Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 2:16 AM Subject: Wired : learner centered movement To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, " [email protected]" <[email protected]>, " [email protected]" <[email protected]> http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/* * *a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration.* entire article : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/ *student centered movement : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/student-centered-movement/* " TED has created a toolkit full of ideas for jumpstarting student-centered learning in your home, local community, or school. It’s called SOLE: How to Bring Self-Organized Learning Environments to Your Community. Download it here <http://www.ted.com/pages/sole_toolkit> and share your story afterward on the SOLE Tumblr <http://tedsole.tumblr.com/>." further large excerpts : Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process. ... “If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.” A charismatic and convincing proselytizer, Mitra has become a darling in the tech world. In early 2013 he won a $1 million grant from TED, the global ideas conference, to pursue his work. He’s now in the process of establishing seven “schools in the cloud,” five in India and two in the UK. In India, most of his schools are single-room buildings. There will be no teachers, curriculum, or separation into age groups—just six or so computers and a woman to look after the kids’ safety. His defining principle: “The children are completely in charge.” Mitra argues that the information revolution has enabled a style of learning that wasn’t possible before. ... Mitra’s work has roots in educational practices dating back to Socrates. Theorists from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi to Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori have argued that students should learn by playing and following their curiosity. ... In recent years, researchers have begun backing up those theories with evidence. In a 2011 study, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Iowa scanned the brain activity of 16 people sitting in front of a computer screen. ... The study found that when the subjects controlled their own observations, they exhibited more coordination between the hippocampus and other parts of the brain involved in learning and posted a 23 percent improvement in their ability to remember objects. “The bottom line is, if you’re not the one who’s controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well,” says lead researcher Joel Voss, now a neuroscientist at Northwestern University. ... A similar study at UC Berkeley demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem. “The science is brand-new, but it’s not as if people didn’t have this intuition before,” says coauthor Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. Gopnik’s research is informed in part by advances in artificial intelligence. If you program a robot’s every movement, she says, it can’t adapt to anything unexpected. But when scientists build machines that are programmed to try a variety of motions and learn from mistakes, the robots become far more adaptable and skilled. The same principle applies to children, she says. ... Evolutionary psychologists have also begun exploring this way of thinking. Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who studies children’s natural ways of learning, argues that human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional schooling. Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum. “We’re teaching the child that his questions don’t matter, that what matters are the questions of the curriculum. That’s just not the way natural selection designed us to learn. It designed us to solve problems and figure things out that are part of our real lives.” Some school systems have begun to adapt to this new philosophy—with outsize results. In the 1990s, Finland pared the country’s elementary math curriculum from about 25 pages to four, reduced the school day by an hour, and focused on independence and active learning. By 2003, Finnish students had climbed from the lower rungs of international performance rankings to first place among developed nations. ... Juárez Correa had mixed feelings about the test. His students had succeeded because he had employed a new teaching method, one better suited to the way children learn. It was a model that emphasized group work, competition, creativity, and a student-led environment. So it was ironic that the kids had distinguished themselves because of a conventional multiple-choice test. “These exams are like limits for the teachers,” he says. “They test what you know, not what you can do, and I am more interested in what my students can do.” ... But these examples—involving only thousands of students—are the exceptions to the rule. The system as a whole educates millions and is slow to recognize or adopt successful innovation. It’s a system that was constructed almost two centuries ago to meet the needs of the industrial age. Now that our society and economy have evolved beyond that era, our schools must also be reinvented. ... *Want to help teachers like Sergio Juárez Correa make a difference? Here’s how you can get involved in the student-centered movement<http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/student-centered-movement/> .* -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
Dante-Gabryell -- This is wonderful stuff. I know of Mitra's work and find it exciting. Some of us in the UN Commons Cluster are working on these ideas as well and how they fit into education of and about all the Commons. But as a 30+ year (Western-US) teacher and the founder of the Transformative Education Forum , I would caution at the over-enthusiasm of the computer-focused translation of this idea of "learner-centered". It is clearly an amazing and freeing tool in countless ways besides providing the "Library of the World" to any child, nearly anywhere with access to one. But it reduces dangerously the historical, pedagogical and epistemological theories of learning and the human child themselves, down to dangerously reductive concepts of what in fact is most important "to learn". Whose "information" gets processed and with what underlying results? It is one of my deepest concerns with the over-promotion of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) in the Western world, dramatically by "education promoting companies" who want to sell this model to everyone else as the US is currently doing promoting "No Child Left Behind" worldwide through the World Bank and Brookings Institute. But for those of us in the education field all our life, there is definite need to examine these issues, like certain brain theory results accompanying early child exposure to computers as their dominant learner - interaction. The TEF tries to address this issue of needed complete intelligence development with arts, humanities and especially the social/cultural/emotional learning not developed with this priority or technological "default". Anyway, more is available on this on the TEF website, but particularly the TEF Principles. There is a serious caution here about just how much and what exactly, the "machines" can and do teach when used primarily? So much cheaper though, for those trying to go into the field of education for their own profit and on top of it, leaves out those more philosophical, even human justice and equity arguments that actually really matter for children around the world to ultimately make sense of their lives and societies. Best, June June Gorman, Educator and Educational Theorist Co-founder, Transformative Education Forum (note website re-work, so ignore "non-standard" notification :-) Education Advisor, UN SafePlanet Campaign Board Project Director for Outreach, International Model United Nations Association Steering Committee, (UNESCO/Global Compact) K-12 Sector for Sustainability Education Member, UN Education Caucus for Sustainable Development Member, UN Commons Cluster ________________________________ From: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> To: p2p-foundation <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, October 18, 2013 4:03 AM Subject: [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 2:16 AM Subject: Wired : learner centered movement To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, "[email protected]" <[email protected]> http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/ a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration. entire article : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/ student centered movement : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/student-centered-movement/ " TED has created a toolkit full of ideas for jumpstarting student-centered learning in your home, local community, or school. It’s called SOLE: How to Bring Self-Organized Learning Environments to Your Community. Download it here and share your story afterward on the SOLE Tumblr." further large excerpts : Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process. ... “If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.” A charismatic and convincing proselytizer, Mitra has become a darling in the tech world. In early 2013 he won a $1 million grant from TED, the global ideas conference, to pursue his work. He’s now in the process of establishing seven “schools in the cloud,” five in India and two in the UK. In India, most of his schools are single-room buildings. There will be no teachers, curriculum, or separation into age groups—just six or so computers and a woman to look after the kids’ safety. His defining principle: “The children are completely in charge.” Mitra argues that the information revolution has enabled a style of learning that wasn’t possible before. ... Mitra’s work has roots in educational practices dating back to Socrates. Theorists from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi to Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori have argued that students should learn by playing and following their curiosity. ... In recent years, researchers have begun backing up those theories with evidence. In a 2011 study, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Iowa scanned the brain activity of 16 people sitting in front of a computer screen. ... The study found that when the subjects controlled their own observations, they exhibited more coordination between the hippocampus and other parts of the brain involved in learning and posted a 23 percent improvement in their ability to remember objects. “The bottom line is, if you’re not the one who’s controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well,” says lead researcher Joel Voss, now a neuroscientist at Northwestern University. ... A similar study at UC Berkeley demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem. “The science is brand-new, but it’s not as if people didn’t have this intuition before,” says coauthor Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. Gopnik’s research is informed in part by advances in artificial intelligence. If you program a robot’s every movement, she says, it can’t adapt to anything unexpected. But when scientists build machines that are programmed to try a variety of motions and learn from mistakes, the robots become far more adaptable and skilled. The same principle applies to children, she says. ... Evolutionary psychologists have also begun exploring this way of thinking. Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who studies children’s natural ways of learning, argues that human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional schooling. Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum. “We’re teaching the child that his questions don’t matter, that what matters are the questions of the curriculum. That’s just not the way natural selection designed us to learn. It designed us to solve problems and figure things out that are part of our real lives.” Some school systems have begun to adapt to this new philosophy—with outsize results. In the 1990s, Finland pared the country’s elementary math curriculum from about 25 pages to four, reduced the school day by an hour, and focused on independence and active learning. By 2003, Finnish students had climbed from the lower rungs of international performance rankings to first place among developed nations. ... Juárez Correa had mixed feelings about the test. His students had succeeded because he had employed a new teaching method, one better suited to the way children learn. It was a model that emphasized group work, competition, creativity, and a student-led environment. So it was ironic that the kids had distinguished themselves because of a conventional multiple-choice test. “These exams are like limits for the teachers,” he says. “They test what you know, not what you can do, and I am more interested in what my students can do.” ... But these examples—involving only thousands of students—are the exceptions to the rule. The system as a whole educates millions and is slow to recognize or adopt successful innovation. It’s a system that was constructed almost two centuries ago to meet the needs of the industrial age. Now that our society and economy have evolved beyond that era, our schools must also be reinvented. ... Want to help teachers like Sergio Juárez Correa make a difference? Here’s how you can get involved in the student-centered movement. -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/ _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
Hi June, Thanks for your reply, I personally do not see this as a replacement of humans by the machines. I rather see the internet as a powerful tool for access to information, both supporting and facilitated by dynamics between learners. I believe that the pedagogies it can be inspired of are that of Piaget, Montessori, ... And as Marco underlined, hardly any new self learning ( or mutual learning ) approaches. What is new, is possibly broader mainstream recognition, possibly supported by the more widespread usage and interconnection of information technologies globally, and in peoples lifestyles, facilitating a shift away of "the expert", or "the teacher" as monopoly in terms of knowledge. Such approaches have been central in my own learning - up to a point where I felt I could learn faster / feel less alienated in my learning by leaving school. The challenge, then, for me at least, is to build up recognition through networked approaches, with peers, rather then through top down , centralized certification programs and education environments. Although one may argue that the tests could at some point confirm the acquired ( self ) learning, the self learner ( or rather, the mutual learners in self organizing approaches ) does not, contrary to official enrolled students, benefit from such "student" status, and at least in my experience, faces pressures from society, even if only in terms of lack of support. Cordially, Dante On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 1:37 PM, June Gorman <[email protected]>wrote:
Dante-Gabryell --
This is wonderful stuff. I know of Mitra's work and find it exciting. Some of us in the UN Commons Cluster are working on these ideas as well and how they fit into education of and about all the Commons.
But as a 30+ year (Western-US) teacher and the founder of the *<http://209.172.54.115/>MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be Transformative Education Forum *, I would caution at the over-enthusiasm of the computer-focused translation of this idea of "learner-centered". It is clearly an amazing and freeing tool in countless ways besides providing the "Library of the World" to any child, nearly anywhere with access to one. But it reduces dangerously the historical, pedagogical and epistemological theories of learning and the human child themselves, down to dangerously reductive concepts of what in fact is most important "to learn". Whose "information" gets processed and with what underlying results?
It is one of my deepest concerns with the over-promotion of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) in the Western world, dramatically by "education promoting companies" who want to sell this model to everyone else as the US is currently doing promoting "No Child Left Behind" worldwide through the World Bank and Brookings Institute. But for those of us in the education field all our life, there is definite need to examine these issues, like certain brain theory results accompanying early child exposure to computers as their dominant learner - interaction. The TEF tries to address this issue of needed complete intelligence development with arts, humanities and especially the social/cultural/emotional learning not developed with this priority or technological "default".
Anyway, more is available on this on the TEF website, but particularly the *MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be* TEF Principles<http://209.172.54.115/web/guest/principles>. There is a serious caution here about just how much and what exactly, the "machines" can and do teach when used primarily? So much cheaper though, for those trying to go into the field of education for their own profit and on top of it, leaves out those more philosophical, even human justice and equity arguments that actually really matter for children around the world to ultimately make sense of their lives and societies.
Best, June *June Gorman, Educator and Educational Theorist* Co-founder*, ** <http://209.172.54.115/>MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be Transformative Education Forum (note website re-work, so ignore "non-standard" notification :-)* Education Advisor, <http://www.safepla.net/> *UN SafePlanet Campaign * *Board Project Director for Outreach, I**nternational Model United Nations Association* <http://imuna.org/>* * *Steering Committee, (UNESCO/Global Compact) **K-12 Sector for Sustainability Education *<http://www.uspartnership.org/main/view_archive/1> Member, UN Education Caucus for Sustainable Development Member, UN Commons Cluster
------------------------------ *From:* Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> *To:* p2p-foundation <[email protected]> *Sent:* Friday, October 18, 2013 4:03 AM *Subject:* [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: *Dante-Gabryell Monson* <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 2:16 AM Subject: Wired : learner centered movement To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, " [email protected]" <[email protected]>, " [email protected]" <[email protected]>
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/* * *a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration.* entire article : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/ *student centered movement : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/student-centered-movement/* " TED has created a toolkit full of ideas for jumpstarting student-centered learning in your home, local community, or school. It’s called SOLE: How to Bring Self-Organized Learning Environments to Your Community. Download it here <http://www.ted.com/pages/sole_toolkit> and share your story afterward on the SOLE Tumblr <http://tedsole.tumblr.com/> ." further large excerpts : Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process. ... “If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.” A charismatic and convincing proselytizer, Mitra has become a darling in the tech world. In early 2013 he won a $1 million grant from TED, the global ideas conference, to pursue his work. He’s now in the process of establishing seven “schools in the cloud,” five in India and two in the UK. In India, most of his schools are single-room buildings. There will be no teachers, curriculum, or separation into age groups—just six or so computers and a woman to look after the kids’ safety. His defining principle: “The children are completely in charge.” Mitra argues that the information revolution has enabled a style of learning that wasn’t possible before. ... Mitra’s work has roots in educational practices dating back to Socrates. Theorists from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi to Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori have argued that students should learn by playing and following their curiosity. ... In recent years, researchers have begun backing up those theories with evidence. In a 2011 study, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Iowa scanned the brain activity of 16 people sitting in front of a computer screen. ... The study found that when the subjects controlled their own observations, they exhibited more coordination between the hippocampus and other parts of the brain involved in learning and posted a 23 percent improvement in their ability to remember objects. “The bottom line is, if you’re not the one who’s controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well,” says lead researcher Joel Voss, now a neuroscientist at Northwestern University. ... A similar study at UC Berkeley demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem. “The science is brand-new, but it’s not as if people didn’t have this intuition before,” says coauthor Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. Gopnik’s research is informed in part by advances in artificial intelligence. If you program a robot’s every movement, she says, it can’t adapt to anything unexpected. But when scientists build machines that are programmed to try a variety of motions and learn from mistakes, the robots become far more adaptable and skilled. The same principle applies to children, she says. ... Evolutionary psychologists have also begun exploring this way of thinking. Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who studies children’s natural ways of learning, argues that human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional schooling. Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum. “We’re teaching the child that his questions don’t matter, that what matters are the questions of the curriculum. That’s just not the way natural selection designed us to learn. It designed us to solve problems and figure things out that are part of our real lives.” Some school systems have begun to adapt to this new philosophy—with outsize results. In the 1990s, Finland pared the country’s elementary math curriculum from about 25 pages to four, reduced the school day by an hour, and focused on independence and active learning. By 2003, Finnish students had climbed from the lower rungs of international performance rankings to first place among developed nations. ... Juárez Correa had mixed feelings about the test. His students had succeeded because he had employed a new teaching method, one better suited to the way children learn. It was a model that emphasized group work, competition, creativity, and a student-led environment. So it was ironic that the kids had distinguished themselves because of a conventional multiple-choice test. “These exams are like limits for the teachers,” he says. “They test what you know, not what you can do, and I am more interested in what my students can do.” ... But these examples—involving only thousands of students—are the exceptions to the rule. The system as a whole educates millions and is slow to recognize or adopt successful innovation. It’s a system that was constructed almost two centuries ago to meet the needs of the industrial age. Now that our society and economy have evolved beyond that era, our schools must also be reinvented. ... *Want to help teachers like Sergio Juárez Correa make a difference? Here’s how you can get involved in the student-centered movement<http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/student-centered-movement/> .*
-- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
This is an interesting discussion, but seems to be leaving out the most important element, consulting the child. Child centered really means the child in charge, trusting the child to make decisions and learn from mistakes. While I understand your concern June, my child self feels constricted by all these principles. TEF seems to have a very clear idea of what it is trying to produce. Has it asked the child? It seems to have been decided what is best for the child, and for society. Certainly more respectful but still a top down decision. Do we really need to stipulate anything? Could we just follow the child, learn from the child? That doesn't mean abnegating my own interaction and involvement, but that must always be strictly as an equal, not to dictate because of my superior age and experience. This is not easy. We think we know. We feel responsible. Huge learning for the adult is involved. And there is still some sort of social demand that the child be 'useful to society', Leave them alone, let them be free. We have done enough damage. Anna On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 5:20 PM, Dante-Gabryell Monson < [email protected]> wrote:
Hi June,
Thanks for your reply,
I personally do not see this as a replacement of humans by the machines.
I rather see the internet as a powerful tool for access to information, both supporting and facilitated by dynamics between learners.
I believe that the pedagogies it can be inspired of are that of Piaget, Montessori, ...
And as Marco underlined, hardly any new self learning ( or mutual learning ) approaches.
What is new, is possibly broader mainstream recognition, possibly supported by the more widespread usage and interconnection of information technologies globally, and in peoples lifestyles, facilitating a shift away of "the expert", or "the teacher" as monopoly in terms of knowledge.
Such approaches have been central in my own learning - up to a point where I felt I could learn faster / feel less alienated in my learning by leaving school.
The challenge, then, for me at least, is to build up recognition through networked approaches, with peers, rather then through top down , centralized certification programs and education environments.
Although one may argue that the tests could at some point confirm the acquired ( self ) learning, the self learner ( or rather, the mutual learners in self organizing approaches ) does not, contrary to official enrolled students, benefit from such "student" status, and at least in my experience, faces pressures from society, even if only in terms of lack of support.
