Something that Iyanla Vanzant, an American speaker and author, said in an interview with Oprah (yes, I love Oprah, she's authentic in everything she does) really resonated with me and highlights my concerns with the decline of the Humanities in universities. Regardless of what one thinks of Iyanla's ideological position, she says that going to university teaches you "how to think, how to analyse ... and how to build an argument," something, in my opinion, that just navigating all the information on the web may not do.
Iyanla continues and says that she "did not go to law school to just to learn, she went to law school to train her mind." This is what drew me to Law when I first went to university in my mid-twenties. I withdrew after one year as the adversarial system was too confronting for my nature at that stage of my life (I was too young) and went into Education, nevertheless, what I learnt, and the structuring of ideas, particularly with the incorporation of sociology and history subjects, taught me how to really dig deep when learning and not to accept dominant paradigms. I really liked the questioning process and the relentless focus on coming to an informed position. Iyanla also says that at university "they don't care what you believe," you have to carefully layout your ideas and at the end demonstrate a very good understanding of the diversity of opinions but also your own. In other words, as I construe it, you come to an informed position.
A video called Networked Student provided me with an articulation of networked learning that allayed some of my concerns about what will happen to Knowledge. It outlines the exact process of learning that I, and my peers, are experiencing in NGL. Although from 2008 (and a little dated in a networked world) it explicitly outlines how, in contrast to my concern about learners not acquiring Knowledge, learners, in a Connectivist approach to how learning will look like in the future, or even what is beginning to happen right now, will be learning to come to an informed position. The video provides an example of how a student who is studying psychology (but it could be any field), is completing most of his learning online, with no textbook or lectures, a learning approach that emphasises the connections that are made rather than the tools that are used to learn. Through this social network approach, students are empowered to "take control of their learning and make new connections with others who will strengthen the learning process," as I am doing with fellow students in NGL. This can only be achieved by building a Personal Learning Network, via a PKM process, to be able to find valid information, keep track of that information and most importantly analyse that information. Through this Network the student is able to share his or her findings online with peers (through blogging) and through the sharing process come to an "informed point of view" about the topic or issue that is being learnt.
The Networked Student video, along with many others that illustrate the new world of networked learning all illustrate how, in contrast to the learning that prevailed in the university sector, that was largely modelled on the tree metaphor, a top-down approach to learning (i.e. major emphasis of the lecturer being the fountain of all knowledge and learning as more of an individual process) learning is now increasingly viewed as a networked metaphor, according to Steve Wheeler, a blogger on eLearning, where:
students seem to be digressing from prescribed pathways, but ultimately discover for themselves new, personalised pathways to explore, and serendipitously encounter pertinent content and experiences. Students become the nodes of their own production, creating content and sharing it through social media tools, much the same way a gardener would cast seed on the ground.This is particularly so when looking at contemporary learning theories such as Situated Learning Theory, that emphasise the collaborative but personalised nature of learning and the importance of learning in authentic contexts, through the use of cognitive tools in an "authentic domain activity." In other words, we can now directly apply what we are learning to our contexts, such as I am in my role as a learning coach and as a learner in NGL.
The video also illustrates how the role of the educator, as I have outlined in a previous post, has changed from knowledge provider to skill provider. The teacher models how to build one's network, take advantage of opportunities, provide guidance in resource acquisition and model how to communicate properly (one of my primary roles), particularly in how to engage in professional discourse in order to acquire what one needs or wants, critical analysis and evaluation (another one of my primary roles and major interests) and lastly, but not least, provide encouragement along the way. I see these as the educator's role as in the end these approaches to learning encourage learner autonomy and empowerment, the fundamental aim of education.
The structuring of learning modelled by the teacher brings to mind George Siemen's argument that there needs to be some structure to the learning process, described as "augmented systems of control," otherwise, he says, we may "descend into anarchy." Dave Snowden, however, says because the Internet has "human sense networks" that rely on a "lack of constraints," or are "chaotic," defined by Snowden to have an absence of constraints rather than merely randomness, only in this way can individuals and groups achieve "complete novelty." Nevertheless, Snowden, like Siemen's says that:
"It is important to have some type of constraint as without it you have randomness. There has to be a happy medium between the level of constraint, the level of flexibility against the level of uncertainty."A recent example about the importance of have a structured sequence of learning, even if it is just in the form of teachers as guides/advisors, may illustrate my point. My son, a frequenter of Reddit, a social networking and news site, remarked about a social-psychological issue that effects men. I cannot give the particulars as it may not be appropriate but what the conversation illustrated to me, and to my younger son (who was present during the conversation and quoted the adage that "on the Internet nobody knows your a dog"), is the importance of critical analysis, something that I gained through university subjects (i.e. linguistics, history, sociology, etc.) that encouraged me to delve in the history of ideas and the representations of truth. At the end, I established, that if one was to only learn what they felt that they needed to, would they ever venture into areas that will challenge or at least disrupt their preconceived paradigms. The conversation ended with my eldest son (18 years) declaring that "not everyone is like you Mum. They may not care about whether they are coming from an informed understanding." We both laughed as it may just be a particularism of how I construe the world.
Although a long blog post I feel that not only am I gaining a deeper understanding about how Knowledge will be constructed in a networked world, I am also experiencing the learning benefits of blogging, as expressed by both Mari and Brendon, two bloggers in my network.
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