Learning in the 21st Century (Part Five)

The debate is raging everywhere.

In Europe, the Bologna process has led to furious discussions about the purpose of universities largely because Bologna (a treaty signed among European nations to create some uniformity about the expectations governments have for the post-secondary sector) has pushed universities towards curriculum that is directly linked to job outcomes and job creation. In England, universities are evaluated on the number of jobs their graduates get and in Canada, labour market data is used to assess the effectiveness not only of degrees but also of the content of student learning. In the US, vocational schools and private for-profit colleges that emphasize job readiness are now celebrated for their effectiveness, even if their outcomes are spotty at best.

This argument about the effectiveness of learning and education has been at the core of the last two hundred years of post-secondary educational policy development and discussion. In Italy, highly qualified graduates cannot find jobs and a generation that is now into their thirties is looking at a bleak future. Although statistics tend to support the notion that getting a degree results in more security and more income over a lifetime, that research includes the boomer generation which had a much easier time finding jobs than their children.

And, I am not talking here about the quality of employment, jobs that are meaningful and lead to a richer life. I am simply referencing the debates about employment as statistical indicators  of anticipated outcomes to learning.

The challenge, and it is a substantial one, is that the purpose, direction and importance of public education may be hidden by the way in which this discussion is being held. On the one side, call it the Humanities side (see Martha Nussbaum’s recent work) writers and policymakers try and defend the role and importance of learning, becoming critical and aware, in other words, students learning to understand what it means to be a citizen in a democracy. This means supporting the study of history, literature and the social sciences. It means supporting the importance of the arts in all of their forms. It means offering as diverse a curriculum as possible to increasingly diverse groups of students. It means taking some leadership on the importance of culture and cultural activity to the well-being of humans irrespective of background.

On the other side, are the pragmatists (those who would link that skills and outcomes in a linear fashion) who want the educational system to serve the needs of society and who see those needs through the labour market and the economy. They want educational institutions to retool and accommodate increasingly complex economic shifts by narrowing their curricula to serve immediate needs defined narrowly by data that is entirely quantitative.

21^st Century learning however, now takes place in a different way and on terms that are not as clear cut as the opposition between humanists and pragmatists would suggest. Today, learning is substantively defined not only by the Internet and what it makes available, but also by the social networks that surround and increasingly define everyday life. We have entered an age of qualitative differentiation. What does this mean?

Learning experiences will be respected for their impact on the personal values of learners and how learners translate their values into pragmatic decisions.

Since learning takes place at all levels and at all times in an individual’s life, employment will be a function not only of what you know, but how well you have defined the context in which your learning can be translated into some outcomes. Learning one thing or learning in one way or learning a particular craft or skill will not suffice. Learning how to learn and maintaining and updating how you learn will be of far greater importance than ever before.

This is the true meaning of life-long learning and it is an exciting prospect because it means that public educational institutions will be essential arbiters of the future. Public institutions are the only places where the curriculum diversity that will be essential to economic and social and cultural health will be maintained. The struggle will be to define a middle ground among the stresses and strains created by overly narrow conceptions of economic need and the broader concerns for critical and historical thinking so essential to the learning process.

Distributed learning among many experiences within diverse venues will only work if learners of all ages can actively discriminate between good information and bad information. To learn means to choose and choices made without an understanding of context challenges the very essence of what it means to engage with work and one’s future.

More on this in the next installment of this series.

Smart Clothes and Wearables

Research into smart clothes and wearables is accelerating. This video talks about the work going on in Europe at the moment. Emily Carr University is also involved in research in this area.

Learning in the 21st Century (Part Four)

Throughout this series, I have been focusing on the learner and the learning experience and trying to reconcile the difficult environment that educational institutions are facing with the cultural habits and aptitudes of students now deeply versed in the worlds of technology and digital culture.

Now, I would like to turn more directly to the institutions themselves because a great deal has also changed both within the structure of institutions and how they meet their missions and goals.

