Category Archives: Pedagogy and Educational Methods

#cck11 – Adding to a New Model of Education: John Seely Brown’s New Book

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What is learning?  What does it mean to understand and what does it mean to be an educated person?  You can give a definition, but your answer will be incomplete without going beyond a simple definition to include a specific a model of learning.  Adding to a new model seems to be what Brown and Thomas are doing in A New Culture of Learning as presented by John Hagel’s blog post.  (I’m still waiting for a copy of the book; possibly more to follow?)  John says:

We all have the uncomfortable feeling that the education we received is serving us less and less well. The reassuring notion that the concentrated dose of education in our younger years would serve us well for the rest of lives appears increasingly suspect.  . . . What if there was a different model?  . . . (A) fundamentally different approaches to acquiring knowledge.

The meaning of the differentiation this book proposes came to me when reading a critique of social media learning by ryan2point0.  If you think about technological changes in education when you are guided by old models, they will look much different then when they are seen through the prism of Brown and Thomas’ model.  We need a new model of learning that embraces tension, imagination and play.  John Hagel add these 4 claims that he draws from the book:

1. Tacit knowledge is becoming more important when compared to explicit knowledge.

(T)acit knowledge cannot be taught – it can only be learned, but only if the environment is designed to do that. In a stable world, focusing on explicit knowledge perhaps made more sense, but in a more rapidly changing world, tacit knowledge becomes increasingly central to our ability to thrive.

2. Questions are more important than answers.  (Hagel, quoting from the book)

(L)earning is transformed from a discrete, limited process – ask a question, find an answer – to a continuous one. Every answer serves as a starting point, not an end point. It invites us to ask more and better questions.

3. Learning is a social process

Collectives provide the context for learning and the learning process involves a complex interplay between the personal and the collective.

4. Brown and Thomas’ new model of learning is derived from imagination and play.

Imagination is about seeing possibilities and generating the questions that frame the learning process. Play is about the engagement and experimentation that drives the learning process.  Both of these become even more powerful when they move beyond the individual and drive collectives that can learn from each other.

This book seems to be devising a way that educators can think about learning processes when guided by the book The Power of Pull.  It’s a much different from traditional educational processes and the organization of most educational institutions.  I think there has always been a pedagogical distinction between passing on received stable knowledge and the generation of new knowledge where we don’t necessarily know the right answer.  But most education is about learning what the teacher already knows.  In traditional education, it is only after you have reached the pinnacle of learning that you deemed ready to venture out to find new stuff.  What we are seeing more and more is that this is a false distinction.  There may be some knowledge that we want to pass on in a stable form, but there is also room at all levels of education to explore new knowledge.  This is not just a constructionist pedagogical trick.  There really is room for new understandings at all levels.  Discovery learning is really about finding new knowledge, not about finding knowledge and then testing the student to see if he really found the correct knowledge.  The world of knowledge is very big indeed!

This looks like a good book.  I’m sure there will be more thoughts to follow.

#cck11 – Equipotency: A Potentially Important Concept for Connectivism?

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I would like to contrast some recent interesting posts (prompted by the CCK11 MOOC) with the peer to peer concept of equipotency which I will define as: an open and equal capability to participate in diverse social network activity.  The theoretical / memetic foundation of equipotency is the emergence of open peer to peer culture, that I think can also be related to the idea of knowledge flows, as defined by Hagel, Brown and Davison (HB&D) in the Power of Pull.

Stephen Downes notes that we need a precise vocabulary  to analyze and talk about social networks.

Rather than use prejudicial and imprecise vocabulary, . . . we can respond to it meaningfully, with clarity and precision.  . . . the point is that we can use network terminology to explain much more clearly complex phenomena such as instruction, communities and interaction.

I believe we need much more than vocabulary, we also need a framework; a theoretical account to help us distinguish between information and noise and to point out how things are changing overtime.  This is the relevance of connectivism as a theory. What is the connectivism framework?  I like Jennie McKensie’s summary in a Connectivism Linkedin Group conversation when she says:

Understanding according to George Siemens is, “Depth, Diversity, Frequency, Integration and the strength of your Ties”.

