[P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement

Fri Oct 18 19:14:48 CEST 2013

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 <dante.monson at gmail.com>
To: June Gorman <june_gorman at sbcglobal.net>; P2P Foundation mailing list <p2p-foundation at lists.ourproject.org> 
Cc: Myra Jackson <mljack19 at gmail.com> 
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 <june_gorman at sbcglobal.net> 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.
>
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>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?
>
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>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".
>
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>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.
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>
>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
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>
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>________________________________
> From: Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net>
>To: p2p-foundation <p2p-foundation at lists.ourproject.org> 
>Sent: Friday, October 18, 2013 4:03 AM
>Subject: [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement
> 
>
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>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
>Date: Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 2:16 AM
>Subject: Wired : learner centered movement
>To: "econowmix at googlegroups.com" <econowmix at googlegroups.com>, "netention-dev at googlegroups.com" <netention-dev at googlegroups.com>, "global-survival at googlegroups.com" <global-survival at googlegroups.com>
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>
>http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/
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>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/
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>" 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 :
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>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.
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>...
>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.
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>...
>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.
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>...
>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.”
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>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.
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>...
>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.”
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>...
>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.
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