education as coaching or a plantation economy?

Two contrasting perspectives on university education caught my eye recently. The first article was an excellent exposition on the meaning of learning and why technology and teaching are not the same:

• Education is not the transmission of information or ideas. Education is the training needed to make use of information and ideas. As information breaks loose from bookstores and libraries and floods onto computers and mobile devices, that training becomes more important, not less.

• Educators are coaches, personal trainers in intellectual fitness. The value we add to the media extravaganza is like the value the trainer adds to the gym or the coach adds to the equipment. We provide individualized instruction in how to evaluate and make use of information and ideas, teaching people how to think for themselves.

• Just as coaching requires individual attention, education, at its core, requires one mind engaging with another, in real time: listening, understanding, correcting, modeling, suggesting, prodding, denying, affirming, and critiquing thoughts and their expression. 

In contrast, the second article was a post lamenting how contemporary universities now resemble a plantation economy:

• The modern university is a plantation....a large agricultural enterprise that raises and sells livestock and crops for profit....
• Undergraduates are livestock. In an actual plantation, livestock are raised and sold for profit....moving undergrads through the system is how universities make a great deal of money...
• An important aspect of raising livestock is keeping them docile... 
• If students are livestock, what corresponds to crops? Research grants and contracts. Not research itself, but research done in order to receive outside money....
• In the modern research university, obtaining grants is a requisite for employment. Yes, one can do research without external funding, but that doesn't count, at least not for much...
• Every plantation needs overseers, bosses who enforce rules and dole out the rewards and punishments. In universities these are department chairs and deans...

The connection between the two posts?  Increasing efforts to transpose teaching practice with the use of technology through the widespread imposition of distance education, on line and "free" large enrollment classes.  What is driving these "initiatives" is not pedagogy nor the quality of education.  Rather, the plantation owners and operators of the university sector are  seeking to further increase revenue, decrease expenditures and sell their measures as educationally sound and driven "improvements".

Education suffers when learning is replaced by grade attainment and performance indicators for the success of your plantation university are the throughput of the livestock students.  Big courses, using distance technology are the university equivalent of Google and Wikipedia: large repositories of information, data and opinions, but they are not learning in and of themselves.  Teaching still requires that a teacher facilitate and empower the learning of the student.  Good tools are nice but are no substitute for skilled coaching, personal engagement and emotional investment.

empowerment

Too often it is assumed that education has to be structured and that learning has to be taught.  A recent experiment with technology reveals just how much this proposition is a fallacy.

The One Laptop Per Child project decided to side track educational structures and, instead, just dropped off sealed boxes of Tablet PCs in two Ethiopian villages.  The results are inspiring to all who subscribe to the strength of the human condition and innovative spirit:

• We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He'd never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.

what is school for?

One of my past students sent me this link:

http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/docs/StopStealingDreamsSCREEN.pdf 

and I am rejoicing that I already have the blog to both share and discuss it's manifesto or otherwise I would have to start one!

This is my first link to the manifesto:I have just finished reading it for the first time and rather than wait while I reflect on it and formulate some responses, I wanted to simply share the link and promote awareness of the manifesto others asap.

My immediate reactions:

• inspired
• validated
• optimistic
• emboldened
• comprehending of what I am seeking to do in my own courses and why my pedagogy resonates with many but perplexes snowflakes

 Some points that stood out for me:

• That’s the new job of school. Not to hand a map to those willing to follow it, but to inculcate leadership and restlessness into a new generation. 

And the book's concluding summary concerning What we Teach:

• When we teach a child to make good decisions, we benefit from a lifetime of good decisions.
• When we teach a child to love to learn, the amount of learning will become limitless.
• When we teach a child to deal with a changing world, she will never become obsolete. 
• When we are brave enough to teach a child to question authority, even ours, we insulate ourselves from those who would use their authority to work against each of us.
• And when we give students the desire to make things, even choices, we create a world filled with makers.

 

education, not training

 I am both a dynamist and a libertarian.  For me, education is a liberating praxis of individual empowerment.  It is the very antithesis of the social engineering so many elites, both within and outside academia, appear content to both promulgate and justify.