But, Paul McKensie reply was also interesting.

Knowledge is distributed with a decreasing half-life – why do we insist on cementing the same blocks of content together.

Traditional education, focusing on content and a specified curriculum is, I think, an example of HB&D’s push learning.  It can only really be successful where knowledge is stable, changing only slowly.  When we are faced with situations where knowledge behaves more like Paul’s decreasing half-life metaphor, we need an openness to change that focuses on more than things like equipotency.  Equipotency may become an important to a connectivism framework.  Concepts such as tie strength may not be focussing on the most salient aspects of learning relationships.

Sui Fai John Mak further expands on this discussion through discourse analysis and asks whether discourse and power relationships are important to the social web.  Quoting Rita Kop he says;

(T)he notion of  ‘supernode’ predictably emerges when some contributors are recognized by a  number of others as having particular relevance to, or knowledge of a problem. There seems to be a natural tendency within the ‘perfectly’ democratic network to organize itself, over time, in a hierarchical system composed of leaders and followers.

In her dissertation Rita also said:

As research has shown, the open WWW has a hierarchical structure and is not the power free environment that some would like us to believe (Barabasi, 2003; Mejias, 2009) (pp. 267-268)

HB&D’s point is that it is not longer possible to identify what will be important in order to push it out to the network.  Digital networks can be seen as a flow of knowledge, and the point is to be open and able to draw on this flow in productive ways.  As I commented on John’s blog: many people are still searching for expertise in their network participation, teachers or knowledgable others (in Rita’s terminology) who can push the knowledge they need to their where they are at the time of need, but participation in peer to peer culture recognizes that value can arise from any node and can not be predicted in advance.  Supernodes, if they are truly valuable, may represent people who are not experts or knowledgable others in content knowledge, but are most able to recognize value in the knowledge flowing around them.

Open peer to peer culture as a way to understand the creation of value and participation in web-based social networks.  Peer to peer culture according to wikipedia is described and defined as:

  • Relationly and structurally dynamic,
  • based on the assumed equipotency of its participants,
  • organized through the free cooperation of equals

Task wise it can be thought of as:

  • the performance of a common task (peer production),
  • for the creation of a common good (peer property),
  • and with forms of decision-making and autonomy that are widely distributed throughout the network (peer governance).

Peer to peer culture may describe a new evolving type of community that is relevant to learning, especial where knowledge is in development.  It is likely important for collaboration and Collaborative Inquiry and it may warrant a prominent place in the Connectivist’s framework.  As I see it, equipotency is an important key to peer network organization.  Strong and weak ties, expertise, authority, and other forms of discourse based power can exist within and can influence network activities, but like Hagel Brown and Davison’s emphasis on serendipity, value creation can not be easily predicted and does not always emanate from expertise or strong network ties. Networks must be open to the unexpected contribution of any node in the network.  This is the basis of equipotency and peer to peer value creation networks.

#CCK11 – The Bias in Frames are an Integral Part of Design, Innovation and Education

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Serendipity drawns me back into the frames discussion, this time through Jon Kolko’s Magic of Design series on the Fast Company Design Blog.  This post also relates to an assertion that the arts are integral to the 21 Century economy.  Most people’s everyday work lives operate in something close to a scientific orientation, but we still need access to a more biased and creative orientation.  Integrating the arts into our social workspaces give us inspiration to add design thinking to this workspace and the process is explained through Jon Kolko’s Magic of Design.

I’ve previously discussed Jon’s first 2 posts on a process for innovation and providing work space to explore deviant ideas.  His last post in this series is about the importance of bringing frames, perspectives and biases to the design process.  The statement: “the true test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time” is attributed to F Scott Fitzgerald.  To participate in design processes, the trick is to bring both diversity and this type of intelligence to your processes.  In this case, we can not ignore science as a way of driving our actions, but we also need creative innovation, and in some ways science and innovation are at opposing ends of a spectrum.  Sometimes we need to embrace our biases.  As Jon explains it:

For as a designer stands in front of a whiteboard in a war-room, surrounded by anecdotes, quotes, pictures, sketches, and working models — and searching for a new, innovative, and persuasive idea — she is relying on her ability to connect something in her own life with something in the data she’s gathered. She is purposefully applying a frame of bias to objective, empirical data, in order to produce something new.

