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Counting the cost

When we talk about the future of learning, we talk about the future of society. Most will agree that good education contributes significantly toward the wellbeing and prosperity of society. Without a trained, educated work force, nation states are not in a position to compete within the global economy. You only have to look at any emerging nation of the world where there is poor or partial compulsory education provision to see exactly how its economy is faring. Moreover, the higher the number of people unemployed, the more drain there will be on the economic and social resources of the state. This is the main reason why successive governments load their deck so heavily in favour of improved educational provision. It is politically expedient and it is also socially and economically desirable to seek to improve the state funded education provision. And it is why most changes imposed by governments don't actually work. This is because the governments of the world often remain blinded by economic considerations, and fail to see the true value of good education. Our leaders know the price of education, but have no idea about its true value.

Education is not just about preparing children for a world of work, and it is more than an organised attempt to secure the economic future of the nation. Education is far more valuable than that. How can we ignore the simple joy of learning? How can we measure the cultural value of learning about art, music, science, faith - the world around us? What price can we place on leading young people to maturity of thought, where they become discerning and critically aware individuals, able to decide for themselves what is right or wrong in the world? How do we place a price tag on enabling children to channel their fertile imaginations into precious, creative, transformative outcomes?

The answer is, we can't ... and we shouldn't. When the world falls apart around us, what we will be left with - is what we have learnt. And while the good people of Christchurch, New Zealand, are struggling to come to terms with their tragic losses, resulting from yesterday's devastating earthquake, what will they be doing? They will be surviving, escaping, organising, caring, sharing, coping, communicating, collaborating, rebuilding, reflecting and reappraising, and drawing on many other valuable skills they have learnt. Skills that go way beyond the mere acquisition of facts and knowledge. They will be drawing upon their emotional and intellectual resources which do not result solely from immersion in a 'curriculum', but rather through their exposure to the values and mores of their community.

As the news of the Christchurch earthquake broke yesterday, many people drew on their social media communication skills to connect with each other, providing vital information and sharing news, in a virtual community that spanned the globe. They achieved this without the help of the broadcast media, who were once again hours behind in reporting from the scene. We received reports from citizen journalists, people caught up in the drama of the moment, using their mobile phones to send out their pleas for help, and their remarkable but disturbing pictures and videos of the scenes they were witnessing before them. Such actions cannot be taught. There is no curriculum that can be developed to give us an appreciation of what we should do in a disaster or a crisis, no way to teach how we can communicate human tragedy as it unfolds. We learn by doing and we learn by being exposed to these experiences. And as we learn, others learn with us and from us. As a community, we somehow survive and ultimately, thrive. Lifelong learning is what education is made of. It was never about knowing what, always about knowing how. Let us never confuse schooling with education. If we do, what will be our future?

Dedicated to the memory of those lost in the Christchurch earthquake of 22 February, 2011.

Donate to the Red Cross NZ Earthquake victims fund

Image source by Martin Luff


Counting the cost by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Heating the house or burning it down?

My public keynote yesterday in the trade fair arena at the LearnTEC Trade Fair and Conference in Karlsruhe, Germany was quite an experience. I wore a microphone headset which made me feel like an astronaut (but alas none could be found, despite the close proximity to Darmstadt European Space Agency Centre). The headset didn't make me look like Michael McIntyre, but it certainly gave me a lot of freedom to move around the audience and interact dynamically with them, and with over 300 people crowding in from all parts of the arena, we had an interesting and fast moving session. I presented a talk entitled: The future of learning: Web 2.0, Web 3.0 and the eXtended Web (Slideset here) which seemed to capture the mood of the conference. They like talking about the future here at LearnTEC, even if it is uncertain (the future, not LearnTEC - which seems to be growing from strength to strength, already in its 19th year, with 6000 exhibition visitors and 1200 conference delegates over the three day event).

