Stephen Downes, an education research specialist, recently published an update of his eloquent and visionary essay, The Future of Online Learning.
I’m only attaching a few excerpts and commentary, courtesy of the P2P Foundation and the Hennistalk Blog, but I highly recommend the essay to anyone interested in the dramatic changes in store for the way we perceive and organize education.
Main argument
“Today, and for the last century, education has been practiced in segregated buildings by carefully regimented and standardized classes of students led and instructed by teachers working essentially alone.
Over the last ten years, this model has been seen in many quarters to be obsolete. We have seen the emergence of a new model, where education is practiced in the community as a whole, by individuals studying personal curricula at their own pace, guided and assisted by community facilitators, online instructors and experts around the world.
Though today we stand at the cusp of this new vision, the future will see institutions and traditional forms of education receding gradually, reluctantly, to a tide of self-directing and self-motivated learners. This will be the last generation in which education is the practice of authority, and the first where it becomes, as has always been intended by educators, an act of liberty.”
Schools and Learning in the Future
There is not a single school of the future. We are still in a classroom based paradigm, which will slowly erode, making place for a number of different schools and learning methods.
“As learning evolves slowly from a classroom-based and deliver-based type of instruction, and toward wide-ranging learning activities that are largely selected and managed by the students themselves, the dedication of space in schools to classroom instruction will be reduced. Instead, schools will be converted into meeting facilities, workrooms and laboratories, multimedia studios, and more.
The convergence of digital life with in-person life is not, therefore, a mere addition of a digital dimension to the in-person life we lead today. It transforms and reshapes that life, removing from it elements that could be done more efficiently (or more pleasantly) in a digital environment, and opening up opportunities for new and more types of in-person activities.
We should also look toward the development and deployment of learning facilities in traditional working environments. Students of all ages will be able to learn about law in learning facilities made available at courtrooms. Galleries at legislatures and town council meetings will be equipped with internet access (of course) and supported with installed facilities for learning and visualization (such as, say, a zoomable hologram of the city, allowing members and visitors along to see zoning changes and planned construction). Farms and greenhouses will employ student workers, who will study and catalogue plant and animal life as they work with it.”
Learning is a social activity, and happens within communities, where knowledge and skills are demonstrated, criticized, and merged: it is not merely the acquisition of new information and skills, but becoming educated in a discipline is..
“to learn the habits, patterns, ways of thinking and ways of thinking characteristic of that discipline.”
Downes proposes two distinct types of learning communities; communities of interest and peer-based, real-life communities. The value of a community lies in its diversity.
The role of the technology, or tool (such as a weblog, or Second Life), was
“to create a space – virtual or otherwise – in which people can communicate, and then the members built the rest.”
….
Online, for example, we would expect not only to find the instructor and any administrative services, but also resource libraries, other students, and digital tools or platforms on which distributed work may be performed. The online component of a person’s learning environment will tend to me more distributed, based on communications and connections of a cognitive nature.
Offline and locally, by contrast, we would expect to find not only coaches and facilitators but also one’s immediate friends and family. We would also expect to find local facilities, along with facility managers and other support staff. The offline component of a person’s learning environment will tend to be more localized and immediate, based on personal relationships, support and emotional attachment.
Typically, the role of the online environment would be to inform and assess, while the role of the local environment would be to reaffirm and to advocate.”