Dennis Hayes recently wrote a piece for Spiked which discusses the construct at the heart of this contrast:

• ...the idea we have of the university, and one seldom commented on, is the shift from education to training. In short, HE has been transformed into a huge training scheme. Whereas education is an open-ended, creative endeavour, training is designed to prepare people for specific roles and is structured around meeting fixed objectives. 
• What has been entirely forgotten in current discussions about ‘What is university for?’ is this important distinction between training and education. Policymakers, political commentators, university managers, lecturers and students now see no difference between the two.

For me it is as simple as the stating that I train my dog, I do not train students.  Unlike my dog, I want students to think for themselves, to appraise a situation, problem solve, interact and engage in social situations with empathy and compassion, act decisively and to daily raise their level of self-awareness and sense of personal integrity.


Training is fatally flawed within the education system, especially at university.  Change is both ongoing and accelerating.  By definition, any training provided at a university level is already dated, behind the times and irrelevant to the very market requirements it claims to be serving.  Training is frozen in the constructs and concepts of those professors doing the training: it is a map of how the world was, not how it is or how it is becoming.


In contrast, education is the basis of lifelong learning.  It is a compass to empower and guide an individual through their life journey, a set of principles and constructs that are both timeless and progressively honed through practice and application as an individual's life develops and unfolds.


Training has an inherently self-justifying quality: the student must keep repeating and recycling their training to "remain current" -- a recurrent , reregistration function not lost on institutions that profit from that training activity.


Conversely, education should be one and done.  Get a handle on the whole learning thing once, and then be equipped to use that higher education to continuously adapt to and innovate the change you wish to see in the world.


If you are a student in one of my courses, and you desire to learn, you do.  The motivation to learn, to extend the mind and to push the envelop of understanding, is an internally derived enthusiasm.  We learn because we are engaged, we are enjoying the experience and we see the relevance of the learning to our own lives.  Simple really.


Many students come into my courses not knowing or accepting this reality.  They have been conditioned to associate grade attainment with education.  They fail to realize that a high mark does not mean understanding or comprehension, merely the successful completion of an assessment activity.  In my courses assessment is learning, of learning and for learning.


The high entitlement snowflakes in the class bitch and complain, some repent and prosper, others not. Some even boast of their lack of engagement on the rate my professor websites, not even aware of the irony that they are posting their own disrespect for their own learning.


I do not "learn" students.  I do not "train" them and then in an exam ask them to jump and assess the height and form of their ability to respond in some Pavlovian multiple-choice stimulus.


Rather, I engage the students in an exploration of their own comprehension and understanding of the subject, its relevancy to them, and them as individuals as a consequence of the learning that has now changed who they are and who they going to be in life.


You can Google anything.  The point is not trained memorization. Or the ability to puke the "correct" ideas as stipulated by a professor's lectures in the approved style for a journal no one will ever read. 


No, the point to higher education should be the progressive realization of a higher functioning human being, one who can take responsibility for themselves and their actions, can lead, can inspire, can innovate change to improve the world wherever they find it and is enthused to act sustainably i.e. to actively engage in the complexities of continuous improvement consistent with deep values of human purpose.


Education, not training.

Facebook as a manifesto for change

Mark Zuckerberg recently issued this letter to potential investors:

• Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission - to make the world more open and connected.
•  At Facebook, we're inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information.

How people spread and use information is the essence of education.  Education should have meaning and purpose.  It should be driven by goals of deep human value and the drive to improve the quality of human life.  Thus:

• Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.
• There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. 
• Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.
• By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information
• We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.
• Finally, as more of the economy moves towards higher-quality products that are personalized, we also expect to see the emergence of new services that are social by design to address the large worldwide problems we face in job creation, education and health care.

Zuckerberg's vision for Facebook is not confined to a defining social purpose and transformational change.  He also understands that fundamental paradigm shifts are both underway and necessary both in the approach to education for change and the implementation of constructive change. 

• The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it - often in the face of people who say it's impossible or are content with the status quo.
• Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works.

Taken in conjunction, the Facebook model represents a manifesto for the implementation of social change that encompasses both educational reform and the sustainable implementation of constructive change.  It is a manifesto based on 5 core values:

• Focus on impact
• Move fast
• Be bold
• Be open
• Build social value

Zuckerberg's message is deceptively simple. Aspire to address a significant social mission, rather than just a business entity. Innovate, and continue to innovate even as you embrace success. Learn by doing, not from strategic simulations of risk avoidance, rent seeking and brand recognition.  Most of all, trust that the primary recipients of improved education, communication and democratic freedoms -- individual, ordinary people -- are quite capable and able to direct relationships in a manner that moves all society forward.