Cordially, Dante
On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 1:37 PM, June Gorman <[email protected]>wrote:
Dante-Gabryell --
This is wonderful stuff. I know of Mitra's work and find it exciting. Some of us in the UN Commons Cluster are working on these ideas as well and how they fit into education of and about all the Commons.
But as a 30+ year (Western-US) teacher and the founder of the *MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be <http://209.172.54.115/>MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be Transformative Education Forum *, I would caution at the over-enthusiasm of the computer-focused translation of this idea of "learner-centered". It is clearly an amazing and freeing tool in countless ways besides providing the "Library of the World" to any child, nearly anywhere with access to one. But it reduces dangerously the historical, pedagogical and epistemological theories of learning and the human child themselves, down to dangerously reductive concepts of what in fact is most important "to learn". Whose "information" gets processed and with what underlying results?
It is one of my deepest concerns with the over-promotion of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) in the Western world, dramatically by "education promoting companies" who want to sell this model to everyone else as the US is currently doing promoting "No Child Left Behind" worldwide through the World Bank and Brookings Institute. But for those of us in the education field all our life, there is definite need to examine these issues, like certain brain theory results accompanying early child exposure to computers as their dominant learner - interaction. The TEF tries to address this issue of needed complete intelligence development with arts, humanities and especially the social/cultural/emotional learning not developed with this priority or technological "default".
Anyway, more is available on this on the TEF website, but particularly the *MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be TEF Principles*<http://209.172.54.115/web/guest/principles>. There is a serious caution here about just how much and what exactly, the "machines" can and do teach when used primarily? So much cheaper though, for those trying to go into the field of education for their own profit and on top of it, leaves out those more philosophical, even human justice and equity arguments that actually really matter for children around the world to ultimately make sense of their lives and societies.
Best, June *June Gorman, Educator and Educational Theorist* Co-founder*, **MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be <http://209.172.54.115/>MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be Transformative Education Forum (note website re-work, so ignore "non-standard" notification :-)* Education Advisor, <http://www.safepla.net/> *UN SafePlanet Campaign * *Board Project Director for Outreach, I**nternational Model United Nations Association* <http://imuna.org/>* * *Steering Committee, (UNESCO/Global Compact) **K-12 Sector for Sustainability Education *<http://www.uspartnership.org/main/view_archive/1> Member, UN Education Caucus for Sustainable Development Member, UN Commons Cluster
------------------------------ *From:* Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> *To:* p2p-foundation <[email protected]> *Sent:* Friday, October 18, 2013 4:03 AM *Subject:* [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: *Dante-Gabryell Monson* <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 2:16 AM Subject: Wired : learner centered movement To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, " [email protected]" <[email protected]>, " [email protected]" <[email protected]>
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/* * *a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration.* entire article : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/ *student centered movement : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/student-centered-movement/* " TED has created a toolkit full of ideas for jumpstarting student-centered learning in your home, local community, or school. It’s called SOLE: How to Bring Self-Organized Learning Environments to Your Community. Download it here <http://www.ted.com/pages/sole_toolkit> and share your story afterward on the SOLE Tumblr<http://tedsole.tumblr.com/> ." further large excerpts : Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process. ... “If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.” A charismatic and convincing proselytizer, Mitra has become a darling in the tech world. In early 2013 he won a $1 million grant from TED, the global ideas conference, to pursue his work. He’s now in the process of establishing seven “schools in the cloud,” five in India and two in the UK. In India, most of his schools are single-room buildings. There will be no teachers, curriculum, or separation into age groups—just six or so computers and a woman to look after the kids’ safety. His defining principle: “The children are completely in charge.” Mitra argues that the information revolution has enabled a style of learning that wasn’t possible before. ... Mitra’s work has roots in educational practices dating back to Socrates. Theorists from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi to Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori have argued that students should learn by playing and following their curiosity. ... In recent years, researchers have begun backing up those theories with evidence. In a 2011 study, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Iowa scanned the brain activity of 16 people sitting in front of a computer screen. ... The study found that when the subjects controlled their own observations, they exhibited more coordination between the hippocampus and other parts of the brain involved in learning and posted a 23 percent improvement in their ability to remember objects. “The bottom line is, if you’re not the one who’s controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well,” says lead researcher Joel Voss, now a neuroscientist at Northwestern University. ... A similar study at UC Berkeley demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem. “The science is brand-new, but it’s not as if people didn’t have this intuition before,” says coauthor Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. Gopnik’s research is informed in part by advances in artificial intelligence. If you program a robot’s every movement, she says, it can’t adapt to anything unexpected. But when scientists build machines that are programmed to try a variety of motions and learn from mistakes, the robots become far more adaptable and skilled. The same principle applies to children, she says. ... Evolutionary psychologists have also begun exploring this way of thinking. Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who studies children’s natural ways of learning, argues that human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional schooling. Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum. “We’re teaching the child that his questions don’t matter, that what matters are the questions of the curriculum. That’s just not the way natural selection designed us to learn. It designed us to solve problems and figure things out that are part of our real lives.” Some school systems have begun to adapt to this new philosophy—with outsize results. In the 1990s, Finland pared the country’s elementary math curriculum from about 25 pages to four, reduced the school day by an hour, and focused on independence and active learning. By 2003, Finnish students had climbed from the lower rungs of international performance rankings to first place among developed nations. ... Juárez Correa had mixed feelings about the test. His students had succeeded because he had employed a new teaching method, one better suited to the way children learn. It was a model that emphasized group work, competition, creativity, and a student-led environment. So it was ironic that the kids had distinguished themselves because of a conventional multiple-choice test. “These exams are like limits for the teachers,” he says. “They test what you know, not what you can do, and I am more interested in what my students can do.” ... But these examples—involving only thousands of students—are the exceptions to the rule. The system as a whole educates millions and is slow to recognize or adopt successful innovation. It’s a system that was constructed almost two centuries ago to meet the needs of the industrial age. Now that our society and economy have evolved beyond that era, our schools must also be reinvented. ... *Want to help teachers like Sergio Juárez Correa make a difference? Here’s how you can get involved in the student-centered movement<http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/student-centered-movement/> .*
-- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
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I grant your point, Anna and am far more aligned with it than not. That is why the 12th Principle of the TEF is my favorite: Principle 12: Sanctity of Human Learning and Life The learning environment shall be sacred, trust in the wisdom of imagination, teach the wonder and potential of every human child, the interrelationship of life and that we can no longer afford to live with privileged disregard of this planet, all its diverse and valuable species and each other. As a 30+ year teacher, I can honestly and most sincerely say everything truly important I learned about education, I learned from the children and students themselves. Mostly, how much the way I had been taught to teach and was the "best way to learn" applied to very few of the actual human beings in front of me who, as true of every child born to the earth, loved learning as a natural a priori for the most "learning-dependent" species on the planet. Before often being destroyed by our often very "rigid" educational systems. I spent all the years after my own "elite" education trying to learn from them how to really teach what they were interested in learning and more importantly, without doing their innate joy and passion in learning, damage. Yes, I think we could easily replace all Teacher Education with a better study of how children prefer to and thrive most in education, by understanding and then choosing their own best way to learn and what most matters to them to learn. But you are still going to have to "systemize" that education, even if the children are some of the prime contributors to it. :-) June ________________________________ From: Anna Harris <[email protected]> To: [email protected]; P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> Cc: June Gorman <[email protected]>; Myra Jackson <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, October 18, 2013 10:02 AM Subject: Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement This is an interesting discussion, but seems to be leaving out the most important element, consulting the child. Child centered really means the child in charge, trusting the child to make decisions and learn from mistakes. While I understand your concern June, my child self feels constricted by all these principles. TEF seems to have a very clear idea of what it is trying to produce. Has it asked the child? It seems to have been decided what is best for the child, and for society. Certainly more respectful but still a top down decision. Do we really need to stipulate anything? Could we just follow the child, learn from the child? That doesn't mean abnegating my own interaction and involvement, but that must always be strictly as an equal, not to dictate because of my superior age and experience. This is not easy. We think we know. We feel responsible. Huge learning for the adult is involved. And there is still some sort of social demand that the child be 'useful to society', Leave them alone, let them be free. We have done enough damage. Anna On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 5:20 PM, Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi June,
Thanks for your reply,
I personally do not see this as a replacement of humans by the machines.
I rather see the internet as a powerful tool for access to information, both supporting and facilitated by dynamics between learners.
I believe that the pedagogies it can be inspired of are that of Piaget, Montessori, ...
And as Marco underlined, hardly any new self learning ( or mutual learning ) approaches.
What is new, is possibly broader mainstream recognition, possibly supported by the more widespread usage and interconnection of information technologies globally, and in peoples lifestyles, facilitating a shift away of "the expert", or "the teacher" as monopoly in terms of knowledge.
Such approaches have been central in my own learning - up to a point where I felt I could learn faster / feel less alienated in my learning by leaving school.
The challenge, then, for me at least, is to build up recognition through networked approaches, with peers, rather then through top down , centralized certification programs and education environments.
Although one may argue that the tests could at some point confirm the acquired ( self ) learning, the self learner ( or rather, the mutual learners in self organizing approaches ) does not, contrary to official enrolled students, benefit from such "student" status, and at least in my experience, faces pressures from society, even if only in terms of lack of support.
Cordially, Dante
On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 1:37 PM, June Gorman <[email protected]> wrote:
Dante-Gabryell --
This is wonderful stuff. I know of Mitra's work and find it exciting. Some of us in the UN Commons Cluster are working on these ideas as well and how they fit into education of and about all the Commons.
But as a 30+ year (Western-US) teacher and the founder of the MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be Transformative Education Forum , I would caution at the over-enthusiasm of the computer-focused translation of this idea of "learner-centered". It is clearly an amazing and freeing tool in countless ways besides providing the "Library of the World" to any child, nearly anywhere with access to one. But it reduces dangerously the historical, pedagogical and epistemological theories of learning and the human child themselves, down to dangerously reductive concepts of what in fact is most important "to learn". Whose "information" gets processed and with what underlying results?
It is one of my deepest concerns with the over-promotion of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) in the Western world, dramatically by "education promoting companies" who want to sell this model to everyone else as the US is currently doing promoting "No Child Left Behind" worldwide through the World Bank and Brookings Institute. But for those of us in the education field all our life, there is definite need to examine these issues, like certain brain theory results accompanying early child exposure to computers as their dominant learner - interaction. The TEF tries to address this issue of needed complete intelligence development with arts, humanities and especially the social/cultural/emotional learning not developed with this priority or technological "default".
Anyway, more is available on this on the TEF website, but particularly the MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be TEF Principles. There is a serious caution here about just how much and what exactly, the "machines" can and do teach when used primarily? So much cheaper though, for those trying to go into the field of education for their own profit and on top of it, leaves out those more philosophical, even human justice and equity arguments that actually really matter for children around the world to ultimately make sense of their lives and societies.
Best, June June Gorman, Educator and Educational Theorist
Co-founder, MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be Transformative Education Forum (note website re-work, so ignore "non-standard" notification :-) Education Advisor, UN SafePlanet Campaign Board Project Director for Outreach, International Model United Nations Association Steering Committee, (UNESCO/Global Compact) K-12 Sector for Sustainability Education Member, UN Education Caucus for Sustainable Development Member, UN Commons Cluster
________________________________ From: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> To: p2p-foundation <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, October 18, 2013 4:03 AM Subject: [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 2:16 AM Subject: Wired : learner centered movement To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/
a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration.
entire article : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/
student centered movement : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/student-centered-movement/
" TED has created a toolkit full of ideas for jumpstarting student-centered learning in your home, local community, or school. It’s called SOLE: How to Bring Self-Organized Learning Environments to Your Community. Download it here and share your story afterward on the SOLE Tumblr." further large excerpts :
Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process. ... “If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.” A charismatic and convincing proselytizer, Mitra has become a darling in the tech world. In early 2013 he won a $1 million grant from TED, the global ideas conference, to pursue his work. He’s now in the process of establishing seven “schools in the cloud,” five in India and two in the UK. In India, most of his schools are single-room buildings. There will be no teachers, curriculum, or separation into age groups—just six or so computers and a woman to look after the kids’ safety. His defining principle: “The children are completely in charge.” Mitra argues that the information revolution has enabled a style of learning that wasn’t possible before. ... Mitra’s work has roots in educational practices dating back to Socrates. Theorists from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi to Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori have argued that students should learn by playing and following their curiosity.
... In recent years, researchers have begun backing up those theories with evidence. In a 2011 study, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Iowa scanned the brain activity of 16 people sitting in front of a computer screen.
... The study found that when the subjects controlled their own observations, they exhibited more coordination between the hippocampus and other parts of the brain involved in learning and posted a 23 percent improvement in their ability to remember objects. “The bottom line is, if you’re not the one who’s controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well,” says lead researcher Joel Voss, now a neuroscientist at Northwestern University.
... A similar study at UC Berkeley demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem. “The science is brand-new, but it’s not as if people didn’t have this intuition before,” says coauthor Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. Gopnik’s research is informed in part by advances in artificial intelligence. If you program a robot’s every movement, she says, it can’t adapt to anything unexpected. But when scientists build machines that are programmed to try a variety of motions and learn from mistakes, the robots become far more adaptable and skilled. The same principle applies to children, she says. ... Evolutionary psychologists have also begun exploring this way of thinking. Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who studies children’s natural ways of learning, argues that human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional schooling. Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum. “We’re teaching the child that his questions don’t matter, that what matters are the questions of the curriculum. That’s just not the way natural selection designed us to learn. It designed us to solve problems and figure things out that are part of our real lives.”
Some school systems have begun to adapt to this new philosophy—with outsize results. In the 1990s, Finland pared the country’s elementary math curriculum from about 25 pages to four, reduced the school day by an hour, and focused on independence and active learning. By 2003, Finnish students had climbed from the lower rungs of international performance rankings to first place among developed nations.
... Juárez Correa had mixed feelings about the test. His students had succeeded because he had employed a new teaching method, one better suited to the way children learn. It was a model that emphasized group work, competition, creativity, and a student-led environment. So it was ironic that the kids had distinguished themselves because of a conventional multiple-choice test. “These exams are like limits for the teachers,” he says. “They test what you know, not what you can do, and I am more interested in what my students can do.”
... But these examples—involving only thousands of students—are the exceptions to the rule. The system as a whole educates millions and is slow to recognize or adopt successful innovation. It’s a system that was constructed almost two centuries ago to meet the needs of the industrial age. Now that our society and economy have evolved beyond that era, our schools must also be reinvented. ... Want to help teachers like Sergio Juárez Correa make a difference? Here’s how you can get involved in the student-centered movement.
-- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
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Thank you June, I felt we were really in tune. But can you enlarge on your last point - why does it have to be systematised? IMO that's where it falls down, thinking that there must be a formula. There isn't. Even that number 12 you quoted is full of 'shoulds' that could be used to impose or undermine. There is no substitute for direct on-the-job experience, which cannot be used to extrapolate a theory to use for the next time. Each moment is unique. That's why we need human beings as well as computers. Computers give us information but only we can feel and understand its significance. Anna On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 6:45 PM, June Gorman <[email protected]>wrote:
I grant your point, Anna and am far more aligned with it than not. That is why the 12th Principle of the TEF is my favorite:
*Principle 12: Sanctity of Human Learning and Life* The learning environment shall be sacred, trust in the wisdom of imagination, teach the wonder and potential of every human child, the interrelationship of life and that we can no longer afford to live with privileged disregard of this planet, all its diverse and valuable species and each other.
As a 30+ year teacher, I can honestly and most sincerely say everything truly important I learned about education, I learned from the children and students themselves. Mostly, how much the way I had been taught to teach and was the "best way to learn" applied to very few of the actual human beings in front of me who, as true of every child born to the earth, loved learning as a natural a priori for the most "learning-dependent" species on the planet. Before often being destroyed by our often very "rigid" educational systems.
I spent all the years after my own "elite" education trying to learn from them how to really teach what they were interested in learning and more importantly, without doing their innate joy and passion in learning, damage.
Yes, I think we could easily replace all Teacher Education with a better study of how children prefer to and thrive most in education, by understanding and then choosing their own best way to learn and what most matters to them to learn.
But you are still going to have to "systemize" that education, even if the children are some of the prime contributors to it. :-)
June ------------------------------ *From:* Anna Harris <[email protected]> *To:* [email protected]; P2P Foundation mailing list < [email protected]> *Cc:* June Gorman <[email protected]>; Myra Jackson < [email protected]> *Sent:* Friday, October 18, 2013 10:02 AM *Subject:* Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement
This is an interesting discussion, but seems to be leaving out the most important element, consulting the child. Child centered really means the child in charge, trusting the child to make decisions and learn from mistakes.
While I understand your concern June, my child self feels constricted by all these principles. TEF seems to have a very clear idea of what it is trying to produce. Has it asked the child? It seems to have been decided what is best for the child, and for society. Certainly more respectful but still a top down decision.
Do we really need to stipulate anything? Could we just follow the child, learn from the child? That doesn't mean abnegating my own interaction and involvement, but that must always be strictly as an equal, not to dictate because of my superior age and experience. This is not easy. We think we know. We feel responsible. Huge learning for the adult is involved.
And there is still some sort of social demand that the child be 'useful to society', Leave them alone, let them be free. We have done enough damage.
Anna
On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 5:20 PM, Dante-Gabryell Monson < [email protected]> wrote:
Hi June,
Thanks for your reply,
I personally do not see this as a replacement of humans by the machines.
I rather see the internet as a powerful tool for access to information, both supporting and facilitated by dynamics between learners.
I believe that the pedagogies it can be inspired of are that of Piaget, Montessori, ...
And as Marco underlined, hardly any new self learning ( or mutual learning ) approaches.
