Digital age learning

In my Learning is learning post yesterday, I started a debate about andragogy and pedagogy. I held the position that the theory of andragogy (Malcolm Knowles) adds very little to our understanding of learning. In some ways, I argued, andragogy theory seems outmoded in the light of recent rapid developments in new teaching methods, learning resources and digital media. Building on this position, I would like to examine two further concepts - namely heutagogy (Stewart Hase) and paragogy (Corneli and Danoff) - which may offer more appropriate ways of framing learning in the digital age. I would like to acknowledge Martin King, who set my thought processes going down this road when he commented on the 'Learning is learning' post. Although the two terms may be unfamiliar to some, most teachers will recognise how they actually work in authentic learning contexts. Heutagogy is a grand way of saying 'self directed or self determined learning'. Paragogy is another way of describing peer to peer learning, where students support each other's learning on an equal basis. Both are highly applicable when we consider the advance of learning technologies and the deep pervasion of social media into many learning spaces, formal and informal.

For me, paragogy is an extension of the concept of scaffolding (proposed by Jerome Bruner), where knowledgeable others (teachers or peers) can create optimal learning environments in which students can learn more than they would if they were studying on their own. Paragogy takes scaffolding farther though, because peers are in an equal relationship. The exchange conditions are duplex - that is, they work both ways and reciprocal learning is achieved as learners connect with each other, share their content and ideas, and engage in dialogue. If this sounds familiar, it is exactly what happens informally day in, day out on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites. Paragogy may also find more synergy than andragogy with emerging explanatory frameworks of digital age learning such as connectivism (Downes and Siemens).

Heutagogy by contrast - and in its loosest interpretation - might be conceived of as a form of flâneurism - the act of wandering described by Charles Baudelaire as a means to more fully experience the landscape or environment one finds oneself in. Many of us assume flâneur-like trajectories when we traverse our way across cyberspace, clicking through hyperlinks, sometimes happening by chance upon pages that interest us, and where serendipitous learning ultimately occurs. Heutagogic learning is essentially self directed and autodidactic, and at its most informal, may involve sense-making of the digital landscape by wandering seemingly aimlessly around it. But there is still a self-determined purpose underlying the actions of the learner. Scholars such as Hase and Kenyon have argued that a shift of emphasis from andragogy to self-determined learning would be beneficial because just like pedagogy, andragogy still holds connotations of teacher control (but see Donald Clark - USA - for an alternative perspective on this).

Image source by Steve Paine



Digital age learning by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Learning is learning

I got embroiled in a Twitter discussion today with Mark Childs and Fred Garnett on whether the word andragogy is actually helpful to our understanding of learning. I'm not convinced. As ever, I like to promote argument, so here on this blog, I offer you my own views on what is quite an old debate. For the uninitiated, Andragogy (from the Greek Andros, meaning man) was a term made popular in the education world by Malcolm Knowles. It refers to learning strategies and experiences that are for adults rather than children. Knowles had made the distinction between children's learning and adult learning on the basis of adult motivation for learning being different from that of children. Pedagogy, another term used widely in education, derives from the time of the Roman slaves, known as pedagogs, who were tasked to either train their masters' children, or in many cases, to 'lead them to education'. Pedagogy is sometimes erroneously applied only to children's education, but is best applied to all forms of teacher directed learning.

The main problem with Knowles's concept of andragogy is that it is intended to be different to pedagogy, which implies that adults learn differently to children. But is there any evidence for this? How does Knowles differentiate between adult and child learning? Here are his four main tenets for andragogy (in italics), accompanied by my own critical commentary:

1) Adults need to be involved in the planning and evaluation of their instruction. This is problematic on several levels. Firstly, the term instruction implies that the teacher is directing the process of learning, which undermines the whole point of the autonomous learning andragogy is meant to epitomise. Secondly, should children not also be involved in the planning and evaluation of their 'instruction' or do they not have the same human rights as adults? Thirdly, if we believe that children don't really know what they need to learn, then we should concede that many adults don't either. However, taking this stance denies that many adults and children are actually much more astute at knowing what they need to learn than teachers give them credit for. Either way, this first distinction is meaningless.

