My scattered thoughts and response to "Learning LOTE session"

Knowledge Collection Learning
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Quickly found my response to Andrea Joe and Mariana's post about \#learning way to long to post as a comment. (http://edgeryders.ppa.coe.int/where-edgeryders-dare/mission_case/learning-lote-session)
 

We need to open up (and maybe i go too many steps back in the process here, but i felt it was needed.) I think we need go deeper & we need a better analysis on the problems.

 
We need more takes on how school can create free-thinking students rather than solutions to help people be a good obedient workforce.
 
 
WHAT THE PROBLEMS WITH EDUCATION?
FOCUS QUESTIONS
 
  • Why is young people today find schooling unneccissary or uninteresting?
  • Is school preparing us to identify and solve complex problems creatively (ourselves or in group?) How can we solve that?
  • How can we transform the school system from a system that today create extrinsic motivation (based on rewards & grades) to a system where youngsters can keep, find & shape intrinsic motivation (curiosity, self-guided, self-motivation)? 
  • How can school prepare people to adapt to many possible future scenarios? Not just for the current paradigm. And not just be flexible in the way current leaders or employers want?
  • How can we create a school that help students to understand themselves and how the can become citizens so they can be a part of society?
  • How can school today create students that solve tomorrows problems?
 
COMMENTS ON POINTS IN POST:
 
"Students must trust mentors and teachers to teach them the right things and to teach them well."
I believe the total opposite. Conformity is not the answer. Students should develop their own compass on what would be important to learn. They should question their teachers and they should be opened for that.
 
Teachers must trust industry/employers to provide realistic and correct guidance as to what they need! (This is probably not happening right now)"
- Why should they? I think teachers need to understand that it's important to take in but I wouldn't like to send the message that we as a community want to create school that produce an obedient working force based on a markets needs.
 
Teachers must trust students to be self motivated learners.
- Disagree. The only thing that teachers shouldn't be at ease with is to trust the students at that point. To constantly push the students to be curious is the most important role the teachers should have. 
 
FURTHER THOUGHTS
 

Alternative education as danish Kaospilots, swedish Hyper Island and indian Mirambika have interesting ways.

 
- Divide classic roles of the teachers into:

  1. Facilitators of group based work. Can come in into groups to help with conflict management.
  2. Experts. Lecturer and workshop holders that are best within their fields come and give input to the students.

    Illustration. Development of Teacher role’s

School work are often problem-based learning in groups.
  1. Self organised group work 
  2. Input from experts (lecture or workshop format
  3. Process: feedback, evaluation and reflection Session with a facilitator. 
The problem with the university today (I believe)
- Lack of process follow-ups. Learn how to manage group work, give feedback, handle conflicts, learning based on reflection.
- too much extrinsic based. Grades.
- too formatted. You can't be creative within the system. Take the APA formatting eg.
- focus on results and not learnings.
- people do not dare to try the crazy because of grades. Therefore people safeguard and conform to the standards.
 
Policy makers should stop thinking education could be measure by quantification. 
 
Deleuze talk about rhizome and that the brain don't work as a tree but that new knowledge connects in many different ways. (the brain is not course based and linear...) an associated term is rhizomatic learning. -> mixing subjects, inter and cross disciplinary thinking. Building upon knowledge - the more you know the more connection points new knowledge can have. Using Systems thinking for example.
 
Illustration: Systems thinking:

 
As you said knowledge are more and more accessible. The Teachers role with lecturing have more and more became obsolete. The way alternative education uses teachers as facilitators are a better solution I think.
 
Teacher should help students to be navigators and explorers of knowledge, informed citizens and skilled actors in large and small groups.
 
- Put metacognition on the agenda! Learning about learning. (Prof Stephen Heppell talks about 20% better learning)
- Education in colaboration, conflict management (eg. feedback) & group dynamics.
 
- Society today is more complex therefore we need less time on separate disciplins and more time on exploring and being interdisplinary. There's where new thinking happens at the moment. Disciplines have been explored for 100 years now. The new things happen in the interdisciplinary and the interinterdisplimary.
 
