The Obliquity of Policy

& The Pull of Learning

I started these posts by looking at the outcomes of #BectaX and identified three possible policy outcomes that would reflect the debates and proposals that group of motivators and builders came up with; Infrastructure, Collaboration & Participation. I suggested wrapping them up in a Web 2.0 programme of CPD for all educational professionals. In election week, with a plethora of suggestions for education policies post-election, I am going to look at how Obliquity might help and why learning is a Pull that fits well in an emerging world of social media.

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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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