What is new, is possibly broader mainstream recognition, possibly supported by the more widespread usage and interconnection of information technologies globally, and in peoples lifestyles, facilitating a shift away of "the expert", or "the teacher" as monopoly in terms of knowledge.
Such approaches have been central in my own learning - up to a point where I felt I could learn faster / feel less alienated in my learning by leaving school.
The challenge, then, for me at least, is to build up recognition through networked approaches, with peers, rather then through top down , centralized certification programs and education environments.
Although one may argue that the tests could at some point confirm the acquired ( self ) learning, the self learner ( or rather, the mutual learners in self organizing approaches ) does not, contrary to official enrolled students, benefit from such "student" status, and at least in my experience, faces pressures from society, even if only in terms of lack of support.
Cordially, Dante
On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 1:37 PM, June Gorman <[email protected]>wrote:
Dante-Gabryell --
This is wonderful stuff. I know of Mitra's work and find it exciting. Some of us in the UN Commons Cluster are working on these ideas as well and how they fit into education of and about all the Commons.
But as a 30+ year (Western-US) teacher and the founder of the *MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be <http://209.172.54.115/>MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be Transformative Education Forum *, I would caution at the over-enthusiasm of the computer-focused translation of this idea of "learner-centered". It is clearly an amazing and freeing tool in countless ways besides providing the "Library of the World" to any child, nearly anywhere with access to one. But it reduces dangerously the historical, pedagogical and epistemological theories of learning and the human child themselves, down to dangerously reductive concepts of what in fact is most important "to learn". Whose "information" gets processed and with what underlying results?
It is one of my deepest concerns with the over-promotion of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) in the Western world, dramatically by "education promoting companies" who want to sell this model to everyone else as the US is currently doing promoting "No Child Left Behind" worldwide through the World Bank and Brookings Institute. But for those of us in the education field all our life, there is definite need to examine these issues, like certain brain theory results accompanying early child exposure to computers as their dominant learner - interaction. The TEF tries to address this issue of needed complete intelligence development with arts, humanities and especially the social/cultural/emotional learning not developed with this priority or technological "default".
Anyway, more is available on this on the TEF website, but particularly the *MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be TEF Principles*<http://209.172.54.115/web/guest/principles>. There is a serious caution here about just how much and what exactly, the "machines" can and do teach when used primarily? So much cheaper though, for those trying to go into the field of education for their own profit and on top of it, leaves out those more philosophical, even human justice and equity arguments that actually really matter for children around the world to ultimately make sense of their lives and societies.
Best, June *June Gorman, Educator and Educational Theorist* Co-founder*, **MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be <http://209.172.54.115/>MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be Transformative Education Forum (note website re-work, so ignore "non-standard" notification :-)* Education Advisor, <http://www.safepla.net/> *UN SafePlanet Campaign * *Board Project Director for Outreach, I**nternational Model United Nations Association* <http://imuna.org/>* * *Steering Committee, (UNESCO/Global Compact) **K-12 Sector for Sustainability Education *<http://www.uspartnership.org/main/view_archive/1> Member, UN Education Caucus for Sustainable Development Member, UN Commons Cluster
------------------------------ *From:* Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> *To:* p2p-foundation <[email protected]> *Sent:* Friday, October 18, 2013 4:03 AM *Subject:* [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: *Dante-Gabryell Monson* <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 2:16 AM Subject: Wired : learner centered movement To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, " [email protected]" <[email protected]>, " [email protected]" <[email protected]>
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/* * *a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration.* entire article : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/ *student centered movement : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/student-centered-movement/* " TED has created a toolkit full of ideas for jumpstarting student-centered learning in your home, local community, or school. It’s called SOLE: How to Bring Self-Organized Learning Environments to Your Community. Download it here <http://www.ted.com/pages/sole_toolkit> and share your story afterward on the SOLE Tumblr <http://tedsole.tumblr.com/> ." further large excerpts : Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process. ... “If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.” A charismatic and convincing proselytizer, Mitra has become a darling in the tech world. In early 2013 he won a $1 million grant from TED, the global ideas conference, to pursue his work. He’s now in the process of establishing seven “schools in the cloud,” five in India and two in the UK. In India, most of his schools are single-room buildings. There will be no teachers, curriculum, or separation into age groups—just six or so computers and a woman to look after the kids’ safety. His defining principle: “The children are completely in charge.” Mitra argues that the information revolution has enabled a style of learning that wasn’t possible before. ... Mitra’s work has roots in educational practices dating back to Socrates. Theorists from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi to Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori have argued that students should learn by playing and following their curiosity. ... In recent years, researchers have begun backing up those theories with evidence. In a 2011 study, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Iowa scanned the brain activity of 16 people sitting in front of a computer screen. ... The study found that when the subjects controlled their own observations, they exhibited more coordination between the hippocampus and other parts of the brain involved in learning and posted a 23 percent improvement in their ability to remember objects. “The bottom line is, if you’re not the one who’s controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well,” says lead researcher Joel Voss, now a neuroscientist at Northwestern University. ... A similar study at UC Berkeley demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem. “The science is brand-new, but it’s not as if people didn’t have this intuition before,” says coauthor Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. Gopnik’s research is informed in part by advances in artificial intelligence. If you program a robot’s every movement, she says, it can’t adapt to anything unexpected. But when scientists build machines that are programmed to try a variety of motions and learn from mistakes, the robots become far more adaptable and skilled. The same principle applies to children, she says. ... Evolutionary psychologists have also begun exploring this way of thinking. Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who studies children’s natural ways of learning, argues that human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional schooling. Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum. “We’re teaching the child that his questions don’t matter, that what matters are the questions of the curriculum. That’s just not the way natural selection designed us to learn. It designed us to solve problems and figure things out that are part of our real lives.” Some school systems have begun to adapt to this new philosophy—with outsize results. In the 1990s, Finland pared the country’s elementary math curriculum from about 25 pages to four, reduced the school day by an hour, and focused on independence and active learning. By 2003, Finnish students had climbed from the lower rungs of international performance rankings to first place among developed nations. ... Juárez Correa had mixed feelings about the test. His students had succeeded because he had employed a new teaching method, one better suited to the way children learn. It was a model that emphasized group work, competition, creativity, and a student-led environment. So it was ironic that the kids had distinguished themselves because of a conventional multiple-choice test. “These exams are like limits for the teachers,” he says. “They test what you know, not what you can do, and I am more interested in what my students can do.” ... But these examples—involving only thousands of students—are the exceptions to the rule. The system as a whole educates millions and is slow to recognize or adopt successful innovation. It’s a system that was constructed almost two centuries ago to meet the needs of the industrial age. Now that our society and economy have evolved beyond that era, our schools must also be reinvented. ... *Want to help teachers like Sergio Juárez Correa make a difference? Here’s how you can get involved in the student-centered movement<http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/student-centered-movement/> .*
-- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
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Thanks Anna for putting this forward. I find Montessori and other related pedagogies of interest in this respect, leaving the space to the child ( in us ) , not forcing it upon the learner. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education ; but also Piaget, Steiner, Freire, etc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy ) And also ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student-centred_learning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-oppressive_education On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 7:02 PM, Anna Harris <[email protected]> wrote:
This is an interesting discussion, but seems to be leaving out the most important element, consulting the child. Child centered really means the child in charge, trusting the child to make decisions and learn from mistakes.
While I understand your concern June, my child self feels constricted by all these principles. TEF seems to have a very clear idea of what it is trying to produce. Has it asked the child? It seems to have been decided what is best for the child, and for society. Certainly more respectful but still a top down decision.
Do we really need to stipulate anything? Could we just follow the child, learn from the child? That doesn't mean abnegating my own interaction and involvement, but that must always be strictly as an equal, not to dictate because of my superior age and experience. This is not easy. We think we know. We feel responsible. Huge learning for the adult is involved.
And there is still some sort of social demand that the child be 'useful to society', Leave them alone, let them be free. We have done enough damage.
Anna
On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 5:20 PM, Dante-Gabryell Monson < [email protected]> wrote:
Hi June,
Thanks for your reply,
I personally do not see this as a replacement of humans by the machines.
I rather see the internet as a powerful tool for access to information, both supporting and facilitated by dynamics between learners.
I believe that the pedagogies it can be inspired of are that of Piaget, Montessori, ...
And as Marco underlined, hardly any new self learning ( or mutual learning ) approaches.
What is new, is possibly broader mainstream recognition, possibly supported by the more widespread usage and interconnection of information technologies globally, and in peoples lifestyles, facilitating a shift away of "the expert", or "the teacher" as monopoly in terms of knowledge.
Such approaches have been central in my own learning - up to a point where I felt I could learn faster / feel less alienated in my learning by leaving school.
The challenge, then, for me at least, is to build up recognition through networked approaches, with peers, rather then through top down , centralized certification programs and education environments.
Although one may argue that the tests could at some point confirm the acquired ( self ) learning, the self learner ( or rather, the mutual learners in self organizing approaches ) does not, contrary to official enrolled students, benefit from such "student" status, and at least in my experience, faces pressures from society, even if only in terms of lack of support.
Cordially, Dante
On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 1:37 PM, June Gorman <[email protected]>wrote:
Dante-Gabryell --
This is wonderful stuff. I know of Mitra's work and find it exciting. Some of us in the UN Commons Cluster are working on these ideas as well and how they fit into education of and about all the Commons.
But as a 30+ year (Western-US) teacher and the founder of the *MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be <http://209.172.54.115/>MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be Transformative Education Forum *, I would caution at the over-enthusiasm of the computer-focused translation of this idea of "learner-centered". It is clearly an amazing and freeing tool in countless ways besides providing the "Library of the World" to any child, nearly anywhere with access to one. But it reduces dangerously the historical, pedagogical and epistemological theories of learning and the human child themselves, down to dangerously reductive concepts of what in fact is most important "to learn". Whose "information" gets processed and with what underlying results?
It is one of my deepest concerns with the over-promotion of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) in the Western world, dramatically by "education promoting companies" who want to sell this model to everyone else as the US is currently doing promoting "No Child Left Behind" worldwide through the World Bank and Brookings Institute. But for those of us in the education field all our life, there is definite need to examine these issues, like certain brain theory results accompanying early child exposure to computers as their dominant learner - interaction. The TEF tries to address this issue of needed complete intelligence development with arts, humanities and especially the social/cultural/emotional learning not developed with this priority or technological "default".
Anyway, more is available on this on the TEF website, but particularly the *MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be TEF Principles*<http://209.172.54.115/web/guest/principles>. There is a serious caution here about just how much and what exactly, the "machines" can and do teach when used primarily? So much cheaper though, for those trying to go into the field of education for their own profit and on top of it, leaves out those more philosophical, even human justice and equity arguments that actually really matter for children around the world to ultimately make sense of their lives and societies.
Best, June *June Gorman, Educator and Educational Theorist* Co-founder*, **MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be <http://209.172.54.115/>MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be Transformative Education Forum (note website re-work, so ignore "non-standard" notification :-)* Education Advisor, <http://www.safepla.net/> *UN SafePlanet Campaign * *Board Project Director for Outreach, I**nternational Model United Nations Association* <http://imuna.org/>* * *Steering Committee, (UNESCO/Global Compact) **K-12 Sector for Sustainability Education *<http://www.uspartnership.org/main/view_archive/1> Member, UN Education Caucus for Sustainable Development Member, UN Commons Cluster
------------------------------ *From:* Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> *To:* p2p-foundation <[email protected]> *Sent:* Friday, October 18, 2013 4:03 AM *Subject:* [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: *Dante-Gabryell Monson* <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 2:16 AM Subject: Wired : learner centered movement To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, " [email protected]" <[email protected]>, " [email protected]" <[email protected]>
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/* * *a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration.* entire article : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/ *student centered movement : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/student-centered-movement/* " TED has created a toolkit full of ideas for jumpstarting student-centered learning in your home, local community, or school. It’s called SOLE: How to Bring Self-Organized Learning Environments to Your Community. Download it here <http://www.ted.com/pages/sole_toolkit> and share your story afterward on the SOLE Tumblr<http://tedsole.tumblr.com/> ." further large excerpts : Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process. ... “If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.” A charismatic and convincing proselytizer, Mitra has become a darling in the tech world. In early 2013 he won a $1 million grant from TED, the global ideas conference, to pursue his work. He’s now in the process of establishing seven “schools in the cloud,” five in India and two in the UK. In India, most of his schools are single-room buildings. There will be no teachers, curriculum, or separation into age groups—just six or so computers and a woman to look after the kids’ safety. His defining principle: “The children are completely in charge.” Mitra argues that the information revolution has enabled a style of learning that wasn’t possible before. ... Mitra’s work has roots in educational practices dating back to Socrates. Theorists from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi to Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori have argued that students should learn by playing and following their curiosity. ... In recent years, researchers have begun backing up those theories with evidence. In a 2011 study, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Iowa scanned the brain activity of 16 people sitting in front of a computer screen. ... The study found that when the subjects controlled their own observations, they exhibited more coordination between the hippocampus and other parts of the brain involved in learning and posted a 23 percent improvement in their ability to remember objects. “The bottom line is, if you’re not the one who’s controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well,” says lead researcher Joel Voss, now a neuroscientist at Northwestern University. ... A similar study at UC Berkeley demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem. “The science is brand-new, but it’s not as if people didn’t have this intuition before,” says coauthor Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. Gopnik’s research is informed in part by advances in artificial intelligence. If you program a robot’s every movement, she says, it can’t adapt to anything unexpected. But when scientists build machines that are programmed to try a variety of motions and learn from mistakes, the robots become far more adaptable and skilled. The same principle applies to children, she says. ... Evolutionary psychologists have also begun exploring this way of thinking. Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who studies children’s natural ways of learning, argues that human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional schooling. Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum. “We’re teaching the child that his questions don’t matter, that what matters are the questions of the curriculum. That’s just not the way natural selection designed us to learn. It designed us to solve problems and figure things out that are part of our real lives.” Some school systems have begun to adapt to this new philosophy—with outsize results. In the 1990s, Finland pared the country’s elementary math curriculum from about 25 pages to four, reduced the school day by an hour, and focused on independence and active learning. By 2003, Finnish students had climbed from the lower rungs of international performance rankings to first place among developed nations. ... Juárez Correa had mixed feelings about the test. His students had succeeded because he had employed a new teaching method, one better suited to the way children learn. It was a model that emphasized group work, competition, creativity, and a student-led environment. So it was ironic that the kids had distinguished themselves because of a conventional multiple-choice test. “These exams are like limits for the teachers,” he says. “They test what you know, not what you can do, and I am more interested in what my students can do.” ... But these examples—involving only thousands of students—are the exceptions to the rule. The system as a whole educates millions and is slow to recognize or adopt successful innovation. It’s a system that was constructed almost two centuries ago to meet the needs of the industrial age. Now that our society and economy have evolved beyond that era, our schools must also be reinvented. ... *Want to help teachers like Sergio Juárez Correa make a difference? Here’s how you can get involved in the student-centered movement<http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/student-centered-movement/> .*
-- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
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Hi Dante, I was in no way suggesting that you saw this as replacing humans with machines. My caution is that there are several very powerful forces in the current models of education being promoted, many under the rubric of "education for sustainable development", that very much do have that exact long-term goal. This in the US, is part of the issue on both sides of the eventual benefit/destruction controversy of public university models promoting the MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) by some of the top private universities in the US. Currently offered many times for free.....but......in the future? And at what loss to the basic premise of universities -- that people from different worlds, views and backgrounds come together in a "combustion" of these different ideas? That often necessitates interpersonal listening and dynamics I haven't seen often well exemplified in truly difficult conversations, on the computers alone. In the individual case, like yours, many valid points do exist such as you say, "Such approaches have been central in my own learning - up to a point where I felt I could learn faster / feel less alienated in my learning by leaving school." Multiple modalities and ways of learning need to be open wide to all to access their preferred way of doing so, and the computer is among these. Even Marco mentions an important one of these with the Boy Scout more Dewyan -- "learn by doing" -- model. But all of these systematic models embody the mostly un-excavated and un-examined prejudices of their dominant instigators and thus in the clear case of the Boy Scouts -- discrimination against girls (handled by funding a separate sex organization in the Girl Guides) and the latest, against homosexuals. There are also some dominant Western "Enlightenment" and entitlement-based ideologies that systemized certainly sexist models of defining ways of most productive thinking and evening feminine/humanities/irrational/nature vs. masculine/science/rational/technology dichotomies with Father-Force and technology having the thus naturally accepted right to dominate and subjugate "Mother-nature". This is one reason many females under that system found it very difficult to proceed in their most productive-to-learn ways and style of learning, and one reason many "others" of different groups also find the computer less judgmental of what "intelligence" most mattered in these limited ways found in our standard educational "systems" and thus found it easier to learn on their own. But my concern is that these still underlying judgments of the technological-dominant view of the world prevail and often remain, now with no dissenting "teachers" at all, and will thus be the only view children are "exposed to" at all, to what is most important to learn. That computers can add to this connecting and learning from others at all ages -- that I think is where your argument is very much more powerful. I completely agree on that point, but it is still necessary to learn the most critical emotional/social/cultural intelligences for a sustainable (healthy, peaceful, caring and more equitable) world only interpersonally with others and critically when children are mostly "emotional" learners and thinkers -- when they are young and until the age of 10 -- before just letting the machines take over. Which again, is where some "educational policy leaders" are definitely headed, so much more "cost-effective" for getting "test-takers" taught on easily measurable quantitative and thus inherently reductive tests of what that "education" should encompass. I was only arguing that despite its advantages, technology as systematic education can have some very negative outcomes and certainly cautions to consider as well. Warmly, June ________________________________ From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> To: June Gorman <[email protected]>; P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> Cc: Myra Jackson <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, October 18, 2013 9:20 AM Subject: Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement Hi June, Thanks for your reply, I personally do not see this as a replacement of humans by the machines. I rather see the internet as a powerful tool for access to information, both supporting and facilitated by dynamics between learners. I believe that the pedagogies it can be inspired of are that of Piaget, Montessori, ... And as Marco underlined, hardly any new self learning ( or mutual learning ) approaches. What is new, is possibly broader mainstream recognition, possibly supported by the more widespread usage and interconnection of information technologies globally, and in peoples lifestyles, facilitating a shift away of "the expert", or "the teacher" as monopoly in terms of knowledge. Such approaches have been central in my own learning - up to a point where I felt I could learn faster / feel less alienated in my learning by leaving school. The challenge, then, for me at least, is to build up recognition through networked approaches, with peers, rather then through top down , centralized certification programs and education environments. Although one may argue that the tests could at some point confirm the acquired ( self ) learning, the self learner ( or rather, the mutual learners in self organizing approaches ) does not, contrary to official enrolled students, benefit from such "student" status, and at least in my experience, faces pressures from society, even if only in terms of lack of support. Cordially, Dante On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 1:37 PM, June Gorman <[email protected]> wrote: Dante-Gabryell --
This is wonderful stuff. I know of Mitra's work and find it exciting. Some of us in the UN Commons Cluster are working on these ideas as well and how they fit into education of and about all the Commons.
