John Connell: The Blog

I came across an inter­est­ing post enti­tled Col­lec­tive Con­scious­ness. David (“a British tech­nol­o­gist liv­ing and work­ing in Hong Kong”) talks about:

.…the emer­gence of a new col­lec­tive con­cious­ness which has formed an almost sym­bi­otic rela­tion­ship between man and machine through which we are now glob­ally connected.

An inter­est­ing read, but i was par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in a list he offers of exam­ples of how ‘the old sys­tems are crum­bling’ around us:

• The end of cen­tral power hubs and phys­i­cal juris­dic­tion of governments
• The end of pro­fes­sional monop­o­lies (edu­ca­tion, law, medicine…)
• The end of tra­di­tional media (news­pa­pers, tv, books, magazines…)
• The for­ma­tion of new polit­i­cal and eco­nomic structures
• The emer­gence of new con­cepts of iden­tity (real / vir­tual), friend­ship and community
• The blur­ring / ero­sion of nation­al­i­ties and culture
• The rede­f­i­n­i­tion of free­dom, pri­vacy, anonymity and accountability
• The growth of a new under­class of peo­ple with­out inter­net access or skills to use it

David asks:

.…any­thing I’ve missed?

What would you add to the list? And do you agree with David’s list?

Tech­no­rati Tags: ran­domwire, col­lec­tive con­scious­ness, change, sys­tems

Steve Wheeler high­lights one of Ivan Illich’s ideas from Deschool­ing Soci­ety: peer-matching:

The oper­a­tion of a peer-matching net­work would be sim­ple. The user would iden­tify him­self by name and address and describe the activ­ity for which he sought a peer. A com­puter would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same descrip­tion. It is amaz­ing that such a sim­ple util­ity has never been used on a broad scale for pub­licly val­ued activity.

Steve asks if the notion of peer match­ing can be achieved within the con­straints of the ‘rigid cur­ric­ula and con­trol freak­ery’ of cur­rent edu­ca­tion sys­tems. Rightly, he is pos­i­tive, and asks:

.…how rad­i­cal can we get with edu­ca­tion? What if every child had their own device to con­nect to the world of knowl­edge and what if it was actu­ally fun. What if they could search for any topic they wanted to know about and find com­plete resources on it in sec­onds, on a screen right in front of them? What if chil­dren could match their inter­ests and knowl­edge needs with oth­ers who they could link with around the globe? What if chil­dren could learn from each other in this way using social net­works and mas­sively online role play­ing games? What if each child could cre­ate his own per­sonal learn­ing envi­ron­ment using tools that were free, scal­able and open for all to use with­out any con­cerns about per­sonal safety? What if this kind of learn­ing was for­mally accred­itable in such a way that employ­ers would recog­nise it? What if the learn­ing webs that Illich dreamed of were actu­ally a real­ity, brought to us through easy to use per­sonal devices, con­nected any­time, any place, and totally free to use?

Steve fin­ishes with the question:

So why aren’t we doing it?

Why, indeed. Illich’s notion of peer-matching, and his con­cept of the ‘learn­ing web’, would have been dif­fi­cult to achieve in any mean­ing­ful way when he wrote Deschool­ing Soci­ety — but with the net­work­ing and social tech­nolo­gies we have today, both are highly real­is­able (as i have dis­cussed on this blog before). And the fact is, these same tools can be used to cre­ate learn­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for teach­ers beyond the con­fines of the offi­cial pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment offer­ings sanc­tioned by the for­mal sys­tem– in other words, much of what Steve sug­gests we can do today can be, and indeed is already being, infil­trated into the sys­tem from out­side, through social net­works and other infor­mal means, whether vir­tual or face-to-face.

Control-freakery in edu­ca­tion has surely had its day.

Tech­no­rati Tags: steve wheeler, ivan illich, peer match­ing, tech­nol­ogy, rad­i­cal­ism

.…(it) reveals just how vac­u­ous power social media users are in their ori­en­ta­tion. Wash­ing­ton faces a debt cri­sis. How do the insu­lar self-perceived new media elites respond? “oh, let’s cre­ate a hash­tag”. It’s rub­bish. And it has no influ­ence. Sure, it’s a good avenue to vent per­sonal feel­ings and blow off steam. How­ever, that is not a “move­ment” and it doesn’t influ­ence policy.…

George Siemens takes to task whose who hype the power of social media way beyond what any ratio­nal analy­sis would per­mit. He notes the rel­a­tive influ­ence in his own career of the emo­tional flow of social media as against the intel­lec­tual sub­stance of his blog­ging, writ­ing and scholarship.

