I recently took part in an on line learning event organised by the University of Manitoba. Other speakers included Dave Weinberger, Jay Cross and other luminaries. You can find all of the presentations here and mine specifically here.
You should note that this was an on line presentation and people were asking questions on the message board as I spoke, including the odd side swipe on the Welsh. So if you listen you may hear a remark which appears out of context and there is some back ground noise. I was also slightly short of breath at the start after rushing around to find a spot in the conference hall with good wireless access and some privacy. My role was to challenge some of the presumptions and over optimism of much thinking about future forms of education. I summarise the content below, having suffered listening to myself (it really is not fun)
Generic issues with learning and knowledge in general
Making measurement systems (paper production) into targets which destroys the measure
Tacit & Explicit Knowledge: Nonaka's SECI model was the first worst thing that happened to KM
Living in real and virtual worlds, they are different and you cannot replicate one in another. Reduction in depth of communication and pervert structures.
Social computing - blogs and wikis are a huge improvement over CoP, Content Management etc. Positive and negative aspects (including questions of intimacy and clustering, boundary crossing and silo creation.
Three big issues
Validation, difference between early days of a new tool (eg. wikipedia) and the latter development as people understand how it works. Only touching the surface of this problem, dependency will increase issue. Tyranny of crowds.
Scale, virtual education takes place in the context of physical education. What happens if they physical goes? What happens as the balance shifts to virtual education? We don't know, we can't assume it will scale.
Cognitive Development, dangers of virtual environment not permitting necessary experience and development at key phases in human development. Is there a danger of a community of autistics? Inhibition circuits based on participation in World of Warcraft?
In response to questions
Future form of organisations, nodal networks. Issues with University education shifting to information processing rather than learning. Need for social interaction in schools. New forms of extended family.
Fundamental error of tacit-exlicit. Think of concrete- narrative-abstract as an alternative. The role of narrative, why blogs and instant messaging are close to natural forms of narrative.
Metaphor as a form of cognition, role in teaching along with irony and humour. Narrative as a research tool. Metaphor based games. Issues of bias in interviews.
Balance between content focus in education and narrative. Constructed stories are another form of content. Tagging or linking narrative to content. Excessive focus on conformance with professorial views in university education.
Contextually reflective models, as opposed to formulaic generation of content. Dangers of increasing levels of autism in educational delivery. Shift from multiple outcome based measurement to impact measurement. Need to increase learning in groups, experience, physical interaction in learning. Issues on innovation and necessary levels of stress. Trans-disciplinary work.
Comments (1)
Hi David - thanks for your presentation...great comments from conference participants.
You may find this map of participants interesting: http://attendr.com/foe (you'll need to change to world view at the bottom left corner...and then use the slide bar on top left to move around). An interesting representation of some of the conference attendees.
George
Posted by George Siemens | June 11, 2007 9:50 PM
Posted on June 11, 2007 21:50