative for every student in Grade 7 & 8, as well as this comment about a high school principal:

On Will’s post there are comments that this kind of approach to education is too narrow and students will burn out. Thinking a bit more on this, I don’t see this as a critical problem. The schools that I see have already reduced physical education and art to such a lowly state that concerned parents have to supplement them with outside activities anyway. If the school only focuses on one area, that may not be so bad, as I don’t believe that public education can solve all of our problems. I would recommend that you read all of Weinberger’s post and follow the links. Again, there are no easy answers.

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.

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.