He con­vinces me.

.…Twitter/Facebook/G+ are sec­ondary media. They are a means to con­nect in cri­sis sit­u­a­tions and to quickly dis­sem­i­nate rapidly evolv­ing infor­ma­tion. They are also great for stay­ing con­nected with oth­ers on sim­i­lar interests.….Social media is good for event-based activ­i­ties. But ter­ri­ble when peo­ple try to make it do more – such as, for exam­ple, non­sen­si­cally pro­claim­ing that a hash­tag is a move­ment. The sub­stance needs to exist some­where else (an aca­d­e­mic pro­file, jour­nal arti­cles, blogs, online courses).

It was a par­tic­u­larly silly Huff Post piece by Jeff Jarvis that got George’s dan­der up.

I can see why.

Tech­no­rati Tags: george siemens, social media, emo­tion, intel­lect, flow, sub­stance

I down­loaded the Air Dis­play app ($9.99) to my iPad, added the accom­pa­ny­ing free app to my Mac­Book Pro, and now i have a sec­ond dis­play for my Mac lap­top — here show­ing Chrome on the lap­top and Tweet­deck on the iPad. Very nice, very simple.

Click the pic for a larger image.

Tech­no­rati Tags: airdis­play, ava­tron, apple, dis­play

.…talk less and lis­ten more.…

So says Greg Whitby, cit­ing sup­port from the likes of John Hat­tie, Daniel Pink, Stephen Covey, Andy Har­g­reaves and Dou­glas Reeves.

I agree.

Tech­no­rati Tags: teach­ing, learn­ing, teach­ers, lis­ten­ing, empa­thy

I am learner.

Just as no one can see the colours I see, just as no one can hear the music I hear, just as no one can feel what I feel when I hold some­thing in my hand, and just as no one can sense the world as I per­ceive it around me, no one can teach me.

No one can teach me.

I am learner.

I am not taught. I learn. I am human and a social ani­mal, so I learn with oth­ers. I do learn from oth­ers, but what I learn is rarely, if ever, what is taught to me, and rarely, if ever, what oth­ers learn at the same time from the same teach­ers. Often I learn entirely alone.

I am learner.

I per­ceive. I use my senses to know the world around me. I dis­cern pat­terns. I shape my under­stand­ing through metaphor and anal­ogy. I seek to cre­ate pur­pose in my life. Some­times I con­ceive pur­pose where there is none; often I accept oth­ers’ con­cep­tions of pur­pose in life, oth­ers’ con­cep­tions of pur­pose in the universe.

I am learner.

I build a uni­verse in my mind and I live there, a uni­verse that changes con­stantly as I learn. All peo­ple, includ­ing the peo­ple I love, live along­side me in this con­stantly shift­ing uni­verse. I see only glimpses of the lives they lead, because, just as they are play­ers in my world, I am a player in all the uni­verses cre­ated by every other per­son alive.

I am learner.

I con­nect. I con­nect with peo­ple and ideas in the phys­i­cal and vir­tual worlds and dis­cern no bound­ary between the two worlds. I learn in, across, through, with and from the net­works in which I live, work, play and inter­act. I con­tin­u­ally extend my own poten­tial through my con­nec­tions. I make con­nec­tions between what I have already learned and what the world chooses to present to me through my own inter­ac­tions with the world and through the inter­ven­tions and actions of others.

I con­nect there­fore I learn.

I am learner.

I am able to recite facts, echo the opin­ions of oth­ers, assume the atti­tudes of so-called author­i­ties when urged to do so, but I pre­fer to seek real knowl­edge of the chang­ing world in which we live, gen­uine under­stand­ing of the real­i­ties of the human con­di­tion, authen­tic insight into our intrin­sic depen­dence on one another. My need to know for myself is stronger than my need to recite from or imi­tate others.

I am learner.

