Posts Tagged ‘knowledge’

Knowledge vs Experience

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After attempting (fruitlessly, it would seem) to show the importance of experience and context in the edublogosphere, I can’t help but poke some fun at myself with today’s daily Dilbert cartoon:

Dilbert is © Scott Adams (Dilbert.com)

Posted: July 13th, 2008
Categories: Everything Else
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My Ed.D. thesis proposal: What does it mean to be ‘digitally literate’?

I submitted the second version of my Ed.D. thesis proposal a while back now. I had to re-submit as I failed the first submission. This was a bit of a shock to the system, never having failed anything academically before. It was actually partly my supervisor’s fault – who has now left the University of Durham and doesn’t have a doctorate himself… :p

I was advised to wait until I had the marks back for the thesis proposal before posting it on my blog. Upon reflection, I could see this was a sensible thing to do, so now I’ve heard back and I’ve passed I’m going to post it in its entirity. I received 63% for the following, which isn’t disastrous but less than I would have hoped for. Because it’s my second submission, however, the mark that’s recorded is 50%. At the end of the day, I’m not overly concerned: my Ed.D. overall is pass/fail… :-)

The comments on the following were:

This is a solid proposal which provides a detailed reflection of the relevant literature in which the proposed study is to be grounded. Although covered in less detail than the literature section, the proposal provides an appropriate methodological base for the research. The proposal suggests a cross-cultural component and it is important in this context that similarities as well as ‘discrepancies’ are identified and that the study does not become unmanageable. In general this is a good solid proposal.

(emphasis mine)

The proposal itself follows after the ‘tag’ cloud that is indicative of its contents (courtesy of TweetClouds)

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My (finely crafted) information environment

Raft

There’s sea of information and knowledge out there. I do the best I can, strapping together several planks by way of information channels into a raft to stay afloat. I thought I’d share those here – both online and offline sources – and I’m definitely open to suggestions and comments!

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Posted: February 11th, 2007
Categories: Productivity
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Some ideas about the structure of my thesis proposal essay

A few months ago when I had to submit an outline for my thesis proposal essay, I indicated that I wanted to look at ‘changing conceptions of, and reactions to, the nature of knowledge by educational institutions.’ My feeling was (and still is) that, as George Siemens so aptly put it in Knowing Knowledge,?

Knowledge has broken free from its moorings, its shackles.

The five questions I framed initially I know think are a little broad: instead I intend to focus on where stimulii for change originate, examples of how changes have taken place in schools, and then what changes can be expected in the future (short to medium-term). This would allow me to discuss ideas surrounding the changing nature of knowledge, the role of educational technology and the structure of a 21st-century curriculum.?

The work that I have done since September, both on my blog and the reading I have done specifically for my Ed.D., has shown me that there is a fundamental difference between ‘education’ and ’schooling’. The former is an ideal, something almost Platonic in form, whereas the latter is the practical implementation of more abstract ideas, subject to multitude pressures from varying angles. It is important not to confuse these two notions, especially when talking about the ‘purpose’ of each.

A lot of what happens in education depends on how conceptions of society, knowledge, human nature and varying degrees of optimism as to what extent the existing (fairly delicate) status quo can be maintained. For it is this stability that educational institutions strive for, over and above creativity, inspirational teaching and motivating students to become lifelong learners. Upon reflection, this has to be the case given that schooling is compulsory and schools do not, in reality, face the same market pressures as commercial entities.

Thesis Proposal Mindmap

The work I’ve done in trying to synthesize (some of) my research so far is here.

(I’ve been using the Open Source program FreeMind to do my mindmapping – I’m still getting to grips with it…)?

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Posted: December 27th, 2006
Categories: Thesis
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The Pressure for Knowledge to Change

I am of the opinion that there are various pressures, not all currently identified (at least by me), on our conception of knowledge to change. Here are some obvious ones:

Pressure gauge

  • The demands of business and the need for new skills in the workplace (but what is driving organizational change?)
  • The pressure on teachers and schools by learners who have different skillsets, interests and motivations than previous generations (but where do these come from – the media?)
  • The ‘flattening world’ due to new technologies?
Posted: December 27th, 2006
Categories: Everything Else
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Property, 21st Century Knowledge, and Creative Commons

I have a feeling that the reason that what I would term ’21st-century forms of knowledge’ are not filtering into schools is because at their core they are fundamentally anti-capitalist. Traditionally, knowledge has meant power with access to the upper echelons being available only to the privileged and/or wealthy. The Internet (along with concomitant social trends) has changed that, leading to some talking about the world being ‘flat’.

It’s also tied into the idea of experts. Wikipedia has been shown to be just as reliable as the Encyclopedia Britannica, yet the former is edited by thousands of ‘amateurs’ whilst the latter is put together by a team of ‘professionals’. It’s certainly larger and a more valuable research for me, being always up-to-date and covering non-traditional information.

Private property is theft

(photo by antmoose @ Flickr)?

Proudhon is famous for his slogan ‘Property is theft!’ in his book What is Property? Whilst I’m no anarchist, I do believe that we have the wrong way of looking at questions surrounding the ‘ownership’ of various things. Take digital downloads of music, for example. The talk here is of ‘intellectual property’ and ‘copyright’. Nevertheless, the music industry is being forced to change the way they deal with customers and, indeed, their whole idea of the inherent ‘value’ of singles and albums due to changes in way the younger generations look at and value music themselves.?

