debate

Page history last edited by rose 2 yrs ago

Summary of the debate at LKL Event September 12 2007

Following the presentation the discussant, Martin Oliver, opened the debate with these general comments. Are LGC innovating because it is now politically OK to look at the learner? There is not much about pedagogy! Martin then highlighted 3 "contrasts" or tensions he had identified in the presentations and then opened out to the audience for questions.

Martin's Contrasts

Teacher vs learners. Will the absence of a teacher in the Into demo (on youth generated content on knifes and gangs) lead to resources that people do not want to share? The contrast between formal and informal.
Is the ‘technology’ arriving with pre-existing ‘properties or are learners appropriating it?
Is the technology a weather vane? For example, is Web 2.0 reflecting social values or is it creating these values.

A wide-ranging debate followed. Here are a few of the issues raised.

There is a tension between personalised learning and collaborative learning and the political imperatives around personalisation has distorted this debate.
Are we transformating learning or developing a mixed economy model?
Why are we saying all this, it has all been said before? One answer: we still need interdisciplinary teams to uncover the issues and build empowering learning environments.
The definition caused debate: “In some senses all contexts can be described in this way: all are created from some combination of human enterprise in the world. The key aspect of Learner Generated Contexts is that they are created through the enterprise of those who would previously have been consumers in a context created for them.” Particularly the notion of consumers. If they consume information then where do they go then? We have to start somewhere and the somewhere in our analysis. How do we validate knowledge? Who validates it? Huge challenge surrounding epistemological questions surrounding assertion ‘I can create my own knowledge’. Do technologies proliferate non-knowledge?
One observation was that the notion of the democratisation of learning ran through the presentation
Similarly it was seen as being a weather vane of what was happening in education and was attempting to be responsive to it
Are we engaging in non-design design?
Why are we having trouble putting our finger on practice?
Are we taking complexity as a starting point?
It was observed that technology currently promoted individualised and selfish responses and how is this going to be addressed

Finally it was observed that we were anarchists. Our view is that we have identified processes of disaggregation in learning and that we are loking at new ways of re-aggregating learning.

Please amend and expand the above.