I hope we as Edgeryders can make some of the fluid undefined interinterdisciplines, understandable disciplines of the future society. 

Illustration. Extrinsic vs Intrinsic learning

Illustration: Disciplinary vs Interdisciplinary

Thanks for reading.
Ola Möller (@olamoller) 
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Great post, Ola.

One point

Great post, Ola.

One point that I think I ought to make is that the quote “Students must trust mentors and teachers to teach them the right things and to teach them well.” shouldn’t be taken as an endorsement of the dictatorial style and isn’t incompatible with facilitation. This ambiguity is a result of my note-taking style, so apologies for that.

By way of example of what I mean - In the summer of 2007, I spent a couple of months learning MFC for Windows programming. Having gained much experience since then, I have come to consider that time not to have been particularly well spent. If I had a time machine and could place myself (knowing what I know now) in a mentorship role for my younger self, then I probably would advise my younger self to investigate WPF rather than MFC. This would have helped my younger self to achieve my goal at that time (“I want to develop this Windows application”) but also have set me up with a skill that would be more useful in future.

This is what is meant in the notes by teaching ‘the right thing’, it does not mean that the teacher/mentor decides what should be learned and that their decision is carved in stone - but it does recognise the value of their experience. The learner may well question “Why should I learn WPF when there is so much material on MFC?” - The learner/mentor will need to answer those questions and answer them honestly. It is at this point that the learner must trust the teacher/mentor to speak honestly (not to misrepresent or use rhetoric to strongarm the learner) and correctly (in this example, to describe accurately the ups and downs of both MFC and WPF).

Basically, to help the learner navigate through an informational overload. The main reason that I started to learn MFC at that time was only because there was such a quantity of material on it which drowned out alternative approaches to Windows programming.

Not sure why I felt that I had to mix timetravel into my example, but these things happen. :s

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dechipering your post by looking up acronyms :slight_smile:

My reading of (re-)establishing trust is also connected to mentorship/ guidance/ advice. If student-teacher interactions are based on reciprocal trust, then filtering content and adapting it to individual needs would improve. BUT I see trust as a (variable) effect rather than a static product. so it would be more of an outcome of policy…

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You’re not good enough. Plx go away, young graduate. Dx

Teachers must trust industry/employers to provide realistic and correct guidance as to what they need! (This is probably not happening right now)"
Definitely agree with you here. I think that this point was borne mostly out of frustration at the current set-up which more or less is about producing a worker. It is presently very frustrating because a student spends however-many years in education (learning what they understand to be desired by the employers) only to come out the other side and have the employer say "OH NO! You are not what we wanted!"

And then they blame the education system for it. :wink:

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Favourite part:

“As you said knowledge are more and more accessible. The Teachers role with lecturing have more and more became obsolete. The way alternative education uses teachers as facilitators are a better solution I think.”

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small amendment

If we are to pursue “teachers as facilitators” idea, must be careful with the framing of argument about obsolescence. I understand where Ola is coming from, but IMO a good public policy will always put teachers = instructors AND facilitators at heart of the educational systems and have a good reward or incentive system to support them. A large no. of students will always need people telling them how to study. this is where I fully agree with Gelada’s point on pedagogy as crucial.

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Yes. When there is more information to choose from the role of teacher becomes even more important.

1.The “availability of knowledge” to me looks more like a stream of data.

So apart from being a teacher, one in theory, should be a content manager and the editor.

But teachers do not develop the strategy for implementation, they implement. It all again comes down to risks that the institution is taking = fights with the administration.

2. What sort of studying/learning you would like your heart surgeon to receive, before he operates upon someone you love, granting that the work experience does not count?

What would you like those people who taught your heart surgeon to be and to do?

3. How this ‘ideal learning’ is planned and developed?

- Say we established a education system which is purely user driven. What does it look like? Editable curriculum?

- Optimised apprenticeship systems? How do we deal the risk of ‘within company brainwash’?

- Prototyping environments?

- Less of the result based learning. More fuzzy goals, more critical thinking?