Tag: Education

Connected Learning: a new model of learning.

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Doug Belshaw

If you’re an educator, if you’re a student, if you’re a parent – in fact, if you’re someone who walks around with their eyes open, you’ll have noticed something. Educational experiences in school and educational experiences outside of school are very different.

So far, so obvious. But what can we do about it?

I’m currently in San Francisco at the MacArthur-funded Digital Media and Learning initiative’s annual conference, #DML2012. As regular readers will know, I blog for DMLcentral and am a big fan of DML’s work.

Today, DML launched an ‘interest-powered, peer-supported, and academically-oriented’ model of learning called Connected Learning. Having been privy to some of the development behind this, I’m excited by the possibilities it affords.

Connected Learning is based upon open networks with a shared purpose to help learners produce things. It’s focused on answering the following questions:

What would it mean to think of education as a responsibility of a distributed network of people and institutions, including schools, libraries, museums and online communities?
What would it mean to think of education as a process of guiding youths’ active participation in public life that includes civic engagement, and intellectual, social, recreational, and career-relevant pursuits?
How can we take advantage of the new kinds of intergenerational configurations that have formed in which youth and adults come together to work, mobilize, share, learn, and achieve together?
What would it mean to enlist in this effort a diverse set of stakeholders that are broader than what we traditionally think of as educational and civic institutions?

This is a great time to get involved, if you’re interested. Go here for more information: http://connectedlearning.tv

Not only is it a great model, but educational legends such as Mimi Ito and Mitch Resnick are behind it – and will be participating in weekly webinars!

(for more on my involvement in the DML Conference, head over to my conference blog and/or follow #DML2012 and @dajbconf on Twitter)

What’s the point of education? [Guardian Teacher Network]

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Doug Belshaw

The Guardian Teacher Network published my piece on the purpose of education yesterday. I like to experiment with new formats, so the whole piece is made up of questions – much like Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood: a novel?

I’d be interested in your comments over there (I’ve turned them off here to encourage you to do so!)

Beyond academic journals?

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Doug Belshaw

This is my third and final post in a (rather impromptu) mini-series on academic journals and their place in the 21st century landscape. You may want to read my previous two posts here and here before reading this one?

To find a new enlightening and inspiring idea (as distinct from finding a recipe for getting safely through the peer-built barricade), browsing through thousands of journal pages is all too often called for. With my tongue in one cheek only, I’d suggest that were our Palaeolithic ancestors to discover the peer-review dredger, we would still be sitting in caves… (Zygmunt Bauman)

In my previous posts on academic journals I’ve compared them unfavourably – either explicitly or implicitly – with the kind of informal ‘peer review’ that happens through blogs and social media. Some commenters have assumed that this means that, like Bauman (see above) I’m completely against peer review. I’m not.

Peer review is valuable. In fact, it’s so important we need a (re)new(ed) academic ecosystem to protect it.

I’m all for new systems such as hypothes.is which provides an open, distributed peer review layer for the web. Although I don’t want to go into it in too much depth here, academia is one of the few unreformed areas with outdated power structures and glass ceilings.

As Stephen Thomas pointed out in the comments to my previous post, academic journals have, and still do, play an important role in both establishing precedent and providing a quality filter. This is important (most of the time).

But, as Dan Meyer pointed out in the quotation making up the bulk of my first post in this series, it’s the edifice that’s built upon the academic journal system that’s problematic:

The incentive seems strange to me… I don’t understand this brass ring I’m chasing. (Dan Meyer)

This academic edifice is built upon other perceived ‘advantages’ of academic journals, including:

Dissemination of work
Status
Career progression
Contact with others inside and outside field

Academics, unfortunately, have ended up inventing a stick with which they can be beaten. In the UK, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a crude instrument looking a research outputs. Career progression (and therefore status) depends upon disseminating work in journals that are, all too often, closed and paywalled.

Part of the answer, I agree, comes through academic journals becoming open access. That’s a step in the right direction (even if it does smack a little of Henry Ford’s ‘faster horses‘). Going further, something more like Alan Cann’s experiments around open peer review could work. But, realistically, we need something a bit more radical.

How can we save peer review whilst democratising and reforming higher education?

I leave you with the words of Frances Bell, who commented on my previous post:

What I suspect is that more research needs to be done on how, for example. scholarly societies can support research, scholarship and practice in a digital age. (Frances Bell)

Amen to that.