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I have a dream....
Learning, Designing Online Courses, Knowledge Management, Open Source, Masters Degree in elearning, Connectivism, Connected Learning Environment 2207 viewsI have a dream... (delusions of grandeur raising their ugly head here) of a learning environment where all people are equal. There is no difference between the rights of teachers and those of learners. Anyone can draw people in to their "group" to work on activities of their choice. Resources can be brought in to support those activities from inside the system (maybe the products of activities) or from outside (using RSS?). It takes a similar approach to Amazon where the system suggests resources based on the user's history & what other people in similar contexts have used and thought valuable. Resources can also include people, so that the system can recommend people to bring into the group based on the other resources that have been selected or the activities chosen. The products of activities can be kept private to the group, to the system, or published externally, again using RSS.
I think this would be ideal as a corporate intranet, an informal learning system, and maybe (?) as an academic system (with extra modules (or links in to CiteULike) to support citing of resources and authentication for subscription-based resources).
It doesn't go as far as Stephen Downes' model of a distributed system as I can't yet see how you can do away with some sort of centralised system to support the "institution". But the use of RSS means that you don't have to be working in the system to contribute to it.
It does support the Connectivist model of education being proposed by George Siemens - supporting the ability to make & change connections rapidly.
The only system out there that is going someway there is Tomoye's Simplify (http://www.tomoye.com/ourproducts/productdemo.htm), but it's still very much a "managed" system. My vision is to put the learners back in control of their own learning - but when they are ready for it - that's where I came in. This is the middle ground; initially the learning leaders will be setting things up, but with the aim of pushing out that responsibility as quickly as possible to the learners.
1 comment
I’ve been kicking ideas like these around in my head for a while now too - it is good to know that I’m not the only one that’s concerned about the status quo. I should say my interest is management learning. I agree with your point about the equality of rights for learners and teachers. I find the assymetric power relationship between teacher (or the more PC tag of facilitator in corporate training) quite troubling and my sense is that teachers/trainers/facilitators do little to break the dependency and so on we go. Central to my thinking about learning practice is the reversal, or ‘flipping’ as your posts refer to, the source of knowledge about practice. I would much prefer to see learners’ workplace practice placed centre stage. By this I mean helping people to pay attention to that we they are already doing (and know) as a basis for action and learning. What we have at the moment is preference given to other peoples knowledge, prescriptions for performance improvement and so on but these must always be abstractions from the context and practice of the learmer. And by privileging external knowledge I think we are overlooking what is it that people already know. Turning these thoughts into action is work in progress.
