Work is learning. Learning is the work.
Learning
Provinent, headquartered in Toronto, with its development shop in Fredericton has just purchased LearnStream, another Fredericton company. From the press release:
Provinent Corporation, Canada’s leader in e-learning consulting and custom e-learning content development, announced today that it has acquired New Brunswick based LearnStream, a pioneer in e-learning courseware development.
I wonder if we’ll be seeing any more mergers and acquisitions this year?
A recurring theme here and elsewhere is that decentralized Web 2.0 technologies are better than older, centralized technologies (e.g. LMS & LCMS) in enabling learning on the Web. Here is an interesting story about a University of Michigan class that implemented blogs for learning, beginning about a year ago. The first installment from the Community Engine Blog is now posted:
The lessons learnt in this case provide some guidance to anyone implementing blogs for education today. Some of the obstacles were due to the fact that this class was just slightly ahead of the technology adoption curve, but their experiences can now inform many others embarking on similar trips. The numerous trackbacks & comments attest to the value of these experiences being posted.
In the space of a year, blogs for learning have moved from the bleeding edge to the leading edge.
I have frequently mentioned how a blog would make home and school communication very simple. Well Debbie Blash, a school Principal, has started a blog:
It’s on Blogger, so it’s free and it seems so obvious that I wonder why more schools (like ours) have not adopted the medium. Mrs Blash is obviously new to blogging, but she has taken the plunge in order to further communication – bravo! In our town we have "Talk Mail" using the telephone system, but not much on the Internet. Maybe soon …
Anol Bhattacharya, author of SoulSoup, has posted some good guidelines on elearning for the corporate world. I can really relate to guideline #1:
1. The business world is not about learning, it’s about doing business.
So before doing training needs analysis – please, do go through a business needs analysis. It may not be the same as the strategic direction or vision statement of the company; it’s more complex. We are dealing with different goals and perspectives. What needs to be learnt varies from the point of view of the CXO, training manager, product manager/department head and the learner. Catering to all viewpoints is a daunting task, but, believe me, it’s the first and foremost task to do. Any shortcut is a pathway to doom’s loop.
This is similar to the principal of The Problem, The Balloon and the Four Bedroom House; namely that an inadequate analysis may rise up and bite you during a subsequent part of the project.
Anol has a number of other principals that would be worthwhile for anyone developing “learning solutions” for the business world. I got a déja vu chuckle from #5, stating that big LMS rollouts are out:
Then the fun begins. People sit together in meeting rooms, munching donuts and sipping coffee, to interview LMS vendors. The process made them feel important. After that hoola-hoop, when the LMS was finally implemented (e Learning rollout – drum roll please!), there was nothing inside it. So they filled it up with off-the-shelf courseware and uploaded all the junk PowerPoint presentations, PDF and Word documents. Finally when they realized nothing is going according to their expectations (god only knows what those were!) – they jumped to the conclusion – e Learning doesn’t work!
Via James at IncSub.
Albert Ip has thrown down the gauntlet to create a compelling PowerPoint story. This is a chance for instructional designers to use this ubiquitous technology for a good cause. The guidelines are all available on Albert’s site and the final product is due on 28 March 2005.
Charlie Lowe at Cyberdash has a presentation available on Teaching Writing, Collaboration, and Engagement in Global Contexts, using the Drupal CMS. According to the presentation (which I reviewed in OOo Impress 2.0 beta), a traditional LMS "Privileges course administration and content management over class community interaction, configuration flexibility, and usability", whereas students and educators need systems that integrate with the Internet and allow more collaborative learning that reflects life outside of academia.
Two slides on user needs provide an excellent synthesis of why proprietary LMS’s do not meet the needs of higher education.
Students & Educators Need:
Institutions Need:
This presentation is a good review for anyone in education looking at their technology options. It is more a review of proprietary versus open source, with specific Drupal examples. The argument is clear, and there are a lot of screenshots from sample sites.
Update: Charlie follows up with some suggestions on how to use the money that is saved on license fees.
In answer to questions posed by our local district education council, I’ll submit a short list:
Many of the graduates of our public school system do not have adequate critical thinking, problem solving nor media literacy skills, to name a few. We are preparing them to be passive recipients of a weak curriculum, when no curriculum can prepare them for the future. Why should one Minister of Education and few cloistered staff know more than the other 740,000 people in this Province? The Wisdom of Crowds tells us that as a collective we have the answers that have eluded those in charge, but no one is listening.
