Some notes I found on the backside of a bill...
They concern exploratory learning and come from BlogWalk 2.

Now i try and find out what they mean(t)

Title: "Self-Organised Learning and Weblogs"
(Yeah, lets take two things and go find a connection.
Looks like we found some though. )


The first note says I should write something about the participants and why they were there. But now I do not remember everyone and everything any more, so I skip this.

What is self-organised learning? Did we have a working definition on BlogWalk2? Probably. Now let me state this:
Some people are talking about self-organised learning and about exploratory learning. Most say it is the same, some say it is not. But the latter group does not really have distinct and consensus definitions, which tells you that I belong to the other one. ;)
I think the important feature of self-organised learning is, that you do not follow someone else but explore the topic of your interest (wish or need to know) by yourself. There may be guides but you chose the guides by yourself and you will probably not rely on just one.
The concept of self-organised learning is opposed to directed learning as we know it from school. Directed learning in an extreme image is the "Nürnberger Trichter".



So Nürnberg is the place to go and revolutionise learning.
Everyone who was there on BlogWalk2 considered himself or herself very able to learn in a self-organised way but doubted this ability to be wide-spread in the population. So on one side we wanted to better the world by making the light of self-organised learning shine brighter and on the other side we wanted to find out what helps ourselves learn and what are the obstacles.

So. Did we succeed?
Well we definately agreed that the world today needs a lot more of self-organised learning.
And we kind of agreed that there is trouble with official certification and valuation of education.
And as far as I remember we did not come up with a solution for that.
If your employee wants a certificate in order to quickly find out what you are worth, then you will want a certificate that tells him or her that you are very good and valuable. And then someone will start rating people in a comparable way so he can make money out of giving certificates.

And then there are little kids who do not want any certificates but do have parents who are concerned about the certificatable future of their children. So they are sent to school in order to learn good things and to get grades.

And then there are teachers who quickly find that grades are traded as instant reward or punishment and thus are perfect for controlling the behaviour of a noisy, chaotic mass of kids. And they want to controll them into learning of course. "Sit quiet and listen to me."

The wish for comparability of learning success leads politicians into defining what shall be learnt. Teachers know that children love to learn things, it is just very hard to make them want to learn the things the politicians found to be very useful in life and society. This usually does not include learning how to destroy a video recorder, how to get most attention from your classmates, learning about the consequences of eating rubbers and paper, how to submit secret massages to the class during a test, how to get chewing gum stick to the ceiling and so on.

If the teachers succeed in permanently controlling their pupils´ behaviour then there will be very passive young adults leaving school. Whose curiousity and ability to learn by themselves is broken.
This is about the picture of "old directed learning" as seen by us revolutionisers.
(I do not actually believe this extreme picture, but let´s pretend.)

Still I think there are aspects to be saved.
Basic skills are neccessary to enable people to learn by themselves. Like reading, handling money, using media or knowing about starting points for self-organised learning.
It is neccessary to get an idea of what is out there to be explored. The wonders and miracles of the world - in biology, chemistry, geography, music, literature...
Some skills and knowledge are neccessary for functioning in society - this is about politics, laws, tolerance, health... responsibilities as a citizen.

But school can never teach everything people need. This is why we cannot accept passive, unable-to-learn-by-themselves people as a result of old-fashioned school.
You need to learn in a self-directed way when a new problem arises, that you did not learn about before or when you are interested in something just because, and it is something that the local adult schools do not offer (affordable) courses for. Well, there are many reasons for learning things without getting a certificate.

Drawbacks of self-organised learning:
The success of your learning is at your own responsibility. You might never know if you really got it if you do not compare your knowledge of the field to that of others.
Learning by yourself can be slower and more tidious than listening to the expert at school (depending on the topic and availability of learning material).
Not everyone might be happy with it. Especially if they did not learn how to learn yet.

As the geeks were in majority we also wondered how a software tool might support self-organised learning and how this might affect the learning culture in general. But why would people use such a tool in the first place as long as they did not adopt that new learning culture? This tool-vs-culture question equals to what-was-first-egg-or-hen-? and this is why we should not worry about it too much but just look at both sides whenever we want to change something.

Coming back at last to the blogwalking group of people who love to learn by themselves and felt the limitations of school learning very much.
They came to write and read weblogs and are happy about it. They feel like reflecting on their learning process and sharing thoughts and questions with others helps them a lot.
Now here is a note that says I should write about the deficits of weblogs in that function and how a tool might support exploratory learning in a better way. But it does not tell me what these deficits were. Hm. Anyway there were some obviously. The new tool would have to be simple, safe and should support self-reflection (like the learning diary usage of a weblog).

Well, all this sounds somewhat confuse. But I guess writing it down was better than not. At least I can throw away the bill now. ;)