But as a 30+ year (Western-US) teacher and the founder of the MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be Transformative Education Forum , I would caution at the over-enthusiasm of the computer-focused translation of this idea of "learner-centered". It is clearly an amazing and freeing tool in countless ways besides providing the "Library of the World" to any child, nearly anywhere with access to one. But it reduces dangerously the historical, pedagogical and epistemological theories of learning and the human child themselves, down to dangerously reductive concepts of what in fact is most important "to learn". Whose "information" gets processed and with what underlying results?
It is one of my deepest concerns with the over-promotion of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) in the Western world, dramatically by "education promoting companies" who want to sell this model to everyone else as the US is currently doing promoting "No Child Left Behind" worldwide through the World Bank and Brookings Institute. But for those of us in the education field all our life, there is definite need to examine these issues, like certain brain theory results accompanying early child exposure to computers as their dominant learner - interaction. The TEF tries to address this issue of needed complete intelligence development with arts, humanities and especially the social/cultural/emotional learning not developed with this priority or technological "default".
Anyway, more is available on this on the TEF website, but particularly the MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be TEF Principles. There is a serious caution here about just how much and what exactly, the "machines" can and do teach when used primarily? So much cheaper though, for those trying to go into the field of education for their own profit and on top of it, leaves out those more philosophical, even human justice and equity arguments that actually really matter for children around the world to ultimately make sense of their lives and societies.
Best, June June Gorman, Educator and Educational Theorist
Co-founder, MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be Transformative Education Forum (note website re-work, so ignore "non-standard" notification :-) Education Advisor, UN SafePlanet Campaign Board Project Director for Outreach, International Model United Nations Association Steering Committee, (UNESCO/Global Compact) K-12 Sector for Sustainability Education Member, UN Education Caucus for Sustainable Development Member, UN Commons Cluster
________________________________ From: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> To: p2p-foundation <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, October 18, 2013 4:03 AM Subject: [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 2:16 AM Subject: Wired : learner centered movement To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/
a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration.
entire article : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/
student centered movement : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/student-centered-movement/
" TED has created a toolkit full of ideas for jumpstarting student-centered learning in your home, local community, or school. It’s called SOLE: How to Bring Self-Organized Learning Environments to Your Community. Download it here and share your story afterward on the SOLE Tumblr." further large excerpts :
Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process. ... “If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.” A charismatic and convincing proselytizer, Mitra has become a darling in the tech world. In early 2013 he won a $1 million grant from TED, the global ideas conference, to pursue his work. He’s now in the process of establishing seven “schools in the cloud,” five in India and two in the UK. In India, most of his schools are single-room buildings. There will be no teachers, curriculum, or separation into age groups—just six or so computers and a woman to look after the kids’ safety. His defining principle: “The children are completely in charge.” Mitra argues that the information revolution has enabled a style of learning that wasn’t possible before. ... Mitra’s work has roots in educational practices dating back to Socrates. Theorists from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi to Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori have argued that students should learn by playing and following their curiosity.
... In recent years, researchers have begun backing up those theories with evidence. In a 2011 study, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Iowa scanned the brain activity of 16 people sitting in front of a computer screen.
... The study found that when the subjects controlled their own observations, they exhibited more coordination between the hippocampus and other parts of the brain involved in learning and posted a 23 percent improvement in their ability to remember objects. “The bottom line is, if you’re not the one who’s controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well,” says lead researcher Joel Voss, now a neuroscientist at Northwestern University.
... A similar study at UC Berkeley demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem. “The science is brand-new, but it’s not as if people didn’t have this intuition before,” says coauthor Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. Gopnik’s research is informed in part by advances in artificial intelligence. If you program a robot’s every movement, she says, it can’t adapt to anything unexpected. But when scientists build machines that are programmed to try a variety of motions and learn from mistakes, the robots become far more adaptable and skilled. The same principle applies to children, she says. ... Evolutionary psychologists have also begun exploring this way of thinking. Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who studies children’s natural ways of learning, argues that human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional schooling. Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum. “We’re teaching the child that his questions don’t matter, that what matters are the questions of the curriculum. That’s just not the way natural selection designed us to learn. It designed us to solve problems and figure things out that are part of our real lives.”
Some school systems have begun to adapt to this new philosophy—with outsize results. In the 1990s, Finland pared the country’s elementary math curriculum from about 25 pages to four, reduced the school day by an hour, and focused on independence and active learning. By 2003, Finnish students had climbed from the lower rungs of international performance rankings to first place among developed nations.
... Juárez Correa had mixed feelings about the test. His students had succeeded because he had employed a new teaching method, one better suited to the way children learn. It was a model that emphasized group work, competition, creativity, and a student-led environment. So it was ironic that the kids had distinguished themselves because of a conventional multiple-choice test. “These exams are like limits for the teachers,” he says. “They test what you know, not what you can do, and I am more interested in what my students can do.”
... But these examples—involving only thousands of students—are the exceptions to the rule. The system as a whole educates millions and is slow to recognize or adopt successful innovation. It’s a system that was constructed almost two centuries ago to meet the needs of the industrial age. Now that our society and economy have evolved beyond that era, our schools must also be reinvented. ... Want to help teachers like Sergio Juárez Correa make a difference? Here’s how you can get involved in the student-centered movement.
-- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
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Thank you June for correcting my apparent mis-interpretation of your reply. I believe it can be part of an equipotential approach , defined in this way http://p2pfoundation.net/Equipotentiality a non-credentialist approach : http://p2pfoundation.net/Anti-Credentialism I remember the story of medieval universities emerging around libraries, as a convergence amongst peers ? Furthermore, I personally have the tendency to discourage the usage of the word "education", preferring the concept of "learning". A further potential I hope we can explore further is one of nomadic learning. Learning via contexts and situations, in interaction with a diverse set of realities , encounters, influences. Cordially, Dante On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 7:14 PM, June Gorman <[email protected]>wrote:
Hi Dante,
I was in no way suggesting that you saw this as replacing humans with machines. My caution is that there are several very powerful forces in the current models of education being promoted, many under the rubric of "education for sustainable development", that very much do have that exact long-term goal. This in the US, is part of the issue on both sides of the eventual benefit/destruction controversy of public university models promoting the MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) by some of the top private universities in the US. Currently offered many times for free.....but......in the future? And at what loss to the basic premise of universities -- that people from different worlds, views and backgrounds come together in a "combustion" of these different ideas? That often necessitates interpersonal listening and dynamics I haven't seen often well exemplified in truly difficult conversations, on the computers alone.
In the individual case, like yours, many valid points do exist such as you say,
"Such approaches have been central in my own learning - up to a point where I felt I could learn faster / feel less alienated in my learning by leaving school."
Multiple modalities and ways of learning need to be open wide to all to access their preferred way of doing so, and the computer is among these. Even Marco mentions an important one of these with the Boy Scout more Dewyan -- "learn by doing" -- model. But all of these systematic models embody the mostly un-excavated and un-examined prejudices of their dominant instigators and thus in the clear case of the Boy Scouts -- discrimination against girls (handled by funding a separate sex organization in the Girl Guides) and the latest, against homosexuals.
There are also some dominant Western "Enlightenment" and entitlement-based ideologies that systemized certainly sexist models of defining ways of most productive thinking and evening feminine/humanities/irrational/nature vs. masculine/science/rational/technology dichotomies with Father-Force and technology having the thus naturally accepted right to dominate and subjugate "Mother-nature".
This is one reason many females under that system found it very difficult to proceed in their most productive-to-learn ways and style of learning, and one reason many "others" of different groups also find the computer less judgmental of what "intelligence" most mattered in these limited ways found in our standard educational "systems" and thus found it easier to learn on their own. But my concern is that these still underlying judgments of the technological-dominant view of the world prevail and often remain, now with no dissenting "teachers" at all, and will thus be the only view children are "exposed to" at all, to what is most important to learn.
That computers can add to this connecting and learning from others at all ages -- that I think is where your argument is very much more powerful. I completely agree on that point, but it is still necessary to learn the most critical emotional/social/cultural intelligences for a sustainable (healthy, peaceful, caring and more equitable) world only interpersonally with others and critically when children are mostly "emotional" learners and thinkers -- when they are young and until the age of 10 -- before just letting the machines take over.
Which again, is where some "educational policy leaders" are definitely headed, so much more "cost-effective" for getting "test-takers" taught on easily measurable quantitative and thus inherently reductive tests of what that "education" should encompass. I was only arguing that despite its advantages, technology as systematic education can have some very negative outcomes and certainly cautions to consider as well.
Warmly, June
------------------------------ *From:* Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> *To:* June Gorman <[email protected]>; P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> *Cc:* Myra Jackson <[email protected]> *Sent:* Friday, October 18, 2013 9:20 AM *Subject:* Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement
Hi June,
Thanks for your reply,
I personally do not see this as a replacement of humans by the machines.
I rather see the internet as a powerful tool for access to information, both supporting and facilitated by dynamics between learners.
I believe that the pedagogies it can be inspired of are that of Piaget, Montessori, ...
And as Marco underlined, hardly any new self learning ( or mutual learning ) approaches.
What is new, is possibly broader mainstream recognition, possibly supported by the more widespread usage and interconnection of information technologies globally, and in peoples lifestyles, facilitating a shift away of "the expert", or "the teacher" as monopoly in terms of knowledge.
Such approaches have been central in my own learning - up to a point where I felt I could learn faster / feel less alienated in my learning by leaving school.
The challenge, then, for me at least, is to build up recognition through networked approaches, with peers, rather then through top down , centralized certification programs and education environments.
Although one may argue that the tests could at some point confirm the acquired ( self ) learning, the self learner ( or rather, the mutual learners in self organizing approaches ) does not, contrary to official enrolled students, benefit from such "student" status, and at least in my experience, faces pressures from society, even if only in terms of lack of support.
Cordially, Dante
On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 1:37 PM, June Gorman <[email protected]>wrote:
Dante-Gabryell --
This is wonderful stuff. I know of Mitra's work and find it exciting. Some of us in the UN Commons Cluster are working on these ideas as well and how they fit into education of and about all the Commons.
But as a 30+ year (Western-US) teacher and the founder of the *<http://209.172.54.115/>MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be Transformative Education Forum *, I would caution at the over-enthusiasm of the computer-focused translation of this idea of "learner-centered". It is clearly an amazing and freeing tool in countless ways besides providing the "Library of the World" to any child, nearly anywhere with access to one. But it reduces dangerously the historical, pedagogical and epistemological theories of learning and the human child themselves, down to dangerously reductive concepts of what in fact is most important "to learn". Whose "information" gets processed and with what underlying results?
It is one of my deepest concerns with the over-promotion of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) in the Western world, dramatically by "education promoting companies" who want to sell this model to everyone else as the US is currently doing promoting "No Child Left Behind" worldwide through the World Bank and Brookings Institute. But for those of us in the education field all our life, there is definite need to examine these issues, like certain brain theory results accompanying early child exposure to computers as their dominant learner - interaction. The TEF tries to address this issue of needed complete intelligence development with arts, humanities and especially the social/cultural/emotional learning not developed with this priority or technological "default".
Anyway, more is available on this on the TEF website, but particularly the *MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be* TEF Principles<http://209.172.54.115/web/guest/principles>. There is a serious caution here about just how much and what exactly, the "machines" can and do teach when used primarily? So much cheaper though, for those trying to go into the field of education for their own profit and on top of it, leaves out those more philosophical, even human justice and equity arguments that actually really matter for children around the world to ultimately make sense of their lives and societies.
Best, June *June Gorman, Educator and Educational Theorist* Co-founder*, ** <http://209.172.54.115/>MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be Transformative Education Forum (note website re-work, so ignore "non-standard" notification :-)* Education Advisor, <http://www.safepla.net/> *UN SafePlanet Campaign * *Board Project Director for Outreach, I**nternational Model United Nations Association* <http://imuna.org/>* * *Steering Committee, (UNESCO/Global Compact) **K-12 Sector for Sustainability Education *<http://www.uspartnership.org/main/view_archive/1> Member, UN Education Caucus for Sustainable Development Member, UN Commons Cluster
------------------------------ *From:* Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> *To:* p2p-foundation <[email protected]> *Sent:* Friday, October 18, 2013 4:03 AM *Subject:* [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: *Dante-Gabryell Monson* <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 2:16 AM Subject: Wired : learner centered movement To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, " [email protected]" <[email protected]>, " [email protected]" <[email protected]>
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/* * *a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration.* entire article : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/ *student centered movement : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/student-centered-movement/* " TED has created a toolkit full of ideas for jumpstarting student-centered learning in your home, local community, or school. It’s called SOLE: How to Bring Self-Organized Learning Environments to Your Community. Download it here <http://www.ted.com/pages/sole_toolkit> and share your story afterward on the SOLE Tumblr <http://tedsole.tumblr.com/> ." further large excerpts : Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process. ... “If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.” A charismatic and convincing proselytizer, Mitra has become a darling in the tech world. In early 2013 he won a $1 million grant from TED, the global ideas conference, to pursue his work. He’s now in the process of establishing seven “schools in the cloud,” five in India and two in the UK. In India, most of his schools are single-room buildings. There will be no teachers, curriculum, or separation into age groups—just six or so computers and a woman to look after the kids’ safety. His defining principle: “The children are completely in charge.” Mitra argues that the information revolution has enabled a style of learning that wasn’t possible before. ... Mitra’s work has roots in educational practices dating back to Socrates. Theorists from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi to Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori have argued that students should learn by playing and following their curiosity. ... In recent years, researchers have begun backing up those theories with evidence. In a 2011 study, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Iowa scanned the brain activity of 16 people sitting in front of a computer screen. ... The study found that when the subjects controlled their own observations, they exhibited more coordination between the hippocampus and other parts of the brain involved in learning and posted a 23 percent improvement in their ability to remember objects. “The bottom line is, if you’re not the one who’s controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well,” says lead researcher Joel Voss, now a neuroscientist at Northwestern University. ... A similar study at UC Berkeley demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem. “The science is brand-new, but it’s not as if people didn’t have this intuition before,” says coauthor Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. Gopnik’s research is informed in part by advances in artificial intelligence. If you program a robot’s every movement, she says, it can’t adapt to anything unexpected. But when scientists build machines that are programmed to try a variety of motions and learn from mistakes, the robots become far more adaptable and skilled. The same principle applies to children, she says. ... Evolutionary psychologists have also begun exploring this way of thinking. Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who studies children’s natural ways of learning, argues that human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional schooling. Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum. “We’re teaching the child that his questions don’t matter, that what matters are the questions of the curriculum. That’s just not the way natural selection designed us to learn. It designed us to solve problems and figure things out that are part of our real lives.” Some school systems have begun to adapt to this new philosophy—with outsize results. In the 1990s, Finland pared the country’s elementary math curriculum from about 25 pages to four, reduced the school day by an hour, and focused on independence and active learning. By 2003, Finnish students had climbed from the lower rungs of international performance rankings to first place among developed nations. ... Juárez Correa had mixed feelings about the test. His students had succeeded because he had employed a new teaching method, one better suited to the way children learn. It was a model that emphasized group work, competition, creativity, and a student-led environment. So it was ironic that the kids had distinguished themselves because of a conventional multiple-choice test. “These exams are like limits for the teachers,” he says. “They test what you know, not what you can do, and I am more interested in what my students can do.” ... But these examples—involving only thousands of students—are the exceptions to the rule. The system as a whole educates millions and is slow to recognize or adopt successful innovation. It’s a system that was constructed almost two centuries ago to meet the needs of the industrial age. Now that our society and economy have evolved beyond that era, our schools must also be reinvented. ... *Want to help teachers like Sergio Juárez Correa make a difference? Here’s how you can get involved in the student-centered movement<http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/student-centered-movement/> .*
-- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
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http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Education On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 5:54 AM, Dante-Gabryell Monson < [email protected]> wrote:
Thank you June for correcting my apparent mis-interpretation of your reply.
I believe it can be part of an equipotential approach , defined in this way
http://p2pfoundation.net/Equipotentiality
a non-credentialist approach : http://p2pfoundation.net/Anti-Credentialism
I remember the story of medieval universities emerging around libraries, as a convergence amongst peers ?
Furthermore, I personally have the tendency to discourage the usage of the word "education", preferring the concept of "learning".
A further potential I hope we can explore further is one of nomadic learning. Learning via contexts and situations, in interaction with a diverse set of realities , encounters, influences.