 A review of public financing of education in Canada in the year 2000 found that, “Public funding for post-secondary education, measured on a per capita and constant dollar basis, is 14% below the levels of 1991/92 nation-wide.” Canadian Parliamentary Review, Vol. 23, # 4

Today, most Canadian universities receive less than 50% of their base funding from government sources.

I mention these statistics because the reductions are not a visible part of public policy or public awareness. Some universities have reacted to the cuts by becoming both more efficient and entrepreneurial. Others have increased the international students they take in to generate more revenue and some have cut back in programs, services and numbers of students. Still others have increased their emphasis on research in order to generate more revenue.

Nonetheless, passion, dedication and a deep concern for the future of our young students have kept most universities going. A few of the major universities suck up most of the donations and most of the operating funds provided by provincial governments and as a result are in generally excellent condition. The rest in a colloquial sense, ‘truck along’ trying to make sense of increased demand balanced against less and less money to hire teachers and even less money to provide some of the most important services from libraries to counseling.

These issues are viewed as challenges by many of us on the frontlines of post-secondary education, but they portend some very negative trends that by 2020 will see very little money coming from the public sector to support universities and colleges in Canada. The most recent example of this direction is in England where cuts as high as 87% will not only make institutions raise their student fees but also cut back on the academic diversity of their programs.

So, we have two converging trends that will see students and their families paying considerably more for their education and fewer programs available for those who can afford to come to university.

One of the most important and cherished traditions within the university sector that is also a historical indicator of a society’s health is our ability and willingness as a community to provide diverse groups of students with as much curriculum choice as possible. In a desperate attempt to justify ever decreasing grants to universities and colleges, governments are increasingly relying on labour market data as key indicators of the effectiveness of the teaching and learning environment. These data inevitably privilege professional programs over the humanities and the social sciences. The areas of greatest contraction in the future will necessarily be in those “soft” disciplines, ranging from the study of literature to the study of history and politics.

Yet, if you were to take a snapshot of the working public you would find that most people were not actually “trained” for the jobs that they are in. There are too many variables from talent to personal ability and from personality to economic conditions (which are changing all of the time) to lock the learning process into a linear and overly constrained outcomes process.

Imagine a situation where you have no social scientists to model learning experiences and relate those to employment trends. I wonder how many people could have anticipated the learning needed to start a Google or manage a company like Apple? Learning has never been a linear process and even at its most limited, learning is about opening the mind to the many rich and engaging elements that make us civilized and citizens.

There are so many variables to the process of learning that universities diversified their curricula during the 20^th century as a way of creating pedagogically rich environments that would allow students to find their own strengths and then to translate those strengths when they graduated.

As the core of most institutions weakens under the twin assaults of decreasing money and increasing demand for more curricula and services, this diversity so crucial to the knowledge economy will decrease. Students will increasingly demand professional programs understandably because they seem like tickets to jobs.

The irony is that anticipating the job market is very difficult. Predicting where a student who has studied will end up is just as difficult. That is, unless we return to the 17^th century model where all learning was controlled by guilds and where the skills students acquired were directed towards very specific crafts.

Modern educational policy is simultaneously locked into the past while desperately searching for ways of predicting the future. Neither approach will work as the next part of this series will try and demonstrate.

Kinect 3D



Artificial Worlds and the Cinema

On the set of Avatar

The cinema was dominated for a hundred years by a certain kind of theatricality, mise-en-scene, in which a set or a scene, something visible, determined the structure of shots and the actor’s role in them and most importantly the director’s creative vista. Now the actor and the director must imagine the scene they are in to a far greater degree than ever before, which is why production processes like pre-visualization and post-production have become so important.

