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I keep reflecting on Teemu’s recent comment…
The aim of reaching everyone is immoral. It seems to be a project of expanding the banking concept of education where “knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing.”
Going back several blog posts to the original statement, it seems that much of the stir was caused by my (perhaps unfortunate) use of the word “education.” Some will say that “education” is evil because it is traditionally forced on people who don’t want it by people who feel like they need it.* But if I did not mean that we need to work so that the “education forcibly imposed on poor, helpless individuals by an evil empire” will reach out to everyone, what did I mean? If educators and instructional technologists aren’t the pawns of Satan, what is that I imagine them doing? To put it simply, I imagine them empowering or, more simply, helping. I think our primary task is helping.
Continue reading ‘Why is it all my recent posts are about immorality?’
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So, I’m still hearing from people about my scalability comments. Just to restate: there’s nothing evil about scalability itself. Scalability is about reaching lots of people, and reaching lots of people is an important intermediate goal. My only concern is that we might stop there - we might stop when our business plans and technology allow us to reach 90% of people and say “we’re finished!”
Now, reaching 90% is obviously better than only reaching 45%. But why don’t we reach the other 10%? Not enough money in their “market”? Worse yet, have we just forgotten they exist? Do we think that reaching 90% is really reaching everyone? If educators and instructional designers aren’t the champions of learning, who will be?
I know that no single solution / answer / product will reach all 100%. And I know that no one company will put enough products in their portfolio to potentially reach all 100%. The goal of supporting everyone’s learning is a world-wide, cooperative effort. I just wanted people to get to talking about those last few. To feel like scaling to 90% was necessary but not sufficient… To realize that after the current round of “let’s scale to really large numbers” talk is over, and that goal is attained, that it will have been a plateau, and not the summit. To feel like there’s still more work to do… That’s all.
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There’s something about the notion of reuse that seems to confuse people. They think “reusable resources” like those in an OpenCourseWare collection should “just work out of the box.” We frequently hear about “design tips” for making learning objects more reusable; what we almost never hear about is “design tips” for how to reuse existing materials.
It seems to me that the all-time best example of reuse, the one that all instructional designers should study as a case, and consequently the one about which I am writing a longer piece now, is The Magnificent Seven. This film was, of course, a remake of Kurosawa’s Shichinin no Samurai. Perhaps we (instructional designers) should all be talking about “remaking” learning objects, and not “reusing” them, in order to better communicate the complicated process involved in taking a cultural artifact developed by another person for another audience and trying to make it speak meaningfully to our audience.
As a mental exercise, complete the following statement. Shichinin no Samurai is to The Magnificent Seven as MIT OCW Linear Algebra, Fall 2002 is to _______________.
If you answered either Universia’s Spanish translation or CORE’s Chinese translation, I think that misses the point. Adding English subtitles to Shichinin no Samurai made it slightly more accesible to non-Japanese speakers, but it didn’t make it speak to Americans like The Magnificent Seven did.
It’s surprising how little we instructional designers know about this kind of reuse, what we might call “shichinin reuse” or the art of the remake. It will be very surprising if we don’t figure it out and are still employed in a few years.
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