The very best thing about curiosity is that every now and again you are rewarded with a “discovery”.
Every now and again you are rewarded with an insight so bewilderingly obvious that it is impossible to imagine how you have been so blind to its consequence. I experienced one of those moments when reading the latest post on Underground Learning on The Connectivism Blog today.
“Administrators, learning designers, and teachers are facing a new kind of learner - someone who has control over the learning tools and processes. When educators fail to provide for the needs of learners (i.e. design learning in an LMS only), learners are able to "go underground" to have their learning needs met.
This happened in a program I was recently involved in as a learner. An LMS was the main learning tool (which was a good choice for the program - many of the learners valued the centralized nature of communication and content presentation). After a short period of time, however, groups of learners "broke off" from the program and started holding discussions through Skype, IM, wikis, and other tools. Learners selected tools that were more tightly linked to the types of learning tasks occurring. When the learning was content consumption or simple discussion threads, the LMS was fine. As the learning became more social, learners started using tools with additional functionality. The learning required by the instructors – assignments, discussions – still happened in the LMS. But much more meaningful, personal, and relevant learning happened underground – outside of the course.”
When I track the history of ICT strategies for schools in New Zealand – Interactive Education (1998)/ Digital Horizons (2002) and (2003) and the Draft (e) learning Framework for the Schools I think that Koestler’s description of the history of cosmic theories as “a history of collective obsessions and controlled schizophrenias” (Koestler, 1969 p14) fits the history of ICT in educational curriculum and pedagogy like a non edible collagen casing fits a salami.
We have been so busy imagining that checking on the above ground results of MOE initiatives in ICT through CORE Ed ict_pd cluster surveys of teacher confidence and teacher competence that we have missed the most telling indicator.
We missed looking for student underground learning through ICT as a measure of how ICT can change learning. If we really believe in the whole constructivism/ teacher as facilitator metaphor and want to look at how students are using ICT for “meaningful, personal and relevant” performances for learning, then asking teachers to report on:
How many days (or day equivalents) of formal ICT Professional development have you had in the last 2 years prior to the Cluster project?
To what extent are you able to focus on ICT issues in your PD this year?
How do you prefer to learn ICT skills?
What proportion of your units of work contains ICT based learning activities?
Is not going to generate anything worthy of the extensive statistical analysis and pivot tables.
In truth, in 2005, asking teachers to report on their confidence and competence in using ICT as an indicator of student learning outcomes through ICT is a crackling example of mindfluff in eduspeak.
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