In the literal sense there is now no scene. There is nothing scenic about a green or blue wall onto which images and events, backgrounds and foregrounds will later be digitally grafted or a motion capture studio where everything happens in complete abstraction from reality. Rather, to be in a scene in the digital cinema is to enter into an imaginary wonderland, a Narnia of the mind, a fantasy upon which and through which actors produce their roles. As in the past, they have to produce themselves as characters but within a carefully constructed space that is existentially artificial and quite bereft of physical markers. In a sense, because special effects are so important to the cinema in the 21^st century, the process of production is more akin the creation of animated films which is why the cinema is now a hybrid or mixed medium.

This is why the contemporary documentary cinema is so wildly popular. Throughout the 20^th century, documentaries were of marginal value to the film business and generally viewed by small audiences with specialized interests. This has changed completely. I attribute the shift to the need to capture events and people with some spontaneity and to produce meaning by engaging with the world — the lens as window without the interference of special effects.    

Artifice is of course foundational to all genres of cinema. There is a young character by the name of Lucy in the film of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Her role is central to the narrative, especially in the beginning when she discovers Narnia, a winter wonderland of snow and extraordinary creatures. In order to make sure that her reaction to the “scene” would be as innocent and as open as possible, the creators of the film kept her away from the set until they needed to film her shots. Then they blindfolded her and brought her into the studio. She still only saw a fragment of the final version of the environment that had been created for the film — heavily composited, reshaped through a variety of sophisticated tools and technologies — but the director wanted her to look as if she had never seen what the filmmakers had created. They needed her innocence to be as genuine as possible in order to bring some authenticity to the shot, as if they were afraid of the artifice of the special effects. This is the challenge generated by creative processes that move from screen to screen until they finally make it to the big (film or television) screen.   

A series of phantoms, images that barely exist outside of the computer, scenes that are not built by actors but by the agile use of technology, all of this adds up to an imaginary world, one that is generated by the use of technologies that have transformed the production process.

An imaginary scene built upon the imagination of viewers, this doubles the effects of identification and viewing and perhaps explains why the movie Avatar was such a success. The director, James Cameron realized that in order to convey the intensity of the world that he had created for his actors, he had to actually play back each scene to them. As much time as possible was spent witnessing the artificial world of Pandora as managing the complexity of acting within the confines of a studio.

Ironically, this is precisely what viewers have to grapple with while watching the film. They have to enter a world they know is artificial, believe in its geography and physicality and struggle with the knowledge that the world only exists in their imaginations. They are imitating the struggle of the actors who have to devise all sorts of ways of legitimizing their roles within non-existent spaces.

Artifice, audience and imagination have merged.

Learning in the 21st Century (Part Three)

I recently had the privilege of talking to a group of parents about the culture of schools and the education that their children were receiving during what is clearly a transitional phase in the history of education.

Many of the parents were very worried about their children and with some justification. This was a boy’s high school and the parents were concerned that their sons were spending an inordinate amount of time on computers as well as playing video games. I put up a slide with the words moral panic written in bold and this seemed to describe their feelings — a combination of hostility, fear and acceptance.

However, my intention in putting up the slide was not to reinforce the moral panic that they were feeling, but rather to explore the implications of the shifting cultural space now occupied by a generation that lives within the “net.”

Distinctions between online and offline life are no longer relevant nor are they germane to the way people learn. The continuum of relationships set up through mediated environments will only become more complex as societies explore the many layers of information and knowledge that now define not only relations among people but also among societies.

We are living within a period of history that is not dissimilar to the massive changes experienced during the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. These changes were as much a product of scientific invention as they were of fundamental social change. In fact, a key feature of that period was the advent of real scientific solutions to previously difficult challenges. At the same time, many old ways of thinking had to change as science gave empirical explanations for what had hitherto been thinking based on religion or superstition. 

Social and cultural changes ‘dislocate’ societies in various and often-unpredictable ways. For example, the Internet makes schools not so much centres of learning, as social spaces for the exploration of relationships, which may include immersion in particular disciplines but not in the manner to which we have become accustomed over the last fifty years. The issue is not only the availability of numerous venues for learning, but also comes down to the choices students make and the emphasis they place on learning experiences in different places.  

