Social Learning and The Freedom To Change Your Mind
3 min read
Last week, Fred Bartels posted that, over the holiday break, he was going to start doing some brainstorming about an online progressive school. In response to some initial questions, Fred started to flesh out his vision.
I responded within the thread; this post is an attempt to extend and clarify some of those thoughts.
Part of the puzzle in defining and "building" an online school requires that we address issues related to reuse, redistribution (of both lessons and completed projects), and possibly recontextualization/remixing of lessons and materials created as part of the learning process.
Lessons, in this context, are really semi-structured exercises that can support a broad array of research-based, project-based experiences.
Assessment shifts from teachers determining what a student needs to know to a student articulating what they learned and considered valuable from the process.
The role of the teacher (and really, every other learner in the system) is to help people spot the gems that arise from their experiences.
Portfolio-based assessment is more readily suited toward documenting this type of experience than multiple choice tests, but whatever form the assessment takes, the assessment should highlight the learner's understanding of their experience as the starting point for determining what has been learned. Toward that end, assessment should include reflection back on how a learner has progressed, and part of schooling would need to include methods to support students as they identify where they have grown, and where they need work.
When it comes to developing a system/web site/web application to support this type of learning, there are many systems that already do this (and a bunch that don't - as a general rule, any system predicated on a hierarchy where the teacher controls a class-like space will be less than satisfying). Rather than getting too deep into the mechanics of designing another one, it might be more instructive to look at common elements/habits of mind that support this type of learning.
The communities, and their output, are endlessly iterative. They support a never ending stream of questions, responses, conversations, outside inputs, search, recontextualization of existing sources, original research, publishing, revision, and so on.
Learners can choose to dip into the stream and highlight what they consider important or valuable; over time these highlighted/curated/researched/freshly articulated/endlessly revised objects become what some people might call "finished." Personally, I think it is more accurate to call them snapshots, as we should all reserve the right to change our minds as we discover more.
But the key to any system like this is the underlying expectation that learning never ends, can always be revised, and should always be subject to new input from various sources. A system that supports this type of learning should simplify the discovery of these new sources of information, and the publication and revision of snapshots of learning in progress.
Image Credit: Photo "Baby Cats" taken by randomix, published under a Non-Commercial/No Derivatives/Attribution license.