2) Experience (including mistakes) provides the basis for learning activities. Adults make mistakes and learn from them, but so do children. All we are talking about here is the length of time it takes to accumulate 'experience'. How much time on this planet does an individual need to accrue before they can in Knowles's terms be accepted as 'experienced'. If this is an indication of how adult learning differs from children's learning, it is tenuous indeed.

3) Adults are most interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance to their job or personal life. This statement is actually more descriptive of the differences between compulsory and elective education than it is about any differences that may exist be between child and adult learning. True, many adults study disciplines to gain qualifications so they can either secure a career, or enhance their position within their present employment. When they leave scjool they have a choice what they wish to study. In school, children are still fed the 'just in case' curriculum, which not only wastes a great deal of contact teaching time, but also ultimately turns many young people off learning for good. Furthermore, although most children don't have jobs, they are constantly and informally acquiring knowledge and learning many skills that have immediate relevance to their personal lives. So what is the difference?

4) Adult learning is problem-centered rather than content-oriented. This is also more a commentary on the nature of state-funded schooling than it is on the nature of learning. Any learning can be supported through problem-centred methods regardless of whether it is adult or child oriented. I would even go farther to suggest that presenting any learner, whether adult or child, with a problem can deepen their understanding of concepts, content and context. In reality within the current western education systems, we find elements of problem based and content based learning in both adult and child contexts.

So does the concept of Andragogy add any value to our understanding of learning? For me, the answer is no.  Learning is learning. Does it really matter whether you are an adult or a child as you learn? Are different processes at work, or is Knowles unwittingly describing the differences between the environments within which adults and children learn? Am I right or am I missing something? Please feel free to enter the debate in the comments box below.

Image from Justin Chadwick's The First Grader


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

Reasons teachers don't blog

I'm a little overwhelmed by the response to my post yesterday entitled Seven reasons teachers should blog which as I write this, is racing toward 2000 views in just 24 hours. Thank you to all those who have taken the time to stop by and read it. It is turning out to be one of my most successful posts of the year, and not just because of the hit rate. It seems that many teachers are interested in blogging (or edublogging), but for various reasons are not yet in there, getting their hands dirty. Some of those commenting on yesterday's post added further reasons why teachers should blog. Currently we are now up to 10 reasons, and I'm sure there will be more added in the coming days. You are very welcome to add your own reasons there.

But I'm concerned about the reasons teachers don't blog. One of the reasons teachers don't blog is because of fear. Fear of posting something they think will be 'below standard' or 'missing the mark', and I would imagine that many fear their ideas and best practices being held up in the spotlight in public, on the web. Some teachers may fear what their bosses might say if they start blogging and say things that their institute might not agree with. Others simply cannot blog because their school is blocking access to certain tools and services on the web. Some complain that they don't have enough time to blog, and are tired when they get home from a hard day in the classroom. Some may think that they have nothing to say that would be of interest to other teachers. These are all valid reasons, but probably the most trenchant barrier to blogging is that many teachers still don't - or can't - see the incredible benefits blogging can offer to them, personally.

Think about it. Blogging is essentially an online diary that enables you to put down your ideas and return to them at any time. The blog can be private - for your eyes only. You only publish what you want to when you hit the Publish button. But sharing ideas and growing a personal learning network are becoming synonymous for many teachers. The advent of social media such as Twitter and Facebook is ensuring that teachers can quickly build contact lists and engage in conversation with their counterparts all over the world. I will stick my neck out and suggest that this kind of informal and free continuing professional development is making more inroads into better pedagogy than any single CPD programme could ever achieve. When teachers blog, they create content, commentary, arguments, resources, links and artefacts that are freely available on the web. In return they receive comments from colleagues that may include other useful resources. Combined, this dialogue creates a digital footprint of useful materials that other teachers can use, engage with, and reflect upon. Edublogging is creating a global discourse that transcends the physical constraints of time and space.