Cordially, Dante
On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 7:14 PM, June Gorman <[email protected]>wrote:
Hi Dante,
I was in no way suggesting that you saw this as replacing humans with machines. My caution is that there are several very powerful forces in the current models of education being promoted, many under the rubric of "education for sustainable development", that very much do have that exact long-term goal. This in the US, is part of the issue on both sides of the eventual benefit/destruction controversy of public university models promoting the MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) by some of the top private universities in the US. Currently offered many times for free.....but......in the future? And at what loss to the basic premise of universities -- that people from different worlds, views and backgrounds come together in a "combustion" of these different ideas? That often necessitates interpersonal listening and dynamics I haven't seen often well exemplified in truly difficult conversations, on the computers alone.
In the individual case, like yours, many valid points do exist such as you say,
"Such approaches have been central in my own learning - up to a point where I felt I could learn faster / feel less alienated in my learning by leaving school."
Multiple modalities and ways of learning need to be open wide to all to access their preferred way of doing so, and the computer is among these. Even Marco mentions an important one of these with the Boy Scout more Dewyan -- "learn by doing" -- model. But all of these systematic models embody the mostly un-excavated and un-examined prejudices of their dominant instigators and thus in the clear case of the Boy Scouts -- discrimination against girls (handled by funding a separate sex organization in the Girl Guides) and the latest, against homosexuals.
There are also some dominant Western "Enlightenment" and entitlement-based ideologies that systemized certainly sexist models of defining ways of most productive thinking and evening feminine/humanities/irrational/nature vs. masculine/science/rational/technology dichotomies with Father-Force and technology having the thus naturally accepted right to dominate and subjugate "Mother-nature".
This is one reason many females under that system found it very difficult to proceed in their most productive-to-learn ways and style of learning, and one reason many "others" of different groups also find the computer less judgmental of what "intelligence" most mattered in these limited ways found in our standard educational "systems" and thus found it easier to learn on their own. But my concern is that these still underlying judgments of the technological-dominant view of the world prevail and often remain, now with no dissenting "teachers" at all, and will thus be the only view children are "exposed to" at all, to what is most important to learn.
That computers can add to this connecting and learning from others at all ages -- that I think is where your argument is very much more powerful. I completely agree on that point, but it is still necessary to learn the most critical emotional/social/cultural intelligences for a sustainable (healthy, peaceful, caring and more equitable) world only interpersonally with others and critically when children are mostly "emotional" learners and thinkers -- when they are young and until the age of 10 -- before just letting the machines take over.
Which again, is where some "educational policy leaders" are definitely headed, so much more "cost-effective" for getting "test-takers" taught on easily measurable quantitative and thus inherently reductive tests of what that "education" should encompass. I was only arguing that despite its advantages, technology as systematic education can have some very negative outcomes and certainly cautions to consider as well.
Warmly, June
------------------------------ *From:* Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> *To:* June Gorman <[email protected]>; P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> *Cc:* Myra Jackson <[email protected]> *Sent:* Friday, October 18, 2013 9:20 AM *Subject:* Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement
Hi June,
Thanks for your reply,
I personally do not see this as a replacement of humans by the machines.
I rather see the internet as a powerful tool for access to information, both supporting and facilitated by dynamics between learners.
I believe that the pedagogies it can be inspired of are that of Piaget, Montessori, ...
And as Marco underlined, hardly any new self learning ( or mutual learning ) approaches.
What is new, is possibly broader mainstream recognition, possibly supported by the more widespread usage and interconnection of information technologies globally, and in peoples lifestyles, facilitating a shift away of "the expert", or "the teacher" as monopoly in terms of knowledge.
Such approaches have been central in my own learning - up to a point where I felt I could learn faster / feel less alienated in my learning by leaving school.
The challenge, then, for me at least, is to build up recognition through networked approaches, with peers, rather then through top down , centralized certification programs and education environments.
Although one may argue that the tests could at some point confirm the acquired ( self ) learning, the self learner ( or rather, the mutual learners in self organizing approaches ) does not, contrary to official enrolled students, benefit from such "student" status, and at least in my experience, faces pressures from society, even if only in terms of lack of support.
Cordially, Dante
On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 1:37 PM, June Gorman <[email protected]>wrote:
Dante-Gabryell --
This is wonderful stuff. I know of Mitra's work and find it exciting. Some of us in the UN Commons Cluster are working on these ideas as well and how they fit into education of and about all the Commons.
But as a 30+ year (Western-US) teacher and the founder of the *<http://209.172.54.115/>MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be Transformative Education Forum *, I would caution at the over-enthusiasm of the computer-focused translation of this idea of "learner-centered". It is clearly an amazing and freeing tool in countless ways besides providing the "Library of the World" to any child, nearly anywhere with access to one. But it reduces dangerously the historical, pedagogical and epistemological theories of learning and the human child themselves, down to dangerously reductive concepts of what in fact is most important "to learn". Whose "information" gets processed and with what underlying results?
It is one of my deepest concerns with the over-promotion of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) in the Western world, dramatically by "education promoting companies" who want to sell this model to everyone else as the US is currently doing promoting "No Child Left Behind" worldwide through the World Bank and Brookings Institute. But for those of us in the education field all our life, there is definite need to examine these issues, like certain brain theory results accompanying early child exposure to computers as their dominant learner - interaction. The TEF tries to address this issue of needed complete intelligence development with arts, humanities and especially the social/cultural/emotional learning not developed with this priority or technological "default".
Anyway, more is available on this on the TEF website, but particularly the *MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be* TEF Principles<http://209.172.54.115/web/guest/principles>. There is a serious caution here about just how much and what exactly, the "machines" can and do teach when used primarily? So much cheaper though, for those trying to go into the field of education for their own profit and on top of it, leaves out those more philosophical, even human justice and equity arguments that actually really matter for children around the world to ultimately make sense of their lives and societies.
Best, June *June Gorman, Educator and Educational Theorist* Co-founder*, ** <http://209.172.54.115/>MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be Transformative Education Forum (note website re-work, so ignore "non-standard" notification :-)* Education Advisor, <http://www.safepla.net/> *UN SafePlanet Campaign * *Board Project Director for Outreach, I**nternational Model United Nations Association* <http://imuna.org/>* * *Steering Committee, (UNESCO/Global Compact) **K-12 Sector for Sustainability Education *<http://www.uspartnership.org/main/view_archive/1> Member, UN Education Caucus for Sustainable Development Member, UN Commons Cluster
------------------------------ *From:* Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> *To:* p2p-foundation <[email protected]> *Sent:* Friday, October 18, 2013 4:03 AM *Subject:* [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: *Dante-Gabryell Monson* <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 2:16 AM Subject: Wired : learner centered movement To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, " [email protected]" <[email protected]>, " [email protected]" <[email protected]>
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/* * *a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration.* entire article : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/ *student centered movement : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/student-centered-movement/* " TED has created a toolkit full of ideas for jumpstarting student-centered learning in your home, local community, or school. It’s called SOLE: How to Bring Self-Organized Learning Environments to Your Community. Download it here <http://www.ted.com/pages/sole_toolkit> and share your story afterward on the SOLE Tumblr<http://tedsole.tumblr.com/> ." further large excerpts : Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process. ... “If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.” A charismatic and convincing proselytizer, Mitra has become a darling in the tech world. In early 2013 he won a $1 million grant from TED, the global ideas conference, to pursue his work. He’s now in the process of establishing seven “schools in the cloud,” five in India and two in the UK. In India, most of his schools are single-room buildings. There will be no teachers, curriculum, or separation into age groups—just six or so computers and a woman to look after the kids’ safety. His defining principle: “The children are completely in charge.” Mitra argues that the information revolution has enabled a style of learning that wasn’t possible before. ... Mitra’s work has roots in educational practices dating back to Socrates. Theorists from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi to Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori have argued that students should learn by playing and following their curiosity. ... In recent years, researchers have begun backing up those theories with evidence. In a 2011 study, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Iowa scanned the brain activity of 16 people sitting in front of a computer screen. ... The study found that when the subjects controlled their own observations, they exhibited more coordination between the hippocampus and other parts of the brain involved in learning and posted a 23 percent improvement in their ability to remember objects. “The bottom line is, if you’re not the one who’s controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well,” says lead researcher Joel Voss, now a neuroscientist at Northwestern University. ... A similar study at UC Berkeley demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem. “The science is brand-new, but it’s not as if people didn’t have this intuition before,” says coauthor Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. Gopnik’s research is informed in part by advances in artificial intelligence. If you program a robot’s every movement, she says, it can’t adapt to anything unexpected. But when scientists build machines that are programmed to try a variety of motions and learn from mistakes, the robots become far more adaptable and skilled. The same principle applies to children, she says. ... Evolutionary psychologists have also begun exploring this way of thinking. Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who studies children’s natural ways of learning, argues that human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional schooling. Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum. “We’re teaching the child that his questions don’t matter, that what matters are the questions of the curriculum. That’s just not the way natural selection designed us to learn. It designed us to solve problems and figure things out that are part of our real lives.” Some school systems have begun to adapt to this new philosophy—with outsize results. In the 1990s, Finland pared the country’s elementary math curriculum from about 25 pages to four, reduced the school day by an hour, and focused on independence and active learning. By 2003, Finnish students had climbed from the lower rungs of international performance rankings to first place among developed nations. ... Juárez Correa had mixed feelings about the test. His students had succeeded because he had employed a new teaching method, one better suited to the way children learn. It was a model that emphasized group work, competition, creativity, and a student-led environment. So it was ironic that the kids had distinguished themselves because of a conventional multiple-choice test. “These exams are like limits for the teachers,” he says. “They test what you know, not what you can do, and I am more interested in what my students can do.” ... But these examples—involving only thousands of students—are the exceptions to the rule. The system as a whole educates millions and is slow to recognize or adopt successful innovation. It’s a system that was constructed almost two centuries ago to meet the needs of the industrial age. Now that our society and economy have evolved beyond that era, our schools must also be reinvented. ... *Want to help teachers like Sergio Juárez Correa make a difference? Here’s how you can get involved in the student-centered movement<http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/student-centered-movement/> .*
-- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
Dante -- Thank you for those links -- a lot of good stuff there. I like what Sebastian Thrun says, I happen to like Sebastian Thrun and his ideas in general, but I believe that this is a limited understanding of human learning and the field of what truly defines the most important human learning when it is literally reduced to the limits of this medium alone. I wrote an entire paper in the UN Chronicle about this concern, linked here: "Bringing Human Passion into Sustainability Education and Bridging Cultures" and that concern is literally in over-emphasizing education that is cognitively freeing but because of the reduction of the interpersonal-necessary learning, emotionally even more narrowing than our current over-regimentalized schools. One can learn so much from books, texts, words and even the greater communication that enhances all those other forms and more that can happen on the computer. But I haven't seen much emotional intelligence developed that way, and by that I mean not only empathy, and compassion but far more importantly emotional energy immediate and forceful enough to actually move people to action on account of all this word "learning". I've only ever seen other people do that with people, or occasionally the immediacy of art and human pain relayed together to evoke a responding emotional connection and passion. I just deeply believe that true human problem-solving on complex human issues, demands a much deeper understanding of this than I have seen come out of the most "wired" places or from the most "wired" people, having lived in and near Silicon Valley a good portion of my adult life. It's not an either/or for me, but there is something definitely to be concerned about in thinking the computers can do the most critical again, emotional/social/cultural intelligence learning/teaching that it is clear in many cases it hampers and often harms. Unfortunately, I find those most trained in the expertise of machine language and learning, often the ones least able to see much less compensate for this lack. But love the information you have sent about this here -- still great resources as a part of a larger construct. Best, June ________________________________ From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> To: June Gorman <[email protected]> Cc: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]>; Myra Jackson <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, October 20, 2013 3:22 PM Subject: Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Education On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 5:54 AM, Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> wrote: Thank you June for correcting my apparent mis-interpretation of your reply.
I believe it can be part of an equipotential approach , defined in this way
http://p2pfoundation.net/Equipotentiality
a non-credentialist approach : http://p2pfoundation.net/Anti-Credentialism
I remember the story of medieval universities emerging around libraries, as a convergence amongst peers ?
Furthermore, I personally have the tendency to discourage the usage of the word "education", preferring the concept of "learning".
A further potential I hope we can explore further is one of nomadic learning. Learning via contexts and situations, in interaction with a diverse set of realities , encounters, influences.
Cordially, Dante
On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 7:14 PM, June Gorman <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Dante,
I was in no way suggesting that you saw this as replacing humans with machines. My caution is that there are several very powerful forces in the current models of education being promoted, many under the rubric of "education for sustainable development", that very much do have that exact long-term goal. This in the US, is part of the issue on both sides of the eventual benefit/destruction controversy of public university models promoting the MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) by some of the top private universities in the US. Currently offered many times for free.....but......in the future? And at what loss to the basic premise of universities -- that people from different worlds, views and backgrounds come together in a "combustion" of these different ideas? That often necessitates interpersonal listening and dynamics I haven't seen often well exemplified in truly difficult conversations, on the computers alone.
In the individual case, like yours, many valid points do exist such as you say,
"Such approaches have been central in my own learning - up to a point where I felt I could learn faster / feel less alienated in my learning by leaving school."
Multiple modalities and ways of learning need to be open wide to all to access their preferred way of doing so, and the computer is among these. Even Marco mentions an important one of these with the Boy Scout more Dewyan -- "learn by doing" -- model. But all of these systematic models embody the mostly un-excavated and un-examined prejudices of their dominant instigators and thus in the clear case of the Boy Scouts -- discrimination against girls (handled by funding a separate sex organization in the Girl Guides) and the latest, against homosexuals.
There are also some dominant Western "Enlightenment" and entitlement-based ideologies that systemized certainly sexist models of defining ways of most productive thinking and evening feminine/humanities/irrational/nature vs. masculine/science/rational/technology dichotomies with Father-Force and technology having the thus naturally accepted right to dominate and subjugate "Mother-nature".
This is one reason many females under that system found it very difficult to proceed in their most productive-to-learn ways and style of learning, and one reason many "others" of different groups also find the computer less judgmental of what "intelligence" most mattered in these limited ways found in our standard educational "systems" and thus found it easier to learn on their own. But my concern is that these still underlying judgments of the technological-dominant view of the world prevail and often remain, now with no dissenting "teachers" at all, and will thus be the only view children are "exposed to" at all, to what is most important to learn.
That computers can add to this connecting and learning from others at all ages -- that I think is where your argument is very much more powerful. I completely agree on that point, but it is still necessary to learn the most critical emotional/social/cultural intelligences for a sustainable (healthy, peaceful, caring and more equitable) world only interpersonally with others and critically when children are mostly "emotional" learners and thinkers -- when they are young and until the age of 10 -- before just letting the machines take over.
Which again, is where some "educational policy leaders" are definitely headed, so much more "cost-effective" for getting "test-takers" taught on easily measurable quantitative and thus inherently reductive tests of what that "education" should encompass. I was only arguing that despite its advantages, technology as systematic education can have some very negative outcomes and certainly cautions to consider as well.
Warmly, June
________________________________ From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> To: June Gorman <[email protected]>; P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> Cc: Myra Jackson <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, October 18, 2013 9:20 AM Subject: Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement
Hi June,
Thanks for your reply,
I personally do not see this as a replacement of humans by the machines.
I rather see the internet as a powerful tool for access to information, both supporting and facilitated by dynamics between learners.
I believe that the pedagogies it can be inspired of are that of Piaget, Montessori, ...
And as Marco underlined, hardly any new self learning ( or mutual learning ) approaches.
What is new, is possibly broader mainstream recognition, possibly supported by the more widespread usage and interconnection of information technologies globally, and in peoples lifestyles, facilitating a shift away of "the expert", or "the teacher" as monopoly in terms of knowledge.
Such approaches have been central in my own learning - up to a point where I felt I could learn faster / feel less alienated in my learning by leaving school.
The challenge, then, for me at least, is to build up recognition through networked approaches, with peers, rather then through top down , centralized certification programs and education environments.
Although one may argue that the tests could at some point confirm the acquired ( self ) learning, the self learner ( or rather, the mutual learners in self organizing approaches ) does not, contrary to official enrolled students, benefit from such "student" status, and at least in my experience, faces pressures from society, even if only in terms of lack of support.
Cordially, Dante
On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 1:37 PM, June Gorman <[email protected]> wrote:
Dante-Gabryell --
This is wonderful stuff. I know of Mitra's work and find it exciting. Some of us in the UN Commons Cluster are working on these ideas as well and how they fit into education of and about all the Commons.
But as a 30+ year (Western-US) teacher and the founder of the MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be Transformative Education Forum , I would caution at the over-enthusiasm of the computer-focused translation of this idea of "learner-centered". It is clearly an amazing and freeing tool in countless ways besides providing the "Library of the World" to any child, nearly anywhere with access to one. But it reduces dangerously the historical, pedagogical and epistemological theories of learning and the human child themselves, down to dangerously reductive concepts of what in fact is most important "to learn". Whose "information" gets processed and with what underlying results?
It is one of my deepest concerns with the over-promotion of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) in the Western world, dramatically by "education promoting companies" who want to sell this model to everyone else as the US is currently doing promoting "No Child Left Behind" worldwide through the World Bank and Brookings Institute. But for those of us in the education field all our life, there is definite need to examine these issues, like certain brain theory results accompanying early child exposure to computers as their dominant learner - interaction. The TEF tries to address this issue of needed complete intelligence development with arts, humanities and especially the social/cultural/emotional learning not developed with this priority or technological "default".
Anyway, more is available on this on the TEF website, but particularly the MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be TEF Principles. There is a serious caution here about just how much and what exactly, the "machines" can and do teach when used primarily? So much cheaper though, for those trying to go into the field of education for their own profit and on top of it, leaves out those more philosophical, even human justice and equity arguments that actually really matter for children around the world to ultimately make sense of their lives and societies.
