Emerging Sounds from St Gallen
Lat week I was at the Scil Congress in St Gallen in Switzerland. The theme of the congress was ‘The changing face of learning - Creating the right balance’. I presented a keynote (slides to come soon on Slideshare) and ran a workshop on Personal Learning Environments. Not sure I got the timings quite right n the workshop - I got a bit carried away with the discussion. But the group certainly had got the idea. And as a last activity I asked them to make a quick podcast. I gave three groups 10 minutes to storyboard a four minute podcast on ‘The changing face of learning: the next steps’ and then we recorded it.
Only one had made a podcast before. But they did a pretty good job. I have done a very quick post production job. Here is the podcast - it is about twelve minutes in total.
May 26th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
Yeah!
Liked it a lot. Authentic reflection. Really liked the wrap up - great Hymn to change: Changing the culture in schools and in companies.
Can’t agree more.
Today I was thinking it is really hard for instance to squeeze a triangle inside a square. Have you eveer thought about that? It can be quite uncomfortable and cause stress, anxiety, lack of interest, because it doesn’t fit, but if someone tells you to try or else… You will do it!… And that is exactly what our education systems have been trying to do: to add something to the existing reality instead of re-thinking it completely. Educators might wnat to cahnge it but if they don’t get official support, most will struggle with it, some feel very frustrated, others will just try to ignore it, etc…
Only if we are able to replace the old frame work (the square) will there be a be space for the change (the triangle).
I can’t see a major change happening until the curricula are dramatically re-designed (maybe even cease to exist!), classrooms stop being organized in rows (maybe we even stop having classrooms as such) and until teachers are demanded not to assess according to unpersonalized criteria (maybe we have to ban the “teacher role” and convert them in storytellers and mentors!.
One thing is for sure: it has t be a dramatic change to achieve learning (r)evolution. We need to choose if we need the square or the triangle, or maybe even something else. We cannot expect teachers to follow national curricula, prepare kids to succeed national exams and do all of that using a 21st skill approach when certification, handbooks and curricula across the world have been developed to accommodate the chalk and talk methodology.
This takes us to another issue then: professional development: it is recognized everyone learns more outside the school, that networking and interacting as part of a CoP is a more efficient way of learning and further development. SO true. I know it. I have experienced it for years now. But we are still too few perceiving that and doing that that way!! And that is because most people have never experienced it, nor have they give it a chance because they don’t know better. Most time when they need to prove to their bosses they know something they enroll to this course which will grant them that certified paper. They go to boring classes, read those long papers, memorize stuff for their exams, and after that they try to keep away from those school walls till they need to prove something else. Then they will have to play the get-another-certificate-to-keep the-boss-happy- game again!
Thanks for that. You got me thinking here!
May 28th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Hi Graham and all participants:
first of all congrats for the pod…;-)
Unfortunaly I had to leave on the fly…
Is there a follow up on the plattform you mentioned??
Kind regards
Uwe
PD: Great music, what is it??
May 28th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Ah - the music - I should have credited it - it is Anas song - from a creative commons remix competition on the jamendo.com web site -= great site for free music.
Sorry being a bit late with the follow up material - hectic here at moment - but will be up soon - and don’t forget the Evolve on-line event on Friday -see my blog for details - will pick up some of the themes we talked about
May 29th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
Susan and I will be there - and we will be accompanying my daughter, Joan and her husband Jim.
May 29th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
One thing is for sure: it has t be a dramatic change to achieve learning (r)evolution. We need to choose if we need the square or the triangle, or m …. gred
June 5th, 2008 at 8:57 am
[...] is consistent but nevertheless this way of structuring the PLE seems a good start What we did in a postconference workshop with Graham Atwell was to think about our own PLEs. I quite liked this idea to start from the [...]