StigmergicWeb

Sebastian Fiedler is wondering “Do we have a content problem?” I think this is a valid question, considering the intensity many instructional technologists devote to learning objects. Indeed, their reverence borders on religious ecstasy when the discussion turns towards learning object repositories and SCORM compliance. Given this concern about collecting, collating, archiving and classifying content, one could conclude that there is a deficit of learnable content, but I find that the opposite is true. We have an abundance of sources of information on a wide variety of topics in developed nations - schools, universities, colleges, libraries, and bookstores. Oh yes - there’s also that newfangled interweb thing I keep hearing so much about. If I want to find out about sea turtles or the differential calculus, there are a great number of places where I can get this information. The information - the content - is out there, but what we need are places where those who have knowledge can share it with those who wish to acquire knowledge. In the real world, we call these learning environments schools or universities. What we need is not a great preponderance of learning object repositories, but virtual learning environments.

So why is there so much energy devoted to learning objects? I can think of only one reason, although I’m sure there are others. School administrators tend to favour learning object repositories for a number of reasons, and I’m sure one of them is that learning objects and the repositories thereof are nicely quantifiable and measurable. They are easy to standardize. The model that this is based on, however, is not education - it is a training model. Training is necessary and desirable in many contexts, but it lacks the richness of experience that comes with a true education. I think that a true education comes not from the stuff we recall for the final exam at the end of the course, but from the process we undergo when we grapple with new ideas. It comes not from the content of a course, but from its context - the community within a classroom. Great teachers have a talent for creating great environments for learning within the classroom, and this talent is not quantifiable, measurable or standardizable. It is most definitely not something that can be archived in a repository!

A classroom is not the only place where an education can take place, of course. One of my high school teachers told us as we were graduating that if we didn’t learn at least as much over coffee as we had in the classroom, we had wasted our time at university. Education does not always require a teacher to be present (although vanity forces me to hope that a good teacher may help to catalyze those discussions that occur outside the classroom ;^)

Fiedler includes a wonderful passage from Cybernetics, e-learning and the education system by Oleg Liber.

The internet empowers people by giving the possibility of control over content and organisation; many VLEs shift the locus of control further away from learners and teachers to institutional management…

Well said. Let us shift our focus from learning objects to learning contexts - what we need are some online spaces that will allow great teachers (who may or may not be teachers by training) to create virtual learning environments that support a true education. And maybe a few virtual coffee houses would help out as well!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 20th, 2004 at 02:56 and is filed under summer 2004 project. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.