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Study Something Open It Works

Posted March 27th, 2008 by chrishambly
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It’s been a while since I reflected on my education, but the conversation came up recently over lunch with friends.

I have a friend who is considering a career change (let’s call him Charlie). Charlie is an instructor, and an instructor in every sense of the word. He works in an environment where training or instruction takes place in a way one manner. It’s the classic “sage on the stage” approach, the “font of all knowledge” where the primary task is to transfer a package of knowledge to the audience. “I have this knowledge and I am an expert, and I will now transfer it to you”.

Excuse me while I stop smirking, due to understanding various other far more empowering methods.

Now Charlie is not necessarily an advocate of the instructor led approach, it just so happens that is the environment he works in, and in fact he would make a diamond educationalist in a more liberal, or open environment.

But what does “open” mean here?

Many years ago I used to “train” or “instruct” just like Charlie, that’s the system we grew up with, that’s what we thought “education” was suppose to equate to. When we go to a conference, that’s the experience many of us still expect, we expect to be talked to by an “expert”. Well guess what? That approach is so old school and educationally limiting it’s time we changed our values, or our beliefs on how education can be delivered, and general information.

I’m speaking as a convert mind, if you read my blog a bit you’ll know that I am primarily an educational technologist, ok so one who has had to learn online marketing, branding and SEO through running a successful online business, but at the heart my core is one of an educational technologist.

Sometimes we reach milestones in our lives, or crossroads where significant experiences change our direction forever, and one of those crossroads for me was completing my Masters of Open and Distance Education way back in 2000, abbreviated to MA ODE (Open).

I studied that programme with the IET over three years part time, and in an online mode. So back in 97 we were a buzzing virtual community located globally and sensing something big was coming, and of course it did. We studied concepts years ago concerning social networks and knowledge nodes, we read material which challenged the very notion of what education should be, we debated social interaction in cyberspace (as it was known then), we enthused about the transparency that technology can yield, and the changing dynamic of teacher and student, the power shifts in a learning relationship.

We did so much brain buzzing that it had a fundamental impact on me which changed my outlook forever, and more importantly enabled me to “give-up” the notion that I had to be an “expert” delivering knowledge. We invested brain energy and practise into words such as “constructivism”, and “heutogogy”, all beautiful words which place the learner at the centre of discovery and the teacher as a “guide on the side” a person who creates scaffolding for the learner, but never “spoon feeds”, never has a notion of having to transfer HER opinion, NO the learner must construct their own learning and assumptions.

It is with background that I enthused to Charlie, in the hope Charlie will also find great richness in “giving-up” the teacher power struggle. It is with this background I tell you that study is a good thing, providing you find an “open” approach.

Have you experienced the open approach, maybe you do it every day of your life but just never assumed it was open education?


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Comments

Great Piece

On March 28th, 2008 Gary Day (not verified) says:

Enjoyed this.
One thing I have noticed though is that often when it comes to getting this point across there's a real risk of falling into the very practice you are trying to escape, you end up standing at the front of a class and pointing at stuff on a board with a stick saying "this is the way to go". There's still the problem of having to engage the "older generation" (for want of a better term) on their level, they aren't going to listen to this on a podcast even if the point you are making is that a podcast is the way to go. In a way this is understandable (although frustrating). Today's students are more than willing to "live their learning" in this way, they were for the most part, born to that world. I think perhaps the hard part is making sure staff/tutors/teachers are aware that these relatively new ideas aren't there to bust their balls or catch them out or even drive them right out of the classroom, this progress occurs to enrich their teaching experience as much as it enriches the process of learning.

What can we learn from the older generation?

On March 28th, 2008 David Corking (not verified) says:

Gary,

You mention the 'older generation' but since a form of constructivism (known discovery learning) was promoted by John Dewey at the beginning of the twentieth century, I wonder if it wasn't todays parents and grandparents that were born to this form of learning.

Rightly or wrongly, discovery learning became discredited as a generation of children in some English-speaking countries fell far behind in reading, writing and basic mathematics.

So today's children are experiencing something much more prescriptive at school, as they hone their skills towards passing standardized tests.

It is great to discover things for myself, so yes, I will seek out facilitators that can give me the scaffolding for discovery. This is how a toddler uses its instinct and intuition to explore the world. But a few thinkers have made some unique discoveries that drove civilization forward. If we want to stand on the shoulders of giants, sometimes we need someone to explain to us how those giants thought.

I consider myself relatively ignorant and there are plenty of things I can still discover for myself. But I will never discover the ideas of Plato, Locke, Newton or Heisenberg without a lecture, textbook or laboratory assignment.

For me, the jury is still out on whether any form of construcivist learning is enough to grasp what is really important for humanity in the twenty-first century.

David

approach

On April 7th, 2008 chrishambly says:

"I consider myself relatively ignorant and there are plenty of things I can still discover for myself. But I will never discover the ideas of Plato, Locke, Newton or Heisenberg without a lecture, textbook or laboratory assignment."

Maybe you will not discover the ideas, of equal importance, because your mind differs. However, I would say you do not necessarily need to be told about these discoveries you could in fact discover them as fact through building your own perception of them through a constructivist approach.

If you learn the outcome yourself, you will not likely forget it, if you are told the outcome you have not experienced it, and may forget it. The secret is constructing constructivist activities where the student builds her own outcomes, she discovers it, even if there is only one possible outcome.

Hi, food for thought. Maybe

On April 7th, 2008 Henk de Kruyff (tdaonp) (not verified) says:

Hi,

food for thought. Maybe even a blog post. Thanks.

Well, I also have been an instructor. Most of my family is or has been in education related jobs so I have plenty of examples of the old school way of doing things.

I believe that there may be a case for both ways of educating/instructing.

The old school way may work when the person educating is indeed the specialist on a certain subject. In my case I instructed on a very proprietary piece of hard- and software so I had to be the one standing in front of the white board or computer screen. I must say that I would have loved in those days to have had the power to be able to feed some of the reactions from the room back into the company designing the soft- and hardware. Alas, the company was thoroughly old-school in every way. Still, I can imagine situations, even in more enlightened environs where the old way of the instructor instructing the class works best. Initially.

When you have a more think-tank like situation I think you need a more equal footing. By the way, there's nothing new in this. Socrates didn't consider himself all knowing and taught from a "I know nothing" stand point and invited discussion and input from his students. Or so we're told by Plato.

In the end and after thinking about it a little I think the education process should never have the arrogance of thinking itself all knowing and invite feedback from the 'classroom' but should at the same time have some authority of knowledge in the beginning of the process.

Blogs are a little like that. The blogger starts the thought, maybe has some specialist knowledge and then the readers take up the thread and develop it. All very Socratic. That's why I love the online thought streams that are weaving in and out of the various social networks.

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