The topic of “communication” arose, and with it an exploration of the different technologies that might support interaction, discussion, open reflection, and sharing of information. Some people offered their experiences on what they use to connect and engage with others – with the particularly plugged-in portion of the group (including myself) rattling off a fairly comprehensive list of tools.

At this point some people started to fidget, and my esteemed colleague Gus spoke to express a critical: “Oi! Don’t you ever get any work done!”

To me Gus represents an important perspective in the equation that shouldn’t be discounted. Time is at a premium for many people these days – both staff and students alike – and many people just don’t have opportunity or inclination to sit in front of a computer or hand-held device all day long, digesting and synthesizing every piece of information or discussion that comes down the pipe.

Learning as process or outcome

More than that though, it made me realise that there are (at least) two schools of thought regarding how information is dealt with, and what purpose it serves in the wider scheme of things.

For some, the significance is in the journey, or the process through which an outcome is achieved; and the learning occurs during the discussion, the reflection, questioning, and reading.  Essentially, learning occurs by engaging in the ongoing evolution of the idea. Each outcome then represents just one stage in an ongoing process of leaping from one node to another in a stream of endless connections.

For others, outcome is key, and information becomes valuable through its capacity to achieve a desired objective – and essentially to enable you to do something. Just give them the information and be done with it. They don’t want an in-depth explanation of how you reached your conclusion, the supporting arguments or logic that lead to its realisation – they just want the result.

Both of these are sensible positions to take I think, but it’s critical to recognise the differences in how they approach interaction and the seeking of information.

Implications

When looking at the implications of classroom or workplace use of social media (blogs, wikis, Twitter, etcetera), this is especially important to consider. In all likelihood we’re going to see a wide range of diverse preferences and opinions on how students and teachers would like to engage in the processes of learning and sharing. Equally likely, these views may not align with one another.

So how do you accommodate and empower both perspectives? This is an evolving conversation in which I currently have more questions than opinions or answers. So I’m quite interested in hearing the thoughts or experiences of others.

Complicating this discussion is the notion that new, social media is individually empowering. Conversations can occur anywhere, at any time, and pursuant to the conditions and locations desired and established by the participants. Blogs can be set up, forums created, Twitter or Facebook conversations occurring, YouTube videos posted, and Flickr images shared – all unbeknownst to the rest of the class or community of colleagues and indeed even in spite of policy to the contrary.

The issue then, can be summarised by two questions – a) how to become aware of the existence of these conversations, and then having done so b) how to organise and structure the information in a way that’s easily navigated, synthesised, useable – and indeed reusable.

Aggregation and Syndication

While they won’t immediately resolve the differences in viewpoint in the “learning/information as a process vs. outcome” discussion, aggregation and syndication have become critical, invaluable ways to deal with the flow of online information – and can therefore go a long way towards accommodating the needs of both perspectives.

Terms Defined

• Aggregation – the process of collecting or bringing together disparate, unrelated content sources into a single location, either for the purposes of consumption or syndication; most commonly incorporates the use of RSS feeds.
• Syndication – the process of taking content from one source and reusing it in another location; may (but does not necessarily) involve editing or remixing the structure of the information to suit a different purpose.

How it works

Both of these activities are most commonly fueled by the use of RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. As invisible and perhaps misunderstood as RSS is, it’s an absolutely critical component in how information is acquired, consumed and distributed in the web today.

In the past, each page in a website had to be coded and maintained by hand. This meant that the content was static, and not easily reused. To view the information, or check for updates, you had to visit the page itself in order to see whether there was anything new there. This made the process of sharing and acquiring information very time consuming.

RSS has made such a difference because it makes information easily shared and reused in different locations and under different conditions and contexts. Significantly, RSS is becoming a standard component of webpages. Frequently, as is the case with blogs, it’s not something that has to be “set up” – RSS tends to already exist by default.

Commonly use of RSS this takes the form of subscriptions, in which readers/users of a blog or website “subscribe” to the site’s feed (in other words, they elect to receive its content) and receive updates automatically via their RSS reader – also known as an aggregator. This enables people to collect the feeds from many different, unrelated locations and have the updates appear in a single space. As a result, dozens of feeds (or more) can be quickly browsed from a single location.

Importantly, RSS feeds frequently exist for many different types of information – including videos, podcasts, blog posts, wiki updates, search results, and Twitter posts.

This enables people to set up customised spaces which feature all the content sources they want, formatted in the way they want. This serves to save a tremendous amount of time and yet does not involve degradation of the original content in any way, since the information is not being replicated, it’s being aggregated and syndicated.

Syndication

Syndication comes into play when you want to reuse a content source elsewhere. This post for example has been automatically submitted to two different blogs. The post was originally posted to the TechTicker, which is my main blog. However the information is equally relevant to the UNSW TELT blog, and I have included the post in a feed that is automatically syndicated there.

When using blogs in the classroom, the implications of syndication are significant. Through syndication a course instructor would be able to establish a single course blog or portal that was “fed” by the feeds of a collection of student blogs elsewhere. This would enable the students to maintain their own space – and therefore begin to amass a portfolio of their work – while reducing the number of disparate locations that had to be browsed to view the collection of student contributions.

Likewise the RSS feed of the search results for a certain term or phrase can be syndicated as well. For example I have subscribed to the search results of the term “UNSW” on Twitter in my feed reader. Anytime ANYONE mentions the term UNSW in a tweet (a tweet is a post to Twitter), their contribution shows up in my feed reader.

This sort of filtering would be literally impossible for me to do by hand and yet happens automatically through the combination of search indexing, RSS, and a feed reader.  As a result I’m automatically informed when relevant content becomes available – I don’t have to go searching for it.

