yesterday I attended a GlobalWatch event, reporting on the outcomes of a Mission to the U.S., looking at e-learning. It was a useful and interesting meeting with some good speakers. reassuringly, they had concluded that the UK isn’t behind the U.S. in this field and, in many cases, is well ahead in the sophistication and use of e-learning (the focus was strongly on the use of e-learning in businesses). The speakers covered a lot of ground including the use of games technologies in e-learning (euan mackenzie from 3mrt.com) and m-learning (gordon bull from learningforte).
Charles Jennings of Reuters dealt with the growth of informal learning and the same area was mentioned by other speakers, particularly Nigel Paine of the BBC who outlined the ways in which the BBC is using a range of social software (blogs/wikis etc) within their intranet to help knowledge transfer and knowledge capture. Refreshingly, he acknowledged that some of this traffic is flippant but that this is a small price to pay for encouraging rapid acceptance and wide use of their intranet.
Lots of good, inspirational stuff but by the end of it I was really frustrated. Jim Terkeurst (Uni of Abertay, Dundee) made the point that although informal learning can have a positive role, it is also a really effective way to disseminate erroneous information: as a parent I watch this happen each day.
Simplistic searching of a plethora of data adds to this danger. Analysis of the AOL search logs, which were inadvertently released onto the web recently, shows that more than half of all clickthroughs come from the first two results, the 10th result gets only 3% and thereafter the next 990 share only 0.01% each (the furthest anyone went was 449, by the way)! So, we’re in an era where people are moving from a deep knowledge model to knowing where to find superficial stuff about a lot of things ["I can go back to this in more detail, later, if I need to..."] bit if the can’t recognise that the content of those first links is crap and their knowledge of the subject will be crap, too.
Charles Jennings talked about ‘new learners’ having a different perception of basic skills’ The development of all these new learning opportunities surely relies upon a crucial basic skill – the ability to critically evaluate the material in front of you. I raised this with Jim in a break and he confirmed it’s a serious problem – Abertay now formally include this in the first year of their courses (the first higher level UK courses to respond specifically to the needs of the games industry).
So I asked the question – how do we / do we develop this ability in schoolkids because by the time they get to HE it’s too late? I also made the point that the software tools that had been referenced throughout the day were ones that most people learn to use at home and then take the skill to work. But this doesnt seem to apply to [most] teachers, many of whom don’t even know about these tools let alone make use of them. If this is the case, how can they prepare kids to be new learners? There wasn’t a response, other than a perfectly justifiable remark that teachers have been turned into testers – boxed in by test after test and a narrowly defined curriculum; they simply don’t have the space to experiment.
I don’t blame the teachers but I do despair. After all, we still don’t teach kids to type – surely the most basic, ‘new’ basic skill of the technology age…
