E-flections

I’ve just presented a paper at the SOLSTICE e- learning conferences recently, so I thought I’d catch up with some of the trends that emerged, particularly where they cross over with journalism and media.

Les Watson, an expert on developing learning spaces  gave a presentation entitled ‘from Space to Place’, about how to create the learning places and spaces of the future, and made some bold statements. He was part of the team that brought the Saltire centre to Glasgow Caledonian, described as rewriting the rulebook for libraries in the 21st century. He opened with a bold statement that we have no established paradigm for 21st cent education, and that today’s students are no longer the people our education system was designed to teach. as a specialist in creating built environments that enhance learnign, he made the challenging assertion that

‘All buildings are predictions about the future’, and that ‘All predictions are wrong,’ but then he argued that ‘you can design them so that it doesn’t matter’ if the system is designed to fit the individual rather than the individual to fit the system

He proposed  that we are moving from the age of information to the age of creation, an age where Know how who and why will be more important than know what. In this transformation, our paradigms shift: our dominant way of doing, knowing and creating value moves from instruction to construction, analysis to synthesise, reactive to creative, quality controlled to quality assured.

What is creativity and how can it be enhanced. Tests of ‘creativity’ levels as we age make pretty depressing reading, for the 3-5 age group 98% show high levels of creative potential, but the numbers fall dramatically as we develop through the education system, from 32% for 8-10, 10% for 11-18 to a miserable
2% for those aged 25+.

Watson’s  solution to this is empowering Imagination, and he argues that we are moving into an  Age of Play, where learning takes place in an environment of stimulation, personal expression, excitement  and enjoyment. The key thing is to enhance the possibility of  Flow experiences , when there is a perfect balance between challenge and skill, when both are at a high level we get those ‘in the zone’ moments when everything just feels right, time flies by and we are utterly engaged with what we are doing.

Eric Hamilton of Pepperdine University in California predicted a new ‘golden age’ of education , where the imaginative deployment of technology could unlock the ‘flow’ of creativity, both for individuals and for groups. he stated that ‘Our collective intelligence is staggering’, but we continue to ‘We squander the time and  treasure of  childhood with a just in case educational model’

He flagged up 8 key trends that he saw developing, trends that were interlinked and informed and shaped each other. He identified them as

Increased Sightlines – technology allows much greater ‘seeing’ by the educator into the world of the learner – e.g. through blogs and e portfolios, or live poling in the classroom, or wifi enabled interactive tablet computers with shared desktops

Conceptual Modelling – moving towards a systems theory of knowledge, modelling knowledge into concepts rather than just masses of unrelated facts. This entails a move from information being supplied ‘just in case’ we might need to know it to ‘just in time’ when we need to know it

Personalisation of learning – the structure of the institution is aligned to the individual rather than the other way around, and becomes plastic’ modelling itself around the learner

Community of learning – web 2.0 expands the community both within and without the institution

Self regulated learning – This entails a move from information being supplied ‘just in case’ we might need to know it to ‘just in time’ when we need to know it. Searching skills and metacognitive skills are paramount

Contextual fluidity – we are in a world of switching modalities, from virtual to real, analytic to synthetic,

Exponential growth of Interactional bandwidth – which increases the capacity of learning environment to mediate meaningful content and community

Generativity – expanding creative, imaginative settings

and he concluded by setting 4 grand challenges that he saw for 21st century education:

Develop an Ultra deep model of collaboration

Unlock group flow in collaboration – he whole group being ‘in the zone’

Agility in learning thru life cycle

Enhance our role in influencing global social transformation

Drawing the threads together
So a lot of these themes  have parallels with media, the questions for both are similar: how do we engage the audience, stimulate and inform them, and how do we get them to trust or believe us, and to maintain that trust. Both media and education are transforming from the be all and end all of knowledge in a top down way into spaces that act as guides; like a trusted friend that we go to for advice on how to make sense of a problem, to point  us in the right direction to the understanding we want.

Essentially both are trying to do the same thing, deliver information, knowledge opinion and understanding to a mass audience of individuals, an audience that is increasingly sophisticated in searching and finding such material from a variety of sources, both universities and media outlets are operating in a competitive environment, and rely enormously on their ‘brand’ as a way of getting their users to ‘believe’ in what they are producing. And both have moved from being the single authoritative source of information to being one of many, and are shifting from a model of an essentially passive audience being given material in a linear, didactic way, into gatekeepers for a mass of other sources,

And what kind of ‘spaces and places’ will this interaction take place – physical ones like campuses or print newspapers and magazines, or virtual ones thru web 2.0 technologies, or some combination of both. The key theme seems to be that this is not an ‘either or’ but a ‘both’, a hybrid form where physical and virtual space will overlap, integrate and synthesise, so that we create learning and information spaces around us that are more efficient, exciting, stimulating and ultimately playful.  In this world, the university, and the newspaper, acts more like a guide or mentor than a teacher or prophet.