Taking this one step further we could then syndicate these search results on a blog or portal along side the aggregated blog contributions of a cohort of students, and perhaps even a similar search result in YouTube and Flickr – thus creating a customised filter to act as a single port-of-call for the course’s disparate activities.

Renegotiating the concept of literacy

One might be tempted to ask what the relevance of this type of technical knowledge is to the wider community.  I would argue – as have others before me – that fundamentally this is an issue of information literacy, not just digital literacy or network literacy.  The concept of information acquisition and construction of knowledge is core to the way we develop as individuals and as a society – and how we interact with one another.  Increasingly this interaction is taking place in virtual spaces.  It stands to reason then that what is considered a core literacy should be re-negotiated and reassessed to reflect common practice – and importantly examine ways to interact with this information in effective and efficient ways.  If we fail to acknowledge these sorts of changes, we risk missing out on valuable conversations or their resulting outcomes.

Criticism
The challenges and obstacles facing the evolution and revolution of education can be traced back to a few key ideas – those of stratification, hierarchies, institutionalisation, power, and control. Essentially, characteristics that have nothing to do with education and learning, but everything to do with how it is controlled, dictated and managed.

Schools have come to symbolise clearly structured environments where teacher presides over a classroom, molds it, guides it, conducts it and confirms or denies competency. The teacher is seen as an authority figure to be followed, not an equal. What is learned is under their control, as well as that of the school or the government; not the will of those who would do the learning.

Schools are sharply and artificially divided into homogeneous demographics, grouped by age, ability, intelligence, gender, religion or worse still, sometimes even race. Classes are generally held indoors, separate from real instances of the subjects that they study; the learning objectives defined by the school curriculum, not the learner.

Indeed it could be said that there are multiple stakeholders in curriculum design, many of whom have very targeted interests that arguably focus outside the learner. Industry is increasingly consulted by schools and universities interested in establishing ties and long term relationships. Indeed as Peters (2007) describes, governments have begun to take notice of the emerging “knowledge economy”:

“In the attempt to re-position and structurally adjust their national economies to take advantage of the main global trends, British, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand governments have begun to recognise the importance of education, and especially higher education, as an ‘industry’ of the future. There is an emerging understanding of the way in which higher education is now central to economic (post) modernisation and the key to competing successfully within the global economy.”

In the wake of this, schools – particularly higher education – have adopted a much more industry-focused approach, in which learners are actively prepared for a productive life in the workforce. This extends to adopting similar terminology and processes such as “business rules,” tasks that are “owned,” SWOT analyses and the “rise of new regulatory regimes that impose an ‘audit society’ on the previously autonomous society” (Peters, 2007).

Learning is divided into subjects, thus creating a disjointed, disconnected sense of unrelatedness across curricula; then organised into a linear order, requiring one lesson be mastered before the next one can be introduced.

Effectively schools are artificial structures, covering compulsory subjects in disjointed fashions for arbitrary groups of passive, segregated learners. This is hardly an environment that fosters personal ownership of learning, or a recognised personal relevance to existing educational processes. As Illich argues (1971), “The creature whom schools need as a client has neither the autonomy nor the motivation to grow on his own.”

Optimism, Letting Go, Embracing

Illich (1971) argues further that:

“…new educational institutions ought not to begin with the administrative goals of a principal or president, or with the teaching goals of a professional educator, or with the learning goals of any hypothetical class of people. It must not start with the question, “What should someone learn?” but with the question, “What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?”

John Holt (1967) echoed this sentiment when speaking of childhood education, saying:

“What children need is not new and better curricula but access to more and more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them; and advice, road maps, guidebooks, to make it easier for them to get where they want to go (not where we think they ought to go), and to find out what they want to find out.”

There are two distinct steps that must be taken for real, lasting change to be occur – the first of letting go, and the next of embracing. We must let go of our standing preconceptions about what education is, and what it is not; what teachers are and what they are not; what school is, and what it is not; and ultimately what learning is, and what it is not.

We must let go of our perceptions of what knowledge is and what it isn’t; who controls the knowledge, affirms or denies its validity and relevance; whether knowledge is something to be hoarded or freely shared; what form it takes, how it is transmitted, retained or realised; and ultimately the purpose of knowledge.

We must forget everything we think we know; and approach learning as though we’ve never done it before; never been taught, and never taught others.

When we’ve done that, when we’ve cast off these barriers to our perception, we can begin to look forward anew. We can embrace the passion, the curiosity, the wonder, the endless questioning and the comparing of what we see, think and feel; our hands and minds free to grasp and to draw inwards; to seize hold of the reigns of our own learning journeys and embrace it for all its potential.

We can then begin to realise that learning is something to be lived; something to be seen, and heard, and felt, and touched; something to be listened to, realised and witnessed. Something to be understood, and sometimes not understood. Something to be experienced. To realise that education is an empowering force to support this process in all its natural chaos and interrelatedness – not something to be managed; not something to be dictated; not something to be controlled..

We can grow to learn in a different model, but first our perspectives on the roles of learner, teacher and school must change.

References:

• Holt, John (1967). How Children Learn.
• Illich, Ivan (1971). Deschooling Society. Accessed 24 November 2008 at http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/chap6.html
• Peters, Michael A. (2007, May 7). HIGHER EDUCATION, GLOBALISATION AND THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY: Reclaiming the Cultural Mission. Ubiquity Volume 8, Issue 18. Accessed 24 November 2008 at http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/pf/v8i18_peter.pdf

It’s likely this will change over time – as will this post – but here’s where I’m at currently

NB: Quotes in mindmap adapted from Downes’ blog entry.