Deliberations

My friend Danny Engelman started the Authorware listserv AWARE in 1994. It continues today even though Authorware is no longer supported by Adobe and most of us have moved on. We hang on as friends and colleagues. The AWARE listserv archive is excellent case study evidence of an online community of practice. Yesterday, Danny posted some open questions after a long hiatus, which I repeat here in edited form:

The medium on which we deliver content has changed (yet again). But has the message changed? Is the knowledge worker from today the same as 10 years ago? Shouldn't we be glad Authorware is dead? Sometimes something has to grind to a halt; to continue in the right direction. What will the (elearning) world look like 15 years from now?

I responded this way: Danny, I think your open reflection is necessary for everyone involved in the provision of "training", whether by e-means or otherwise. The prevailing metaphor of knowledge is a thing to be acquired, transferred, gained, deployed, delivered, published, assessed. This is all about declarative knowledge and the banking model (Freire) of learning. As Anna Sfard suggested in her oft-cited 1998 paper, there is another metaphor for learning which views it as participation. We become experts, we engage in practice, we apprentice, we increasingly demonstrate competence, we explore diverse perspectives, we share stories, we collaborate to solve problems. Most importantly, we reflect critically and sceptically, both in private and in public as with your post. This is about performance underpinned by declarative and procedural knowledge. As I articulate this post, I incrementally add to my own understanding and my identity as somebody who has learned something. And maybe help others in our professional learning community. So learning is lifelong and life-wide. Anna suggested that we shouldn't view learning exclusively from either of the two perspectives. Recently, some commentators, notably Canadian Carl Bereiter and his wife Marlene Scardamalia, have promoted a third metaphor of learning as "knowledge building". This fits in a social constructivist world-view, reifying epistemic objects like models, theories, graphs, etc as public representations of negotiated and tentative truth. These are distinct from the real world of bricks and mortar and individual mental objects that we arguably carry at the neural level. The goal of education becomes idea improvement or as is loosely stated, to learn how to learn. This helps people solve emerging, unpredictable problems in a complex world. Danny, if all we do is change software to "carry" facts and ideas, we're not really changing the medium, just the channel. We need to design for learning that recognises all these metaphors of learning. For trainers locked into the paradigm of provision, this is a huge challenge.

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Posted by Ron Lubensky on 18 August 2008 at 10:08 AM | Link