There seems to be so much to blog about right now! A lot has happened for me in the last week in relation to thinking about learning. And the subject of exams for 16-year olds has also been in the news again in the last couple of days, so I feel I the need to add something to my previous post about the GCSE English results.
I will start by devoting this post to a thought that was sparked by attending the Association for Learning Technology's ALT-C Conference in Manchester last week.
I enjoyed the conference, but I came away with a strong impression (gained from several different sessions and from conversations with delegates) that:
Educational institution have become paralysed.
They are paralysed by fear of inspection and audit
(and the perceived need to pander to inspectors and auditors).
They are paralysed by over-simplistic and scientifically ludicrous models of learning and assessment
(and the perceved need to accept these models unquetioningly).
They are paralysed by the false rhetoric of austerity
(and the perceived need to accept that austerity is inevitable).
I do feel this paralysis makes it difficult for educational insititutions really to innovate in teaching and learning. So often what is called innovation boils down to clever new technological ways of doing the same old things.
This might sound rather negative, but the other, and very positive, side of the same coin was that I met the inspirational Fred Garnett again at the conference. I had not been in touch with Fred for several years, and I was very interested in his ideas about heutagogy, or self-directed learning, and about how learning can often take place successfully outside of institutions. This fitted in with my own contribution to the conference - a pechakucha on 'digital hedge schools':
Hi Terry, i am interested in your analysis but paralysis has ,I fear, been an institutional norm for a long time and is probably not so new as you seem to be suggesting. I would suggest that the innovation has been exception. My interest in use of technology in learning is the potential it has to provoke educators to examine thir practices and to re-think learning.
The potential for more and more independent self directed learning in a connected world couldn't lead to a world where people Mai hei own arrangements to learn what they need and only use institutions for 'qualifications' which like twenty pound notes have no inherent value in themselves but hrough some strange set on conventions at seen as being a 'proxy' for things that really matter.
Posted by: Alastair clark | Sunday, 23 September 2012 at 09:01 AM