Teacher or educator?

Everyone is a teacher. We all have the ability to help others to learn. This is exactly what Vygotsky had in mind when he proposed his famous Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) theory. Children (and adults too) can learn more broadly, deeply and extensively if they have a knowledgeable person by their side, than they can on their own. In our society, we often think of that knowledgeable other person as a professional educator, a tutor, lecturer or classroom teacher. But it need not be. Not everyone is cut out to be a professional educator, but anyone can teach and most of us do exactly that, just about every day. The artistry of a good educator though is to continually engage students in learning, to inspire them to persist in their studies and to transfer their own personal passion to that student's learning. The art of education is to draw out the very best from learners, to encourage them to excel at what interests them, and to instill this within them so they continue to do so for the rest of their time on this planet. The very, very best teachers can do all these things, and usually instinctively.

We learn in a multitude of ways, some within formal settings, others less formally. How did you learn to tie your shoelaces? Most people would remember a friend, or a parent showing them how it was done. Then it was practice, practice, practice, until you could do it without thinking. Your first language was acquired naturally before you ever went to school. You learnt informally, listening to your family members speak and then engaging with them as you built your vocabulary. One of the great, unchanging roles of a parent is to be an informal teacher of their children, and older siblings also take a hand. Children today learn a lot of social rules and mores through informal play, long before they ever see a school playground.

If there is any difference at all between formal and informal learning, it is where that learning is heading. What is the study for? In formal learning contexts, learning is usually aimed toward obtaining some kind of qualification, an accreditation of a skill or knowledge. In informal contexts, it's simply about living. Going to school or college can be a real effort, day in, day out. Formalised learning can be a chore, but it need not be. This is where the skilled teacher can make learning engaging and fun, and motivate students to arrive each day anticipating something special. It takes passion, dedication, drive, tenacity and self-belief to become a professional educator. That's the difference between education and teaching, and it is why, although there are 7 billion teachers in the world, only a very few ever go on to become skilled educators.

Image by Momento Mori

This post was first published on August 1, 2011.

Seven billion teachers by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The future of learning

The Future of Learning

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler.

What is the future of education? With the upsurge in ownership of smart mobile devices such as iPhones, Androids and Blackberries, the rapid social penetration of touchscreen computers such as iPads, and an increase in the purchase of Kindles and other e-reader devices, the future of learning is definitely smart mobile. 80 per cent or so of the learning that most of us engage in is of an informal nature. Informal learning is becoming an increasingly enriched experience with personal tools, and there is improved connectivity too, ensuring that anyone who has a mobile smart device is more likely to be able to connect to the Internet quickly and seamlessly. Social networking sites and online media sharing sites are also enjoying exponential increases in membership, leading to the supposition that this generation is a profoundly connected generation. Students will use Facebook when they want to, and their institutional managed learning environment when they have to.

It is clear that education will not share the same future as the state funded school, because education and school are not synonymous. It doesn't end at school either. Those who pursue formal learning to the level of further and higher education will experience a growing gulf between the capabilities of the technology they arrive with in their hands, and technology that is provided in the classroom. They are different tools, for different purposes. The Blackberry or iPhone will be used to connect to informal learning and friends, for fun, entertainment and social purposes. The institutional system will be used for connecting to formal learning, and activities that are more formalised and by their nature, less entertaining and engaging. The personal technologies will be sleek, attractive, must-have, rapid action and intuitive devices, while the institutional systems will be rule-bound, clunky, opaque and bland. It follows that many students will prefer to access learning resources, their tutors and peers through their own personal technologies. We will thus witness a gradual decline in on-campus learning, with an increasing number of blended programmes made available to meet the demand of an increasingly mobile student population. Because students will increasingly rely on smart mobile tools for learning, FE and HE institutions may agree special arrangements with telecommunications companies to offset the call cost for students, as a trade off to the money the save by reducing their on-campus operations.

