This past week has been dominated with sessions, discussions, and presentations at the ADETA e-learning conference at the University of Calgary. One of the common themes that routinely crops up is the comment that "Things have changed. Technology has stood the old paradigm on it's head." Often these kinds of comments are made in regards to various social applications and so-called "Web 2.0" apps, though the most succinct one I heard was made in reference to RSS feeds via the short video, "RSS In Plain English". Basically, the Plain English video said that in "the old model" (without really explaining what the old model was), the reader went out and found information, where as in the new model, the information came to you.
This is an important distinction and not just for web apps. There is a notion that basic educational processes are in need of significant change, now that information is freely available. The "old model" of education is one based on the following precepts:
1. Information is hard to find.
2. Information is hard to understand.
3. A teacher is someone who has already found and understood the information.
4. A teacher's role is to help others understand this information.
Essentially, this a picture of informaiton scarcity. The development of boards of education serve to define and train teachers, while the emergence of sanctioned curricula introduces the interesting wrinkle that not all information is equal, nor is all of it desirable. Textbooks help to deal with the idea that the information students are required to know needs to be gathered in one place for them, that they are lacking in the skills needed to process and evaluate the information on their own.
Many people at the conference here, have suggested that this is paradigm that new tecnologies have overturned. No longer do students need to be told what to learn, or to be limited to learning solely what's in the curriculum. Sort of a no more fences approach to learning.
However, hidden even deeper behind this is the basic idea that the process of education is about information transfer. It's been stated several times during discussions, and we've even said it in a previous post here on Exploding Beakers. To suggest that education is simply about the transfer of knowledge is to still rest on the image that the student is an empty vessel or blank slate that needs to be "filled up" by the teacher or educational agency. Listening to discussions where people are excited about the implications that new technologies have for education, and they all talk about the creative abilities they offer students. But where is the call for students to create new knowledge in curricular documents? This I think is the new challenge for educational reform, and one that truly places the emphasis on students and student learning.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
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