Facebook stands testament to the fact that improved facilitation, not increased management, is the key to evaluational reform and the implementation of constructive change.

what is geography?

Colouring maps and remembering places.

For many people geography is some variation of this memory from their earlier education.  One of the courses I teach is the Philosophy and Methodology of Geography.  One of the first things I ask of the students is what is their definition of geography?

Any discipline has validity if its practitioners understand its utility to others.  So the corollary to defining geography, is the description of a metaphor, analogy or model that explains what the discipline of geography is to those who do not intuitively or innately know, and/or are obscured in their understanding by their previous brush with crayons and outlined shapes of nations and the world.

As often happens to me, I awoke with a burst of inspiration this morning.  I keep paper and pen by my bedside to inscribe these pearls of insight before I forget them as I drift off into continued somnolence: in fact, I think the deciphering of my scrawl the morning after a nighttime burst of insight is an activity that drives the creative urge -- if I can interpret my scrawl I can do anything!

So, to geography and its definition.  Apparently my brain had dwelt on a feedback question from one of my students asking for my definition of geography.  So in completing my own assignment, my nocturnal inspiration is that:

geography is the thin line of discovery that separates enlightenment from oblivion. 

For me, the here and the now is always contextualized by an awareness of the landscape with which I am engaged: the environmental, economic and social dynamics of space and place at any point in time.  Thus, lifelong learning is the journey of discovery to enlightenment that accompanies the awareness of the myriad of landscapes through which I travel, engage and experience.

How do we learn?

Sunday. And instead of watching Liverpool vs. Man.City live, I am sitting in church.  My wife has been asked to join a choir and I am the spousal support team.  Small, rural Ontario church, much the same as all small, rural United churches throughout Ontario.  Same architecture, same set of hymnals and books, basically the same service structure and I still have no idea when I am supposed to stand and when it's o.k. to stay sitting.  I sit at the back: my wife has a beautiful singing voice, hence the choir invite -- me? Not.  I am one of those who listens and no one ever comes over and says "you should be singing" once they have hear me sing.


As the service progresses, my mind wanders (as it often does during church services) and I reflect on how people learn.  I am actually quite spiritual, but my faith is my own and I am not even sure it is shared by the rest of my family.  So how do we learn?  And how do we learn the most elemental of constructs to the human condition, such as spiritual awareness?


Well it occurred to me, sitting in the back pew that people divide into a number of groups:

• experience: those that learn by doing, doesn't matter what you tell them, they have to experience for themselves. They experiment and often latch onto the newest leading edge not so much to store and reflect on the learning as to experience the first steps of new learnings and to be in the constant process of the not yet known.  Pioneers.  Not always with any overt purpose other than it is necessary.
• personal journey.  More than experimentation, more than experience, these are people who set off on a path of personal discovery. Often painful, often more time consuming, ultimately very personal and deep learning.   Discovery is to go on a spiritual journey of self-awareness and actualization like the main character in A Razor's Edge.
Their journey is driven by a constant question of "why?" to just about every facet of life and living.  Disdainful of rules, authority and conformity. Innovative.  Charismatic or delusional, depending upon the audience. Often wrong, seldom in doubt.
• directional: people who learn but need guidance and leadership to venture into new domains, like structure and the re-assurance of a conforming message. Will apply new rules but not initiate nor innovate those new meanings.  Community builders. The mainstay of small, rural Ontario churches.  People who run things.
• institutional: people who are less about learning and more about being educated.  They seek, need and appreciate the structure and directions supplied by an institutional setting and instructional training.  There is clarity in conforming to norms, not questions.  Comfort from consistency and compliance, not acquiescence.  The congregation, the majority of students who sit in class and associate their grade with learning: "is this going to be on the exam?".  Need to 70 to get into Heaven.

Einstein said that Problems can not be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.

So how to learn about sustainability and change? What is the role of education if learners divide into a number of categories (doubtless there is a book and a whole forest of trees devoted to journal articles with various schema for categorizing learning types in 32 sub-fields of algorithmic certitude, but for now I 'll play with my simple fourfold back pew reflection).


Well I often use the analogy of the beach.  The beach has sand and waves that crash onto the shore.  And I will liken traditional pedagogy to an accepted paradigm of building sandcastles.  The waves represent change: inevitable, constantly changing, dynamic and not subject to human instruction, even royal fiats as Canute can testify.