I don’t recommend more knee-jerk reactions, but the bottom line is that the school system works for fewer and fewer students. Tweaking the existing system is not good enough. Let’s start to experiment at a local level in some positive ways right now because we have nowhere to go but up.
The meeting for this evening was cancelled, and I won’t be able to attend the next one, so here is my parting shot:
One more reason why I believe that we have to focus on learning processes, not subject matter.
Robert Paterson has put together many of his thoughts on social software and societal reform in an excellent synthesis entitled, “Going Home – Our Reformation. Rob’s article begins:
I was in a meeting this week with a group of “educators”. We were talking about Communities of Practice. I mentioned blogging several times in the meeting. At the meeting’s end, one of the participants approached me and said, “Every time you mention blogging I get annoyed. It is only a fad and will never affect education.”
I believe that it is not a fad. I believe that Blogging, and its wider family of Social Software tools, will not only affect education but will shake our entire society to the core. I believe that our descendants will look back at its arrival the same way that we now look back at the advent of the printing press.
He continues with a number of current scenarios that show the desperate conditions we have created, and then goes on to show how targeted, local initiatives can get us out of this mess. The future that Rob sees for Prince Edward Island could happen almost anywhere, and he describes the kinds of grassroot projects that are possible and feasible. Rob’s description of the new schooling model is an example:
The School Revolution — As with seniors, the revolution in PEI schools did not happen as a result of any deliberate project to transform schools. What is happening is that a series of projects designed to engage children have taken hold. This work did not even take place in the regular school day but in the afternoon. The afternoon has become a place where children can do the one thing that they really love. They choose and then the community tries its best to find people who can take them to a place of great expertise.This idea had its start in two areas, Theatre and Sport. Theatre PEI began a community program in the afternoon to awaken kids to the thrill of theatre. At the same time, Sports PEI began a similar program to offer the average kids more opportunity in sport. All this work was organized and expanded by the use of local blog sites that were designed to engage the local community. The resources came from adults who lived close by.
Take some time to read Rob’s article and see if it makes sense to you. Either way; please make a comment. This is just the beginning and Rob has given us the first draft of the blueprint.
Here in Sackville, the town is going through a strategic planning process – once again. Our downtown is in decline, due in part to competition from the nearby Trans-Canada Highway development of fast food restaurants and drive-through shopping. The new highway also makes it easy to go to the big box stores and shopping complexes in nearby Moncton. Much of the discussion that I have heard to date is focused on the symptoms, not the root causes of the decline of the community. Instead of debating the problems for another decade, we now have some concrete examples of what we can do in Sackville (The Commons Network; The Media Revolution; Local Food Networks; Seniors College; and The Consulting Revolution) . Rob’s examples provide a starting point to initiate conversations on how to create our own future.
Thank you Rob, now it’s up to us.
John Taylor Gatto, a former educator who was ‘New York City Teacher of the Year’, wrote an article in 2001 for Harper’s Magazine, entitled ‘Against School’. He starts by saying that for the thirty years that he was in the public school system, there was one constant — boredom.
They [students] said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more.
He goes on with his argument.
Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don’t hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest.
Gatto traces the roots of the modern school from Prussian military schools and alludes to a more sinister reason for our current school structure:
Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.
After a review of some of the influential educators in America, Gatto concludes on a positive note:
After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
Given that most of the children in our schools today will not be working in a factory or for a corporation (except as casual workers for a multi-national franchise), why are we still preparing them to be docile recipients of information, doled out in pre-measured Pablum consistency? Not only does once size not fit all, it fits no one. Our current age-cohort school system of ‘bums in seats’ can easily be replaced by any number of other learning environments — apprenticeship, mentorship, collaborative learning across age groups, problem-based learning, etc.
For instance, the current cost of access to information is approaching zero. The same is happening with communications. Therefore, our children can connect with just about anyone and find out about any fact for almost free. In spite of this, our children go to school in the same group every day to receive parcels of information and are told to be quiet in class for six hours a day.
What are we preparing our children for? Definitely not to be entrepreneurial and start their own business (touted by our governments as the prime driver for prosperity). I don’t see any changes to this until something tips the balance, such as:
So there you have it. The problem is not that we don’t teach enough math or science or English. The problem is the structure itself. Until the structure is addressed, I don’t imagine that any fine-tuning of our current system will address the systemic problem that our schools promote childishness and discourage learning.