I imag­ine. I reach beyond the real­ity of my senses and there I build my own dreams and visions; some­times I wel­come oth­ers’ wish­ful think­ing and cre­ate my own place in their fan­tasies, accept­ing the val­ues they place before me, fil­ter­ing and refin­ing them to fit my uni­verse. Often, by acci­dents of time and place and birth, I am con­di­tioned by those around me to accept their social, moral, reli­gious and polit­i­cal val­ues. In these cir­cum­stances, I still cre­ate my own truth but I strug­gle to do so freely, con­strained by the stric­tures imposed on me by others.

I am learner.

I lis­ten to sto­ries from oth­ers; I tell my own sto­ries, to myself, to oth­ers; I par­tic­i­pate in sto­ries, mine and oth­ers’. I deter­mine who I am through a prism of dra­mas, tales, myths, his­to­ries, lies, assumed truths, rit­u­als, games and a com­plex and intri­cate nar­ra­tive that I weave around the real­i­ties of my life. I live and learn from the drama of the now and I recall and learn from the nar­ra­tives woven out of past dramas.

I am learner.

I am not taught.

I learn.

_________________________________________________________

A plain text ver­sion of I Am Learner can be down­loaded here.

Tech­no­rati Tags: i am learner, learn­ing, teach­ing, edu­ca­tion, phi­los­o­phy

When every­thing is down­load­able, the mys­tery of his­tory can be lost. It is only with MS in hand that the real mean­ing of the text becomes appar­ent: its rhythms and cadences, the rela­tion­ship of image to word, the pas­sion of the argu­ment or cold logic of the case.

So wrote Tris­tram Hunt, his­to­rian and Con­ser­v­a­tive MP for Stoke on Trent, in The Observer a few weeks ago. He went on:

.…it is only with MS in hand that the real mean­ing of the text becomes appar­ent: its rhythms and cadences, the rela­tion­ship of image to word, the pas­sion of the argu­ment or cold logic of the case. Then there is the serendip­ity, the scholar’s eter­nal hope that some­thing will catch his eye. Per­haps another doc­u­ment will come up in the same batch, per­haps some mar­gin­a­lia or even the leaf of another text inserted as a book­mark. There is noth­ing more thrilling than unty­ing the frayed string, open­ing the enve­lope and leaf­ing through a first edi­tion in the expec­ta­tion of unex­pected discoveries.

His con­clu­sion?

None of that is pos­si­ble on an iPad.

He is absolutely enti­tled to his opin­ion, but it really is just a load of old hooey.

I agree with James Gle­ick, who wrote recently in the New York Times in reply to the same piece:

I’m not buy­ing this. I think it’s sen­ti­men­tal­ism, and even fetishiza­tion. It’s related to the fancy that what one loves about books is the grain of paper and the scent of glue.

My own con­tri­bu­tion to this par­tic­u­lar debate was made more than 3 years ago, over two blog posts, The Per­sis­tent Fet­sish Part 1: Whither the Book and Part 2: Dis­in­ter­me­di­a­tion Beck­ons.

Noth­ing Tris­tram Hunt has writ­ten tells me I got it wrong at all.

Tech­no­rati Tags: book, fetish, tris­tram hunt, james gle­ick, new york times,the observer

Just a few weeks ago, I wrote about RF Macken­zie and men­tioned that part of the teach­ing pro­fes­sion that he called ‘the priest­hood’. I described those who belonged to the priest­hood as:

.…those teach­ers who have cho­sen through the cen­turies to col­lude with the elite, those who have been, and are, happy to take on the hon­oured sta­tus of ‘teacher’ but who demean that noble title by serv­ing a nar­row and self-serving estab­lish­ment at the expense of those who are deemed, on what­ever spu­ri­ous basis, unwor­thy of an education.

All those respon­si­ble for set­ting up, oper­at­ing, work­ing within and oth­er­wise val­i­dat­ing the utterly nau­se­at­ing sys­tem of apartheid at Crown Woods col­lege in Green­wich, in Lon­don, described by Rowenna Davis in yesterday’s Guardian — School colour-codes pupils by abil­ity — should be ashamed of them­selves. They have for­feited the right to the noble title of teacher.

Tech­no­rati Tags: crown woods col­lege, apartheid, school, teacher, rf macken­zie