In my view, there are more reasons for teachers to blog than there are reasons against. There are more benefits and barriers. So I encourage you to take the plunge if you have not already done so, and get blogging. Barriers are only barriers if you can't get around them, and if there is a will, most barriers can be broken down. If you are a new teacher blogger I invite you to post your blog URL in the comments box below, and if you are a genuine edublogger, I will make sure it appears for all to see on this blog.

Image source by 2create


Reasons teachers don't blog by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Seven reasons teachers should blog

I have written extensively on what makes a good blogpost and why it is so powerful. From personal experience blogging is one of the most beneficial professional development activities I have ever engaged with. I learn more from blogging than I do from almost any other activity I participate in. Here are 7 good reasons why teachers should blog:

1) Blogging causes you to reflect. Donald Schon suggested that reflection on, in and through practice were vital components of any professional practice. Teachers naturally think back on what has happened in their classroom, and often wonder what they could have done better. Blogging can help with this process, enabling teachers to keep an ongoing personal record of their actions, decisions, though processes, successes and failures, and issues they have to deal with.

2) Blogging can crystalise your thinking. In the act of writing, said Daniel Chandler, we are written. As we write, we invest a part of ourselves into the medium. The provisionality of the medium makes blogging conducive to drafting and redrafting. The act of composing and recomposing ideas can enable abstract thoughts to become more concrete. Your ideas are now on the screen in front of you; they can be stored, retrieved and reconstructed as your ideas become clearer. You don't have to publish if you want to keep those thoughts private. Save them and come back to them later. The blog can act as a kind of mirror to show you what you are thinking. Sometimes we don't really know what we are thinking until we actually write it down in a physical format.

3) Blogging can open up new audiences. You can become a teacher within an infinitely larger classroom, and as you blog on subjects you think are interesting, you will discover that there are plenty of other education professionals 'out there' who are also interested. People who are interested will eventually find your blog and visit it regularly to see if they can learn something new from you.

4) Blogging can create personal momentum. Once you have started blogging, and you realise that you can actually do it, you will probably want to develop your skills further. Blogging can be time consuming, but the rewards are ultimately worth it. In my own experience, I find myself breaking out of inertia to create some forward movement in my thinking especially when I blog about 'edgy' topics that may be emotive, controversial, challenging. The more you blog, the better you become at writing for your audience, managing your arguments, defending your position, thinking critically.

5) Blogging can give you valuable feedback. As you gain feedback from your readership, you gain a sense of peer review, sometimes challenging and refuting your ideas (tricky to handle, but be open minded and you will learn a lot from constructive criticism) or affirming what you already believe to be true (some feedback from readers adds further value to your blogpost, and it's there for all to read). Affirmation of your own beliefs can be a powerful enabler for you as a professional practitioner.

6) Blogging can be creative. If you persist with blogging, you will discover that you develop new and creative ways to articulate what you want to say. As I write, I often search for alternative ways to express myself, and this can be through images, quotes, a retelling of old experiences through stories, videos, audio, or useful hyperlink to related web resources. You have many ways to convey your ideas, and you are simply limited to your own imagination. Try out new ways of communicating and take risks. Blogging is the platform that allows you to be creative.

7) Blogging can raise your game. Blogging is immediate. As soon as you press the Publish button, your ideas are on the web in front of a potential worldwide audience. Time and again I have heard from other teachers (and students) that they take much more care over grammatical construction, spelling and punctuation when they discover they have an audience.

Image source (edited)


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

Secrets of the bloggerhood

How do you drive people toward your blog, and how do you gain a regular readership for your website? Well, there are many opinions on how this can be done. I read a very interesting and thought provoking blogpost on popularity earlier today by Ankesh Kothari, who guest writes on the Problogger site under the title of The Secret to Blog Popularity.

Here is an abstract from the post:

Psychologist Antonius Cillessen of the University of Connecticut wondered how kids became popular. So he started researching social behaviors and peer relations of early adolescent kids in American schools. And he found something very interesting. He found that every school had a bunch of very friendly kids who are socially accepted and liked by everyone. But they are never considered popular.

