Designs on eLearning #DEL12: Cave to Cloud

The second day of the Designs on eLearning Conference started with the keynote from Bruce Brown, titled ‘Cave to Cloud’. Bruce highlights the technology shifts through the ages (mechanical to digital) and their fundamental impact on education.

• There is a genuine revolutionary shift in learning and technology, highlighting the same Gutenberg printing development that Steve Molyneux talked about in the first keynote yesterday. This move is happening with or without us, so we have no choice butto recognise the new generation of technology, and how it affects knowledge acquisition and consumption?
• “We still talk of the future but act in the past” is something everyone is still guitly of, but how do we get past this?
• Our “old and broken” model of education is not reflecting or modifying itself in the face of the current trend and shift in modern society.
• It’s not only about who wants content, but where that content has been ‘approved’. The current knowledge acquisition / revolution is no longer the one-to-many relationship, it is now the many-to-many and many-to-one, which we need to engage in as this is how the students are living,  therefore this is their experience … “the tyranny of one over many”.
• The ‘cave’ in the keynote title comes from the time (20,000 years ago?) when man first started using tools of sorts to paint on cave walls… and then on each other. Is this the first form of learning and subsequent mobile learning – those who ‘read’ the pictures took away their own interpretation of the message (hunting, gathering, etc) and passed it on through their own pictorial artwork.
• “Embodied knowledge” – not just taught but caught, the knowledge that changes behaviour. Learning is “the embodiment of knowledge and experience to create permanent changes in behaviour”. How many still think of learning as the exchange of ideas with this definition in the room?
• “Transmission Teaching” is designed to control content and to conquer distance via development of means for distance ‘teaching’, not distance ‘ learning’ – image making, typographic printing (mechanical age), electronic transmission, cloud computing (digital age). Image making and electronic transmission are just intermediary ages for the movement from mechanical to digital ages.
• The escalating need for content helped drive the development of printing technologies, and enabled the knowledge transfer of one-to-many information dissemination techniques – e.g. books. Electronic transmission (not just the written word – dont forget the development of radio and then television!). This also vanquished time (delay) in the transmission of content. All development of content dissemination has tried to rid the delay in getting this information to the people
• Mechanical technologies have passed into borderless transmission techniques – e.g. personal computing and the World Wide Web – again based on the need for the consumption of content, not broadcast of content.
• “If you want to learn rather than be taught, how an you use technologies to enable collaboration” good question for everyone here …
•  ‘Gene Sharp: How to start a Revolution‘ illustrates the real power of how new digital technologies transforms many independent communities into one based around a desire or need that harnesses technological developments into the conquering of scale and interaction.

• Have we now moved from the one-to-many content creation direction to many-to-one? With everyone having somewhere to go to have their say (blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc) who’s listening anymore?
• 1971: “Education to furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known” Ivan Illich quote to showcase not teaching, but learning, as the centre for education.
• MOOCs are described as the “future of online education” (EdX) and students can expect to be connected 24/7 … For “anyone, anywheres, anytime”. Question: is this learning based on the many-to-one relationship? There is still evidence that MOOCs are being delivered as transmission teaching using the one-to-many relationships, using existing techniques and are not utilising the changes in content transmission technologies.
• “Students are getting access to lifetime of embodied knowledge” – this SHOULD be our answer to the questions from students about what they get for their £9,000 tuition fee. Bruce left us with this statement, and also that “Universities will have to move from control of content to co-production of knowledge” in order to compete in modern education.