Stephen Downes

Transcription

Thank you. Thanks, it's a pleasure to be here. I was alive when some of those pictures that Audrey showed were created which makes me feel a bit paleo and I'm still waiting for our flying firefighters. I want to talk about new learning and new society and I want talk about it beginning from the perspective of the model. You might wonder why am I going to talk about the model? Well, technology is just the pointy end of a model and a model is the way we think about things, the way we frame our ideas, our understandings of what the world should be and where the world is going. We're saying today that existing models are failing and that raises the question, what is the best model for learning? What is the best organization? What is the best structure? What is the best design? What is the best, indeed, technology? Well, the people from places like Canary Wharf have a lot of ideas about what that model should be. Some of them talk about privatization, some of them talk about measurement and data. The pundits all have their own models: data-driven educational design; let's map every single person, every single county, every single school; create league tables that will induce success. Different pundits have different ways of designing learning. Some of them talk about tiered learning, value-added learning, providing basic services for some, advanced services for others. Others talk about changing the model of contributions. I was reading just this morning that in Ontario more than 50 percent of the cost of university and college education is now paid for by tuitions. The designers are also full of models. The designers talk about we know how to present content, we know how to present text. It's the Apple "I know what's good for you; you don't need to look under the hood" mentality. Other technologies have come into play: the flipped classroom, the clicker which allows everybody to respond, including this one in my hand here, which I'm not actually using because the slides auto-forward. [laughter] Other designers talk about the entire value chain of education, another concept from economics. Going from original production all the way through to design and delivery and credentials. The technology behind learning is also full of models: workflows for creating course content, course content that consists of workflows, mechanisms for animation, mechanisms for, as they say, the amplification of learning content, broadcasting learning. There's also models for creating new kinds of incentives to create motivation through things like badges, through things like personalized courses, and on it goes. But the thing is, what we understand or we ought to understand is that these models, these are all new versions of old models. They have the same sort of idea of learning in mind and they are not going to produce new results. We go from the old picture of learning, and Audrey showed us several, you just saw one up there. These new versions of learning, the MOOCs with videos and talking heads and quizzes and things, look exactly the same and if we look under the hood, we find the same structure, the same content: course, chapter, module, quiz. And it's now expressed in XML and JSON. People are looking for something new, though. You've heard already from two people something that is more human, more relevant, more practical. Something that has meaning in their lives, something that they think they are doing rather than something that is being done to them. They're looking for an education that reflects the sort of world that we live in today. "Everyone knows," to quote, "that knowledge is growing at an increasing depth and an increasing breadth, so you need people which can constantly learn and bridge that gap even while they're in their current jobs." And as I've reflected on this and I've worked in these models all of my life as a philosopher, as a technologist, as a designer, I'm thinking the right model is to do away with the models. The right model is to stop attempting to design learning and education and technology for people and to create mechanisms that enable this, enable them to do it for themselves. And that leads us to the concept of self-organized learning, which is not a mirage. It's not a mysterious and powerful phenomenon. It's actually more real than the model that we have been using. The idea that you can control through design, the idea that you can script out the way learning ought to work best is an illusion. The idea that there are causes of ideas and concepts and theories rather than things that are created by all of us as a society is an illusion. This is Lucy Gray who knows the reality of this unpredictability. All of her SlideShare slides were removed unceremoniously. Her entire productive life disappeared. We have to look at learning as something that is not done for us, but something that we do. We have to, as Audrey has said, (maybe not today) we have to look at education as a reclamation project of owning our own learning again. Jim Groom, pictured at Mary Washington University, has developed something called "domain of one's own" where students create their own online presence but it's more than just ownership of our own work, it's reclaiming our culture, reclaiming the images, the sounds, the pictures, the concepts and ideas that form our cultural heritage. What's missing is not just our capacity to create. What's missing is not just our capacity to learn in the workplace. We need also to be able to as, Michael Jackson says, "be bad": Bricolage, Affordances and Distribution. I try to capture that under the heading of personal learning and I contrast that with personalized learning. Personalized is something that people do for you; personal is something that you do for yourself. Personalized is you take a big piece of software and tweak the variables. Personal is you choose your own software and mix-and-match. Personal is cat pictures and yes I'm looking at you. Cat videos. These are things that matter. At least they matter to me [laughter] and what's important is the personal isn't design, it isn't something that is flaked and formed for you. It is built and based on your own needs, desires and it's self-organized. Here's an example of non-mysterious self-organization: a flock of