Rene’s Assessment

Time for some reflection, and answer the big question for December 2008: what did you learn about learning in 2008? And in doing so, perhaps time to come clean about my own learning disabilities.

Geek Inside

I’m a classical geek: A bit of a recluse, overly rational and sometimes perhaps lacking a bit in some social graces. On most days I read more then my girlfriend talks. I will trust you to correctly apply the stereotypes in that sentence. They are characteristics that, for the most part, have actually served me quite well. Our education system has bestowed the most extraordinary amount of positive action on the minority of people like me. People that can, and are willing to, learn at least some things solely by engaging with the written word.

The problem is of course that this is not how most people learn, and it’s not how the most important things are learned. But it’s easy to stick with something that works, and so it has taken me quite a bit of time to really understand that. To understand that we only really learn by (inter)acting. And while the education system is still accepts, and even favours people with similar disabilities to mine to cling to their narrow learning habits, modern social and professional life make it increasingly hard to be successful with that disposition. Because this disposition is suited primarily for information gathering. And information is of course just another commodity, and an increasingly cheap one.

But aside from this personal realisation, this is something that needs to be translated to our practices, and our institutions and systems, which is not trivial. How are we going stimulate learning, if we are not teaching? How do we verify that learning has taken place, if we aren’t sure how create authentic and valid assessments for the competencies we are now aspiring to instil? And aside from solving these challenges on an intellectual level, how will we actually implement them and change the entrenched system of education in which we work. It’s a worthy challenge, one for after the Christmas holidays…

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My brother pointed out this great TEDtalk to me yesterday by Susan Savage-Rumbaugh, called Apes that write, start fires and play Pac-Man. it’s a great watch, and if you have 20 minutes I would certainly recommend you have a look, as it is quite amazing how much these primates are like us, and how much they can learn. I was also intrigued by what she said about how they learn:

“The most important thing is not to teach them.”

The Bonobos pick up things very naturally and freely  as long as they are in an environment that is fun, with meaningful individuals that they like to interact with. They watch, experiment and learn. And in this Bonobos are probably a lot like us. I think most of us are starting to understand that learning isn’t about knowledge transfer. It is about making connections to concepts, activities and individuals that are meaningful to us in some way. And doing so is not something we can be told to do, it is something we have to want to do, and allowed to do freely, because it has a relevance, an importance to us.

Anyway, I thought it would be a good motto for 2009: The important thing is not to teach them!

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It’s only the first week and I’m already behind schedule, how embarrassing. Either way, here are my reflections on the first week of connectivism:

Levels of analysis
Although not a part of this weeks reading, I did find a lot of value in a video recommended by Clark Quinn: (not Donald Clark as I erroneously said earlier):

It seems to me that a lot of the differences in the various theories and views on learning really boil down to the level of analysis or perspective that you take on the problem. Connectivism in that sense is the result of the analysis of learning within a new level or structure that has been created through new technology.

Analogies
Aside from the level of analysis, analogies can form another perspective on a problem. Often we start employing an analogy because it aids in the representation of an aspect of an idea. However, analogies are always flawed, and so when we start employing our analogy to liberally we inevitably run into problems. Unfortunately our brain seems to like, and need, simplicity and so we often find ourselves stuck in our own analogy.

The brain as a computer is a very obvious analogy. Knowledge as an object that can be internalised is perhaps also the result of a subconscious analogy. In the days where books were not too abundant and the number of views expressed in them relatively limited perhaps it was logical to see the book as a synonym for knowledge. And so reading the book, internalising it, equivalent to learning. the observation had very little to do with what learning really is. It is more an expression of how learning commonly took place.

And so for the blogging, networking and podcasting fanatics amongst us, networked learning has become our preferred mode of learning. And while it serves a lot of us very well, I am not sure it actually makes it a theory of learning, or if it is merely an instantiation of it. And to be very precisely, perhaps it is more a means of sense making, more then learning. Learning, to me, is still something I cannot easily separate from the individual.

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I have previously expressed some ideas about the value of higher education and how, at least for the less research intensive institutes, it is moving away from content and knowledge, and towards guidance and accreditation. However a few separate experiences this week have lead me to start thinking slightly differently about the future and value of higher education.

It all started with my enrolment on the connectivism course that is being prepared by Stephen Downes and George Siemens. I think it was Stephen who made the case for assessment to be individual. After all learners come to a course or activity with individual goals and ambitions, and so it doesn’t really make sense that they would be assessed in the same way. While this doesn’t invalidate the importance of assessment and accreditation, it does question the validity of having predefined outcomes and criteria for these perhaps.

over coffee this morning I had a discussion with a colleague, who was explaining to me the importance of the community of practice, and how we needed to find a way to make learners part of a community of practice before and after their actual enrollment on a module or course. He made a very strong case for what should be a major benefit of doing a course with the University: Joining a community of peers and experts. Very consistent with Stephen’s ideas I thought.

Then this afternoon, while I was wrestling the backlog in my GReader, I stumbled on a piece on the value of social networks by Engeström (via Grainne’s blog) which again confirmed this notion. Basically Engeström explains that a relation, and thus a network, only has value as a result of the object that this relation is built on. In Flickr these are pictures, in Delicious they are bookmarks. Similarly in education, these could be courses or subjects, just like my colleague was proposing with the communities of practice.

And so maybe the value of HE is not primarily around accreditation. Perhaps the most important value we can offer is the organisation and support of learning networks around subjects of interest. In that case, we have a lot of work to do…

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