The blended learning courses of the future will be those that combine formal and informal learning features. Formal learning will be undertaken mainly for the purpose of gaining accreditation, informal learning will be engaged with for the remainder of the waking hours. Unless we can harness the power, excitement and richness of the informal personalised learning experience and translate it into formalised settings, we will continue to see a widening rift between school and education. The slideshow above - a part of the keynote speech I gave at LearnTEC in Karlsruhe, Germany, earlier this month - illustrates these and other thoughts about what we might see in the future of learning.


The future of learning by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Turn and face the strain

Below is an extract from a forthcoming chapter I'm publishing soon in a book edited by Manuela Repetto and Guglielmo Trentin, on Web Enhanced Learning. My chapter is all about change that is brought about by the introduction of new technologies in formal learning settings, and how it affects learning and teaching. It has the optimistic title of: Teacher resistance to new technologies: How barriers to Web Enhanced Learning can be overcome.

Abstract

This chapter will address the question of how a transformation in teachers' use of information and communication technology can be achieved. There is evidence to suggest that the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in higher education can enhance and extend the learning experience. There is also evidence that although many teachers recognise this, many resist using ICT in formal education contexts, resulting in a shortfall in the adoption of technologies. An analysis of the barriers and constraints, and how they might be managed and overcome will feature during the discussion. A particular emphasis on Web Enhanced Learning (WEL) approaches will be made and strategies for university-wide adoption of social software (Web 2.0) tools and services will be presented.

The Nature of Change

Change is often painful, and most people avoid it if they can. This is human nature. People feel more comfortable with routines they have developed, and trust their own methods before they will trust those of another. Notwithstanding, Web Enhanced Learning (WEL) has the potential to revolutionise higher education at a number of levels.

At the pedagogical level – where we are concerned with how learning takes place – there are indicators that WEL and other technology enhanced approaches have the potential to transform the quality of learning. WEL provides a flexibility of pace and space that was previously unattainable. Further, WEL enables students to more directly participate in, and take control and responsibility over, their own learning processes.

Formal and Informal Learning

This emerges through formal and informal learner activities such as online discussion, user generated content, active social tagging and the sharing and exchanging of digital artefacts direct from user to user. We can observe this in the interpersonal dialogue that is common on social networking sites such as Facebook, in the user generated encyclopaedia pages of Wikipedia and on video and photo-sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr. Not only do students enjoy using these tools informally, they also use them within formal education contexts, and often during lessons or for the purposes of completing their assignments. Engagement with learning at this level is a departure from the didactic, passive, instructional methods often seen in higher education. Students are now using WEL tools to engage more deeply and actively with their learning, and through their quick and easy to set up social networks, can call upon help and support to collaborate while they learn. It seems a shame that there appears to be a gulf growing between the expectations and activities of students within the social web, and the expectations and practices of university staff within the lecture room.

The book will be published soon, and I'm looking forward to reading the chapters by the other authors in the volume.

Image by Banksy: source

Turn and face the strain by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Outrageous alternatives

What is the most outrageous alternative education scenario you could imagine? Children not attending school, but instead learning from home? Done it. Got the t-shirt. Distance education in the outback of Australia and other large area countries has been there for years, and so has home schooling in all its hues and colours. OK. What about no school at all then? Children going straight to work as soon as they are able to walk? Well, the sweat shops in the Far East can easily lay claim to that one. And of course, in Europe in the last century but one, it was prevalent for all but the very well off. It may be radical, but anyone who advocates it deserves a size 12 boot up their backside.

OK, what about children taking control of the curriculum, controlling discipline, and deciding what the teachers should teach them? Nope, completely passe. T'was done by Summerhill School and a number of other progressive, humanist schools in the 1960s in England and elsewhere. How about something a little less radical then? Teachers stepping back out of the way, so that the child takes centre stage and learning is focused on their personal development? No again - Montessori schools have been taking the approach for years. How about a more balanced curriculum then, where academic topics are equally weighted with artistic, aesthetic and social skills? Close, but no cigar - the Rudolf Steiner school movement has cornered 'head, hearts and hands' education for some time. Are we running out of alternatives? Is there any radical approach that has not been tried and tested? Are we doomed to continue with a rusty, creaking, increasingly outmoded national curriculum which every day becomes more and more irrelevant to the needs of the modern, fast changing, digitally-rich world of the information society? Are we?