starlings. There's no design here. There's no head starling telling everyone where to go. There's no starling incorporated. Here's a picture of apple pie recipes. There's no rule saying which recipe you have to pick first and it's funny, nobody's overwhelmed by the fact that there are thousands of apple pie recipes. You pick one, you choose what you want to do, you go, you make an apple pie. Reclaimed learning is us taking back our vocabulary instead of restricted taxonomies, we create the hashtag. Reclaimed learning is network learning. Instead of all meeting together in a common institution, in a learning management system, we connect directly with each other, peer to peer in networks of our own design, our own creation. David Wiley talks about publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere as a model of content distribution. I publish what I've created here, I distribute it to my friends and some of my enemies too because I want them to know that I'm still there. Mary Meeker says, "The edge is becoming more important than the node" which is graph speak for "the connection is becoming more important than the content." George Siemens who with me has developed and run away with the theory of connectivism has recognized this probably as much as anyone else. The idea that social networks and neural networks operate on similar processes where the content isn't what's important. Getting together, linking with each other, having conversations, that is what is important. In technology we're seeing a moving away from the centralized system to something called the distributed developer's stack. Applications that you can access and you can create your own personal learning system based on applications you pick out of the cloud. Up to the point where your future learning management system is a black box sitting in your living room running on a network drive using something like ownCloud. You become your own learning management system. This is the kind of idea that we had in mind when George and I built the first massive open online course. What we wanted to do was to structure a course not in the traditional speak and tell kind of way, not in this traditional linear format, but as this messy diagram indicates a network, a set of connections between concepts, a set of connections between people, a way for people to choose their own technologies, their own forms of representation and even to call our course a duck or a cow or whatever they wanted to call it. Some of them called us "techno communists" but that was okay. But, you know, as Audrey said, as others say, it's not just about the technology. You can't design your technology in a way that creates learning. You can't autoprogram it. It doesn't work that way. So we've talked about something called connectivism. Connectivism is, as a learning theory, is the idea that we learn by forming connections. We learn by interacting with each other, creating connections with each other, creating connections between concepts in our mind by joining things that look different together, by joining ideas that look different together. 15 minutes - not really enough time to talk about it, but think of it as the projection of one's own neural network out into a social network. Or think of it as a social network that is a perceptual organ just like the brain is a perceptual organ. These are the elements that we tried to build into our original MOOCs, the elements of multiple diverse systems interacting with each other. The element of people learning not from what the instructor tells them but from conversations that they have real conversations about real problems using real artifacts. This is the kind of course where we don't create videos and quizzes and deliver them to you. You as a student or a participant in the course go out and find the resources that are relevant, bring them back, and then we talk about whether they really are relevant. In these kind of courses, reading and networking become one and the same thing. You don't go away to read. You read with other people. And content, which everybody likes to stress today, and literacy actually become the same thing. To understand science is to understand a language. To understand history is to understand a language. And you learn it by immersion and practice in the same way. And it's a model where the learner, not society, not the parent, not the teacher, but the learner is at the centre of the world. Where the learner gradually over time assumes greater and greater control over their environment. Control over the content, control over the pedagogy, control over the goals and outcomes of learning. It is engagement in an authentic problem space. Each person comes into this space with their own resources and the diversity and the autonomy propel conversations and these conversations propel learning. Not learning that is a replication of what was known, but learning that builds on what is known. This kind of learning is transforming the workplace. This kind of learning is represented by what we might call cooperation. Everybody talks about collaboration but collaboration is based on everybody's working on the same goal, everybody has the same objectives, everybody has the same vocabulary, everybody has the same background. Cooperation is the opposite of that. It's a meeting of people who exchange mutual value but they come from a different place. They're trying to do different things. They're interacting in a syntactic way but each person has their own content, their own idea of reality, their own way of thinking, their own things that they want to do. That's what a course of the future is like. The skills of the future are the skills involved in working in this kind of environment where everybody is different, not the same. Where everybody is autonomous and not following the rules. So what do we say when we say we need education? What do we say when we need more learning? It's not that we need more content knowledge. It's not that we need people to know more things. It's that we need people who are able to work and learn and grow in a society that is based on democracy, on freedom, on autonomy, choosing one's own goals, pursuing one's own values being free in whatever way they think is being free. Thank you very much. [applause]