3 Starting points for thinking

From Stellar Deliverable 1.1

2 Starting points for thinking

The changing world

“In a changing world it is organisations’ and individuals’ capability to learn, rather than simply their access to information, that determines socio-economic development” (Kaleidoscope, p 3)

The changing world of work

“Over the last 20 years, the nature of knowledge required in the workplace has been influenced by three significant changes

" a dramatic increase in the deployment of information technologies … a change of focus from mass production to prioritising customer requirements on a more individual basis – ‘personalisation’ …a shift in expectations regarding employees’ actions, from the ability to execute specific commands towards a greater ability to conduct personal judgements and take personal initiatives” (Kaleidoscope scientific vision, p 3)"

" In a changing world it is organisations’ and individuals’ capability to learn, rather than simply their access to information, that determines socio-economic development” (Kaleidoscope, p 3) 

“Move away from central control and allow for the “creative chaos, fluent behaviour and redundancy needed for collaboration, creativity and innovation.” (Pro-Learn, p 13)

The changing world of education

“The role of TEL is to achieve the improvement in the quality and reach of education. [ ] Improving quality means using TEL to change the way learners encounter and engage with knowledge [ ] Improving reach means exploiting the internet to bring wider access to knowledge and communities of practice [ ]" (Kaleidoscope, p 6) 

“The major technological developments that are likely to have the most impact on education goals, methods, and processes over the next 25 years cohere around the notion of augmentation/enhancement of human thinking capacity, activity, performance and communication through the use of computing technology, both inside and outside the body” (Cliff et al, p 18) 

“In the future students will be increasingly developing alternative lives and identities online, and learning via pedagogic games….what are now widely referred to as serious games” (Cliff et al, p 19) 

“To what extent is education essentially and fundamentally about constructing futures, about building the contexts within which the forces of “politics/technology/economics/society might operate? What role does education fundamentally have as, itself, a ‘driving force’ in these futures” (Sandford and Facer, p 48). 

"Powerful learning demands a flexible and varied teaching approach, according to learner needs. There are occasions when more conventional didactic strategies will be the most effective. Those consulted so far, however, suggest that the ‘transmitter-recipient’ model in its various forms continues to dominate. This is especially so among teachers feeling pressure to ‘teach to the test’, where ‘knowing things’ is valued more than ‘knowing how to do things’. (Hamlyn, p 11)

The changing world of technology

“ At the level of the computer chip, and the data centre, and the organisation-wide IT system, we currently see rapid increases in the number of computing elements that interact with one another to form the IT “fabric” on which business processes and activities ever more critically rely. [ ] technically these are complex systems, which is a shorthand way of saying that there are mathematical nonlinearities (“tipping points”) in the responses of the components, and in the interaction between the components, which compound across the system in such a way, that even if you know everything about all the components and all their interactions, it may not be possible even in principle to accurately predict the system-level behaviour” (Cliff et al, p 13). 

“The three broad categories that we feel the technologies most likely to have a distinctive impact on society and education in the future can usefully be grouped under: automation and artificial intelligence; ubiquitous computing; brain/world interfaces” (Sandford & Facer, p 44) “Establish interoperable learning repositories” (Pro-Learn p 10) 

“Develop more efficient multimodal interfaces for professional learning” (Kaleidoscope, p 9) 

The changing world of knowledge and skills

“Traditionally formal education has focused on the transmission of stable knowledge established by scholars and scientists. But education is now recognising the importance of equipping individuals with the capability to produce their own knowledge’. (Kaleidoscope, p 4) “… a knowledge worker is defined as someone who doesn’t just consume knowledge but who is able to create it and who reflects critically …” (Pro-Learn, p 7)

“The  skills  of  enquiry,  analysis,  synthesis,  collaboration,  knowledge  negotiation,  evaluation,  communication  are  the  high-level  cognitive  skills  that  we  all  need  as  citizens  and  as  a  workforce”.    (Kaleidoscope,  p  4))

“ [ ] develop specific competences related to thinking out of the box, creativity, asking the right questions, leadership” (Pro-Learn, p 13)

Learning and context

All activity is performed in context. Cole (1996) makes an important distinction between context as “that which surrounds us” and context as “that which weaves together”. This mirrors the distinction made in the technical literature on pervasive computing between context as a ‘shell’ that surrounds the human user of technology and context as arising out of the constructive interaction between people and technology.