As John Falk and Lynn Dierking emphasize in a recent and brilliant article in American Scientist, (Nov-Dec 2010 issue) students spend only five percent of their lives in the classroom and learn most of what they know about the sciences outside the classroom. “We contend that a major educational advantage enjoyed by the U.S. relative to the rest of the world is its vibrant free-choice science learning landscape—a landscape filled with a vast array of digital resources, educational television and radio, science, museums, zoos, aquariums, national parks, community activities such as 4-H and scouting and many other scientifically enriching enterprises.” (p. 486)

Since Falk and Dierking are talking about K-12 as well as post-secondary, it would not be too hard to extrapolate an even lower percentage of university students for whom the classroom is the main venue for learning. This raises interesting issues for policymakers who have focused all their efforts on grading and testing while not recognizing that informal modes of learning are the dominant mode of learning.

I believe that parents are worried because mediated environments can lessen social interaction and can decrease if not eliminate the qualities of everyday conversation so essential to our well being. They are also worried because the information on digital culture is itself so contradictory. Statistics appear everyday from varying sources that suggest a whole variety of impacts caused by the swift appropriation of the Internet for nearly everything we do on an everyday basis. This is so to speak more of a source for the ‘panic’ than the actual engagement of children and adults with digital experiences.

In part four, I will look into the issues of moral panic and digital culture in greater detail with an emphasis on the importance of this discussion for learning and education.  

Smule, Eye-Pad :) and Pachelbel

Learning in the 21st Century (Part Two)

One of the recurring themes in discussions about learning and education is that our post-secondary institutions are always to varying degrees on the verge of decline or even death. “The American Liberal Arts College died today after a prolonged illness. It was 226 years old.” (Washington, D.C., 2 July 1862) Quoted in the Winter 1971 edition of the History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 4 p. 339.

In 1862, colleges in the US shifted from a skills orientation to broader curricula more concerned with social, economic, artistic and cultural issues than traditional approaches to job-ready training. It is important to remember that in the 19^th century it was not necessary to go (as Richard Hofstadter has put it) “…to college to become a doctor, lawyer, or even a teacher, much less a successful politician or businessman….Higher education was far more a luxury, much less a utility, than it is today.” (History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 4 p. 340)

The key word in what Hofstadter says is “utility.” Today, in our rush to promote the utility of education, we have reduced learning to a series of “courses” defined in larger measure by a structure that privileges speed over gradualism. Intuitively, learners know that new knowledge cannot be ‘acquired’ through the simple consumption of information. Intuitively, teachers know that tending to the emotional intelligence and needs of their students is perhaps more important than promoting rote learning. Nevertheless, schools try to squeeze learning into narrow disciplinary boundaries. So much of the structure of schools works against change including the fact that hiring of new teachers is still defined by discipline.   

When economies go into crisis, policymakers look to schools to solve the immediate challenges of unemployment and thereby raise expectations that schools will simply ‘produce’ the workers needed to solve the economic challenges. This is also why the for-profit sector in education has become so large because they play into the fears learners have that they will not be employed unless they have specific skills needed for specific jobs. Policymakers amplify this even further by linking funding for public institutions to labour market data that is often years behind the economy itself.

In a globalized environment, it is increasingly difficult to predict economic direction and to manage complexity. Schools should be the places where we encourage complex thinking and doing, creating and collaborating. Instead, we rush to both prove the value of education and its outcomes. In the process, we have created straightjackets that limit invention, innovation and crucially the human imagination from flourishing and thereby actually decrease the opportunities for change and impact.

Our educational institutions are not dying, although some will disappear. The rhetoric around their value has become embedded in the fabric of Western democracies. The challenge precisely is to understand how that value can be transformed to reflect and enhance the ability of learners to generate, shape and contribute to knowledge-based societies.

Part Three will examine some of the central characteristics of the knowledge society and whether schools are in fact the pivot for the new digital era.