I really appreciated Karen’s recent post Trying to grok the lack of structure in peer learning.
I’m reading A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown. I’m particularly interested in the part on peer learning and learning collectives.
This passage struck me:
[O]ne might be tempted to ask how we might harness the power of these peer-to-peer collectives to meet some learning objective. But that would be falling into the same old twentieth-century trap. Any effort to define or direct collectives would destroy the very thing that is unique and innovative about them.
This might be at the core of the tension I often feel when working in P2PU. It runs through everything from instructional design to system architecture.
I used to think it was my “old-school” teacher tendencies coming out, but I think it goes deeper than that. The very notion that perhaps peer learning shouldn’t be be structured, shouldn’t have learning objectives, and can’t be externally assessed simultaneously makes sense to me and is very uncomfortable.
There is clearly a panicked, aggressive rejection of the idea that a “teacher” should attempt to provide any measure of guidance to learners among some. And it is increasingly clearly politically correct – many of the cool kids hate structure, disdain objectives, and share equal belief in assessment and the flying spaghetti monster. And who doesn’t want to be cool?
History clearly demonstrates that people can learn under situations whose structure is completely self-determined (i.e., situations in which no meddling know-it-all instructor tries to predetermine learning outcomes). Pure, unguided (or more correctly, self-guided) discovery learning can work. No one denies this.
However, the purpose of the machinery of education is to improve the efficiency of the learning process. While some adventurous people want to find their way to the top of Everest alone, unguided and unsupported, others prefer the guidance of someone who know little tidbits like “people who walk over there die” or “an aluminum ladder is a great, lightweight way to cross a crevasse.” While some might prefer to work for years without reference to others to rediscover known scientific principles, others would like to accomplish this learning in a weekend and don’t mind leveraging others’ expertise to get it done.
You can’t – with intellectual honestly – claim to oppose structure and disdain learning objectives on the one hand and then aggregate dozens of resources and technologies for students that will help them learn more about a certain topic (including tutorials on how to use them effectively!). You’ve just predetermined what the students will learn about and given them guidance. MOOCs, for example, are clearly pointed at a topical learning outcomes and for all their supposed lack of structure people feel the need to write software which imposes a structure on the vast, undifferentiated mass of stuff. (But it’s open source, so you can step back and spend six months learning PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby and rewrite it so that it reflects your personal way of organizing things better!)
I appreciate that individuals are agents with the ability to make and be accountable for their own choices. I believe (religiously) that it is important for us to respect and protect that agency and help individuals grow in their capacity to exercise it. (Oops, I said I wanted to help… See what a control freak I am?) However, when someone says to me, “Hey, you know a lot more than I do about X, would you help me learn more about it?”, I don’t think it’s an authentic respect of agency to say, “I don’t want to hinder your exercise of free will. Consequently, I’m not willing to provide direct guidance to you. I’m only willing to softly suggest a list of websites – which you can augment with any other material you wish, and please don’t ask me if they’re appropriate or not – and to gently recommend that you get a Twitter account – or substitute any other technology in place of Twitter or use none at all. Don’t let me tell you what to do! God bless; let me know when you figure it out.”
The purpose of the machinery of education is to improve the efficiency of learning. The spirit of education should include respecting the agency of learners. It would be just as inappropriate to use coercive torture techniques to improve the efficiency of learning as it would be to eliminate the provision of specific, direct guidance in the name of agency. As with much else in life, our goal here should be to find and walk the virtuous middle way.
In my opinion, much in the current ed tech vogue is too far from center (i.e., trying desperately to avoid giving sufficient guidance). But please don’t let my opinion influence yours in the slightest. Or you can accept it wholeheartedly if you choose. I don’t want to exert any influence on your learning. Why did you even bother reading this? Or perhaps you would care to read it again?
I agree that this *should* be the purpose, but I have found a great many (perhaps even a majority) of practitioners do not agree.
The purpose of the educational system seems to me, to have always been to pass on the accepted paradigm of learning and thinking–to place the “imprimatur” on your scholarship and direction. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the purpose of institutions in a society. There is nothing wrong with showing me the pieces, we all stand on the shoulders of giants….just do not demand that I put them together in the same way as you do. Otherwsie we will have no revolutions of thought and action!!