Best, June June Gorman, Educator and Educational Theorist
Co-founder, MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be Transformative Education Forum (note website re-work, so ignore "non-standard" notification :-) Education Advisor, UN SafePlanet Campaign Board Project Director for Outreach, International Model United Nations Association Steering Committee, (UNESCO/Global Compact) K-12 Sector for Sustainability Education Member, UN Education Caucus for Sustainable Development Member, UN Commons Cluster
________________________________ From: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> To: p2p-foundation <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, October 18, 2013 4:03 AM Subject: [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 2:16 AM Subject: Wired : learner centered movement To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/
a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration.
entire article : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/
student centered movement : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/student-centered-movement/
" TED has created a toolkit full of ideas for jumpstarting student-centered learning in your home, local community, or school. It’s called SOLE: How to Bring Self-Organized Learning Environments to Your Community. Download it here and share your story afterward on the SOLE Tumblr." further large excerpts :
Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process. ... “If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.” A charismatic and convincing proselytizer, Mitra has become a darling in the tech world. In early 2013 he won a $1 million grant from TED, the global ideas conference, to pursue his work. He’s now in the process of establishing seven “schools in the cloud,” five in India and two in the UK. In India, most of his schools are single-room buildings. There will be no teachers, curriculum, or separation into age groups—just six or so computers and a woman to look after the kids’ safety. His defining principle: “The children are completely in charge.” Mitra argues that the information revolution has enabled a style of learning that wasn’t possible before. ... Mitra’s work has roots in educational practices dating back to Socrates. Theorists from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi to Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori have argued that students should learn by playing and following their curiosity.
... In recent years, researchers have begun backing up those theories with evidence. In a 2011 study, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Iowa scanned the brain activity of 16 people sitting in front of a computer screen.
... The study found that when the subjects controlled their own observations, they exhibited more coordination between the hippocampus and other parts of the brain involved in learning and posted a 23 percent improvement in their ability to remember objects. “The bottom line is, if you’re not the one who’s controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well,” says lead researcher Joel Voss, now a neuroscientist at Northwestern University.
... A similar study at UC Berkeley demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem. “The science is brand-new, but it’s not as if people didn’t have this intuition before,” says coauthor Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. Gopnik’s research is informed in part by advances in artificial intelligence. If you program a robot’s every movement, she says, it can’t adapt to anything unexpected. But when scientists build machines that are programmed to try a variety of motions and learn from mistakes, the robots become far more adaptable and skilled. The same principle applies to children, she says. ... Evolutionary psychologists have also begun exploring this way of thinking. Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who studies children’s natural ways of learning, argues that human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional schooling. Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum. “We’re teaching the child that his questions don’t matter, that what matters are the questions of the curriculum. That’s just not the way natural selection designed us to learn. It designed us to solve problems and figure things out that are part of our real lives.”
Some school systems have begun to adapt to this new philosophy—with outsize results. In the 1990s, Finland pared the country’s elementary math curriculum from about 25 pages to four, reduced the school day by an hour, and focused on independence and active learning. By 2003, Finnish students had climbed from the lower rungs of international performance rankings to first place among developed nations.
... Juárez Correa had mixed feelings about the test. His students had succeeded because he had employed a new teaching method, one better suited to the way children learn. It was a model that emphasized group work, competition, creativity, and a student-led environment. So it was ironic that the kids had distinguished themselves because of a conventional multiple-choice test. “These exams are like limits for the teachers,” he says. “They test what you know, not what you can do, and I am more interested in what my students can do.”
... But these examples—involving only thousands of students—are the exceptions to the rule. The system as a whole educates millions and is slow to recognize or adopt successful innovation. It’s a system that was constructed almost two centuries ago to meet the needs of the industrial age. Now that our society and economy have evolved beyond that era, our schools must also be reinvented. ... Want to help teachers like Sergio Juárez Correa make a difference? Here’s how you can get involved in the student-centered movement.
-- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
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Hi June, Thanks for putting these points forward. I realize this is a very broad topic. I am giving some more elements, which extend beyond curriculum , institutionalized education and accreditation. /// did you by any chance hear of a *field of study called "Digital Anthropology" ?* *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_anthropology*<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_anthropology> I like some of Michael Mesch and his students videos http://www.openculture.com/2011/02/michael_wesch_rethinks_education.html one of the more popular / viral ones they produced, and which some of us may have seen ? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o also see : *http://p2pfoundation.net/Tower_and_The_Cloud*<http://p2pfoundation.net/Tower_and_The_Cloud> one of my first finding, 10 or more years ago, on such topics being http://ecolecon.missouri.edu/globalresearch/ /// In the initial example given in the wired article ( http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/) , I remember mention of the students asking questions to the teacher, and the teacher returning with information it can find online, while also opening up *potential for self organization in their learning approach*. I seem to interpret in your message a *concern in relation to reliance on digital mediums ?* What comes to my mind is that some studies indicate *effects on attention span* http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2012/mar/19/atte... although personally, I sense such attention span may also be *contextual*. imho , It is possible to have longer attention spans , *combining various mediums of information, * * * *for example when one has a question one wants to answer, or a field of interest we explore ? * I know from my own experience that I *can spend many hours researching a specific topic, including online.* I can also have a long attention span in watching documentaries, or online presentations, *when they are of interest to me. If not, I can skip through.* Perhaps more of us have such approach ? Having *questions*, and researching online does , for me, speed up access to certain *references*, which in turn *can lead to further questions*, ... progressively building *a puzzle of inter related fields of knowledge* , enabling me to understand and *develop new questions and ideas*, possibly also in support of enabling a *holistic understanding of interconnected realities ?* You mention books : When I find interesting references to books, I may end up reading the books. In some cases, I can find a library locally that has them available. In other cases, I can find references to people who discuss the books, and eventually, if they live locally, meet them, and borrow it from them, while eventually discussing the ideas together, and further open up new questions, or new ideas. I also like to share references, for example via *social bookmarks* https://www.diigo.com/user/dante-gabryell I know Michel and others on this list also use social bookmarks : https://www.diigo.com/user/mbauwens for example *https://www.diigo.com/user/mbauwens/P2P-Learning*<https://www.diigo.com/user/mbauwens/P2P-Learning> Personally *I do not buy books as it costs resources to store them, resources to buy them, resources to transport them.* There are also options such as book crossing ( I did not use it much ) I do miss *an environment for interaction*. I left school ( at age 15, officially 16 ), and spent years traveling. Makerspaces and other informal spaces may open up potentials for certain forms of interaction. I sense there are ( more and more ) movements in the process of supporting the development of such spaces. *Situated cognition, action research learning, communities of practice*, etc are many approaches that can be put into practice, and are put into practice even without being called such. Beyond maker spaces, its a whole new ( some may say, very old ) approach to learning, that can involve the creation of new lifestyles. I also appreciate : *http://p2pfoundation.net/Festivalism* I sense we are developing tools for "real social" networks, that enable an interface between online and face to face, or that have as focus to facilitate face to face meetings. Hospitalitywebsites ( such as bewelcome.org or couchsurfing ) are one of such examples, and a very rich source of learning through encounters and travels. *My own position on learning is that we can use diversity,* *and that such diversity can be introduced yet need not be imposed.* Moocs <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course>, since you mention it, is in my view but only one approach - offering a online environment which seems to have more in connection with an academic approach ? I am also aware that there are discussions being held about cursive hand writing - will it still be taught ? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-14121541 It seems to me that the ( more ) restricted resources put in a linear system of public institutional learning , may lead to leave potentials for a greater diversity of learning out - *p2p, mutual learning may open up potentials of learners beyond any limited curriculum* and more centralized teacher approaches. /// There may be *transitions, including in terms of value systems.* Personally I see potential in *modularity and self organization.* It seems of interest to me to make parallels between elements you describe in your article http://wwwupdate.un.org/wcm/content/site/chronicle/home/archive/issues2012/d... , and elements from the hypothesis of *spiral dynamics* http://www.calresco.org/wp/spiral.htm another ( rather simple ) graph in relation to spiral dynamics http://farm1.static.flickr.com/104/288326085_9b6372b709_b.jpg to get more into depth into such forms of hypothesis I find this pdf of interest http://www.stillpointintegral.com/docs/cook-greuter.pdf and also http://www.clintfuhs.com/files/pdf/Fuhs_Perspective-taking-Appendix.pdf I also just found this link, which seems to make an interesting compilation regarding spiral dynamics https://sites.google.com/site/mumcongress/welcome/home/organizational-and-so... Offcourse,* its just a theory*. There can also be different approaches to such theory. There are various approaches to integral theory, and here is an interesting 2005 text by Michel Bauwens as critique to one of the approaches http://www.kheper.net/topics/Wilber/SDi_critique.html /// I also want to cc Parker Rossman<http://ecolecon.missouri.edu/globalresearch/author.html> , who quite some time ago initiated the following compilation http://ecolecon.missouri.edu/globalresearch/ Before finding out about http://p2pfoundation.net , the compilation Parker initiated has been very useful to me. On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 2:59 AM, June Gorman <[email protected]>wrote:
Dante --
Thank you for those links -- a lot of good stuff there. I like what Sebastian Thrun says, I happen to like Sebastian Thrun and his ideas in general, but I believe that this is a limited understanding of human learning and the field of what truly defines the most important human learning when it is literally reduced to the limits of this medium alone. I wrote an entire paper in the UN Chronicle about this concern, linked here: "Bringing Human Passion into Sustainability Education and Bridging Cultures"<http://wwwupdate.un.org/wcm/content/site/chronicle/home/archive/issues2012/dialogueamongcivilizations/bringinghumanpassionintosustainabilityeducation> and that concern is literally in over-emphasizing education that is cognitively freeing but because of the reduction of the interpersonal-necessary learning, emotionally even more narrowing than our current over-regimentalized schools.
One can learn so much from books, texts, words and even the greater communication that enhances all those other forms and more that can happen on the computer. But I haven't seen much emotional intelligence developed that way, and by that I mean not only empathy, and compassion but far more importantly emotional energy immediate and forceful enough to actually move people to action on account of all this word "learning". I've only ever seen other people do that with people, or occasionally the immediacy of art and human pain relayed together to evoke a responding emotional connection and passion.
I just deeply believe that true human problem-solving on complex human issues, demands a much deeper understanding of this than I have seen come out of the most "wired" places or from the most "wired" people, having lived in and near Silicon Valley a good portion of my adult life.
It's not an either/or for me, but there is something definitely to be concerned about in thinking the computers can do the most critical again, emotional/social/cultural intelligence learning/teaching that it is clear in many cases it hampers and often harms. Unfortunately, I find those most trained in the expertise of machine language and learning, often the ones least able to see much less compensate for this lack.
But love the information you have sent about this here -- still great resources as a part of a larger construct. Best, June
------------------------------ *From:* Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> *To:* June Gorman <[email protected]> *Cc:* P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]>; Myra Jackson <[email protected]> *Sent:* Sunday, October 20, 2013 3:22 PM
*Subject:* Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement
http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Education
On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 5:54 AM, Dante-Gabryell Monson < [email protected]> wrote:
Thank you June for correcting my apparent mis-interpretation of your reply.
I believe it can be part of an equipotential approach , defined in this way
http://p2pfoundation.net/Equipotentiality
a non-credentialist approach : http://p2pfoundation.net/Anti-Credentialism
I remember the story of medieval universities emerging around libraries, as a convergence amongst peers ?
Furthermore, I personally have the tendency to discourage the usage of the word "education", preferring the concept of "learning".
A further potential I hope we can explore further is one of nomadic learning. Learning via contexts and situations, in interaction with a diverse set of realities , encounters, influences.
Cordially, Dante
On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 7:14 PM, June Gorman <[email protected]>wrote:
Hi Dante,
I was in no way suggesting that you saw this as replacing humans with machines. My caution is that there are several very powerful forces in the current models of education being promoted, many under the rubric of "education for sustainable development", that very much do have that exact long-term goal. This in the US, is part of the issue on both sides of the eventual benefit/destruction controversy of public university models promoting the MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) by some of the top private universities in the US. Currently offered many times for free.....but......in the future? And at what loss to the basic premise of universities -- that people from different worlds, views and backgrounds come together in a "combustion" of these different ideas? That often necessitates interpersonal listening and dynamics I haven't seen often well exemplified in truly difficult conversations, on the computers alone.
In the individual case, like yours, many valid points do exist such as you say,
"Such approaches have been central in my own learning - up to a point where I felt I could learn faster / feel less alienated in my learning by leaving school."
Multiple modalities and ways of learning need to be open wide to all to access their preferred way of doing so, and the computer is among these. Even Marco mentions an important one of these with the Boy Scout more Dewyan -- "learn by doing" -- model. But all of these systematic models embody the mostly un-excavated and un-examined prejudices of their dominant instigators and thus in the clear case of the Boy Scouts -- discrimination against girls (handled by funding a separate sex organization in the Girl Guides) and the latest, against homosexuals.
There are also some dominant Western "Enlightenment" and entitlement-based ideologies that systemized certainly sexist models of defining ways of most productive thinking and evening feminine/humanities/irrational/nature vs. masculine/science/rational/technology dichotomies with Father-Force and technology having the thus naturally accepted right to dominate and subjugate "Mother-nature".
This is one reason many females under that system found it very difficult to proceed in their most productive-to-learn ways and style of learning, and one reason many "others" of different groups also find the computer less judgmental of what "intelligence" most mattered in these limited ways found in our standard educational "systems" and thus found it easier to learn on their own. But my concern is that these still underlying judgments of the technological-dominant view of the world prevail and often remain, now with no dissenting "teachers" at all, and will thus be the only view children are "exposed to" at all, to what is most important to learn.
That computers can add to this connecting and learning from others at all ages -- that I think is where your argument is very much more powerful. I completely agree on that point, but it is still necessary to learn the most critical emotional/social/cultural intelligences for a sustainable (healthy, peaceful, caring and more equitable) world only interpersonally with others and critically when children are mostly "emotional" learners and thinkers -- when they are young and until the age of 10 -- before just letting the machines take over.
Which again, is where some "educational policy leaders" are definitely headed, so much more "cost-effective" for getting "test-takers" taught on easily measurable quantitative and thus inherently reductive tests of what that "education" should encompass. I was only arguing that despite its advantages, technology as systematic education can have some very negative outcomes and certainly cautions to consider as well.
Warmly, June
------------------------------ *From:* Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> *To:* June Gorman <[email protected]>; P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> *Cc:* Myra Jackson <[email protected]> *Sent:* Friday, October 18, 2013 9:20 AM *Subject:* Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement
Hi June,
Thanks for your reply,
I personally do not see this as a replacement of humans by the machines.
I rather see the internet as a powerful tool for access to information, both supporting and facilitated by dynamics between learners.
I believe that the pedagogies it can be inspired of are that of Piaget, Montessori, ...
And as Marco underlined, hardly any new self learning ( or mutual learning ) approaches.
What is new, is possibly broader mainstream recognition, possibly supported by the more widespread usage and interconnection of information technologies globally, and in peoples lifestyles, facilitating a shift away of "the expert", or "the teacher" as monopoly in terms of knowledge.
Such approaches have been central in my own learning - up to a point where I felt I could learn faster / feel less alienated in my learning by leaving school.
The challenge, then, for me at least, is to build up recognition through networked approaches, with peers, rather then through top down , centralized certification programs and education environments.
Although one may argue that the tests could at some point confirm the acquired ( self ) learning, the self learner ( or rather, the mutual learners in self organizing approaches ) does not, contrary to official enrolled students, benefit from such "student" status, and at least in my experience, faces pressures from society, even if only in terms of lack of support.
Cordially, Dante
On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 1:37 PM, June Gorman <[email protected]>wrote:
Dante-Gabryell --
This is wonderful stuff. I know of Mitra's work and find it exciting. Some of us in the UN Commons Cluster are working on these ideas as well and how they fit into education of and about all the Commons.
But as a 30+ year (Western-US) teacher and the founder of the *<http://209.172.54.115/>MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be Transformative Education Forum *, I would caution at the over-enthusiasm of the computer-focused translation of this idea of "learner-centered". It is clearly an amazing and freeing tool in countless ways besides providing the "Library of the World" to any child, nearly anywhere with access to one. But it reduces dangerously the historical, pedagogical and epistemological theories of learning and the human child themselves, down to dangerously reductive concepts of what in fact is most important "to learn". Whose "information" gets processed and with what underlying results?
It is one of my deepest concerns with the over-promotion of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) in the Western world, dramatically by "education promoting companies" who want to sell this model to everyone else as the US is currently doing promoting "No Child Left Behind" worldwide through the World Bank and Brookings Institute. But for those of us in the education field all our life, there is definite need to examine these issues, like certain brain theory results accompanying early child exposure to computers as their dominant learner - interaction. The TEF tries to address this issue of needed complete intelligence development with arts, humanities and especially the social/cultural/emotional learning not developed with this priority or technological "default".
Anyway, more is available on this on the TEF website, but particularly the *MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be* TEF Principles<http://209.172.54.115/web/guest/principles>. There is a serious caution here about just how much and what exactly, the "machines" can and do teach when used primarily? So much cheaper though, for those trying to go into the field of education for their own profit and on top of it, leaves out those more philosophical, even human justice and equity arguments that actually really matter for children around the world to ultimately make sense of their lives and societies.