It’s the same with knowledge. As Woodrow Wilson famously said:

I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.

If knowledge can reside in networks as well as groups, we need to be not just ’standing on the shoulders of giants’, but interacting with one another and collaboratively building knowledge. Many blogs and various sources of information and knowledge on the Internet (including photos posted to Flickr) are released into the wild with a Creative Commons license. Instead of focusing on the things that you can’t do with the information/knowledge/photograph/whatever, it focuses on what you can do. The license for my teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk blog, for example, states that my work can be shared or remixed in any way you like, provided that attribution is given, it is not used for commercial (i.e. for-proft) ends, and that any resultant remixing is also released under a Creative Commons license. Compare that to the restrictive practices of the RIAA…?

What does plagiarism look like in the 21st century? Can a line be drawn between that and being ‘inspired’ by another’s blog post? Where does the collaborative knowledge which comes as a result of wiki creation fit? Are examinations outdated? ?

Posted: December 26th, 2006
Categories: Everything Else
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Connectivism

In the 21st century it is almost impossible to be an expert on anything. There is so much information – and indeed knowledge – out there that we could only ever become experts in ever-diminishing content areas. Instead, we need to ourselves become, and train our students to likewise become, experts in connecting knowledge. This is where connectivism comes in:

Signs

Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.

The theory is advocated most passionately by George Siemens via his connectivism.ca blog, in his article on connectivism at elearnspace, on the Learning Circuits blog, an article for the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning and his excellent book (available via PDF or on his wiki), Knowing Knowledge.

Some notes:

(There is a connectvism online conference running in February 2007 that should be worth checking out…)?

Posted: December 26th, 2006
Categories: Everything Else
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Knowledge Management in Education

I’ve just come across a blog by Liz Lian, KM in Education, the tagline of which is:

A blog to explore where and how knowledge management principles apply to education.

Could be useful for looking how and why forms of knowledge appropriate to business have been or are being applied to education…?

Posted: December 26th, 2006
Categories: Everything Else
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The purpose of education? It isn’t this…

I’m reading David Carr’s Making Sense of Education this morning, who on page 14 quotes P.H. Hirst, The curriculum: educational implications of social and economic change (London, 1974). The latter states that education should be,

…based on the nature and significance of knowledge itself, and not on the predilections of pupils, the demands of society, or the whims of politicians.

I don’t think I could disagree more with that, really! Knowledge is not an objective thing that is out there for us to grasp, it is formed by precisely the things that he wants to remove from the educational process – the interests and desires of pupils, the current societal demands, and the need for politicians to implement reforms to ensure relevance. Instead, education should be based on the changing nature of conceptions of knowledge and how they are formed through interactions between the various agencies and people involved in the educational process – government, schools, other bodies, teachers and learners.

Posted: December 8th, 2006
Categories: Everything Else
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Some great quotations about education in the 21st century (and in general)

I came across this site, which has lots and lots of great quotations to do with education. Here are some of my favourite and those that should be relevant to my thesis!

‘We need a metamorphosis of education – from the cocoon a butterfly should emerge. Improvement does not give us a butterfly only a faster caterpillar.’ (www.learningtolearn.sa.edu.au)

‘The world by and large has to be reinvented.’ (Charles Handy, Beyond Certainty)

‘How has the world of the child changed in the last 150 years?’ … the answer is. ‘It’s hard to imagine any way in which it hasn’t changed….they’re immersed in all kinds of stuff that was unheard of 150years ago, and yet if you look at schools today versus 100 years ago, they are more similar than dissimilar.’ (Peter Senge)

‘The map is not the territory.’ (Alfred Korzybski)

‘Some people think you are strong when you hold on. Others think it is when you let go.’ (Sylvia Robinson)

‘You can’t jump a chasm in two bounds.’ (Chinese saying)

‘If a torrent sweeps a man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a new theory.’ (R.L. Stevenson)

‘It is our belief that schools in the main are entering the twenty-first century with structures and more importantly, underlying assumptions which are nineteenth century in origins, or relating to the world of the 1950 or 1960s.’ (C. Bowring-Carr & J. Burnham West)

‘I have a feeling we are not in Kansas anymore.’ (Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz)

‘Remember a dead fish can float downstream but it takes a live one to swim upstream.’ (W.C. Fields)

‘Do not confine your children to your own learning for they were born in another time.’ (Hebrew Proverb)

‘To be a teacher you must be a prophet – because you are trying to prepare people for a world thirty to fifty years into the future.’ (Gordon Brown, MIT)

‘There is something about the Procrustean bed about schools; some children are left disabled by being hacked about to fit the curriculum; some are stretched to take up the available space, others less malleable are labeled as having special educational needs.’ (C. Bowring-Carr and J. Burnham West)

‘What we want to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.’ (G.B. Shaw)

‘We must not entrust the future of our children to habit.’ (Judy Yero)

‘The curriculum is to be thought of in terms activity and experience rather than knowledge to be acquired and facts to be stored.’ (Haddow Report UK 1931)

‘Destiny is not a matter of chance it is a matter of choice.’ (Anon.)

Posted: September 23rd, 2006
Categories: Education, Thesis
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