I talked about how the Web, in all its incarnations, is changing the way learning can be conducted, and discussed the impact of mobile technologies. We touched on a number of new and emergent technologies including augmented reality (AR) and non-touch, natural gesture interfaces such as the XBox 360 Kinect and MIT's Sixth Sense wearable. At the end there was at least 15 minutes of questions and discussions, and I could tell from the questions that everyone seemed to be thinking deeply about what was being said. It was an ideal environment for this presentation, as hopefully the pictures above will show. To be deep in the heart of exhibitor land, and with many of the exhibitors leaving their stands to participate, just has to be a way forward in the context of the debate on the divide between vendor and practitioner (see the comments on my previous post for the discussion thread).

One of the comments from conference convenor Prof Peter Henning was that the discovery of fire was a game changer. I added in my response that perhaps it was not the discovery of fire that was so important, but the discovery of the ability to make fire. We discussed the disruptive innovation of the Gutenberg Press (invented so close to Karlsruhe, in Heidelberg) and its role �n democratising knowledge. Previous to movable type setting, publishing was extremely limited, but with the introduction of mass affordable publishing came the need to develop the entire population's literacy skills. My message to the audience was that with the introduction of social media and semantic web technologies, a new disruption is now occuring - and we now need new literacies - digital literacies for the entire population. We also discussed how to harness the excitement and richness of informal learning within formalised contexts, and how the future of learning will rely for its success on preparing young people not to learn facts (which are often outdated by the time students graduate) but to instill within them all the ability to learn how to learn, solve problems and adapt quickly to changing situations. The final message for the audience was that just as with fire, web tools have the capability to be used skillfully, or badly, and without care. We can either heat the home, or we can burn the house down.

Image source by Gudrun Porath


Heating the house or burning it down? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Our viral web

We are all Big Brother now. Not in the Orwellian dystopic sense of course. But we all have access to the power of social media, and with appropriate use, and with enough of us involved, we are all watchers - and we can all make a difference. Reading a blog post by Jonathan MacDonald today got me thinking about the vast, untapped potential of the social web to inform, challenge, educate and motivate. MacDonald witnessed a tube train guard threatening and verbally abusing a passenger. He reported it online, sharing his outrage with his social network. The story went viral, spreading rapidly across other networks. YouTube, Twitter and the rest of the social media family were quickly unundated with comments and views. Within 24 hours, the story (and others of a similar nature) had made it into the mainstream on traditional mass media, where it was covered by the likes of BBC TV News and Sky TV News, The Telegraph and The Daily Mail. Even the Mayor of London joined in with the discussion. The guard was subsequently suspended and is under investigation.

In an interesting episode last year, I personally experienced the power of the viral web through Wikipedia Commons. I took several pictures of Punk Godfather Malcolm McLaren when he spoke at Handheld Learning 2009 in London. The next day I posted his picture onto my Flickr account and licenced it under Creative Commons for free sharing and re-use. Subsequently others loaded it up in several versions to Wikimedia Commons. None of us were aware at the time, but Malcolm's speech was to be one of his last public appearances before his untimely death in 2010. The media went into overdrive, and of course, searched around for images they could freely use to illustrate their stories.

Many journals and newspapers found and used my image of McLaren, with me duly credited as the photographer. My photo even graces his Wikipedia page (in all language versions). My name is now forever linked to that of Malcolm McLaren. A simple search on Google using his name and mine together will deliver you hundreds of hits. Try it. It's an example of a picture going viral on the web. There are many other examples of the viral spreading of images, videos, sound bites and ideas - some are legendary. They become memes as people pass them on quickly across the social web from one to another. There are also many examples of citizen journalism, where those who are actually present at the scene of an incident can upload their images quickly, or can tweet their observations instantly, for sharing to a potentially world wide audience on the web. The truth of what is happening becomes common knowledge, even before the press can get there to report it, or in some cases edit, sanitise and filter it.

I don't believe we have even begun to tap into the true potential of social media yet. As more and more people connect with each other in different ways, across a multitude of platforms, through a bewildering array of devices, I think we are going to see some extraordinary things happening, socially, culturally and politically. Communities are going to be transformed and our society forever changed by the use of these tools. Let's hope it will be for the better.

Image source by Ocean Flynn

Our viral web by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.