Boost Blog

Late last year, Danny and Peter in my team published eight great little videos of tertiary students talking about their experiences with and views on e-learning (the video above is part 1). Sometimes the concerns of tertiary take a different emphasis from ours in schooling, but more often than not, working alongside these guys just sharpens my focus (check out Ako Aotearoa for more on teaching practice in the tertiary sector). 

The videos were designed to inform students contemplating taking online and blended courses, although the messages are useful too for tertiary staff I’m sure. The wider social scaffolding that e-learning provides these students is one of the clear values of e-learning. 

I was struck by the number of statements by the students along the lines of ‘I can check out MIT lectures on same subject’, and ‘Missing class is not a problem because I can catch up later’ and ‘I’m able to get on with it without waiting for lectures’. What are they saying about their relationship with the institution?

Before he left the ministry last year, I had the pleasure of a long chat with Dean Carroll, who was also working in the tertiary area. He argues that we are going through a ‘digital reformation’. Back in the 16th century, the Catholic Church mediated its worshippers’ relationship with God. The invention of the printing press and increased circulation of copies of the bible (amongst other social and technological changes) enabled the common person to seek a relationship directly with their God, avoiding the church altogether, contributing to the break away of the The Church of England from the authority of the Pope, and bringing the Catholic Church into crisis. 

In the same way, Dean says, education institutions have mediated young people’s access to knowledge. Today’s technologies are enabling young people to avoid the ‘church’ of education and to find, use and create new knowledge with their peers and networks through the new digital channels and spaces where knowledge resides. As I’ve often said on this blog, the agency of our young people outside school in producing and using knowledge contrasts with young people positioned by the education establishment as consumers of information mediated and authorised by adults.

The students in the videos are not avoiding the church of education, but they are seeking a much more flexible, personalised relationship with it – and one that doesn’t exclude relationships with other sources of knowledge.  

Here’s a quote from an excellent post (lovely diagrams of ‘closed’ and ‘networked’ systems) by Bill Farren on the breakdown of the educational hegemony by the schooling system:

Opening up the institution may seem like a counter-intuitive way of protecting it, but in an era where tremendous value is being created by informal and self-organized groups, sharing becomes the simplest and most powerful way of connecting with external learning opportunities. Why limit students to one teacher when a large number of them exist outside the institution? Why limit students to a truncated classroom conversation when a much larger one is taking place all over the world? Why not give students real-world opportunities to learn how to manage and benefit from networked sources? Institutions that are opening up are betting that the benefits obtained by sharing their resources will outweigh the expenses incurred in their creation. These institutions understand that larger and richer sources of knowledge and wisdom are to be found outside their walls. They understand that allowing students to access these sources, sharing their own, and helping students learn how to manage and understand all of it, will add value to what it is that they do as institutions. 

Will Richardson talks about our own learning networks, as educators, and the disconnect with students’ schooling experiences: 

Those of us who write to connect and who live our learning lives in these [networked] spaces feel the dissonance all the time. We go where we want, identify our own teachers, find what we need, share as much as we can, engage in dialogue, direct our own learning as it meets our needs and desires. That does not feel like what’s happening to my own children or most others in the ‘system’.

Will’s post sent me on to a great post by Scott Leslie – ‘Planning to share vs just sharing’. Scott delves further into this dissonance and how it is that institutions make networked learning fraught with difficulties. Worth a read.

I think we can only realise the vision of our curriculum – young people who will be confident, connected, actively involved, lifelong learners – within open and authentic environments. We know this works because it works for us. As Scott says, ‘every single day I share my learning and have knowledge and learning shared back with me [through my learning networks]. I know it works. I literally don’t think I could do my job any longer without it – the pace of change is too rapid, the number of developments I need to follow and master too great, and without my network I would drown’. 

PS: On the same theme – how many of the benefits of institutional learning can be accomplished via social media – is this rather good presentation by Sarah ‘Intellagirl’ Robbins from EduCause on Social Media and Education: The Conflict Between Technology and Insitutional Education, and the Future. Thanks to Joss Debreceny for passing this on.