So we organize society into little teams, each building sandcastles. Some elaborate and using buckets and spades, some using left over cups and some using powerful sand moving technology Tonka trucks (made in China).  Bullies knock over other peoples castles, some castles aren't very robust, fights break out over who has the best looking sand castle and everyone accepts that life is about building sandcastles under fear of "the big wave" that knocks any and all sand castles down and washes them away -- they are sand after all.


There are classes on castle building, rules and directions on correct castle design, construction and maintenance, people who draw castles, people selling shovels and spades and people running around preventing people from running on sections of the beach to protect the castles (well the important ones anyways).  And on one end of the beach there are the people protesting that 1% of the people have 99% of the sand, another group extolling the virtues of castle building as God's work and people organizing teams to tell other teams how to build their castles like their castles....


Then there are the groups who watch the waves.  They are assisted by others who shout about how the next incoming wave is "the big wave" and constantly try to run drills shepherding people up the beach to safety in case the "big wave" hits -- which of course hasn't happened but every wave does destroy at least one castle, especially those built close to the margin of the shore.


And there are people who don't actually do any building any more. Like parents they sit under umbrellas, on comfy beach chairs and sip cool beers or drinks with little umbrellas and watch the beach around them.  Occasionally, they walk the length of the beach, saving their prime spaces on the beach with books, determining what new activities should be allowed and what should be prohibited.  They make the rules, rules that fit their view and use of the beach but after all, without rules, where would the organization be?


Meanwhile waves come and go,  Change is constant.  Some people have tried to play in the waves. Pioneers, with big boards, they surf in the waves, look wonderful, routinely drown once in a while and are invigorated and inspired.  Many watch them but do not aspire to surf themselves as it is challenging, difficult to learn and not something everyone can do: not everyone is blond, with 10% body fat and blue eyes, coordinated and a strong swimmer.


Some complain about surfing.  It is risky. Not everyone can do it.  It is hard to learn. There are movements afoot to ban surfing.  Plus it is disruptive: often during castle building classes kids will gaze at the surfers and admire them, wonder "what if...", it gives them wrong ideas.


That is until someone had a bright idea.  Big boards are difficult but little tiny floating devices, boogie boards, allow everyone to play in the waves.  You don't even need big huge dangerous waves, just the every day, on the shore waves can be enjoyed by everyone using a boogie board.  Wow! Technological innovation changes the whole dynamic of the beach.  Waves are not to be feared but enjoyed -- easily and by everyone!  Suddenly the metric and pre-eminence of castle building is challenged.  More and more people stop trying to mold the beach into castles of sand they seek then to protect and preserve, and instead they jump into the very waves they have be told to fear and frolic, boogie boarding, laughing, together, people from all sections of the beach, playing in the ever changing waves.   Life is not dreary, a daily drudge of more castle building.  Instead it is a daily play in the waves of change.


Of course this comes at a cost.  The chair people have lost their control over beach life.  People are too busy playing in the waves to worry about the chairs or to want to "steal" them.  No one worries about the "big wave" -- people do not fear change, the waves are a new challenge and new opportunity to test their skills and learn how to enjoy the dynamics of constant change.  Most of the beach monitors are irrelevant: the water and the waves are the focus of life, not the beach.  Who knew?


So are we educating people for a life on the beach? A life based on moving sand, inherent impermanence, rule by chair people and plagued by bullies?  An education predicated on fear of change and the illusion of castles?


Or is education for sustainability about embracing the changes of new technological innovation?  More and cheaper boogie boards to allow more people from more places on the beach the opportunity to play and revel in the constant waves of change?


Educate to conform. Or educate to empower?


Directional training. Or personal journeys of discovery and the exploration of new frontiers of knowing?


As I write this, Southern Ontario is getting its first dusting of snow for the season.  A heavy wet snow.  Guaranteed people will gripe and moan. I think I will start an "Occupy Cayman Islands" movement to protest the mal-distribution of sun and sand on the planet that persecutes snow and winter bound Canadians.


Or I can get out my hat and mitts, build a snowman, check out my skis and snowboard, get out the snowmobile....and change my whole analogy of the beach to a Ski and snow metaphor.  Life is for living, laughter and love.  Not worry, whining and work.  (Thank you Ed!)


What are we teaching? Why and how?