George Siemens at eLA

Posted on | May 29, 2008 | 4 Comments

I have been in Accra for two days already, but the eLearning Africa Conference really only kicked off this morning, Thursday 29th June. The two Ministerial round tables I attended on Monday and Tuesday were pre-conference events.

The highlight for me was the chance to listen again to George Siemens, who spoke to the theme: A Narrative of Learning for a World Without Boundaries. I wasn’t able to live-blog, since the wifi provision in the conference centre does not extend to the main hall, so I am writing this up later on the basis of a few notes, and more in summary than with any analytical intent. I will come back to some of his points more deeply when I have time. I will be paraphrasing him on occasions, but George will be able to correct anything I get wrong later.

The opening plenary started around an hour late (nothing starts on time in Ghana, I am discovering) so George had to fit a fairly complex argument into just 22 minutes (I timed him) but did it beautifully.

He asked a number of important questions, including:

What does it mean to be human in a world of ICT? How do we remain civil, in the most basic sense of the word. We need to find ways to retain our human attributes, through deeply social uses uses of technology.

He asked: what is the life of a learner? Being a learner is about so much more than doing courses, and we need to understand the broad range of difficulties that can arise in the life of a learner, especially where the learner has other commitments and responsibilities beyond the learning itself.

He told us that Governments cannot educate, but that they can do much to foster the environment that will allow education to flourish in their country and for their people.

He made the point that we need to think less about content and more about the interactions, the connections that exist between learners.

He quoted Geoffrey Crowther, founding Chancellor of the Open University in the UK, when he said that we need to be open in education, “….to people, to places, to methods, to ideas.” On this, George was clear that technology cannot be used as an excuse for less openness – technology itself does not inhibit openness. Rather, openness is dependent upon the will of groups who might be unwilling to use technology to connect, to really connect.

He worked through a diverse range of issues that we need to think about in establishing an environment for connected learning, including respect for local/national history and culture, mobile technologies (especially important across the continent of Africa), open educational resources, socialization, and a narrative of inclusion in education. George also noted that we have to attempt to resolve, or at least to acknowledge, the many tension points that arise in education as technology becomes pervasive in our lives: questions such as, who is an expert? what is the nature of authority? what makes a person an authority? can people work together successfully to create knowledge without the intervention of experts? (this last point is definitely a paraphrase on my part – George may have meant something different).

He made the interesting comment that, “…we are on the edge of our knowledge,” and used this to begin an interesting line on the complex, as opposed to complicated, nature of learning today – this is an argument I have heard other discuss recently, and I think it is an interesting area to consider. So, as George noted, until now we have been able to view society as complicated – there are senses in which we have been able to know it in advance. But perhaps society is now complex rather than complicated; complex in the sense that a weather system is complex – difficult to predict, impossible to ‘know’ the right answer as we advance into the unknown.

Education, he argued, has a complex structure – we need to negotiate as we go, and this points us to the need to see that learning is now happening in a world without boundaries.

In the past, the teacher took on the role of the expert, and the learner was the empty receptacle waiting to be filled up with knowledge. In the world without boundaries, in this complex world, we need instead a model of active participation in learning – participation in content creation, in learning network formation, in socialization, and in the owning of our own participation.

Too many educational reforms, George believes, ignore the whole view -

- learning
- learner needs
- diversity
- access
- technology
- variability of information quality
- international global relations/partnerships

All of these, and many other issues besides need to be brought into consideration when we seek to reform education. Carried through carefully, we can avoid the risk of building a development model too soon or too rigidly -which is what happens when we think we know the answer, when we think we can predict what will happen in this complex society of ours.

George finished with the line: “The information revolution is global, but it “happens” locally!” (again, paraphrased).

So, in the space of just 22 minutes, George managed to work his way through a complex matrix of issues that, I hope, gave the 1400 delegates to eLA much to think about. One delegate was certainly moved to react – as I left the hall, I heard someone use the word ‘Maoist’ to describe George’s philosophy. I’ll leave it to George to decide whether he likes that or not!

Technorati Tags: george siemens, elearning africa, eLA, complexity

Category: authority, education, emerging regions, government, knowledge, society, technology

Comments

4 Responses to “George Siemens at eLA”

George Siemens
May 29th, 2008 @ 6:20 pm

Hi John,

Thanks for your kind comments. I appreciate your summary of the presentation.