The kids who are considered popular are often just as friendly as these universally liked kids, but with one difference. The popular kids draw a boundary around themselves, and exclude a few “outcasts” from their circle. Professor Antonius found that you can’t become popular unless you learn to exclude. He stumbled onto a truth that Chinese philosopher Confucius had described years earlier:

“Build small community and thousands will want to join.” – Confucius

It’s a truth high-end clubs have realized too. The harsher they are in excluding people from entering their premises, the more popular they get. Facebook grew when Friendster and other social sites didn’t. Why? because of their initial exclusivity—they only allowed folks with a .edu email address to sign up.

Ankesh Kothari goes on to argue that exclusivity is the key to blog success. Exclude some, and you will attract others in great numbers, he suggests. Kothari's post is interesting on a number of levels. Firstly, it is written from a commercial perspective, and subscribes to the philosophy that 'big is better.' This in itself is not a good start for many educators, who are more concerned about achieving success for their learners than they are about making money for themselves (who would become a teacher if they wanted to get rich?). But the post also challenges the belief that 'if you build it they will come' which a great number of would-be bloggers cling to when they launch out into the blogosphere for the first time. Katie Hafner recently repurposed a Winston Churchill line when she said: "Never have so many people written so much to be read by so few." Cynical, but probably true for so many who write, and write, and write .... and nobody reads. They give up after a while, and their blogposts hang there in cyberspace like abandoned and dilapidated gas-stations in the desert. Most bloggers do not write because they want to achieve commercial success, but simply to share their ideas. If no-one reads these ideas though, it's a little like whistling into the wind. The article does however provides a clear insight into what drives crowds to certain sites and why they avoid certain other sites.

Secondly, the article is interesting because it highlights the power of content. Content is king, it has been said, but in this instance, Kothari is arguing that it is what you don't include as content that is just as powerful. He is not arguing only that you should exclude certain individuals from your blog (in this case beginners and those who are techno-nomads) but also that you exclude certain content. I can subscribe to the latter, but I find it hard to agree to the idea that we should deliberately exclude certain individuals from reading our blogs. It runs against the ethos of just about everything I value in good teaching. Yet I can concede the point that perhaps this kind of weeding out of readership will happen naturally. My own blog for example attracts mainly teachers, trainers and learning technologists in its readership. I wouldn't expect lawyers or bankers to be reading it too much, because the content is irrelevant to many of them.

Finally, the article is interesting because it is a guest blog post. Kothari may be hung up on exclusivity, and motivated by commercial success but he doesn't seem to mind spreading the love a little by sharing his ideas for free as guest posts on other blogs. He does this because he knows that he will gain a larger audience for his ideas and that what he gives away will be returned to him with interest:

The first thing I did when I started out was to focus on who my ideal readers would be. I zeroed in on people who would take action without making excuses, and who have achieved some success already and are hungry for more. I know that if I can help my readers’ blogs grow, my site will grow automatically. And so I only wanted to focus on readers who are willing and able to put in the work to take action and grow their blogs.

What Kothari does not mention however, is the style and the format in which blogs can be presented. I consider this to be fundamental to the success of good blogging. Find a formula that works and stick to it. You need an aesthetic and conducive setting for your content. You have sweated over it, so it deserves to be presented in the best possible way. This can only be done by trial and error, but ultimately, you have to be able to say something important if you are to draw your readership back time and time again to your blog. There are other factors not mentioned, such as the ability to come up with bite sized blogposts (long tomes can turn people off unless the content is earth shattering) and also snappy titles that attract readers when they see them, for example on Twitter.

Ultimately Kothari is correct when he says that we cannot serve everyone. I am uncomfortable with the exclusivity tag, but can see his point that content must be targeted to those who will benefit best from it. Kothari's post is a very revealing and thought provoking blogpost on all these levels, but most of all it is interesting because it epitomises what blogging is all about, and the underlying processes that make it what Lawrence Lessig calls: "The most important form of unchoreographed public discourse we have."

