Ahh Insouci, you have just given me a new indicator for educational well being – another criterion for assessing the connectedness of mental spaces in education.
Just as The Economists Big Mac Index makes exchange rate theory easier to understand, and Sulfuric Acid Production is a ready indicator for industrial well being, you have introduced the notion of a Calvin Klein g-string Index for wellbeing in the education sector.
In New Zealand we have an aging workforce, the average age of teachers lies around 47 +, and in the disciplinary silos I once played (the physical and biological sciences in secondary schools), the average age is I suspect significantly higher.
The mental space in which the New Zealand teaching workforce is thinking is different from that of the students they teach. They are different, and we are ignorant of the depth of The Abyss of Difference because it lies “beyond the horizon of our attention”.
The mental space in which I live is a different one from that of Goethe or of Schiller. The conceptual and perceptual topology in which I live is non continuous with the past. The axioms that spin out of the space in which I move are not the same axioms my grandfather still took for granted. The certainties by which we can talk to each other without ever mentioning them – because they lie so to speak, beyond the horizon of our attention – are different today than fifty or a hundred years ago. Ivan Illich in Conversation P128
Perhaps it is this difference that explains the disconnection between teacher and learner, and between teaching and learning. Perhaps it is this difference that explains the disconnection, and perhaps it does it more poignantly than any claims about compulsory institutionalisation in the classroom face2face environments or over managed and over limited on-line LMS learning environments arguments can.
Your new Calvin Klein g-string Index promises to be an effective rough and ready indicator of wellbeing in education, of mindspace mis_alignments between teaching and learning. We can forget about shallow judgements based on the walk shorts, cardigans and retro M*A*S*H Hawaiian shirts because we have a new appearance based index of educational connectedness.
I have been made jealous by the recent techno_achievements of edu_bloggers who have been podcasting from the (e) learning conferences they attend. I have been trying to think of powerful questions I might ask and then record and podcast from the educators at LearningatSchool_06 ict_pd conference in February.
Your comment resolves this Insouci, I reckon asking the educators present How comfortable would you be teaching in a Calvin Klein g-string? will be a great place to start.
And I will follow this up with the fabulous questions from George Siemens Enough with 2.0 post on his Connectivism Blog.
How can we portray that we are at a new place in regards to method of learning, but still in the same place in regards to the act of learning?
How can we grow our scope, our image, our conception of learning and learning design (especially when we break from courses and classrooms)?
Think there may be some interesting insights [I might need help to put together one of those CORE Ed Microsoft Office Excel pivot tables Sandra] when I analyse the patterns in the responses.
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