Best, June *June Gorman, Educator and Educational Theorist* Co-founder*, ** <http://209.172.54.115/>MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be Transformative Education Forum (note website re-work, so ignore "non-standard" notification :-)* Education Advisor, <http://www.safepla.net/> *UN SafePlanet Campaign * *Board Project Director for Outreach, I**nternational Model United Nations Association* <http://imuna.org/>* * *Steering Committee, (UNESCO/Global Compact) **K-12 Sector for Sustainability Education *<http://www.uspartnership.org/main/view_archive/1> Member, UN Education Caucus for Sustainable Development Member, UN Commons Cluster
------------------------------ *From:* Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> *To:* p2p-foundation <[email protected]> *Sent:* Friday, October 18, 2013 4:03 AM *Subject:* [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: *Dante-Gabryell Monson* <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 2:16 AM Subject: Wired : learner centered movement To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, " [email protected]" <[email protected]>, " [email protected]" <[email protected]>
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/* * *a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration.* entire article : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/ *student centered movement : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/student-centered-movement/* " TED has created a toolkit full of ideas for jumpstarting student-centered learning in your home, local community, or school. It’s called SOLE: How to Bring Self-Organized Learning Environments to Your Community. Download it here <http://www.ted.com/pages/sole_toolkit> and share your story afterward on the SOLE Tumblr <http://tedsole.tumblr.com/> ." further large excerpts : Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process. ... “If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.” A charismatic and convincing proselytizer, Mitra has become a darling in the tech world. In early 2013 he won a $1 million grant from TED, the global ideas conference, to pursue his work. He’s now in the process of establishing seven “schools in the cloud,” five in India and two in the UK. In India, most of his schools are single-room buildings. There will be no teachers, curriculum, or separation into age groups—just six or so computers and a woman to look after the kids’ safety. His defining principle: “The children are completely in charge.” Mitra argues that the information revolution has enabled a style of learning that wasn’t possible before. ... Mitra’s work has roots in educational practices dating back to Socrates. Theorists from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi to Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori have argued that students should learn by playing and following their curiosity. ... In recent years, researchers have begun backing up those theories with evidence. In a 2011 study, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Iowa scanned the brain activity of 16 people sitting in front of a computer screen. ... The study found that when the subjects controlled their own observations, they exhibited more coordination between the hippocampus and other parts of the brain involved in learning and posted a 23 percent improvement in their ability to remember objects. “The bottom line is, if you’re not the one who’s controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well,” says lead researcher Joel Voss, now a neuroscientist at Northwestern University. ... A similar study at UC Berkeley demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem. “The science is brand-new, but it’s not as if people didn’t have this intuition before,” says coauthor Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. Gopnik’s research is informed in part by advances in artificial intelligence. If you program a robot’s every movement, she says, it can’t adapt to anything unexpected. But when scientists build machines that are programmed to try a variety of motions and learn from mistakes, the robots become far more adaptable and skilled. The same principle applies to children, she says. ... Evolutionary psychologists have also begun exploring this way of thinking. Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who studies children’s natural ways of learning, argues that human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional schooling. Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum. “We’re teaching the child that his questions don’t matter, that what matters are the questions of the curriculum. That’s just not the way natural selection designed us to learn. It designed us to solve problems and figure things out that are part of our real lives.” Some school systems have begun to adapt to this new philosophy—with outsize results. In the 1990s, Finland pared the country’s elementary math curriculum from about 25 pages to four, reduced the school day by an hour, and focused on independence and active learning. By 2003, Finnish students had climbed from the lower rungs of international performance rankings to first place among developed nations. ... Juárez Correa had mixed feelings about the test. His students had succeeded because he had employed a new teaching method, one better suited to the way children learn. It was a model that emphasized group work, competition, creativity, and a student-led environment. So it was ironic that the kids had distinguished themselves because of a conventional multiple-choice test. “These exams are like limits for the teachers,” he says. “They test what you know, not what you can do, and I am more interested in what my students can do.” ... But these examples—involving only thousands of students—are the exceptions to the rule. The system as a whole educates millions and is slow to recognize or adopt successful innovation. It’s a system that was constructed almost two centuries ago to meet the needs of the industrial age. Now that our society and economy have evolved beyond that era, our schools must also be reinvented. ... *Want to help teachers like Sergio Juárez Correa make a difference? Here’s how you can get involved in the student-centered movement<http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/student-centered-movement/> .*
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Note - Just noticed the message to Parker , in cc, bounced back. I just found out he died a few days ago. Rest in peace Parker. Thank you for your contributions. I am happy I could engage in online conversations with him. http://www.columbiamissourian.com/a/166994/parker-rossman-94-worked-toward-s... ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> Date: Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 4:36 PM Subject: Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement To: June Gorman <[email protected]> Cc: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]>, Myra Jackson <[email protected]>, Parker Rossman <[email protected]> Hi June, Thanks for putting these points forward. I realize this is a very broad topic. I am giving some more elements, which extend beyond curriculum , institutionalized education and accreditation. /// did you by any chance hear of a *field of study called "Digital Anthropology" ?* *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_anthropology*<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_anthropology> I like some of Michael Mesch and his students videos http://www.openculture.com/2011/02/michael_wesch_rethinks_education.html one of the more popular / viral ones they produced, and which some of us may have seen ? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o also see : *http://p2pfoundation.net/Tower_and_The_Cloud*<http://p2pfoundation.net/Tower_and_The_Cloud> one of my first finding, 10 or more years ago, on such topics being http://ecolecon.missouri.edu/globalresearch/ /// In the initial example given in the wired article ( http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/) , I remember mention of the students asking questions to the teacher, and the teacher returning with information it can find online, while also opening up *potential for self organization in their learning approach*. I seem to interpret in your message a *concern in relation to reliance on digital mediums ?* What comes to my mind is that some studies indicate *effects on attention span* http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2012/mar/19/atte... although personally, I sense such attention span may also be *contextual*. imho , It is possible to have longer attention spans , *combining various mediums of information, * * * *for example when one has a question one wants to answer, or a field of interest we explore ? * I know from my own experience that I *can spend many hours researching a specific topic, including online.* I can also have a long attention span in watching documentaries, or online presentations, *when they are of interest to me. If not, I can skip through.* Perhaps more of us have such approach ? Having *questions*, and researching online does , for me, speed up access to certain *references*, which in turn *can lead to further questions*, ... progressively building *a puzzle of inter related fields of knowledge* , enabling me to understand and *develop new questions and ideas*, possibly also in support of enabling a *holistic understanding of interconnected realities ?* You mention books : When I find interesting references to books, I may end up reading the books. In some cases, I can find a library locally that has them available. In other cases, I can find references to people who discuss the books, and eventually, if they live locally, meet them, and borrow it from them, while eventually discussing the ideas together, and further open up new questions, or new ideas. I also like to share references, for example via *social bookmarks* https://www.diigo.com/user/dante-gabryell I know Michel and others on this list also use social bookmarks : https://www.diigo.com/user/mbauwens for example *https://www.diigo.com/user/mbauwens/P2P-Learning*<https://www.diigo.com/user/mbauwens/P2P-Learning> Personally *I do not buy books as it costs resources to store them, resources to buy them, resources to transport them.* There are also options such as book crossing ( I did not use it much ) I do miss *an environment for interaction*. I left school ( at age 15, officially 16 ), and spent years traveling. Makerspaces and other informal spaces may open up potentials for certain forms of interaction. I sense there are ( more and more ) movements in the process of supporting the development of such spaces. *Situated cognition, action research learning, communities of practice*, etc are many approaches that can be put into practice, and are put into practice even without being called such. Beyond maker spaces, its a whole new ( some may say, very old ) approach to learning, that can involve the creation of new lifestyles. I also appreciate : *http://p2pfoundation.net/Festivalism* I sense we are developing tools for "real social" networks, that enable an interface between online and face to face, or that have as focus to facilitate face to face meetings. Hospitalitywebsites ( such as bewelcome.org or couchsurfing ) are one of such examples, and a very rich source of learning through encounters and travels. *My own position on learning is that we can use diversity,* *and that such diversity can be introduced yet need not be imposed.* Moocs <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course>, since you mention it, is in my view but only one approach - offering a online environment which seems to have more in connection with an academic approach ? I am also aware that there are discussions being held about cursive hand writing - will it still be taught ? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-14121541 It seems to me that the ( more ) restricted resources put in a linear system of public institutional learning , may lead to leave potentials for a greater diversity of learning out - *p2p, mutual learning may open up potentials of learners beyond any limited curriculum* and more centralized teacher approaches. /// There may be *transitions, including in terms of value systems.* Personally I see potential in *modularity and self organization.* It seems of interest to me to make parallels between elements you describe in your article http://wwwupdate.un.org/wcm/content/site/chronicle/home/archive/issues2012/d... , and elements from the hypothesis of *spiral dynamics* http://www.calresco.org/wp/spiral.htm another ( rather simple ) graph in relation to spiral dynamics http://farm1.static.flickr.com/104/288326085_9b6372b709_b.jpg to get more into depth into such forms of hypothesis I find this pdf of interest http://www.stillpointintegral.com/docs/cook-greuter.pdf and also http://www.clintfuhs.com/files/pdf/Fuhs_Perspective-taking-Appendix.pdf I also just found this link, which seems to make an interesting compilation regarding spiral dynamics https://sites.google.com/site/mumcongress/welcome/home/organizational-and-so... Offcourse,* its just a theory*. There can also be different approaches to such theory. There are various approaches to integral theory, and here is an interesting 2005 text by Michel Bauwens as critique to one of the approaches http://www.kheper.net/topics/Wilber/SDi_critique.html /// I also want to cc Parker Rossman<http://ecolecon.missouri.edu/globalresearch/author.html> , who quite some time ago initiated the following compilation http://ecolecon.missouri.edu/globalresearch/ Before finding out about http://p2pfoundation.net , the compilation Parker initiated has been very useful to me. On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 2:59 AM, June Gorman <[email protected]>wrote:
Dante --
Thank you for those links -- a lot of good stuff there. I like what Sebastian Thrun says, I happen to like Sebastian Thrun and his ideas in general, but I believe that this is a limited understanding of human learning and the field of what truly defines the most important human learning when it is literally reduced to the limits of this medium alone. I wrote an entire paper in the UN Chronicle about this concern, linked here: "Bringing Human Passion into Sustainability Education and Bridging Cultures"<http://wwwupdate.un.org/wcm/content/site/chronicle/home/archive/issues2012/dialogueamongcivilizations/bringinghumanpassionintosustainabilityeducation> and that concern is literally in over-emphasizing education that is cognitively freeing but because of the reduction of the interpersonal-necessary learning, emotionally even more narrowing than our current over-regimentalized schools.
One can learn so much from books, texts, words and even the greater communication that enhances all those other forms and more that can happen on the computer. But I haven't seen much emotional intelligence developed that way, and by that I mean not only empathy, and compassion but far more importantly emotional energy immediate and forceful enough to actually move people to action on account of all this word "learning". I've only ever seen other people do that with people, or occasionally the immediacy of art and human pain relayed together to evoke a responding emotional connection and passion.
I just deeply believe that true human problem-solving on complex human issues, demands a much deeper understanding of this than I have seen come out of the most "wired" places or from the most "wired" people, having lived in and near Silicon Valley a good portion of my adult life.
It's not an either/or for me, but there is something definitely to be concerned about in thinking the computers can do the most critical again, emotional/social/cultural intelligence learning/teaching that it is clear in many cases it hampers and often harms. Unfortunately, I find those most trained in the expertise of machine language and learning, often the ones least able to see much less compensate for this lack.
But love the information you have sent about this here -- still great resources as a part of a larger construct. Best, June
------------------------------ *From:* Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> *To:* June Gorman <[email protected]> *Cc:* P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]>; Myra Jackson <[email protected]> *Sent:* Sunday, October 20, 2013 3:22 PM
*Subject:* Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement
http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Education
On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 5:54 AM, Dante-Gabryell Monson < [email protected]> wrote:
Thank you June for correcting my apparent mis-interpretation of your reply.
I believe it can be part of an equipotential approach , defined in this way
http://p2pfoundation.net/Equipotentiality
a non-credentialist approach : http://p2pfoundation.net/Anti-Credentialism
I remember the story of medieval universities emerging around libraries, as a convergence amongst peers ?
Furthermore, I personally have the tendency to discourage the usage of the word "education", preferring the concept of "learning".
A further potential I hope we can explore further is one of nomadic learning. Learning via contexts and situations, in interaction with a diverse set of realities , encounters, influences.
Cordially, Dante
On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 7:14 PM, June Gorman <[email protected]>wrote:
Hi Dante,
I was in no way suggesting that you saw this as replacing humans with machines. My caution is that there are several very powerful forces in the current models of education being promoted, many under the rubric of "education for sustainable development", that very much do have that exact long-term goal. This in the US, is part of the issue on both sides of the eventual benefit/destruction controversy of public university models promoting the MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) by some of the top private universities in the US. Currently offered many times for free.....but......in the future? And at what loss to the basic premise of universities -- that people from different worlds, views and backgrounds come together in a "combustion" of these different ideas? That often necessitates interpersonal listening and dynamics I haven't seen often well exemplified in truly difficult conversations, on the computers alone.
In the individual case, like yours, many valid points do exist such as you say,
"Such approaches have been central in my own learning - up to a point where I felt I could learn faster / feel less alienated in my learning by leaving school."
Multiple modalities and ways of learning need to be open wide to all to access their preferred way of doing so, and the computer is among these. Even Marco mentions an important one of these with the Boy Scout more Dewyan -- "learn by doing" -- model. But all of these systematic models embody the mostly un-excavated and un-examined prejudices of their dominant instigators and thus in the clear case of the Boy Scouts -- discrimination against girls (handled by funding a separate sex organization in the Girl Guides) and the latest, against homosexuals.
There are also some dominant Western "Enlightenment" and entitlement-based ideologies that systemized certainly sexist models of defining ways of most productive thinking and evening feminine/humanities/irrational/nature vs. masculine/science/rational/technology dichotomies with Father-Force and technology having the thus naturally accepted right to dominate and subjugate "Mother-nature".
This is one reason many females under that system found it very difficult to proceed in their most productive-to-learn ways and style of learning, and one reason many "others" of different groups also find the computer less judgmental of what "intelligence" most mattered in these limited ways found in our standard educational "systems" and thus found it easier to learn on their own. But my concern is that these still underlying judgments of the technological-dominant view of the world prevail and often remain, now with no dissenting "teachers" at all, and will thus be the only view children are "exposed to" at all, to what is most important to learn.
That computers can add to this connecting and learning from others at all ages -- that I think is where your argument is very much more powerful. I completely agree on that point, but it is still necessary to learn the most critical emotional/social/cultural intelligences for a sustainable (healthy, peaceful, caring and more equitable) world only interpersonally with others and critically when children are mostly "emotional" learners and thinkers -- when they are young and until the age of 10 -- before just letting the machines take over.
Which again, is where some "educational policy leaders" are definitely headed, so much more "cost-effective" for getting "test-takers" taught on easily measurable quantitative and thus inherently reductive tests of what that "education" should encompass. I was only arguing that despite its advantages, technology as systematic education can have some very negative outcomes and certainly cautions to consider as well.
Warmly, June
------------------------------ *From:* Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> *To:* June Gorman <[email protected]>; P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> *Cc:* Myra Jackson <[email protected]> *Sent:* Friday, October 18, 2013 9:20 AM *Subject:* Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement
Hi June,
Thanks for your reply,
I personally do not see this as a replacement of humans by the machines.
I rather see the internet as a powerful tool for access to information, both supporting and facilitated by dynamics between learners.
I believe that the pedagogies it can be inspired of are that of Piaget, Montessori, ...
And as Marco underlined, hardly any new self learning ( or mutual learning ) approaches.
What is new, is possibly broader mainstream recognition, possibly supported by the more widespread usage and interconnection of information technologies globally, and in peoples lifestyles, facilitating a shift away of "the expert", or "the teacher" as monopoly in terms of knowledge.
Such approaches have been central in my own learning - up to a point where I felt I could learn faster / feel less alienated in my learning by leaving school.
The challenge, then, for me at least, is to build up recognition through networked approaches, with peers, rather then through top down , centralized certification programs and education environments.
Although one may argue that the tests could at some point confirm the acquired ( self ) learning, the self learner ( or rather, the mutual learners in self organizing approaches ) does not, contrary to official enrolled students, benefit from such "student" status, and at least in my experience, faces pressures from society, even if only in terms of lack of support.
Cordially, Dante
On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 1:37 PM, June Gorman <[email protected]>wrote:
Dante-Gabryell --
This is wonderful stuff. I know of Mitra's work and find it exciting. Some of us in the UN Commons Cluster are working on these ideas as well and how they fit into education of and about all the Commons.
But as a 30+ year (Western-US) teacher and the founder of the *<http://209.172.54.115/>MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be Transformative Education Forum *, I would caution at the over-enthusiasm of the computer-focused translation of this idea of "learner-centered". It is clearly an amazing and freeing tool in countless ways besides providing the "Library of the World" to any child, nearly anywhere with access to one. But it reduces dangerously the historical, pedagogical and epistemological theories of learning and the human child themselves, down to dangerously reductive concepts of what in fact is most important "to learn". Whose "information" gets processed and with what underlying results?
It is one of my deepest concerns with the over-promotion of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) in the Western world, dramatically by "education promoting companies" who want to sell this model to everyone else as the US is currently doing promoting "No Child Left Behind" worldwide through the World Bank and Brookings Institute. But for those of us in the education field all our life, there is definite need to examine these issues, like certain brain theory results accompanying early child exposure to computers as their dominant learner - interaction. The TEF tries to address this issue of needed complete intelligence development with arts, humanities and especially the social/cultural/emotional learning not developed with this priority or technological "default".
Anyway, more is available on this on the TEF website, but particularly the *MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be* TEF Principles<http://209.172.54.115/web/guest/principles>. There is a serious caution here about just how much and what exactly, the "machines" can and do teach when used primarily? So much cheaper though, for those trying to go into the field of education for their own profit and on top of it, leaves out those more philosophical, even human justice and equity arguments that actually really matter for children around the world to ultimately make sense of their lives and societies.
