I’ve been reading Breaking Down the Digitial Walls: learning to teach in a post-modem world by Burniske & Monke. Here are some references to follow up (holdings at Durham University Library in brackets):
- Apple, M. (1990) Ideology and Curriculum (Education, 306.43 APP)
- Birkerts, S. (1994) The Gutenberg Elegies: the fate of reading in an electronic age (not available @ Durham)
- Bowers, C.A. (1988) The Cultural Dimensions of Educational Computing: understanding the non-neutrality of technology (not available @ Durham)
- Hutchins, E. (1996) Cognition in the Wild (Main, SLC, 153 HUT)
- Ihde, D. (1990) Technology and the Life World (not available @ Durham)
- McLuhan, M. & Powers, B. (1989) The Global Village: transformations in world life and media in the 21st century (not available @ Durham)
Scott McLeod over at Dangerously Irrelevant has posted the results of the edublogosphere survey he carried out via his blog. 160 edubloggers responded, and he has put the information together in a spreadsheet, a narrated Flash video, and a Powerpoint slideshow.
The two slides of the slideshow that stood out for me were the two slides pertaining to what edubloggers get out of blogging and what the most difficult thing for them is about the whole deal:
(click to enlarge)
Interestingly, the average number of RSS feeds subscribed to by the participants in the survey was 89. This, of course, will be skewed towards the top end, as those who were aware of the survey will be those who read the most RSS feeds! Stephen Downes estimates the edublogosphere to be around 500 blogs strong, so it’s a reasonable sample.
Jay Cross writes about his concept of ‘learnscaping’ over at the Informal Learning Blog:
Informal learning is about situated action, collaboration, coaching, and reflection, not study and reading. Developing a platform to support informal learning is analogous to landscaping a garden. A major component of informal learning is natural learning, the notion of treating people as organisms in nature. Our role as learning professionals is to protect their environment, provide nutrients for growth, and let nature take its course. Self-service learners connect to one another, to ongoing flows of information and work, to their teams and organizations, to their customers and markets, not to mention their families and friends.
Because the design of informal learning ecosystems is analogous to landscape design, I will call the environment of informal learning a learnscape. A landscape designer’s goal is to conceptualize a harmonious, unified, pleasing garden that makes the most of the site at hand. A learnscaper strives to create a learning environment that increases the organization’s longevity and health, and the individual learner’s happiness and well-being. Gardeners don’t control plants; managers don’t control people. Gardeners and managers have influence but not absolute authority. They can’t make a plant fit into the landscape or a person fit into a team.
A learnscape is a learning ecology. It’s learning without borders.
I’ve mentioned ‘creating the ecosystem’ over at teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk a couple of times: it’s a metaphor that I think works well when you’re trying to get across the difference between 20th and 21st-century teaching. Educational technology is such now that teachers beyond their first year of teaching should have a bank of digital resources from the teaching experiences of both themselves and others at their disposal. Where they go with their classes should be a negotiation process, never an undemocratic, authoritarian march through a syllabus.
Teachers meeting the needs of 21st-century students need to recognise and celebrate the diversity of interests and motivations of young people. With the opportunities we have on offer to personalize learning there really is no excuse for a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to teaching and learning.
How healthy is your learning ecology?