This is called sensemaking.  . . . the interplay of action and interpretation rather than the influence of evaluation on choice.”  . . . all of this (design activity) is useless if the people doing the synthesis aren’t very interesting. Synthesis requires a team of varied and highly eclectic designers who are empowered to embrace their biased perspectives. . . . Groundbreaking design doesn’t come through statistical regression testing, metrics, and causality. It comes from the richness of a biased perspective on the world.

Here is the primary Issue: How do we hold the multiple perspective as important and shift between them on an everyday bases?  There is no place where this is more important than in education.  What kind of Environment can help us to function better in this way?

#CCK11 Education: Stretching the Mind by Adopting New Frames

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A follow up on the frame discussion prompted by reading Jamshed Bharucha’s Education as Stretching the Mind.   Jamshed places the idea of re-framing as a central goal of education, which he states like this:

Learn new frameworks, and be guided by them.  But never get so comfortable as to believe that your frameworks are the final word, . . .

He defines frameworks broadly:

a range of conceptual or belief systems — either explicitly articulated or implicitly followed. These include narratives, paradigms, theories, models, schemas, frames, scripts, stereotypes, and categories; they include philosophies of life, ideologies, moral systems, ethical codes, worldviews, and political, religious or cultural affiliations. These are all systems that organize human cognition and behavior by parsing, integrating, simplifying or packaging knowledge or belief. . . .

But there is a problem.  Frames are necessary to reduce cognitive chaos and complexity to a manageable level, but the mind also has an overwhelming bias to maintain these frames, even in the face of disconfirming evidence and sometimes they even create perceptions that are just plain wrong.

The brain maps information onto a small set of organizing structures, which serve as cognitive lenses, skewing how we process or seek new information. These structures drive a range of phenomena, including the perception of coherent patterns (sometimes where none exists), the perception of causality (sometimes where none exists), and the perception of people in stereotyped ways.

But the plasticity of the brain can allow us to change our mind, abet within limits and with much effort, critical tools, reasoning, and the support of ethical and committed people called educators.  Neuro-linguistic Programming: I’ve always thought that therapy should be grounded in education, but maybe education should be grounded in therapy.  I believe strongly in positive psychology, but maybe we can also benefit from curing some of our diseased conceptions.

How Might Schools Prepare Us for “Real Life”

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Michele at the Bamboo Project got my interest with a post about: How School Screws Things Up for Real Life.  My take on her main point:

(S)chool does a really terrible job of preparing our young people for “the real world” by setting up some seriously unrealistic expectations.

Let’s summarize this way:  people expect school to prepare them for their work life, but fail because the social structures and expectations, “the rules of the road if you will”, are completely different.  It’s reasonable that this “hidden curriculum” is important, but I think that there is even more involved.  It’s something that goes to the very purpose of schooling and I’ll begin with this list:

  1. Skills are more important than Content.  Schools put too much emphasis on content recall instead of things like analysis.  Most students do need an understanding and recall of some content, but skills are more important, especially skills like analysis.  Many specifics that Michele lists can become issues because novices often take their world at face value (i.e., their first impression).  Analysis prepares us to look deeper and begins with problem framing, exploring different way of looking at a problem in order to find an acceptable way to communicate and to guides one’s actions.  This is the essence of maturity and something important to workers and employers and it leads me to a 2nd point.
  2. In early life, Maturation is more important than Knowledge.  Our lifetime is generally divided into 3 periods.  Schooling, working, and retirement.    Because schooling is first, it’s natural to assume that what is happening at this time is maturation.  Instead of trying to cram everything they will need to know into one’s first 22 years, an impossible task to begin with, strive instead for helping students reach maturity in their capabilities; to be their best possible self.  The ability to act with whatever capabilities one excels, along with promoting emotional, physical, and personal wholeness, is much more important than what content one knows.  This is how we should be measuring students.
  3. Graduates don’t need certificates; they need resources.  It make no sense to think that one’s learning needs end with graduation at age 22 or there abouts.  John Hagel has suggested that knowledge today is found in flows, and if we want to be successful, we need access to these knowledge flows.  It also makes no sense that one’s developmental influences (their school) should not be a participant in this flow.  Students should graduate with more than a certificate, they should also have an active personal learning network.  I can think of no better transition process than to build a learning network in school that can be carried into later life.  Imagine if an employer was not only hiring a school’s “product”, but also an entire knowledge network resource.  It is the essence of this 2.0 networked world that artificial boundaries to accessing resources are being eliminated.  Let’s make schools part of this boundary breaking

