Well the online conference boldly entitled 'The Future of Education' is over and I have only attended or caught up with three sessions so far. Although the sound is bad, it was great to hear Sugata Mitra enlarge on his idea that education can be self-organising to a much greater extent than we allow it to presently. Interesting to hear his definition of an expert as someone who has not yet demystified his subject, though again I don't think that this can be applied across the board. The implications of the experiments that Mitra has done over and over again potentially have huge implications for the way in which we think of education. But will we dare to question the structures which we have built up over centuries?
This brings me on the Jay Cross session in which he asserted that incrementalism is the enemy of innovation. One example was the introduction of blogs which he said, if done against the background of a bad education system, was of no value. Cross talked about the need for entrepreneurial learners or free-range learners who determine their own learning paths and are not tied to a pre-determined course package. An interesting observation in this session was that there is no real dichotomy between formal and informal learning and this was illustrated by a clever use of the Kolb experiential cycle diagram overlaid first with formal learning tools and then by informal learning tools (above).
You could tell how revolutionary these ideas were from the furious text chatting going on at the same time as the sessions in which attendees obviously had furrowed brows as they struggled to imagine these ideas embedded into their formal, certificated and documented systems of the present.
There are several sessions I want to catch up on which were scheduled awkwardly for my timetable so thank goodness for the archives which have mostly been recorded as a screencast which may be an advantage to some who do not want to download the conferencing software.
I thought this was a very connected online conference with its associated Moodle discussion forums, tailormade Pageflake page and Twitter channel. These were not isolated podcasts simply 'made available'. This was a real conversation both during the sessions themselves and contiuing through and beyond the conference period. A model to emulate.
Keywords: FOE2007, informal learning, Jay Cross, self-organising learning, Sugata Mitra