Well, there is 'deschooling' of course. Deschooling in the sense that Ivan Illich proposed in the early 70s. No need to panic. It's not doing away with schools, as most people think when they hear the phrase 'deschooling'. No, it's more a philosophy premised on the assumption that universal education is simply not possible, nor is it desirable. We don't all need to know the same stuff, therefore why should we all sit together in the same room, at great public expense, for so many thousand hours of our young lives, to be forced to learn it all? Illich was also concerned that we should do away with 'funnels' - he talked about 'learning webs' that enabled every child (and indeed every adult) to learn what they personally needed to survive, thrive, care and share in the society they found themselves in. His idea of 'peer matching' was radical:

The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity. (Illich, 1971)

Hmmm. Impossible? Under the current funding regimes of mass public education, and in the present ethos of rigid curricula and control freakery of Western governments, trying to formalise something like this is difficult. But when we consider that 80 per cent of what we learn is achieved primarily outside the school gates, I am sure we might agree there are some potential loopholes to exploit. So let's see - how radical can we get with education? What if every child had their own device to connect to the world of knowledge and what if it was actually fun. What if they could search for any topic they wanted to know about and find complete resources on it in seconds, on a screen right in front of them? What if children could match their interests and knowledge needs with others who they could link with around the globe? What if children could learn from each other in this way using social networks and massively online role playing games? What if each child could create his own personal learning environment using tools that were free, scalable and open for all to use without any concerns about personal safety? What if this kind of learning was formally accreditable in such a way that employers would recognise it? What if the learning webs that Illich dreamed of were actually a reality, brought to us through easy to use personal devices, connected anytime, any place, and totally free to use?

So why aren't we doing it?

Image source

Outrageous alternatives by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

What price education?

Derek Bok once said: "If you think education is expensive, you ought to try ignorance." Yes, education is expensive, but in spending public money on teacher training, salaries, professional updates, school and university buildings, technology and learning resources, we are investing into the future wellbeing of our own society. My recent trip to the Gambia, one of Africa's poorest and smallest countries, showed me that failing to invest in quality education can be disasterous, and that ignorance is indeed costly on a number of levels.

State funded education in the Gambia covers only lower basic (primary) education. You may have read in a previous post that the government only supplies the buildings, the teachers and the chalk. Anything else must be paid for by parents. They need basic things like pencils and exercise books. I used an old shirt to clean the blackboard during a lesson because their was no board cleaner. The walls need educational posters. Coloured chalk, crayons, text books. All of these are relatively inexpensive to us. To the Gambians they are luxuries. When a child reaches the age of 11, if his parents do not have enough money (and that would be quite a high percentage), that child has to leave formal education. But what can they do next?

I saw many young teenagers simply hanging around on street corners, kicking their heels, trying to earn a living any way they could, selling small items, panhandling, dodging the traffic, living off their wits. Some are lucky enough to go out working on the flimsy fishing boats, but this is a very dangerous occupation. Many of the young girls we saw were tasked to look after their younger siblings. I saw one 6 or 7 year old girl carrying a new-born baby around, tied onto her back with a cloth.

Several times we were approached out on the streets by young men who tried to glue themselves to us in the hope of relieving us of some of our cash. We witnessed the 'Bumsters' working the scene - young males who wait for female travellers to pass their way who they then follow remorselessly in the hope of earning a little money for their 'services' rendered. This is just one of the many humiliating occupations young people can fall into, and believe me, there are some even worse. Unemployment is high in the Gambia, but it would be a mistake to blame this solely on a lack of education. The economic circumstances largely dictate the number of jobs available. It does seem sensible though, to conclude that if the standard of education was higher, and there was more opportunity for children to stay in school for free until they at least reached the end of their teens, that they would be so much better off. It is also inescapable that any society's wealth relies greatly on the standard of its education provision.