Best, June *June Gorman, Educator and Educational Theorist* Co-founder*, ** <http://209.172.54.115/>MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "209.172.54.115" claiming to be Transformative Education Forum (note website re-work, so ignore "non-standard" notification :-)* Education Advisor, <http://www.safepla.net/> *UN SafePlanet Campaign * *Board Project Director for Outreach, I**nternational Model United Nations Association* <http://imuna.org/>* * *Steering Committee, (UNESCO/Global Compact) **K-12 Sector for Sustainability Education *<http://www.uspartnership.org/main/view_archive/1> Member, UN Education Caucus for Sustainable Development Member, UN Commons Cluster
------------------------------ *From:* Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> *To:* p2p-foundation <[email protected]> *Sent:* Friday, October 18, 2013 4:03 AM *Subject:* [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: *Dante-Gabryell Monson* <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 2:16 AM Subject: Wired : learner centered movement To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, " [email protected]" <[email protected]>, " [email protected]" <[email protected]>
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/* * *a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration.* entire article : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/ *student centered movement : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/student-centered-movement/* " TED has created a toolkit full of ideas for jumpstarting student-centered learning in your home, local community, or school. It’s called SOLE: How to Bring Self-Organized Learning Environments to Your Community. Download it here <http://www.ted.com/pages/sole_toolkit> and share your story afterward on the SOLE Tumblr <http://tedsole.tumblr.com/> ." further large excerpts : Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process. ... “If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.” A charismatic and convincing proselytizer, Mitra has become a darling in the tech world. In early 2013 he won a $1 million grant from TED, the global ideas conference, to pursue his work. He’s now in the process of establishing seven “schools in the cloud,” five in India and two in the UK. In India, most of his schools are single-room buildings. There will be no teachers, curriculum, or separation into age groups—just six or so computers and a woman to look after the kids’ safety. His defining principle: “The children are completely in charge.” Mitra argues that the information revolution has enabled a style of learning that wasn’t possible before. ... Mitra’s work has roots in educational practices dating back to Socrates. Theorists from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi to Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori have argued that students should learn by playing and following their curiosity. ... In recent years, researchers have begun backing up those theories with evidence. In a 2011 study, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Iowa scanned the brain activity of 16 people sitting in front of a computer screen. ... The study found that when the subjects controlled their own observations, they exhibited more coordination between the hippocampus and other parts of the brain involved in learning and posted a 23 percent improvement in their ability to remember objects. “The bottom line is, if you’re not the one who’s controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well,” says lead researcher Joel Voss, now a neuroscientist at Northwestern University. ... A similar study at UC Berkeley demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem. “The science is brand-new, but it’s not as if people didn’t have this intuition before,” says coauthor Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. Gopnik’s research is informed in part by advances in artificial intelligence. If you program a robot’s every movement, she says, it can’t adapt to anything unexpected. But when scientists build machines that are programmed to try a variety of motions and learn from mistakes, the robots become far more adaptable and skilled. The same principle applies to children, she says. ... Evolutionary psychologists have also begun exploring this way of thinking. Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who studies children’s natural ways of learning, argues that human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional schooling. Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum. “We’re teaching the child that his questions don’t matter, that what matters are the questions of the curriculum. That’s just not the way natural selection designed us to learn. It designed us to solve problems and figure things out that are part of our real lives.” Some school systems have begun to adapt to this new philosophy—with outsize results. In the 1990s, Finland pared the country’s elementary math curriculum from about 25 pages to four, reduced the school day by an hour, and focused on independence and active learning. By 2003, Finnish students had climbed from the lower rungs of international performance rankings to first place among developed nations. ... Juárez Correa had mixed feelings about the test. His students had succeeded because he had employed a new teaching method, one better suited to the way children learn. It was a model that emphasized group work, competition, creativity, and a student-led environment. So it was ironic that the kids had distinguished themselves because of a conventional multiple-choice test. “These exams are like limits for the teachers,” he says. “They test what you know, not what you can do, and I am more interested in what my students can do.” ... But these examples—involving only thousands of students—are the exceptions to the rule. The system as a whole educates millions and is slow to recognize or adopt successful innovation. It’s a system that was constructed almost two centuries ago to meet the needs of the industrial age. Now that our society and economy have evolved beyond that era, our schools must also be reinvented. ... *Want to help teachers like Sergio Juárez Correa make a difference? Here’s how you can get involved in the student-centered movement<http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/student-centered-movement/> .*
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On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 13:03:27 PM +0200, Michel Bauwens wrote:
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/
a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive... ...
hardly "radical new". As I tweeted when I first found that piece, this sounds a lot like Scouting as it was meant to be since 1907. Compare:
Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another.
with, just to name the first 3 pages I found in a 1-minute search: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scout_method#Self-learning or "Learning through doing" in http://infed.org/mobi/robert-baden-powell-as-an-educational-innovator/ and "progressive self-education" in http://scoutdocs.ca/Documents/Fundamental_Principles.php Marco
Yes, Marco, I agree. It's hardly new or radical. On the other hand, having worked in education for over 15 years, and an active reformer, I can say that it's one of the hardest places to achieve change. So I believe that we need to support every effort that makes education more learner-centered and p2p. I know Sugata and have followed his work since 2003. Anecdotely, he has had remarkable results, and I fully support his continued lab-baseed research. There has been criticism that he needs to back it up with scientific data and I was glad to see in the Wired article, the references to studies on learning impact. We would be wise to support this work or augment it in whatever way we can, while replacing the label of "new and radical" with, perhaps, "necessary". Steve Ediger On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 10:22 AM, M. Fioretti <[email protected]> wrote:
On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 13:03:27 PM +0200, Michel Bauwens wrote:
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/
a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive... ...
hardly "radical new". As I tweeted when I first found that piece, this sounds a lot like Scouting as it was meant to be since 1907. Compare:
Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another.
with, just to name the first 3 pages I found in a 1-minute search:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scout_method#Self-learning
or "Learning through doing" in
http://infed.org/mobi/robert-baden-powell-as-an-educational-innovator/
and "progressive self-education" in http://scoutdocs.ca/Documents/Fundamental_Principles.php
Marco
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On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 12:19:49 PM -0500, Steve Ediger wrote:
Yes, Marco, I agree. It's hardly new or radical.
On the other hand, having worked in education for over 15 years, and an active reformer, I can say that it's one of the hardest places to achieve change.
So true!
We would be wise to support this work or augment it in whatever way we can, while replacing the label of "new and radical" with, perhaps, "necessary".
you're preaching to the choir :-) In fact, my critique was only to the author of the article, not to the proposal itself!
On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 7:03 AM, Michel Bauwens <[email protected]>wrote: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: *Dante-Gabryell Monson* <[email protected]> entire article : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/ The article lists BIG WAVES in the contemporary free learning, and names people who talk about each wave. - computer-based explorations, Sugata Mitra, Nicholas Negroponte - freeschools, Peter Gray - cognitive and neuroscience studies, Joel Voss, Alison Gopnik I would like to expand this list. Here are my suggestions: - the Maker movement - homeschoolers, unschoolers - computer-based modular expert systems for networks of learners (e.g. Project Euler) More? Cheers, Dr. Maria Droujkova moebiusnoodles.com 919-388-1721 =~+~=
:) Thanks Maria This is a list of spaces , which may correspond to the spirit http://emergentbydesign.com/2012/01/08/93-superhero-schools-collaboratories-... As for names for such approaches... Connectivism may be one of such learning approaches ? ( some see it as related to constructivism ? ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectivism ... I am very tempted, though this may be more general, to add Buckminster Fuller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller and Ivan Illich ( " Tools for Conviviality" , ... ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich ... I wish to put forward the suggestion and potential for some of us who are in Europe ( or those that can easily make it to europe ) to organize some collective for a week or two on such topics. A not for profit is making available this space in Antwerp , though it will take at least a few months before the place can be made hospitable enough to welcome people http://sharewiki.org/en/Antwerp_Collective Cordially, Dante On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 2:55 PM, Maria Droujkova <[email protected]>wrote:
On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 7:03 AM, Michel Bauwens <[email protected]>wrote:
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]>
entire article : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/
The article lists BIG WAVES in the contemporary free learning, and names people who talk about each wave.
- computer-based explorations, Sugata Mitra, Nicholas Negroponte - freeschools, Peter Gray - cognitive and neuroscience studies, Joel Voss, Alison Gopnik
I would like to expand this list. Here are my suggestions: - the Maker movement - homeschoolers, unschoolers - computer-based modular expert systems for networks of learners (e.g. Project Euler)
More?
Cheers, Dr. Maria Droujkova moebiusnoodles.com 919-388-1721 =~+~=
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On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 4:31 PM, Dante-Gabryell Monson < [email protected]> wrote: :) Thanks Maria This is a list of spaces , which may correspond to the spirit http://emergentbydesign.com/2012/01/08/93-superhero-schools-collaboratories-... As for names for such approaches... Connectivism may be one of such learning approaches ? ( some see it as related to constructivism ? ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectivism ... I am very tempted, though this may be more general, to add Buckminster Fuller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller and Ivan Illich ( " Tools for Conviviality" , ... ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich Thank you! These general resources help as well, because people who actively follow Buckminster Fuller ideas (for example) tend to form flexible learning/working groups more than other demographics. Very helpful! Cheers, Dr. Maria Droujkova moebiusnoodles.com 919-388-1721 =~+~+~=
Thanks Maria. I found this 2007 archive, copied below, where Michel shared a list of references from the wiki, in reply to a longer thread which I initially titled *" No curriculum , No students , No teachers / but Interconnected Questions , Initiatives , and Peers of all ages CREATING - with access to Unlimited Knowledge Pools "* longer thread reposted here https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/econowmix/qGFtigVrVqA note : R.I.P. Parker Rossman ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Michel Bauwens < [email protected] <[email protected]>> Date: May 7, 2007 9:26 AM Subject: Re: No curriculum , No students , No teachers / but Interconnected Questions , Initiatives , and Peers of all ages CREATING - with access to Unlimited Knowledge Pools To: Parker Rossman <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected], Hi Parker, some links that may be of interest to your investigation, all collated from our p2p learning pages, see also the inspiring citations at the bottom: http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Education http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Educational_Resources <http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Educational_Resources> http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Textbooks tags http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/Open-Education <http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/Open-Education> http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/Open-Textbooks http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/P2P-Learning misc on free curricula http://opencontent.org/blog/ http://www.eliteskills.com/free_education/?foo=x http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Free_Curricula_Center http://opencontent.org/ocwfinder/ various open concepts as related to education - OER Commons <http://www.p2pfoundation.net/OER_Commons> - One Laptop per Child<http://www.p2pfoundation.net/One_Laptop_per_Child> - Online Gradebooks <http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Online_Gradebooks> - Online Learning Communities<http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Online_Learning_Communities> - Open Access <http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Access> - Open Archives <http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Archives> - Open Archives Initiative<http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Archives_Initiative> - Open Biology <http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Biology> - Open Code <http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Code> - Open Content <http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Content> - Open CourseWare Finder<http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_CourseWare_Finder> - Open Courseware Initiative<http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Courseware_Initiative> - Open Curriculum Movement<http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Curriculum_Movement> - Open Data <http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Data> - Open Education <http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Education> - Open Education 2006 <http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Education_2006> - Open Educational Resources<http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Educational_Resources> - Open Learning <http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Learning> - Open Media Registry <http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Media_Registry> - Open Science <http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Science> - Open Source Education Models<http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Source_Education_Models> - Open Source Knowledge Building<http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Source_Knowledge_Building> - Open Source Schools <http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Source_Schools> - Open Source Software Distribution Initiative<http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Source_Software_Distribution_Initiative> - Open Source Virtual Worlds<http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Source_Virtual_Worlds> - Open Textbooks <http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Textbooks> citations Citation 1: The Open Education movement is gaining momentum "*The field of open education is gaining momentum around the world. Literally hundreds of open education projects are springing up from Tokyo to Boston to Paris to Beijing. Over 2000 courses are now available through OpenCourseWare projects alone. Add to this the growing number of open access learning object repositories, increases in the number and quality ofopen source educational software projects, the open education work agencies like UNESCO and the OECD are doing, and the field is diversifying as quickly as it is growing.*." ( http://cosl.usu.edu/conferences/opened2006/ <http://cosl.usu.edu/conferences/opened2006/> ) Citation 2: Schools need to open up to peer-based learning models "When you look at children's learning outside school, it is driven by what they are interested in, which is the direct opposite of school-based learning. For example, inthe United States a group of students were interested in Manga, the Japanese animated cartoons. In order to get hold of them before they were due to arrive on themarket, this group got together, taught themselves Japanese, subtitling and web streaming, because they were motivated to. What is the relationship with this idea that education is handing down a general baseof knowledge? I think that is one of the tensions. When you look at learning in the home you see knowledge-building communities. Children can act as teachers, they are allowed to adopt different identities and they are not just learners. They have control over the time of their learning and how long it will take. The school system needs to know a lot more about what is happening outside school in terms of children's passions, interests and abilities than it does at themoment. *We need a shift towards an education system that is about listening to what thelearners are bringing into the school situation, as well as thinking about an education system that is pushing things out*." ( http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2006/07/smart_learning_.html <http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2006/07/smart_learning_.html> ) [ edit<http://www.p2pfoundation.net/More_Citations_about_Peer_to_Peer_Learning?title=More_Citations_about_Peer_to_Peer_Learning&action=edit§ion=3> ] Citation 3: the Learning 2.0 approach "The traditional approach to e-learning has been to employ the use of a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), software that is often cumbersome and expensive - and which tends to be structured around courses, timetables, and testing. That is an approach that is too often driven by the needs of the institution rather than theindividual learner. In contrast, e-learning 2.0 (as coined by Stephen Downes) takes a 'small pieces, loosely joined' approach that combines the use of discrete but complementary tools and web services - such as blogs, wikis, and other social software - to support the creation of ad-hoc learning communities." ( http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/e-learning_20.php <http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/e-learning_20.php> ) [ edit<http://www.p2pfoundation.net/More_Citations_about_Peer_to_Peer_Learning?title=More_Citations_about_Peer_to_Peer_Learning&action=edit§ion=4> ] Citation 4: Education is diverging from schooling "Education, the means by which young people learn the skills necessary to succeed in their place and time, is diverging from schooling. Media-literacy-wise, education is happening now after school and on weekends and when the teacher isn't looking, in the SMS messages, MySpace pages, blog posts, podcasts, videoblogs that technology-equipped digital natives exchange among themselves. This population is both self-guided and in need of guidance, and although a willingness to learn new media by point-and-click exploration might come naturally to today's student cohort, there's nothing innate about knowing how to apply their skills tothe processes of democracy." ( http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2006/11/14/participatory_media_and_the_pedagogy.htm<http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2006/11/14/participatory_media_and_the_pedagogy.htm> ) [ edit<http://www.p2pfoundation.net/More_Citations_about_Peer_to_Peer_Learning?title=More_Citations_about_Peer_to_Peer_Learning&action=edit§ion=5> ] Citation 5: Theresa Williamson on The power ofpeer teaching *"Everybody knows the proverb about how it's better to teach a man to fish than just to give him a fish, but there's a step beyond that: it's better that a man's neighbor is the one teaching him to fish, his peer. If some expert swoops in from afar you miss half the value of the interaction because of the inequality in that relationship. But if it's his peer teaching him? Then the man is much more likely to offer something in return. You are much more likely to create a real sustainable relationship rather than just a new dependency*." Theresa Williamson, Founder, Catalytic Communities ( http://www.nextbillion.net/node/1723 <http://www.nextbillion.net/node/1723> ) [ edit<http://www.p2pfoundation.net/More_Citations_about_Peer_to_Peer_Learning?title=More_Citations_about_Peer_to_Peer_Learning&action=edit§ion=6> ] Citation 6: John Maloney on the new knowledge leaders
From http://www.kmcluster.com/ (newsletter, 2004)
*"The silent killers of effective knowledge leadership are the pervasive 20th-century traditions of linear, mechanical and reductionist thinking paired with their obsolete managerial behaviours of control, dominance and technocracy.* Top knowledge leaders routinely 'suspend their disbelief' to unlearn their harmful industrial-era habits and models. They learn from the emerging future through authentic conversation. 21st-century knowledge leaders actively pursue external interactions and continuously use genuine action/research networks to their strategic and collaborative advantage." [ edit<http://www.p2pfoundation.net/More_Citations_about_Peer_to_Peer_Learning?title=More_Citations_about_Peer_to_Peer_Learning&action=edit§ion=7> ] Citation 7: From learning "just in case" to "learning on demand" Paul D. Fernhout: "Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change." ( http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.htm... <http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html> ) On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 3:56 AM, Maria Droujkova <[email protected]> wrote:
On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 4:31 PM, Dante-Gabryell Monson < [email protected]> wrote:
:)
Thanks Maria
This is a list of spaces , which may correspond to the spirit
http://emergentbydesign.com/2012/01/08/93-superhero-schools-collaboratories-...
As for names for such approaches...
Connectivism may be one of such learning approaches ? ( some see it as related to constructivism ? ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectivism
... I am very tempted, though this may be more general, to add Buckminster Fuller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller and Ivan Illich ( " Tools for Conviviality" , ... ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich
Thank you! These general resources help as well, because people who actively follow Buckminster Fuller ideas (for example) tend to form flexible learning/working groups more than other demographics.
Very helpful!
Cheers, Dr. Maria Droujkova moebiusnoodles.com 919-388-1721 =~+~+~=
participants (7)
-
Anna Harris -
Dante-Gabryell Monson -
June Gorman -
M. Fioretti -
Maria Droujkova -
Michel Bauwens -
Steve Ediger