Smelly Knowledge Blog Questions

It is Boxing Day morning, and whilst the rest of the house slumbers off "Christmess", I keep coming back to the questions raised in Moving Forward with Open Eyes and an Open Mind, a recent post on Jeremy Price’s Smelly Knowledge Blog.

The post is stuffed full with provocation, jammed taut with new insight, and drizzled with a delicious link to the articles at EDGE .  I am a new convert to the blog and a new subscriber to the Edge.

[To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated
minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves. ] 

Why did Smelly Knowledge Blog's three questions capture my thinking?  Probably because they start to encourage educators to think about what ICT can do in a way that escapes the helpless valorising that pervades institutional thinking about ICT in education.

The questions alert us to the possibility that whilst ICT might enhance and create conditions for teaching and learning, it might also reinforce, stultify, undermine, negate, destabilise, and or act as a barrier for the conditions of value in teaching and learning.

Just imagine what discussion might evolve if we replaced the essentially valorising website content from from the "Learning Environment Strand" at COREed's LearningatSchool 06 Conference in Rotorua with questions like these. 

"Learning Environment: In developing an understanding of the potential of ICT to enrich the learning process as teaching professionals, we need to confront and debate the issues of learning styles, multiple intelligences, metacognition and other learning theory. In working through these issues we are challenged to examine the ways in which we act as the facilitators of learning."

Imagine the rich discussion and thinking that might ensue if we replaced "the potential of ICT to enrich the learning process" with Smelly Knowledge Blog's questions.  If we encouraged conference registrants to unpack, deconstruct, tease out, reconstruct and mess around with questions like these.

Check out the descriptors for the Leadership: Maori: Online: and Technical strands while you are at it - they are screaming out for the injection of similar Smelly Knowledge type questions.

So what are the questions?

Smelly Knowledge Questions

1.What new challenges and barriers does the use of social software create, or what challenges and barriers does the use of social software reinforce?

2.  Does the use of social software connect back to the learners’ experiences and “real-world” environment (and yours)?  [What are the implications of the educational process?]

3.  Does the use of social software encourage the development of depth of thinking, knowing, and becoming in addition to breadth?

[But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become "pancake people"—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.] THE PANCAKE PEOPLE, OR, "THE GODS ARE POUNDING MY HEAD" [3.8.05] Richard Foreman 

Jeremy’s questions and elaborations, connections and links made me realise that my ever faithful cluster contract key questions –the ict_pd mantra of

What are the conditions of value in teaching and learning? 

How might ICT enhance these conditions?

might well help me escape "toolishness" but are too limiting. I have been too focused on "value", on "advantage" and have become complicit in the valorising of ICT in education.

I am guilty of constraining thinking about the educational role of ICT in teaching and learning, by the very questions I ask.