Speculations on eLearning:
Designing digital networks for pedagogical, social and economic
development.
It is Boxing Day 2010 and the landscape of what we broadly call 'elearning' is vastly changed, and utterly dynamic.
Unsurprisingly, this landscape has expanded pretty much at the same rate
as which the World-Wide-Web (hereafter simply referred to as 'the web')
has expanded and soo much of that growth has been due to the way in
which the web enables social communication, an intrinsically pedagogical
act.
Pedagogy is intrinsic to social communication because any act of
communication requires an adjustment to circumstances
by all who are included in order to be completed.
In these speculations I am exploring ways to think about how to build a
social learning model of eLearning but on a large
scale. But let me 'nail my colours to the mast' for I am explicitly
opposing what I think is an emerging alternative model. At the moment I
have only a slightly pejorative name for it: "the bureaucratic
centralist" model of eLearning.
Resources
Knowledge: Commodity or Biography?
Communities of Practice
Naturally, given the geographic dispersal of the region, the somewhat difficult terrain, the diversity of social and personal needs among the popuatlion, the education strategy includes developing a digital infrastructure for learning.
But there is too little discussion about what that digitally supported education will really look like. Currently we are steeped in 'server-farm' models of eLearning, a hangover perhaps from the days of the National Grid for Learning (NGfL) which has become absorbed into the psyche of planners and policy makers.With that NGfL baggae comes certain assumptions which, by definition, are mostly unconsicous. For example, that e|Learning involves some sort of 'logging on' with all that that implies about registration. But what does registration really mean in the Edgeless University? Or that eLearning involves people "accessing" resources through a computer display of some type (I have heard this referred to as "accessing learning"!) as if education is all about creating repositories of resources.
In general terms these centralist models can be critiqued from several points of view, buyt paritularly thatthis is a discussion about power an dcontrol. Social learning models challenge established institutions and their norms. Centralism is a natural reflex on the part of such instiuttions as Uniervsitiy bwecause of course they will fight hard ot stay the same. Yet, now too in 2010, the established harmony of the HE sector in Wales is fallking away sharply like some continental shelf. Footing is lost.
So, in these pages I give more emphasis to a social model of eLearning which may provide us with a more useful approach to deploying tools and guidance on thos etools, particularly for creating searchable archives of personal material (aka a portfolio) but which does not specify programmes of study in the conventional sense. The bottom-line here, in this context of radical change and a drive for social regeneration, even traditional qualifications and their procedural necessities are called into question. This might even inlcude the gtereater empahsis igiven to such educatged attrivbtues as "employabliity" this too might promote a reductive approach to learning and education. Alternatives must be found. For while a social model of eLearning is more likely to fit the circumstances of the HOVbut traditional pathways can be offered and available these do not suit the majority. Social eLearning should therefore support and accredit what individuals can already do and lead to them further opportunities, some, but not all, of which will include traditional qualifications. Accrediting what people can do may start with such examples Stephen Heppell's BA in Mumology or online 'free schools': School of Everything, WiziQ.