Comments on: There’s something wrong in education – a response to Stephen Downes

By: Goals, Growth and Getting Going in 2015 - Read Write Respond

Goals, Growth and Getting Going in 2015 - Read Write Respond — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 06:46:05 +0000

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By: Gerald Ardito

Gerald Ardito — Sat, 03 Jan 2015 14:12:46 +0000

Dave,
I have been struggling with Stephen Downes on this as well. I have worked in my classrooms (both secondary and higher ed) to remove the distinctions between learning and education. The fundamental difference, as I see it, is that education requires some curriculum that is developed into semester or trimester chunks by institutional needs. Learning is pursuing a individual or small group goal. The issue I have been struggling with is how to reconcile these two. I have worked to give my students a sense of pursuing their own learning, whilst seeking to meet the educational objectives of the various institutions for which I work.
It is similar to me to the various research and conversation on “student choice” in classrooms. It is one thing to say that I am trying to learn Portuguese (which I am) and allowing myself a variety of choices of platforms and resources and pacing , etc. More typically, we talk about offering students choice in terms of process or more usually product. However, particularly in an elementary or secondary setting, this conversation seems to ignore that students are compelled (either by laws or their parents or grades or whatever), and so the “choices” we give them sit on top of a situation that is fundamentally involuntary.
All of this is by way of saying that I can see your discussions of engagement and caring about learning as ways to close these gaps.

By: Matt Crosslin

Matt Crosslin — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 01:20:27 +0000

I know we need a new idea like another hole in the head, but one of the reasons I like Heutagogy (teaching learners how to learn rather than what to learn) is that the very foundation is that they have to learn how/why to care first.

By: Dave Quinn

Dave Quinn — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 20:14:57 +0000

“It’s designed to get people to a ‘standard of knowing.’ … I’m suggesting that we need to replace the measurable ‘content’ for the non-counting noun ‘caring’. Give me a kid who’s forgotten 95% of the content they were measured in during K-12 and I will match that with almost every adult i know. Give me a kid who cares about learning… well… then i can help them do just about anything.”

If you have a second, Dave, check out Matthew Lieberman’s book Social, particularly Ch.12 where he discusses education. He echoes your point on page p.282 where he writes:

“We spend more then 20,000 hours in classrooms before graduating from high school, and research suggests that of the things we learn in school, we retain little more than half of the knowledge just three months after initially learning it, and significantly less than half of that knowledge is accessible to us a few years later.”

Brutal. Yet we continue to double down.

By: Terry Elliott

Terry Elliott — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 14:55:22 +0000

Kevin pulled a quote from your post above and I responded here before I read the whole post: http://www.screencast.com/t/MOwM9zgrxqC

The quote was out of context so perhaps my response is not as measured as it might have been (quoting the italics above). Would love to carry this on in a more collective way using Hypothesis (https://hypothes.is/).

By: Kevin Hodgson

Kevin Hodgson — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 13:45:01 +0000

Well, I don’t have much to add here, other than a head nod in your direcction.
But this quote stuck out for:

“The problem is that we have built an education system with checks and balances, trying to make it accountable and progressive (in some cases), but we are building it without knowing why. We have not built an education system that encourages people to be engaged. ”

I wait for the pendulum swing that is bound to come back around. Right? Please tell me I am right.
🙂

Kevin

By: Frances Bell

Frances Bell — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 12:24:21 +0000

@Davecormier I was interested to read this as I had already seen reference to your previous post at #fedwikihappening and I wanted to post something there about caring (and thanks to David Wiley for that excellent Nell Noddings ref).
Teachers are expected to be and do all sorts of things, often within constraining systems. Reform is an attractive prospect but often leads to more of the same. Deficit models of students’ attitudes and competences are worthy but likely to be of little interest to students. So I thought I would throw in a couple of links that look at things differently.
One of the things that teachers can do is inspire students to do something, make a change, whatever . There is no standard model for inspiration, and it doesn’t necessarily need teachers to be ‘liked’ as these personal stories show http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/jul/23/10-inspiring-teachers-as-nominated-by-our-readers.
A few years ago I took part in a project called Purpos/ed organised by Doug Belshaw – you can browse through the variety of purposes here http://web.archive.org/web/20130821155343/http://purposed.org.uk/
My own post included this
What is education? I refer you to the stained glass window above see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_%28Chittenden_Memorial_Window or my interpretation that it is an activity involving serious angels and though which light can shine.
Looking at what learners think about teachers and what teachers think about education is just as important as thinking about change and technology. Change in people can be emergent from experience rather than determined.

By: David Wiley

David Wiley — Tue, 30 Dec 2014 23:32:05 +0000

Dave, I know you’re talking about caring from a slightly different perspective, but if you don’t know Nel Noddings’ work I would highly recommend it to you (e.g., http://infed.org/mobi/caring-in-education/).

A few years ago we had a student look at caring in online learning for her dissertation (specifically, she looked at the Open High School of Utah) – http://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/3355/. You might find something interesting there as well.

By: Simon Ensor

Simon Ensor — Tue, 30 Dec 2014 20:50:56 +0000

“Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being “with it,” yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.”
? Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

“People are going to need to care about learning if any of the cool stuff is going to happen.”

What do people care about learning?

What do people really care about learning about on the internet?

How much of what people care about learning enables them to make a living?

What is the cool stuff that happens unhampered by instruction?

What on earth does/could ‘unhampered’ mean? People who are not hampered by school are generally unhampered by meaningful participation in Western societies.

What are most meaningful settings for most people?

Can we create more meaningful relationships with people in educational settings? Yes.

Do we have a choice but to try enable a more active, critical participation in education? Not in my opinion.

My concern is that the ‘we’ who would read this, reflect on this, agree with this are a marginal number of people involved in education.

Most people do not care or do not agree that education should be in any way ‘cool’.