The delay was interesting (to put it mildly). We were waiting in a side room for the VP. I guess it’s a bit tough to begin a conference without the conference opener! He was very courteous. What I found interesting was the cavalier attitude from other attendees on the delay to getting started. Had I been in the audience and not aware of what was going on behind the scenes, I would have been vibrating waiting for the event to begin.

With regard to the maoist comment. Hmm. Not sure what to make of that. I suspect it wasn’t intended as a compliment, so I would love to know which of my comments triggered that remark! It’s always interesting to receive comments on what others heard. While I would hope that educational reform would increase the opportunities of individuals in countries in Africa, I suspect the reform will likely come from economic restructuring. Education is a long, slow revolution. As we’ve seen from countries like China and Russia, market-based reform create almost overnight revolutions. It’s an interesting comment with regard to maoism…though, I must say, I prefer the notion of democracy, appropriate market principles to permit personal autonomy and capacity for creating and capturing opportunities, etc.

If the individual referred to Maoist doctrine from the perspective of concern for individuals (not from an economic slant), then I may coerce myself into seeing it as an intentioned compliment on the need for contextual considerations of learning implementation .

Take care John – it was great to meet you f2f finally!

If I don’t see you before the conference ends, travel safe!

George
John Connell
May 30th, 2008 @ 4:05 am

In my younger days, George, I might have accepted ‘Maoist’ as a compliment, whether it was intended as such or not – I’m less sure now.

From the snatch of conversation I heard, I’m sure it was not intended as a compliment for you, as I think the user of the epithet was of the opinion that any philosophy that appeared to dilute the authority of the ‘authority’ in educaton was suspect. He, like so many others, will just have to get used to the changing relationship between teacher and learner as access to information becomes less and less restricted to an information-rich elite.

For what it’s worth, in my view the authority, the expert, will continue to hold a special position in society, and in education, but such authorities had better be prepared to submit to much greater scrutiny of their right to title of ‘expert’ by those who now have access to the same sources of information, who can make the same kinds of connections as the expert, and who can therefore begin to challenge the assumptions that underly the expert’s knowledge.

My guess is that our friend’s use of the ‘Maoist’ tag was thinking, rather crudely, of Mao’s decision to send China’s educated elite to work in the fields and the factories. The notion of teacher and learner learning together was probably just too much for the poor soul.
Martin Stewart-Weeks
June 8th, 2008 @ 2:47 pm

This notion of the world having become so complex we can’t expect education to ‘teach’ content…it bothers me a little. I buy completely the need to co-create learning and insight and the idea of collaborative learning, and I buy also the removal of the teacher from the front of the class filling the waiting ‘empty minds’ with facts and figures. Gradgrind has never been a compelling model of education, I guess.

But presumably there is some need, somewhere, for students to be taught actual content and facts and figures and given guided access to the raw materials from which they can then engage in the process of co-creation. It irritates me that much of the contemporary education debate seems often strung out unhelpfully between the extremes of the traditionalists at one end, bemoaning the absence of the three Rs and good old fashioned, content-laden ‘instruction’ and, at the other end, a mind of post-modern insistence that all education happens by some sort of spontaneous, collaborative combustion as learners are mysteriously guided to knowledge and insight without actually knowing anything.

I assume the best of the new thinking about learning and teaching is comfortable at neither of those extremes but advocates instead some kind of genuine synthesis between a kind of ‘building blocks’ approach that helps students get to grips with ideas, theories and facts/content and a rich, collaborative approach to emergent learning that is constructed as they are challenged to do something with what they know and, in the process, start to know more.

Is the dichotomy I’m sketching too simple and crude? Strikes me the truth about the kind of learning to which we should be aspiring is not all that hard to discern. It’s just that the discussion invariably gets hijacked by those who subvert the discussion by hiding behind whichever of the extremes suits them best.
John Connell
June 8th, 2008 @ 4:42 pm

I agree, Martin. Not only is there a balance to be struck, but I think the balance between the two shifts as we deal with learners as they get older. For me, it’s about shifting the locus of control more and more towards the learner as they are able to cope with that control more readily.

The youngest learners, I feel, require the balance to be weighted towards guided access, towards ‘teaching’ in the sense we tend to recognize the term. As kids get older, the balance can shift gradually away from the more traditional paradigm to a situation in which the learner takes more and more control over their own learning.

However, as you say, this is not to advocate any kind of gradgrind philosophy for any learner at any age. Play, imagination, creativity need to be core elements of teaching and learning at every stage.