Learning 2.0: The Power of Learning in a Networked World – part 1

Posted on | March 21, 2008 | 1 Comment

The Cisco Tech Chat that I led last week on Second Life was, for various reasons, one the tougher ‘gigs’ I have undertaken – speaking in a large auditorium in front of a thousand people is much easier that dealing with just 30 or 40 participants in Second Life! However, it was also hugely enjoyable, despite the weird heckler who appeared on stage half way through and tried to push me around. I’d love to meet that idiot in real life!

I promised to post all my references from the talk – I meant to do this within a day or two of the event itself, but the day-job intervened with a vengeance in the past week or so. But better late than never.

Amy Buckland, aka Jambina, kindly liveblogged the talk – thank you, Amy. A ‘machinima’ recording of the event is also available on the Cisco-Live website.

I began with the fact that the start of my career in education, as a primary teacher in Scotland, coincided with the arrival of the BBC Micro in UK schools in the early 1980s. Since that time:

“….I have been convinced not simply that technology has a central place in effective education, but that technology has changed and is changing the very nature of educational possibility – although to look at most schools in most countries in the world today, you would not know it. In a world where digital technologies are pervasive, where the Web has already become the platform for so much that we do, it would be perverse in the extreme to construct an education system that did not recognise that reality. And yet, across the world, and other than in small pockets here and there, that is still the case.”

I offered a statement, one I have used before, from Greg Whitby, CEO of Parramatta Catholic School District in Sydney, Australia, as my starting point:

“Technology is changing the way we live, communicate and learn. It also enables educators to re-frame schooling in order to meet the needs of twenty-first century learners.”

Greg, like me, I believe, is not one of those who think that education, as a category, is somehow a given, a universal of some kind, with a definition that is somehow unchanging from one era to another. Our understanding of education, of the processes of teaching and learning, can only be fully understood in the particular context of time and space in which we study it, or do it. So, the possibilities of education today are, for instance, profoundly different from educational possibilities in the 19th century. Why?

Because technology is a determinant, at many different levels, of the way we live our lives, and education, of course, is a human process that enables us to realise our potential within the environment in which we live. Technology is by no means the only determinant of how we live our lives – but it is a crucial one in setting a major part of the context within which we exist and interact and work and play, and attempt to reproduce or improve our societies. Today, with the Web as the learning platform, we are faced with an opportunity to radically re-define our thinking and our practice in teaching and learning.

I agreed with George Siemens, that:

“Those who struggle to create an adequate theory of learning must admit that the process is much like stumbling in the dark.”

And I went on to quote George further:

“The developing structure of technology, neural research, institutional reorganization (from hierarchy to network), and the social impact of learning under new ideologies, is evolving too rapidly to be effectively detailed as: “this is what it is!” ”

“The moment this declaration is made…” – i.e. the moment anyone declares that they have isolated the essence of what learning is in the modern world – “…the environment has shifted. We need to lay aside therefore the desire to know, and embrace instead the desire to continue to learn. Knowing is no longer a destination. Knowing is a process of walking, in various degrees of alignment with a dynamic environment.”

I borrowed some more wisdom from George, and from Stephen Downes, on the nature of interconnectedness. From Stephen, I quoted his alliterative descriptors of effective networks: decentralized, distributed, disintermediated, disaggregated, dis-integrated, democratic, dynamic and desegregated.

As I said:

“It is this shift away from the notion that we need a top-down hierarchy of some kind to organise and operate education on our behalf that is crumbling under the impact of networks. The merely-smart education leaders are those who are trying to find a compromise between the two paradigms – but the truly insightful are those who know that such compromise can only be a holding pattern. The notion of the network is simply too powerful, and will prevail as the organising model for much that we do in future as human beings, including learning.”

[Continued in Part 2]

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Category: Web 2.0, cisco, education, knowledge, learning, network learning, ontology, pedagogy, platform, schooling, social technology, technology

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The Joy of Learning: Convivial Education in a Connected World - Pt.2 : John Connell: The Blog
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