So what price education? Well, above is my idea of what this month's National Geographic magazine should be featuring. Yes, it's one of my own pictures, taken of a young girl in the Gambia last week (original here), and the magazine cover is one I created myself, but I hope I have made my point. We all need to care more about how the children of the world are being educated. To my mind, we should invest as much in education as we can afford, because failing our children in their formative years is storing up a shed load of trouble for the future. Let's hope the world wakes up to this fact, stands side by side with the poor nations of the planet and invests more in their future, and in their richest natural resource - their youth.

Hanging in there

Socrates once said: 'I cannot teach anyone anything, all I can do is make them think'. And then there was Andrew Carnegie who said: 'People who can't motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.' Some teachers struggle to motivate their students, and some students find it hard to concentrate for long enough to learn anything. So what is this slippery, elusive thing we call motivation? We certainly need it to do anything, anything at all. But where does motivation to learn come from and how can we capture it?

One of our Atlantis University team, Tillman Swinke, recently published a blog post called 'This time it's personal' where he deals with the subject of motivation in relation to informal learning. He remarks that learning always starts at the personal level (correct) and argues that therefore, informal forms of learning should assume more importance. Tillman then goes on to describe some of the most motivational ways to learn (e.g. my girlfriend only speaks Chinese, therefore I am motivated to learn to speak Chinese). He argues that informal learning has both intrinsic (self motivated) and extrinsic (externally imposed demands) motivation. I tend to agree but will maintain that informal learning is more reliant upon an individual's intrinsic motivation than it is by any external pressures. In other words, we learn because we are interested. When we move into the more formal aspects of learning, there the extrinsic motivation begins to be applied through a need to achieve good grades, complete successful projects and avoid falling behind your peers. The trick is to maintain an intrinsic motivation that is just as strong as if one were still learning informally.

This is one reason, I think, why personal learning environments (which tend to heavily represent informal learning approaches and are intrinsically motivated) are assuming an ever increasing importance in education. For it is within the PLE that students can truly pursue their own interests, motivate themselves to learn and generally capitalise on their personal talents and skills. It is the PLE that enables learners to transcend the often stifling nature of the institutional VLE to make their own creative choices about tool selection and formation of digital presence and identity. Now that's interesting....

Related posts

Intrinsic & extrinsic motivation and informal learning (DPhil Stuff)

What's in it for me? (Social eLearning)

There's no LMS in my PLE (Shelley Gibb @mollybob)

It’s Personal: Learning Spaces, Learning Webs

It’s Personal: Learning Spaces, Learning Webs

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler.

My slides for the upcoming PLE/PLN Online Symposium hosted by the University of Manitoba are now available for viewing above. In 'It's Personal: Learning Spaces, Learning Webs', I attempt to compare and contrast a number of learning philosophies, and define some of the (un)boundaries of informal and self organised learning - the fertile ground within which personal learning approaches flourish. Above is the scary baby from the cover slide: I will present this slide show with live commentary on Thursday from the Cork Institute of Technology over the Elluminate platform. I'm looking forward to hearing comments from those who are interested in this fascinating area of learning development.

Learning futures festival

I'm a guest speaker at the University of Leicester Learning Futures Festival which kicks off on 11th November. I will be sharing a session with Steven Warburton (Kings College London) and Ricardo Torres Kompen, (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain) where together we will be addressing the topic of the 'Social Web for Formal and Informal Learning'. I am still debating whether to wear formal or informal attire for the presentation, but in the final analysis it probably won't matter to anyone but me. Y'see the sessions will be delivered synchronously online through Elluminate, so I can dress how I want on this occasion.

Here's the blurb on the session: The Social web, also known as Web 2.0 technologies and services that enables the lay-person to be actively and collaboratively participate on the Internet has received much attention in the recent years. Educators, researchers, practitioners and technologists are keen to harness the potential of social web for learning. This two hour seminar and discussion forum will explore the potential of social web for both formal and informal learning.

The session is on 19th November 2008 between 14:00 - 16:00 (GMT) and will be live on Elluminate. Here's hoping you can join us!