Surface Tension

Lately I feel I have been living this blog's tagline.

A couple weeks ago I spent a day with Alan November at an Ohio Dept of Education workshop. Alan is a sought after consultant to the international K-12 arena. He convened the Building Learning Communities conference I attended last summer. He is one of those people who can see the forest and the trees on the frontiers of change. Through a handful of stories and graphs he neatly pointed out how our approach to education underserves our students by failing to cultivate the literacy, creativity and skill to function in a global economy using a global digital network.

I left the workshop with mixture of feelings. I was struck by absurdity of saying we -- and I lump all Colleges in this we along with my own -- believe in lifelong learning when we shut off the learning space at the end of 10 or 15 weeks. How can we say we are student-centered when the student-produced content of an online course disappears when it is over. Do we own the learning or do they?

Earlier this year I began to see a course management system as a "content-rationing system" and I my view has not changed. What we call "lifelong learning" is the opportunity to buy an educational experience at many life and career stages. Does this serve our students or does creating an environment for, and teaching the skills of, self-learning better serve our community?

To change from the rationing model will be disruptive. How we define and evaluate teaching and learning is built on centuries of course-semester-degree defines learning but the world now requires us to be far more nimble.

These thoughts have been percolating down to my posts in the OLN Podcasting Listerv I co-moderate.

As I continue to think about podcasting in ed, I keep coming to back to the thought that podcasting — along with blogs, wikis ands other tools — pushes learning to be a social experience. Publish, listen, read, share, belong. That is the culture the web is fostering now. Combine that with ubiquitous connectivity and the traditional model of education crumbles.

I recall that when ATMs first appeared they were placed inside the banks. They were automatic tellers after all and tellers belong in banks. Or so we thought. I think in many ways we are still in the early ATM stage of educational technology, concerned about transmission and tools that create digital versions of classrooms that begin and end on 10 or 15 week schedules. I wonder where we'll end up.

I appreciate Rich Bowers reply and the implications of what he says must happen:

You have hit on a key point. Until “education” is willing to begin the creative destruction of the models and procedures used heretofore, we’re just going to be tinkerers with interesting new gadgets.

As a newcomer to the “reality” of distance learning a couple of years ago – coming from the commercial world where we felt free to try anything until we found what works – I was horrified when I learned that WebCT & Blackboard were the online “environments” of choice for distance learning. To me, they appeared to be a perversion of what technology could offer – in the service of no-change, throwbacks built to make practitioners comfortable rather than effective.

I think we are in one of those areas where success will come after a serious disjunction in the gradual path – a leap that takes us to something very new and different and enables to re-start considering the nature of “education” from a whole new place. First we need inspiration, then we’ll need engineering.

How does change happen? By evolution or revolution? Well ... that's a topic for another post.

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