The ‘context as shell’ model, exemplified by the Shannon-Weaver (op. cit.) informational model of communication, situates the learner within an environment from which the senses continually receive data that are interpreted as meaningful information and employed to construct understanding. Thus, a learner in a classroom may receive information from a teacher, a whiteboard and a text book, all of which must be assimilated and integrated to form a composite understanding of the topic being studied.

But learning not only occurs in a context, it also creates context through continual interaction. The context can be temporarily solidified, by deploying or modifying objects to create a supportive workspace, or forming an ad hoc social network out of people with shared interests, or arriving at a shared understanding of a problem. But context is never static. The common ground of learning is continually shifting as we move from one location to another, gain new resources, or enter new conversations (Lonsdale et al., 2003). " (Sharples, Taylor & Vavoula, 2007)

“Since learning is social, personal, distributed, flexible, dynamic and complex in nature, a fundamental shift is needed toward a more social, personalized, open, dynamic, emergent and “knowledge-pulling” model for learning, as opposed to the one-size-fits-all, centralized, static, top-down, and “knowledge-pushing” models of traditional learning solutions”. (Pro-Learn, p 14)

“ … a new educational culture and mindset is required which relates more to informal learning methods that differ from teacher-centric models and allow for creativity and collaboration to be at the centre of the learning process.” (Pro-Learn, p 13) 

“Where in the past schools, universities and other institutions grew around the fixed resources of libraries and laboratories – if information can be accessed anywhere, if simulations and experiments can be run anywhere, if ‘human’ interactions can be achieved virtually in any location, where does learning need to take place?” (2020 and beyond, p 16) 

Intellectual property and transactions and ethical issues

“Open source is fundamental to Learning-intensive Society Learning Spaces (LIS-LS). Current intellectual property rights systems, transactions and payment systems, and peer-to-peer contractual platforms all fail to address the needs of LIS-LS for sharing and accessing knowledge (School’s Over, p x).

“Much as these [Web 2.0] services have made life easier on the Web (who can imagine life without Google now?) there is a darker side. Who owns this data? Increasingly, data is seen as something – a resource – that can be repurposed, reformatted and reused. But what are the privacy implications?” (Anderson, p 19)

Policy makers and practitioners

"Adopt programmes and policies to promote open educational resources” (report of NSF task force, page 7)

“But there is a real sense… that a shift in perception (and eventually policy) is imminent. Calls to radically change the ways we structure and administer schools are being amplified by a number of factors: a sense that further adherence to standards-led drivers are unlikely to wrest any more significant improvements in performance rising levels of adolescent disengagement the inability of ‘incrementalism’ in education policy formulation to match the technology driven, and rapidly changing world our young people inhabit.’ (Hamlyn, p 4)

Visions for research

Research in TEL needs:

 multidisciplinary teams, where research is led by one discipline and supported by others interdisciplinary teams, where two or more research disciplines join force in order to solve a problem of mutual interest sub-committees of researchers who gradually accumulate and share research findings laboratories, where innovative technologies can be developed and transferred to learnbing environments for testing a diversity of methodologies, for coverage of the human organisational, and technological challenge set by TEL” (Kaleidoscope, p 8)

“The TEL research community should also reach beyond researchers to the teaching community”. (Kaleidoscope, p 8)

"The challenge for research is to design and build the TEL products that allow the varied local contexts to shape them. (Kaleidoscope, p 4) “ A commitment to an open research would operate on three levels; open outcomes, open tools, open process?” (Kaleidoscope, p 8) “Explore ways of collaborating with digital industries”. (Kaleidoscope, p 8)

“Model learning as an emergent process”. (Kaleidoscope, p 9)

“A series of relatively small-scale, probably mixed methodology, linked and overlapping studies should be launched. These would attempt to tease out those aspects of ‘social capital’ which appear to be most strongly related to pupil achievement, participation and motivation and which might, at the same time, be amenable to school-initiated interventions”. (Coffield, p 11) 

Assessment and target setting.

"Massively researched and comprehensively analysed, two results in this area seem incontestable: (a) educational systems are driven by assessment systems and (b) many current approaches to assessment seem at least as likely to inhibit as promote learning. Assessment and target setting are not going to go away. How best to use assessment to promote learning? The research and professional community owes the political community more than criticism here". (Coffield p 6).