Learning 2.0: The Power of Learning in a Networked World – part 2

Posted on | March 21, 2008 | 9 Comments

Continued from Part 1 – this is a rough and ready summary of my Cisco Tech Chat on Second Life on Thursday 13 March, 2008

I speculated on the conditions that typified the ’smokestack school’: a society “…where information was scarce, where key sources of information were controlled by an elite, where teachers were seen as founts of knowledge, where the wider economy demanded mass production of learning, where the curriculum as a direct result was centrally determined, and where…..pedagogy meant “knowledge transfer”.”

However, despite the fact that the conditions that determined this kind of schooling have disappeared or are disappearing rapidly, this is still an accurate description of most systems of schooling in most countries in the world today. Those who cannot, or will not, see beyond that decaying paradigm are hanging on for dear life, and in most places, pretty effectively for the moment.

I have previously quoted both RF Mackenzie and Woodrow Wilson is this context.

I have also previously written about the similar characteristics that Education and Technology share – their mutual potential for good or ill.

I spoke of how we can start – some started long ago! – to re-define ’school’. School could be, amongst other characteristics:

• A place where learning is the focus rather than teaching
• A hub for educational resources, facilitation and access to expertise/information
• A place set up to enable social and collaborative learning – let’ call it network learning for want of a better term – as much as individual and even isolated learning – there are always going to be occasions when that is the preferred, and right, choice of the learner
• A locus for immersive learning – where teachers and learners learn together, and indeed where they can gain access to learners anywhere else in the world
• An open learning environment built on negotiation and mutual respect
• And….an extended community resource

But when we add all of that up, we might start to realise that learning need not be restricted to the school. With the Web as our platform for learning, the notion of the school (or the college, or the university, or any educational institution) as having some kind of monopoly position in the “supply and delivery” of learning very quickly becomes a dead duck. Depending on the way our societies are organized, there is no reason whatsoever that the school’ place in our ecology of learning should be endangered any time soon – the concept of the school is a persistent one – but it should lead us to question the precise role of the school in the broader learning ecology that networks make possible.

Again, I used the wisdom of George Siemens to look at the nature of network learning:

- that learning and knowledge should rest on a diversity of opinion
- that learning is a process of connecting specialised nodes or information sources
- that the capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known
- that nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning
- that the ability to see connections between fields, ideas and concepts is a core skill

I have quoted Ivan Illich’s three purposes of education before – his stated purposes, I believe, move any conception we might have of education far beyond the reductive and instrumental paradigms that envelope most instances of formal education through schooling in most parts of the world today.

I spoke about values in education, quoting Jared Diamond, and about education as preparedness for change, in a paper called Network Learning, by Pithamber Polsani.

Polsani also wrote that:

“….the knowledge economy or the information society is not a stable structure with definitive functions, but a flexible condition where diverse programs can be developed using fragments of knowledge from different fields.”

In the context of Learning 2.0, those diverse programs need not be created and delivered by external agencies – they can be and will continue to be – but the individual is now able to do this for himself or herself given the platform for learning that the Web in particular provides for us.

Knowledge itself, is a moving feast in this context, but we can summarise knowledge in lots of different ways:

- Knowledge is created
- Knowledge is grown
- Knowledge is personal
- Knowledge is socially mediated
- Knowledge is making connections
- Knowledge is recognising patterns
- Knowledge is perception

In other words, Knowledge is Learning.

I quoted Stephen Downes from his paper ‘Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge’:

“Knowledge is not located in any given place (and therefore not transferred or transacted per se) but rather consists of the network of connections formed from experience and interactions with a knowing community.”

I think that phrase from Stephen – ‘interactions with a knowing community’ – is a superbly pithy definition of network learning.

I also looked at pedagogy for Learning 2.0, and took as my starting point some simple truths from Paulo Freire – from his book Pedagogy of Freedom. He wrote that:

“Learners are active participants and co-constructors of knowledge….”

…that….

” Learning should be meaningful and purposeful to the learners…..”

…and that….

” Learning should have a critical focus.”

I also quoted Ron Burnett on his thinking around the ‘radical impossibility of teaching’:

“Learning can never be reduced to the way information and ideas are structured for communication. The core confusion is between the authority of the teacher and the authorship that goes into various educational discourses and the manner in which these discourses are exchanged amongst learners and teachers.”

I finished with:

Underpinning [Learning 2.0] is the notion of the Web as the Platform, the Web as the Learning Platform – through that we can dive deeply into concepts such as network learning, connectivism, and so on. We need to be able to use the platform that all of those technologies and components offer us to push for radical change in the way we do education. I quoted Feynman’s words:

“To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven…..the same key opens the gates of hell.”

Applied to education, we can either, to put it bluntly, help our society to become a better place to live, or we can screw up. Let’ try to get it right.

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