Blog Action Day 2012: The Power of We

This year's Blog Action Day topic is "The Power of We." (Of course, it really should be 'the power of us', but let's not quibble!). The point is how groups of people can get things done around the world. I would like to take this opportunity to discuss how we can get the process of education to flourish in the world.
In order to make education a truly democratic and egalitarian process, I believe we need to lose the distinctions between those who have an education and those who need one. When we come together to make learning happen in my classes, I am as much a part of the learning that happens as my 'students'. The reason I teach is so that I can feed my thirst for learning, and it's not just learning about how the new generations of students approach problems that I am talking about: It's learning new ideas, new ways to interact, new strategies for negotiating the world around me.
John Cleese once remarked (I believe the video is available on YouTube), "I'm very old and will soon be dead. And I would like to die knowing as much as possible." My heart echoes these sentiments.
In my teaching, I long to pass this passion for learning on to my 'students'. By the time they get into my class, many are rather jaded regarding the education process: it seems like such a waste of input and output to them. They listen to lectures (many illustrate the process known as 'death by powerpoint' in extreme fashion!), they regurgitate facts or applications of principles on quizzes and exams, and then it's on to the next course where the process is repeated.
Because many of my students say their other professors have a negative view of such online general sources of information as Wikipedia, I encourage my students to write articles for Wikipedia. Maybe some of my students will challenge their other professors to join the task of improving the quality of Wikipedia beyond its already high standards.
Because many of my students experience an almost total disconnect between classes and the rest of their lives, I encourage my students to find things to change (inside and outside class). I admonish them of the great Gandhian challenge to "be the change [they] hope to see in the world" and to be audacious in the projects they choose to involve themselves in. I give them up to 20% of their credit in some courses for projects they themselves design to change their worlds.
Because many of my students struggle to pay for their food and lodging after they have paid tuition and fees and bought their books at the institution where I work, I use the news forum of the online learning systems that support our classes to post announcements of food banks and free food events available on campus. I also encourage them to sponsor ad-hoc food events (potlucks, etc.) of their own to offset the high prices of campus-produced foods from Aramark. I encourage them to share their $4/day (!) parking passes with others, so that those who are not served by local transit can get a break from this added fee for education. I also work to develop open education resources through Open Learning locally and the initiatives of OERu globally. I dream of a day when education to the very top levels is as readily available to all as public libraries in many parts of the world.
This post has become much longer than I had hoped, but I get very passionate when I think about the value of 'we' in the area of education. I would like to see everyone have full opportunities to learn as much and as long as they desire from wherever they live. If you have ideas relevant to this desire, I would appreciate your comments on this post. Please participate, comment, write, and talk up this years Blog Action Day topic, "The Power of We" to everyone you can.

The Language of Learning

In catching up on a backlog of reading, I have become aware of a controversy regarding the nature of learning. One writer, Downes, an advocate of connectivism as an approach to learning, has taken some criticism from Wiley for unnecessarily complicating the issues of learning. Downes seems to have problems with notions of learning that are characterised as transfer, transmission, or replication. Much of what I have to say regarding their argument probably has more to do with my background in linguistics and philosophy, rather than a genuine deep reading of Downes and Wiley, but still, it may contribute something of worth to the discussion.

Michael Reddy has articulted some of the difficulties inhent in characterising communication as a transfer of information. The chief objection is due primarily to the grounding of understnding in experience and the essential non-linear nature of experience. While a view of learning as the accumulation of information and skill at handling it may provide us a simple metaphor to characterise our relationships in learning communities, it represents an oversimplification. Eistein has encouraged us all that our theories should be as simple as possible, but he goes on to warn us that they should be 'no simpler'. It is necessary for us to have a deeper insight into learning than would be satisfied with a definition of it as transfer or transmission of information. Part of the problem with this is a faulty segregation of the experience into a content stream and a form (medium) stream.

A superficial study of the field of education as it exists in the world today may lead people to conclude that democracy is inherent in the education process, that education breaks down the divisions of society and allows educated people to better themselves. However, the traditional forms of education tend to perpetuate distinctionand division in the world between authority and citizen, master and disciple, degree-holder and degree-seeker. This current system in education is petuating elitism, rather than democracy.

All this is not to say that the education system has been harmful overall. There was a time when information was scarce in the world and when people needed considerable time to learn how to find reliable data. In such a restricted world, it was easy to conceive of the classroom as the proper construct of a learning environment. However, today's world of social media has changed the imperative of the classroom from 'inform' to 'connect'. This, I believe is where Downes' approach would take us.

At the same time, Wiley's call not to entirely scrap a working system has value for us in the sense that many currently successful scholars will not willingly shift from the old paradigm to a new one, when the old one seems to be working for them. For example, when the Duke Univ. School of Nursing set up its online school virtual learning environment (see DUSON in Second life) and could have chosen from a wide range of interactive frameworks, they chose the metaphor of a classroom. We have a need for familiar contexts, even when new frameworks would better serve us.

Starting a New Year

This semester, I am teaching three courses (with two sections of the science writing course), so I have been quite busy setting courses up and introducing students to the Moodle course pages and the social media tools I use in education. Although I have a small business in educational support (mentioned in other posts), I am employed by Thompson Rivers University to teach these particular courses this semester. It is important for me to state clearly that the opinions and claims made in this blog are my own and should not be taken to reflect TRU policies at any organizational level.

In the courses I am teaching, I have assigned each student to establish and contribute to a blog.Students in the science writing course have been encouraged to create a blog on some aspect of science they are interested in.  Students in the professional and business writing courses have been encouraged to create the sort of blog that could support some serious academic, professional, or business endeavor. Some of the students are quite eager to begin blogging, while others are unsure of a topic to settle on. Once every student is on board with this project, I should have about 150 new blogs to add to my reading list. I hope I can keep up with them!

Along with writing in their own blogs, I am encouraging students to read each other's blogs. I intend to use this format as a forum where students can practice the skills of dialogue (reading, commenting, quoting, linking, and so forth) in the blogosphere. Although it is not a requirement for the courses, I hope that my students will get readers from the 'outside'. Even a few scholars or professionals who would interact with the students would significantly raise the self-image of these new writers. Future entries on this blog will likely link to many of these new student blogs.

Considerations of Collaborative Learning in Web 2.0 Environments

I am thinking about the implications of the following video (if you cannot see the YouTube video linked below, search Google using the phrase: "The Machine is Us/ing Us").

What would the discussion in class be like, if instructors prepared an assignment before the beginning of a class challenging the students to see how many articles on a given subject (picked by the instructor) they could find before the class? Apparently, an instructor found students in one class who had found 94 articles on an assigned topic before the class began. How might that change class activities?

Would it help us to prepare for academic life when we face this as a classroom?