This is not an exhaustive list.  What other ways of educational reform could help us function better or healthier in life?  What should schools look like; what should be their purpose?

New Forms for Pedagogy: Another Take

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Developing Creativity through Lifewide Education by Norman Jackson considers the inadequacies of the structure of higher education and claims that;

(E)duration that is dominated by the mastery of content and cognitive performance in abstract situations, (it) is not enough. . . . (Quoting Douglas Thomas and John Seeley Brown)  “What is required to succeed in education is a theory that is responsive to the context of constant flux, while at the same time is grounded in a theory of learning”.

And it’s not just educational practice.   The problems also extend to research based knowledge generation.

Paradoxically, the core enterprise of research – the production of new knowledge – is generally seen as an objective systematic activity rather than a creative activity that combines, in imaginative ways, objective and more intuitive forms of thinking.

This critique of knowledge generation also fits with the ides of my last post inspired by Jay Cross.   If your context is rather stable, than knowledge generation that emphasizes objectivity and systematicity will work relatively well.  But if one’s situation trends towards a contextual flux in a complex multi-demensional variable field, then systematic objectivity may be useful for verification of experimental data, but not for generation hypotheses and theories, the things that lead and guide inquiry.  Current methodological thought treats the creative generation of hypotheses and theories rather cavalierly considering their central place in inquiry.

Norman list 8 propositions for a new curricular approach.

In order to facilitate students’ creative development for the real world we must create a curriculum that –

  • Proposition 1 : gives them the freedom and empowers them to make choices so that they can find deeply satisfying and personally challenging situations that inspire and require their creativity. A curriculum should nurture their spirit: their will to be and become a better more developed person and create new value in the world around them
  • Proposition 2: enables them to experience and appreciate knowledge and knowing in all its forms. And enables them to experience and appreciate themselves as knower, maker, player, narrator and enquirer
  • Proposition 3 : enables them to appreciate the significance of being able to deal with situations and to see situations as the fundamental opportunity for being creative. They need to be empowered to create new situations individually and with others by connecting people and transferring, adapting and integrating ideas, resources and opportunities, in an imaginative, willful and productive way, to solve problems and create new value.
  • Proposition 4: prepares them for and gives them experiences of adventuring in uncertain and unfamiliar situations, through which they encounter and learn to deal with situations that do not always result in success but which do not penalize ‘mistakes’ or failure to reach a successful outcome
  • Proposition 5 : enables them to develop and practice the repertoire of communication and literacy skills they need to be effective in a modern world
  • Proposition 6: encourages participants to behave ethically and with social responsibility promoting creativity as means of making a difference to people or adding value to the world
  • Proposition 7: engenders a commitment to personal and cooperative learning and the continuing development of capability for the demands of any situation and the more strategic development of capability for future learning
  • Proposition 8: helps them develop and explain their understandings of what creativity means in the situations in which they participate or create, and values and recognizes their awareness and application

More broadly, how do we do this?  I’ll fall back on Hagel, Brown and Divison’s Power of Pull framework.

  1. Tap into knowledge flows, especially through Web 2.o technologies such as Personal Learning Environments or community wide collaborative research projects.
  2. Find a trustful, creative and knowledge flow filled environments (both virtual and physical).  Places where serendipity is more likely to strike.
  3. Rather than scalable efficiency,  strategize for scalable connectivity, scalable learning, and new possibilities for performance.
  4. Tap into people’s passion.  You could say, manage by helping people find inspiration.

