Untangling the Web; Education

(1) From Education to Learning; A Brief History of Open

If we try to untangle the impact of the web on education we can describe it as enabling a shift from a focus on education as a system to learning as a process, particularly since the web itself has become more open, social and participatory, especially since Web 2.0.  So how did we get here?

Background; I myself (@fredgarnett) started looking at the impact of the Web, indirectly, in 1984 when I began teaching a Unit called Information, Technology and Society. Deciding that taking the tropes of the Industrial Revolution and applying them to the Information Revolution was way too limited I looked instead at how the social organisation of settlements emerged out of agriculture and that from hunter-gathering; maps, flints and fires. Inspired by Yoneji Masuda and Nikolai Kondratieff, and my own observations, by 1988 I had evolved the NSU model, so-called because I think social change comes from new Networks being built, new Services being provided and new User behaviours emerging, over 50-year long-wave Kondratieff economic cycles stimulated by new technologies; the micro-chip was invented in 1971. New economies emerge from new networks of distribution. In 1989 I wrote a story to capture the changes we might see by 2021 as a Masters paper called Homi & the NeXT One (the title a tribute to Steve Jobs). Consequently I have had some understanding of the process by which new technology changes society ever since. For me the key aspect discernible over the last 250 years (especially when preceded by a knowledge revolution like the scientific revolution) are the cumulative effects of unnoticed second-order, or unanticipated, effects; hence the poverty of most predictions about the future which focus on first-order (anticipated effects) based on the knowledge of experts whose expertise is historically based.

Watching the Web Flow 1990s; Being more Utopian than dystopian I looked forward to the, then, forthcoming information revolution democratising our representative democracy, with its UK roots in the 17th Century (1689), by enabling new participatory *constitutions* to be written, redefining the social relations by which we live. Whether they be communications, networked or mash-ups, technologies don’t change society, they create first-order effects, that is consequences of what the technologies were designed to do. Social change comes from users inventing new use-states in line with their beliefs and social behaviours.

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Ambient Learning City Workshop

CAL11 Workshop 1pm  April 15^th  #mosialong

This workshop was exploring how to design ambient learning environments using the Emergent Learning Model. Slides for this session were updated from the Ambient Learning City talk March 2011.

If this is too abstract then we can reference the works of Howard Rheingold, Dave Weinberger and Clay Shirkey and describe the Emergent Learning Model as; Smart Mobs + Everything is Miscellaneous means Here Comes Everybody

We are also thinking of how we might use Innovation as an ‘Open Platform’ (Steven Johnson) to allow ‘generative innovations‘ to further transform learning. 

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Context is Queen

Louise Michel

It’s only during the past year that I discovered what a remarkable woman Louise Michel was having seen the French film Louise Michel La Rebelle and heard @paulmasonnews talk on the Paris Commune at the Really Free School. She was a key Communard in the Paris Commune of 1871 who was tried, convicted and sent to New Caledonia for 9 years before being part of a general pardon and returning to France in 1880. In New Caledonia she supported the political and educational struggles of the local people, and on her return to France she returned to her political activism, was imprisoned again in 1883 but remained an active educationalist. Like all true revolutionaries she saw that education was where activism had her home.

#contextisqueen We use the concept Context is Queen as a result of research we did when commissioned to identify a Digital Divide Content Strategy (by the DfES). We concluded that, rather than there being some explicitly defined content that was socially inclusive, so proving that Content is King, in fact socially inclusive learning was better served by tools and skills appropriate to context. In fact social inclusion requires a move from Access to Content to Context;  Fair Access is not enough. As a consequence Ronan O’Beirne ironically coined the phrase ‘Context is Queen.’ So on International Women’s Day here is a little more on Louise Michel and also on some of the women working today to make Context the Queen of Learning; which is why we created the hashtag #contextisqueen for Twitter. 

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The Purpose of Education

purpos/ed

So far in reflecting on the Purpose of Education, meeting the challenge that Mike Wesch set us, we have had some stimulatingly personal views from Lou, Stephen and Cristina.  But Ewan gave us a Scottish perspective taking in the policy horizon, highlighting the collaborative nature of their Curriculum for Excellence.

Pat Kane elaborated on this collaborative quality in Scottish education at the Really Free School on Friday and situated it in a deeper tradition he called the Democratic Intellect. He challenged the audience, most of whom were sharp, newly radicalised students, to describe how they saw the relationship between Citizenship and Education. Unsurprisingly, to me, no one gave him an answer; why? 

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Heutagogy & The Craft of Teaching

Heutagogy, Emergent, Ambient (1)

This is the first of three posts looking at developing the heutagogic qualities of the Open Context Model of Learning into the Emergent Learning Model and from that examining the possibilities of building an Ambient Learning City in Manchester. I start by looking at what Heutagogy might tell us about teaching in the 21st Century.

