Birth of a Radical

Today is my last day in my current role in Learning & Teaching @ UNSW, with tomorrow marking the beginning of a new chapter in my career at the uni as Educational Technologist for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. As you might expect I’ve been reflecting a bit on the last 7 years, and where I’ve been during that time.

In some ways it feels like the briefest of flashes, and yet looking back I’m amazed at how far I’ve come, how much I’ve learned, and above all the incredible transformation that’s taken place in the way I perceive learning and teaching.

When I started in 2002 I had only basic computer skills, having come from a job in desktop publishing at a small company – where I’d worked the previous 5 years. I knew my way around a computer in a general sense, but certainly not to the degree I do today.

I began on a project called the Learning Resources Catalogue, which (like other learning object repositories of the time) had been developed to facilitate sharing of teaching materials and collaboration between academics locally and globally. My role here could only be called a junior position, and the bulk of my day was spent digitising slides so they could be included in the catalogue – quite literally scanning bugs and coastal geomorphology ink-dye tests for hours at a time.

Eventually staffing changes in the project thrust me into a support role and I found myself looking after staff from 15 or so institutions worldwide. I had no previous experience with user support, nor any comprehension whatsoever of academic culture – so the learning curve was extraordinary.

Importantly this marked my first exposure to the wide, systemic obsessions with Intellectual Property Rights that are so prevalent in higher education today, as well as the arguably more significant cultural dischordance in which many staff do not understand why you would want to share, highly protect their privacy rather than operate in the open, and as such do not assign sharing, reuse and open education any real value whatsoever.

Looking back it’s become quite clear to me that, despite the fact the LRC project itself ultimately failed due to lack of interest and uptake, this early exposure to the cultural factors that continue to influence trends and challenges in education – particularly Open Education – was an extremely valuable personal learning outcome, not to mention equally important formative stage for my philosophies and in the way I would come to see education later.

In the wake of the LRC I moved into the role of a research assistant – again, a very new area for me – and I had the opportunities to experience work with emerging technologies that cast the process of learning and teaching in a very new light. These times began to show me that the classroom was only one place where these two processes can occur – certainly not the only place. Thus my philosophies on learning and teaching continued to shift even further.

Around the same time, 2004 or 2005 I believe, I began to experiment with blogs and wikis as tools for collaboration, reflection, discussion and sharing. Initially my experimentation with blogs took place on a personal level, and I quickly found myself exploring the power of the medium for personal expression in the form of political blogging.

In hindsight the fact my preliminary work with blogs took place outside the walls of formal education was really important because I had no expectations or percieved policy constraints to hold me back and as such I went for it with gusto and cut my teeth in the unhindered, uninhibited open web.

So when the two spheres of activity – professional and passionate hobbyist – ultimately converged I had already had time to formulate a very clear view on what blogging is, and what the nature of the medium and the human dynamics it entailed actually look like in practice – especially in terms of its ability to support grassroots initiatives and empower the individual.

Perhaps it would not surprise anyone to realise that my bogging life began as a radical political agitator – sites set firmly on the bloated authoritarian political system of the Bush Administration and the ways it was undermining the rights and freedoms of the individual. When I began to notice subtle similarities in formal education – in both structure and practice – my sites acquired a new target.

Adding to this fire was the arrival of our two children, our ultimate decision to homeschool, and the resulting exposure to different sources of literature such as John Holt and philosophies such as radical unschooling, that challenge the traditional notion of what learning is, where it is and what form it takes, what it looks like, and above all the notion that it is a very personal process that is and should be inspired, directed and assessed internally by the learner themselves rather than through a set of artificial constructs and criteria imposed from the outside.

Despite a very conscious effort to keep my unschooling attitudes out of my professional life it is clear that this portion of my life has heavily influenced my philosophies on what formal education should look like, and the relationships that should exist in the learning and teaching processes.

This was particularly inspired, I think, by my participation in Connectivism and Connective Knowledge in 2008 and the resulting exposure to to critics like Illich. Siemens and Downes might be absolutely horrified to hear this, but in my mind and my experience the structures and dynamics described during that course regarding networked learning and the like bear very close resemblance to the unschooling community.

So, as had occurred with blogging, when this epiphany occurred to me a further collision of my progressive attitudes with my career and professional philosophies was inevitable.

Combining these elements with the explosion of debate on the edupunk ideology, guerilla DIY edtech, reliance on open source software and open education as epitomised by The Reverend Jim Groom himself – and my transformation from mild-mannered bug scanning junior to hardcore radical educator and institutional agitator was finally complete.

And now they’re letting me loose in the faculties. UNSW will never be the same…

Posted via email from Mike Bogle