subjectdiscipline2.0 – join the debate!

Posted on | December 10, 2006 | 10 Comments

I have enjoyed a thought-provoking email conversation with Greg Whitby over the past week or so. Greg, for those who do not know him, is one of those rare creatures: someone who can see how education, present and future, has to change to reflect the realities of the digital world that we now live in, and who also has the seniority, the clout and the mandate to work towards such change across a local authority or similar. As the recently appointed Executive Director of Catholic Schools in the Diocese of Parramatta, Sydney, Greg is already beginning to push for the changes that he recognises as necessary and inevitable across his patch. Take a stroll through through his site to get an outline of his thinking, and also take a glance at some of the conversation that arose around his farsighted 24-Hour School Project.

Greg is currently working on a paper on “21st Century Pedagogy” and raised an intriguing question around one particular aspect of this topic: in thinking about a new pedagogy for secondary schools, “…what is a subject discipline in a web 2.0 world?” He fears that, for too many too often, ” the talk is of new ways of learning but all that happens is the old framework is polished and added to.”

Greg has agreed that we should open out this question to allow the educational blogosphere have a go at answering the question and at exploring the full range of issues raised by it.

To quote Greg further: “We need a conceptual leap which will match some of the emerging pedagogies I am seeing. I see some great teachers engaging students in a personalised learning approach yet in discussion with these teachers they are at a loss to explain the framework outside of a “mashup” of the existing curriculum construct. I look forward to the conversations.”

So – a challenge to all you edubloggers out there! Can we have the conversation that Greg seeks?

If anyone wishes to engage with the conversation, can I suggest that we all use an agreed tag, so that we can gather the full discourse together at a later date? I would suggest we use the tag: ’subjectdiscipline2.0′. Please join the conversation and spread the debate through your own blog if you can.

Technorati Tags: gregwhitby , subjectdiscipline2.0, pedagogy, web 2.0, parramatta

Category: Web 2.0, education, praxis, technology

Comments

10 Responses to “subjectdiscipline2.0 – join the debate!”

Judy O'Connell
December 10th, 2006 @ 10:25 pm

John, I too very much look forward to engaging in this dialogue. ’subjectdiscipline2.0′ – cool! More on this later…in the meantime, the hyperlink to Greg is not working.
chris
December 11th, 2006 @ 12:44 am

What does that quote actually mean, though? As an English specialist, I find it meaningless – and I’m not trying to be an aggressive dinosaur here For me, the heart of what I teach is what I have to share, and I’m willing to use any means I find effective in sharing it. But it’s nevertheless a specialised area, and I’d be surprised if there were to come a time when expert knowledge is deemed unnecessary.
Maybe I’m getting the wrong end of the stick here – but that’s a possible result of ambiguity and jargon.
John Connell
December 12th, 2006 @ 8:33 pm

Dinosaurs welcome – aggressive or otherwise

I guess I would be equally surprised, Chris, should there “… come a time when expert knowledge is deemed unnecessary.” The heart of the question for me, though, is in the nature of knowledge itself and the extent to which that is changing, if at all.

I’ve been trying to work up my own thoughts on Greg’s question, and I think my focus might be on the extent to which the very concept of the subject discipline as we have known it for so long is still useful as a means of organising the curriculum, or of organising our perspective on knowledge. Is the ambiguity you identify to be found in the question itself, or is it somehow in our changing understanding of the nature of knowledge (or our understanding of the changing nature of knowledge, a quite different thing altogether)?

As a primary teacher, I was always relatively comfortable with some vagueness around how I might have tried to define a ’subject’, and I think I’ve always accepted that, in any case, the notion of the subject that we have lived with for so long has always been, to an extent, an artificial construct – but also one that has developed and shifted continuously over time. ‘English’ as a subject discipline, for instance, has certainly never stood still.

I appreciate too that we run the risk of obfuscation through the use of jargon – but jargon can have its uses too. While we are in this period of change, the language we use is necessarily vague because we simply have not yet come to a position of general agreement on definitions. Maybe we never will.

I’ll post some more extensive thoughts on this soon.
Wax on, wax off at whereisab
December 13th, 2006 @ 2:37 pm

[...] Courtesy of John Connell from an ongoing discussion with Greg Whitby, comes the concept of ’subject discipline 2.0′. So I thought I’d add in my thoughts, for what it’s worth. [...]
chris
December 13th, 2006 @ 11:11 pm

John, for what it’s worth: I was told this evening by a (much younger) quondam English teacher that she had never seen anyone convey as clearly as I do how to write effectively. She thought I should be disseminating this more widely. She may be right, but what I’m giving this example for is as an example of an area in which I have expertise which I can use one-to-one in meatspace, in the classroom (tho’ I’m no longer doing that), online interactively, or online as a “how-to” – though I don’t think that’d be particularly effective. I agree that delivery systems are vital – and I’m now into exploring this in another context – but you have to have something worth delivering as well.
I guess I’m clarifying things for myself here as much as anything ….thanks for the space!
Bob
December 13th, 2006 @ 11:40 pm

Knowledge is not a limited or finite amount of information. Subject knowledge within even the EU will be different across countries. But people can still be “educated” having aquired different bodies of knowledge at school. Perhaps what makes a person “educated” is the ability to acquire knowledge. Does that not then imply that subject teaching is about the specialised tools which that subject uses and can offer, not about teaching facts or information for later regurgitation.

I too am depressed at how little ICT and all the exciting new tools have actually changed the classroom methodology. The Blackboard is still the centre piece however high tech it might appear to be.

I look forward to reading what Greg Whitby has to say.

I have made some earlier posts to my own blog about this subject, so if it’s Ok with you, I will add the new tag to them.
John Connell
December 14th, 2006 @ 12:12 am

Chris – this is one of those ‘it’s late at night and I have to get up at 6 in the morning’ responses So I’ll give a fuller response later.

Your own thinking has led me to another connection in all of this – and it’s a connection with one of Ivan Illich’s statements. Thanks for reminding me of it, and I’ll explain when I have time tomorrow (possibly).

Bob – I think we just have to be realistic about the little that has been achieved to date, but we also have to ‘keep the faith’ and struggle on until it really does start to make a difference. I know it’s been said a million times before, but I think we’re reaching a genuine turning point in the use of technology in education. It just feels different from anything that has come before. Again, I’ll expand when I have a little more time.
Bob Hill
December 14th, 2006 @ 3:17 pm

Mine was also a late at night comment. I do agree that we now have a great opportunity to change direction. I just don’t want us to concentrate on current technologies when what is really at issue is pedagogy.

For instance, a Glow Group could be used for real collaborative learning giving all pupils concerned a sense of ownership and self-worth. The same is true of a blog or podcast, but it could also be achieved with paper and pencil in a classroom. The newer tools are just motivators, however powerful.
David Truss
December 17th, 2006 @ 11:17 am

Interesting discussion, (and another late night post here).
It is weird to wander over here and read your quote above: “He fears that, for too many too often, ” the talk is of new ways of learning but all that happens is the old framework is polished and added to.”
After posting this today:
http://elgg.net/dtruss/weblog/144035.html
I think that if we want students to be lifelong learners, and we want them to take ownership of their own learning to any extent, then subject discipline must be, at the very least, ‘loosened’ up.
John Connell: the blog » Blog Archive » subjectdiscipline2.0 - my contribution
December 19th, 2006 @ 5:45 pm

[...] subjectdiscipline2.0 – join the debate!12/17/2006 11:17 am9 Comments [...]