The Salford Method; Using the time-shifting mechanisms available to us all in iWorld I recently gave a Philosophy Phriday talk on a Tuesday in the Salford Think Pod called Heutagogy & The Craft of Teaching. Cristina Costa kindly invited me to give the first talk in the Salford Method series, partly to answer David Roberts’ interest in all things Heutagogy. I give my Learner Generated Contexts interpretation on this here, but you might also want to read Stewart Hase on From Andragogy to Heutagogy. Heutagogy is a key element of the Open Context Model of Learning, which this blog is about so, partly because of the audience in Salford and partly to follow on from the iPED 2010 talk (The Open Context Model and the Craft of Teaching), I have chosen to refine how heutagogy might help us rethink the practice of teaching. Since our iPED talk in September I have also had time to further reflect on the innovative work of Paul Lowe as a ‘technology steward’, in developing his MA in Photojournalism, and Thomas Cochrane’s use of the PAH Continuum to help ‘Bridge Learning Contexts’ on his B.Sc in Product Design at Unitec in New Zealand.

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Some thoughts on closing Becta

XBectaX not #BectaX

Heather Brooke in the Secret State, published in April, flatly states that there is no way that we will invent a “British Google” as the UK Government is far too obsessed with secrecy to allow it to happen. I was part of the team who developed a prototype “Facebook for Learning” for the DfES in 2003, who then paid management consultants £4m to describe it as a “Google for Learning,” which I always assumed was simply out of ignorance about social media. Well it was 2003, and all the expensive management consultants could come up with as a metaphor was Google. So maybe perhaps, yes, that did set off the alarm bells in the Cabinet Office and they closed it down to restrict civil rights, as Heather Brooke suggests. Ignorant Cock-up or knowing Conspiracy? Who knows?

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Developing Learner-Centred Policy

Learning Matters

As mentioned in last weeks blog Education policy tends to focus on institutions and management rather than on learners and professionals. These big picture issues not only allow politicians to show how well (value for money) they spend our tax-pounds (School buildings), but also to retain the political assumptions behind the policy. Critically the current approach to policy formulation hides both the context within which education operates and ignores the learning and teaching process itself. Education policy continues to remain concerned with discussing the business model and not the learning-process. So lets look at what education policy might be if it was the learning that really mattered and it we focussed on learner-centred approaches.

This blog is concerned with promoting the Open Context Model of Learning and the post-Web 2.0 views of Education of the Learner-Generated Contexts Group. As a group we also realise that you have to change education policy to get the kind of systemic transformation necessary to implement the learner-centred approaches we advocate. As a result we have already spent some time reviewing what a learner-centred policy in the 21st Century might consist of. Over the past two years we have surveyed a range educational professionals on what their preferred policy might be in a project called the Policy Forest. So let’s examine what happened when we offered a range of possible policy statements reflecting traditional, web 2.0 and learner-centred approaches.

If you would rather take the survey before learning of its outcomes then download the Policy-Forest-survey.

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3 Policy Consequences of #BectaX

On Reflection

#BectaX took a fresh look at new technologies and schools by bringing together social media experts and teachers, workshopping a range of possible ways of using new technology to develop “a growing community of movers and shakers from education and digital media collaboratively (designing) solutions to identify how education might evolve in a connected world.”

As I commented in my previous post, part of the outcomes looked for from #BectaX were policy recommendations. Well I identified three, which may not be part of any Party Manifesto’s, but could be part of the post-election debate. Labour have just published their Lemon-Jelly inspired Manifesto cover (pdf) which manages that difficult trick of looking like a cross between a British Rail poster for the Chiltern’s in the 1930s and heroic Soviet Realism from the same time, but without the workers. I guess that is a graphically accurate summary of their policy achievements after 13 years, so fair enough. The tick-box driven design lets us know we can expect even less from more of the same. However there are three real issues we can pick up on from #BectaX; Infrastructure, Collaboration & Participation.

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A Coincidence of Motivations leading to Agile Configurations

#BectaX

Well organised, chaotic, frustrating, fascinating, optimistic and dynamic event, which allowed for policy, research, comment, argument and debate to speed-date each other in a twitterfall of networking, finally topped off with a learner whisper that roared with youthful wisdom and eloquence from the very edge of Skype, thanks to the kids from Cramlington.

Education in schools is hemmed in and shut down by the political constraints that come from the combination of their in-loco parentis responsibilities and the artificial demands developed by the current managerial target culture that denudes teachers of their professionalism. Teachers have to both manage kids and meet targets for which the rewards are elsewhere. Learning, motivation, identity and values get lost in the current mix, which is why trying to do something stimulating relating to schools can be so damned frustrating.

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