People might say; “this does not represent the real world”.  I would counter that their real world was the 20th Century.  That world is now fading, and as they say, the new world is here, it’s just not evenly distributed,

What Might be the Future of Educational Reform

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Ken Allan recently referenced James Kauffman in this post, who correctly notes that many calls for change in education fail to define any specifics of change. In this post I want to look at trends that are relevant to much of educational reform (and to work practices in general), trends that might help specify change needs.

As the world changes, so do learning needs.  Raelin et al (2010) points out that a 20th Century scientific approach to practice, characterized by standardization, no longer suffices.    I find this sentiment to be an echo of Hagel, Browns and Davison (HBD) who encourages us toward a “pull” model of learning.  This means not depend on trying to predetermine knowledge and push it in advance to where it will be needed, but instead to focus on tapping into knowledge flows and pulling knowledge to where it is needed right now.  The Agile Manifesto, explained in Sahana’s view here, is a recent idea that highlights a new found importance for flexibility beyond practice standards.  I find this flexibility beyond standards to be an important pattern in all approaches.

For most of history, education and work practices were predominately guided by a tradition that began in ancient Greece.  Each generation added to that tradition, but learning’s foundation remained in this ongoing tradition.  It’s still with us today, as it rightfully should be.  We can’t escape our heritage, at least not completely.  But, there were limitations to depending on tradition these limitations were to be exposed by the enlightenment thinkers.

The enlightenment sought to place the authority of science above tradition as a new method to make judgements.  Empirical science was used to build practice standards that were considered more authoritative than tradition and positivism sought to extend these standards into every aspect of our lives and our practices.  Successful standardization in 20th Century Fordist practices in some ways can be seen as the apex of enlightenment thinking about standards and practice.  However, in many other ways the triumph of scientific standards proved allusive.  In the face of a growing recognition of the complexity of life, especially the opened nature of social life, postmodern, post-structuralist, post-Fordist and many other critiques took root.

While standardization proved very productive in closed and limited process situations, much of the most importance processes in our lives were open, multidimensional and complex.  While science would help us to better understand these processes, these processes would not conform to universal standards and simple applications of scientific experimental findings.  It became recognized that something more flexible than standards are required.

If you look at current suggestions for change in education, Raelin’s practice-based learning, HBD’s Power of Pull or software developer’s calls for agility; they have a common theme.  The need to improve practice in ways that are open and flexible, are beyond what can be achieved by standards, and allow people to make use of the mind’s capacity for pattern recognition when responding to everyday complexity.  This seems like as good a trend as any when specifying educational reform.  That does not mean the closed processes and standards are finished.  The evidence-based practice movement can be seen as a recognition that practice standards and protocols can still be improved.  But we also need a layer of learning that sits on top of practice standards.

What is the driving force of this new level? It’s not tradition.  It’s not science, at lest in a positivist sense.  It seems to be digitally enabled collaboration, the enablement of creativity, the ability to adapt to contexts, and maybe much more.  I think the jury is still out, while the research come in.

A “Clean-Sheet” Perspective for Education: A Rationale Derived from Hagel and Brown

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Interesting HBR article: Innovation Blowback: Disruptive Management Practices from Asia (Hagel & Brown, 2003).

Their main point

Companies offshore production to cut wages, gain access to skills and capabilities and seek new markets, but they fail to gain more than a small affluent segment of these emerging markets because they do not seek the level of innovations to target the demands of the larger low-wage market.  Long-term they then are often undercut by the local companies that do seek this level of innovation.

What do the authors recommend:

  1. Specialize, develop partnerships and orchestrate the resulting process network to extend your capabilities.
  2. Develop open collaborative environments and orchestrate innovation within these partnership networks.
  3. It is not enough to strip costs from existing products.  Instead, redesign products and processes from a “Clean-sheet” perspective in a way that amplifies your own distinctive capabilities and those of the partners in your network.

