Education 2.0

Richard Sambrook posted this:

John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, made a really good point at  the Clinton Global Initiative:

He said the current education system of grades and exams puts people in competition with each other and is a top down command-and-control model. As the leader of one of the world's biggest IT companies he believes future education should concentrate on networking and collaboration - which will support greater innovation and corss-discipline creativity. It will also, he said, attract talent. Call it Education 2.0 then...

This is why I have been getting involved with The Open University, Horsesmouth and School Of Everything. I reckon it matters.

Comments

[Bob H]

Competition is good we need to strive towards our goal. One aspect of what is wrong with society today is that people don't believe that they have to strive to be better, they believe that just by making themselves 'famous' they will achieve in life.

We need measures to better ourselves by and to have goals that are comparable to metrics.

The Cisco and Microsoft corporate 'education' system is a farce which invalidates your study after a period and does not encourage the study of principles to work from. It requires you to learn facts and repeat them in a robotic fashion to pass the exams. I have been offered the financing to study these exams several times and I have always always refused on principle that they are a waste of money.

We learn almost everything from authoritative sources and without assurance of achievement we cannot ensure consistency.

While I love social networking and social information strategies I cannot endorse a wholesale libertarian approach to education. Socrates has his Socratic method, it has functioned well for society for over 2400 years. Learn from the past while looking to the future. Trying a square wheel isn't original even if it is made from an advanced composite.

[Euan Semple]

Surely the Socratic method is very much in keeping with a networked way of learning?

[Bob H]

Yes it is, however it assumes there is someone to lead the conversation. I totally support dialogues between student and teacher, however I am worried when I see the comments made by cisco that they assume a maturity in learning that does not exist in general pedagogy (teaching the young) only perhaps in proactive andragogy (teaching adults).

[Nigel]

Depends how you define 'lead' the conversation, surely?
I always thought Socratic dialogue although initiated by the 'teacher' had the 'teacher' assuming a position of not knowing.
Inelegantly expressed but it's a wet cold Monday morning!

[Nigel]

Just read this on 'Wired' - too good not to post!

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for
authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place
of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their
households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They
contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties
at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."

The text is attributed to Socrates.

[Euan Semple]

Great quote!

[Bob H]

Excellent quote.

If Cisco were to publish more of it's material openly I might feel happier, but as it is sometimes it is a nightmare to get what you want out of them. But I still find myself horrified by the IT word's idea of training.

Much like in conventional education there are good teachers and bad teachers, however at least in education there is a solid filtering and peer review process. In corporate training I don't think this happens well enough.

[Tom Hopkins]

or creativity: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66

(Think I mentioned this last night).

[Euan Semple]

Great video - thanks!

[JJ Commoner]

From Wim Veen's research on what he has termed "Homo Zappiens" and the learning / teaching challenges presented by digital natives, at TU Delft:

but instead of looking at children from the point of view what they should do according to their parents and teachers, why not looking at them from the point of view what they actually do?

... followed later (in summary) by:

"Learning is an active mental process of the learner; reflection with the ‘inner self’, and through communication with others
transforming information into meaningful knowledge.

Thus, teaching is enabling students to be active, communicating, and thus constructing knowledge"

... which I interpret to speak loudly towards suggesting that increasingly learning (and teaching) will lean on the social construction of knowledge, with teachers increasingly using socratic, "guide on the side" models.

[Jon Husband]

A tidbit more, from an interview of Chris Corrigan by Dave Pollard ... this bit on Chris' work at home-schooling his children:

DAVE: We talked then about how you can help engender these capacities in others. I was aware from previous conversations that Chris' children, and many of the children in his community, are home schooled. I asked him how he found time for this along with all the other important and demanding things he was doing. He told me it required looking at learning a completely different way from the way school systems do:

CHRIS: We call it Life Learning, the positive appellation of 'Unschooling' ..

One of the things Life Learning has taught me is that the more you let go of inappropriate control the easier things get, and this is a lesson also from Open Space, by the way. We feel the need to be in control of our children's education, and lots of people who decide to introduce home schooling feel the need to reproduce the school environment in their house, to know how and what their children are learning. They look to the education system to show them how to do this, so lots of home school parents will do things like test their kids to give them confidence that it's all working. We don't do any of that in our house, because it's not conclusively known in the education system whether any of that testing works...

It forces you into a more narrow box, and doesn't allow the child's learning to uncover the complex relationships that actually make up the world. They divide the world into subject 'chunks' when the world isn't made up that way. The world wasn't designed with math, geography, physics etc., all separate. So having a much more interrelated experience of the world is our approach. In terms of finding time to do this, this is something my partner and I are pretty single-minded about. We carve out a whole lot of time to be present with our kids.

My daughter and I both subscribe to StumbleUpon and we'll send each other interesting items and she'll be all over it, so then for the next week we'll be talking about sacred architecture or quantum physics or Edgar Allan Poe [DAVE: So the focus is on helping her discover, rather than teaching?] Right, it's enabling her to learn rather than teaching her. This 'strewing and conversation' approach applies to websites, to books, to people, to opportunities, we just throw them out there, and some of them the kids take up, and some they don't.

And then we talk about it, about the experiences, and engage with them and be present with each other."

The full interview here.

[Euan Semple]

Great quotes from Chris - thanks Jon.