Image source by Geek and Poke


Secrets of the bloggerhood by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Creative destruction

Anyone who has tried the Towers of Hanoi puzzle will know that it looks simple, but can be extremely complex to complete within the minimum number of moves. It drives some people mad. You can try it online here, but which ever way you do the puzzle it takes time and patience. It's not so much the amount of moves needed to complete the puzzle. It is the counter-intuition that often baffles. To complete the Towers of Hanoi problem, you must first build and then destroy what you have built to reach your target.

Using wikis for collaborative writing is a little like solving the Towers of Hanoi puzzle. When two or more people work on the same wiki page, there is often a lot of deletion, modification and overwriting - a kind of destructive creativity - that goes on as the content is refined and polished. From my recent research I found that many students don't like the idea of their content being deleted or modified. They feel a sense of ownership for what they have created. Some of them want sole credit. Or it is simply too strange for them to accept. And yet wikis, as community spaces, are by their nature, a 'free for all'. The polishing and refining process is something that students do all the time when they are completing an essay. So why do they falter when faced with community editing? Perhaps they feel they have lost some control. Or perhaps it seems illogical to delete content to make it better. Similarly to the Towers of Hanoi, content management on a wiki can appear to be counter intuitive - but to create, sometimes you must first destroy. To build you may need to dismantle first.


Image source by Kenjiys


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

Light the blue touch paper...

Should teachers try to create order from chaos? Or should we try to achieve the opposite - turning order into chaos? Let me explain. The human mind naturally and subconsciously seeks order, pattern, closure - the Gestalt psychology experiments of Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Kohler from the previous century has established that. We are oh so comfortable with order and predictability. We know what is coming next, we can control it, and it doesn't tax our minds that much. But for today's schools and universities, where we should be trying to 'draw out from within', surely order and predictability run counter to creative learning and self-driven critical enquiry. Shouldn't we be taking learners outside their comfort zones? For far too long, schools have been providing learners with definitive answers to sterile questions, and there is usually only one answer. Yet we can do so much more by encouraging students to question for themselves. We would see a great deal more evidence of critical thinking if we taught students to question more and answer less. One of my colleagues once said that he preferred to send his students out of the classroom confused. That way, they would be more likely to resolve their own cognitive dissonance by going off and doing some personal research to see if they could resolve their own confusion.

So should be try to achieve chaos from order? Should we attempt to subvert the ordered, linear curricula that we are commanded and expected to deliver? Should teachers try to create uncertain, and dare I say it - dangerous - environments within which students can question and argue? Do we need anarchy in the school system? Sugata Mitra, who is famous for his Hole in the Wall experiments, believes in what he calls minimally invasive education, where students can use tools to find out for themselves. He argues that all the answers are already there on the web for learners to discover for themselves. The new roles of teachers are to ask timely and relevant questions - searching ones that will stretch students and cause them to research for themselves. For a long time problem based learning has been a mainstay of the training of medical students. Present the students with a problem, and they will need to find a solution to resolve the dissonance. Along with many others, I have taken this a step farther by presenting my students with ill-structured problems. These are problems that have very few parameters and very little information. Students are forced to 'fill in the gaps' usually drawing on previous knowledge, before they can find their own personal solutions to the problem. Moreover, there are many possible solutions to ill-structured problems.

Such problem based learning takes a little time, and with the addition of a shared discussion space, develops over time, but the understanding of the topic is ultimately far deeper than if students were served up the answers on a plate. Maurice Holt provides an excellent argument for 'slower education' in his blog post Fresh Thinking about Schooling, and I quote:

"Since education is essentially about equipping our children with the ability to act responsibly in a complex society, the idea of a Slow School follows very readily from the metaphor of Slow. It brings to mind an institution where students have time to discuss, argue, and reflect upon knowledge and ideas, and so come to understand themselves and the culture they will inherit."

Much of the power of setting ill-structured problems for students is that they can post their solutions (and the reasoning behind them) onto shared online spaces such as wikis, where they will then have the task to defend their solution against criticism from the rest of the group. Students also have licence to attack the solutions of their peers. Learners need to think on their feet against all comers, and of course they learn by synthesising the best elements from other people's solutions. So, light the blue touch paper, stand back, and let the chaos commence....

Image source by Christopher Hubenthal


Light the blue touch paper... by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.