Relevance for Education

Whether it’s high school dropouts, workers needing re-training, organizations with new learning demands, higher expectations from graduates, or a multitude of other new demands for learning; we too are facing new and different “markets” for learning.  It is not enough just to make small adjustments to existing systems that were designed for other demands.  We need to redesign our educational products and processes by innovating within our own capabilities and by seeking open network partnerships to extend those capabiities.

The Search for a New Common Sense

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I’ll begin where I left off in my last post.  Our task (as educators) is to find a new common sense for how to operate in a 21st Century economy (Hagel and Brown).

The Current State of Affairs

Here is my big picture view of what is going on in the economy today.  Globalization, digitalization, standardization and other productivity improving factors are decreasing general labor requirements; a first level of economic restructuring.  Some of that labor is falling to low wage and low skill service jobs, but there is a significant effort being directed to developing totally new forms of value.  Hagel and Brown’s call is consistent with the call of Drucker to improve the productivity of knowledge workers.  What is this new common sense; this new source of productivity:

Living on the edge will help you build the strongest core.

What do we mean by this? The edge is where the action is – in terms of growth, innovation and value creation. Companies, workgroups and individuals that master the edge will build a more sustainable core (Hagel and Brown).

The bohemian spirit has defined the edge.  That doesn’t mean we should adopt old bohemian models, but we should be wiling, in various ways, to help people explore their boundaries and boundary conditions.

From Push to Pull:

Over the past century, we have been perfecting highly efficient (push) approaches to mobilizing resources. . . . In education, we design standard curricula . . . In business, we build highly automated plants or service platforms supported by standardized processes . . . In technology, we write massive enterprise applications specifying activities . . . (but) powerful forces (increasing uncertainty, growing abundance, intensifying competition, growing power of customers) are at work shaping the need for an alternative approach. . . pull models help people to come together and innovate in response to unanticipated events, drawing upon a growing array of highly specialized and distributed resources. . . . pull models seek to provide people on the periphery with the tools and resources (including connections to other people) required to take initiative and creatively address opportunities as they arise (Hagel & Brown).

Note: this is not the death of standardization.  It is alive and well and plays an important function, but economically speaking, it is playing a decreasing role as a differentiator, a role that is now falling to creativity and innovation.

A Need for New Forms

This is the place for new forms of Personal Learning Environments;  personal environments that we create collectively.  It’s also about developing the resources to be able to pull to you, what you need, when you need it.  It’s also about helping people to find and pursue their passion to creating value, change their thinking and perceiving, and it’s about changing the functions of institutions and organizations in order to fit with this new pull model.

I believe this pull model will increase knowledge work productivity, it will enlighten us on the connections between the economy and the creative industries and it will play a big part in helping us to securely face the future.

The Focus of Education

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American Design Schools Are a Mess, and Produce Weak Graduates by Gadi Amit

In this fast company article Gadi says:

The first five years in a designer’s career are absolutely critical and the true educational experience. A young designer must appreciate that opportunity to mature while on the job and take nothing for granted. A willingness to do anything and everything he or she can to get experience and learn, from the ground up, should be reinforced by the schools.  . . . — your first job is your true MA, your best chance to establish a career path, your opportunity to work on the coolest projects . . ..

First a revision to the thoughts behind my posts of 11-23 and 11-12.   Schooling and development are very important and much of the structure to our educational institutions is appropriate.  We need to introduce students to traditional ways of thinking and knowing and then help them find new ways of thinking and knowing.  But this is the beginning of education, not the end.  Students, and indeed, all of us need support as we address real world context and achieve Morin’s contextualization principle of knowledge.  This is what Gadi is referencing, contextualization from the ground up.  This is where we need personal learning networks in the broadest of conceptions.  Peers, mentors, coaches, customers, digital acquaintances from around the world, textual friends from our readings; we need all kinds of help to find our ways and we need institutions, learning structures, designed environments and the like to help us achieve this type of learning network.

This is the task assigned to us by Hagel and Brown: to find a new common sense for how to operate in this 21st Century Economy.