Thank you to everyone for your participation during Connected Learning week. It was a busy time for everyone, but we still managed to get some rich responses to our discussion questions.
Activity 1
We asked you to share an example of connected learning from your own teaching practice. Many memorable learning experiences were highlighted, including using social media in remote First Nations communities, to a collaborative project that proposed a solution to a real community problem, to supporting special needs students achieve success with CL. It was interesting to note that many examples of connected learning are already in practice, seamlessly fitting in to our current system.
Activity 2
We asked participants to share their experiences teaching in other countries/systems, with a view to understanding CL in an international context. We asked if you thought it possible that CL take hold in places other than North America.
Many participants have had international teaching experience but nowhere has CL taken a foothold. It was generally agreed that China is a hard place to use connected learning in the classroom. A lack of funding and infrastructure as well as cultural differences makes it a challenging environment to try and create change. A focus on test scores in the public education system means that innovation is slow to come about, anything that takes away from the rote learning of information is not valued, despite it’s benefits for the students.
Even when schools have the will to implement CL they often run up against the local government which still sets the curriculum for many schools.
In addition to governmental problems, the cultures of some schools inhibit the use of CL in the classroom. Teachers and administrators who don’t see the value in it make it difficult to get projects off the ground, even when there is a great interest among the students.
One participant pointed out that most of us critically view the education systems of other countries through a European lens. While they may seem to stifle students from our point of view, they may be in fact successful and work as intended. CL, although advantageous in a North American education system, might not work to the same advantage in an education system with different goals.
Activity 3
As a means to connect our topic with the OERs of previous weeks, we asked that you comment on how the ventures you have explored can contribute, or not, to the implementation of connected learning.
It’s no surprise that many of our OERs fit in well with CL. The creation and coding of apps, makerspaces, game based learning, and digital textbooks all have close ties with CL. Each of these OERs deal with subjects that are collaborative, academically oriented, authentic, and interconnected, core tenets of CL. The Learning Analytics group expressed reservations that in some cases,, CL may make it difficult to track the learning of individual students, which would hamper efforts to identify students at risk and put individual learning plans in place for them. The other point of view is that a truly connected learning system helps to personalise learning by using learning analytics to better understand each student and guide their learning over a lifetime.
Activity 4
We asked you to either share a radical CL venture or tell us why CL cannot be implemented in our educational system.
The discussion for Activity 4 seemed to center around the common theme of CL not being a panacea. True CL seemed overwhelming and too open, too anarchistic. This openness makes it hard to quantify and as such it is difficult to get legislators on board. As the analytics group pointed out is is hard to gather data on the diverse nature of CL. At present, while CL offers some great tools for teaching it seems to be relegated to the elective, or less important courses.
Conclusion
A recurrent theme throughout the discussion was the incompatibility of CL attributes with a system of standardized testing; the more you have of one, the less you can have of the other. Although no one argued directly against the potential benefits of CL on the quality of learning, many felt that the need to keep checks and balances for the education system would indeed keep it on the fringes of our current model. Others believe that CL principles can be integrated with the current system and gave examples of how they have done so. Overall, while many were excited by the benefits of CL, it seems that as a full package venture, it is destined to remain on the fringes, while CL as a movement, can find a place in the existing system through the adoption of its methods by individual teachers. Although modern technology affords us easy ways of implementing some of Illich’s ideas, it seems that deschooling is not about to happen any time soon. As for the dream of Maria Montessori to make education equitable for everyone, the new and powerful technologies at our disposal do not seem to offer a solution, in fact many people believe access to technology adds a new layer of inequity. Children who don’t have access to technology do not simply miss out on a multitude of learning resources, they are also not learning to use the tools they need to become lifelong learners.