The efficiency of the learning process speaks nothing of the effectiveness of it. Might we say, “the machinery of education is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the learning process”? I doubt that many educators would argue against this as an espoused theory, but as a theory in use, perhaps it is a different story (as Jeremy eludes to). Comparing MOOCs to educational institutions (if I must), I find that some MOOCs are actually more structured than some institutional courses I’ve been involved with – at least in terms of laying out a content timeline and delivery. Regardless, to understand the effectiveness and efficiency of any learning process, one needs to analyze how the socio-material dynamic (i.e., how over time people interact with each other together with the necessary artifacts that allow such interaction to take place) emerges within a given structure.
Offering guidance in any structure could be seen as being helpful or a hindrance. What constitutes guidance? A newsletter? Syllabus? Freedom of choosing an ICT? Personal explanation/feedback? Graded exam? Lecture? These all could be seen in both a positive and negative light depending on the circumstances. But it’s precisely the circumstances that we need to understand in order to have a better idea about the effectiveness and efficiency of the learning process at hand.
To what extent should teacher provide guidance to learners? You have touched on the nerve of most online courses, in particular MOOC. First, would this depend on the type of learners, the capability and prior experience of the learners? For MOOC, our research revealed that lots of experienced learners (educators) were more likely to be active in the peer-teaching and learning, whereas there were quite a lot of unknowns relating to the background of those others less than active or mere lurking in the course. Would there be lots of cool kits in MOOC? I don’t know, but I doubt very much if cool kits are that interested even in a structured/unstructured learning facilitated by professors, scholars or educators under a MOOC.
“many of the cool kids hate structure, disdain objectives, and share equal belief in assessment and the flying spaghetti monster. And who doesn’t want to be cool?” I don’t think people are “hating structure, disdaining objectives” as such, if the learning is a valuable experience that help them to learn more “effectively” and “efficiently”. As shared in my post here: effective learning requires – learner centred, knowledge centred, assessment centred, and community centred, in mobile learning, under a social constructivist framework:
http://suifaijohnmak.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/change11-pedagogy-mobile-learning-and-assessment-in-mooc/ However, such structure, learning objectives may better be reframed in the learners’ learning goals (i.e. learner centred), where emergent knowledge and learning would likely be the sought-after knowledge when learning online with others (social learning), when coupled with personal learning, and personalised learning (assessment centred based on say eportfolio and self-assessment via blog posts, personal learning networks (PLE), and learning as a community and network (as a growth and development strategy for the learner and educator, learning together) will foster the education, thus lessening the often perceived control by the educators. Second, as you shared: “The spirit of education should include respecting the agency of learners. It would be just as inappropriate to use coercive torture techniques to improve the efficiency of learning as it would be to eliminate the provision of specific, direct guidance in the name of agency. As with much else in life, our goal here should be to find and walk the virtuous middle way.” Would this relate the value of education? There are many assumptions held in distance and online education, in the case of MOOC. The critical aspect in such way of “education” is to question the assumptions behind the learning emerged from the conversation, and education. When one’s goal becomes “our goal”, then we might have to share a deeper understanding of what constitutes a virtuous middle way. Is giving direct guidance necessary and sufficient? To what extent should we encourage and support discovery learning? When? How and Why?
It should be cool kids, not kits, sorry for the typos.
John
Difficult as it is to say, efficiency in learning is an important concept. It seems a bit cheapening to apply such an industrial production term to the sacred act of becoming more knowledgeable (or less worried / distracted by non-essentials or minor details). Maybe “efficiency” is another term for reaching a point of self-knowledge where a person can admit to being not the all-knowing cool kid but rather someone prepared to take on the challenge of receiving the knowledge of others? It’s risky to admit you don’t know everything–especially at a time in life when the building of an intact and resilient self is still in progress.
Alternately, not knowing and doing it wrong without asking for guidance seems a good definition of “inefficiency.” This could be corrected by learning from one’s mistakes; were a cool person willing to admit to mistakes.
In a way, though MOOCs seem to reside at the edge of orderly inquiry and are a model of hiding guidance behind a wall of mad activity I feel they approach a middle way. The learning for me emerges here from others who are still building their knowledge. You can witness and maybe share in the building of an idea, guide and follow each other, borrow and lend. This isn’t a place where something is being torn down, it’s a place of building.
Thanks for your post
Scott