Don’t only draw your own conclusions
A few years ago when I was in the middle of a big project to define corporate e-learning needs, a colleague provided me with a humorous but wise take on things – “E-learning is like Northern Ireland politics: if you’re not confused, you don’t know what is going on”. I was reminded again of the wisdom of this recently when pulling together a commissioned report on the future of e-publishing.
Keep up if you can
The speed of change across a variety of areas is not only difficult to keep up with and difficult to interpret. The feeling is encapsulated quite well by what Mark Pegrum calls an exaggerated sense of awe or fear at the range of developments. We may not question our ability to make a judgment in normal circumstances – it just seems impossible to actually arrive at one because of the never ending stream of announcements. Are we witnessing something genuinely transformational like Google Wave or just another hyped product announcement?
Secondly, it is pretty clear that no-one constituency has the answer: digital anthropologists; educationists; learning technologists; technologists; social media experts, elearning gurus and webonomics experts have all got something to contribute but it is only by ranging across all or most of them that it’s possible to develop any sort of robust hypothesis.
When discussing this with a friend, I was pointed in the direction Mark Pegrum’ s work. An Australian academic, he’s worth knowing about just for the e-learning resource he maintains. Turns out he has been giving this area a lot of thought and even has a book coming out called From Blogs to Bombs: the Future of Digital Technology in Education. His main thesis is that we need to understand all aspects of the discussions around digital technologies to be able to make meaningful, informed decisions about how they develop.
although digital technologies in education are currently the subject of many discussions, most of these are narrowly focused and simply do not intersect with one other. The main discussions draw on five different sets of lenses: the technological, the pedagogical, the social, the sociopolitical, and the ecological. It is important that we begin to connect up the insights provided by these different discussions.
If that sounds a bit general he illustrates the concept of the ‘five lenses’ using a graphic which, literally, brings it all into focus.
Mark Pegrum's 5 lenses model
Don’t only draw your own conclusions
For me, the drawing together insights across a number of related but independent perspectives is a good corrective to anyone tempted to only draw their own conclusions. Not only is the topic grouping interesting but the positioning within bands and proximity to one border or another suggests any number of lively debates. With the exception of the noosphere and process theology which I hadn’t come across before and don’t really have an opinion about, it is useful to get all of these, literally, on the same page and see them related to e-learning.
Social and social
What I’m not so sure about is the third category – social. It is a sort of boundary grouping itself, marking the division between what seems to be a sort of ‘core’ definition of e-learning (technology + pedagogy) and the context in which it operates (and which operates on it). I think there may be are two types of social conflated here. There are the aspects of social digital behaviour such as community, collaboration and UCG which are as much a component of e-learning as technology and pedagogy because of the way that society is pushing into the classroom. Only a few short years ago a lot of the ethos of computer assisted language learning (CALL) was to wire up that old fashioned classroom box and make it more efficient with some of the tools out there. One web 2.0 blizzard later the educators have partly lost control of the agenda which is being driven by the fact he kids are all on social networks, using Facebook, listening to music & podcasts etc and education is playing catch up. For me all that is quite a different thing to the remaining social issues around cyber-bullying, sexting and the rest of it.
Nothing for it but to read the book when it comes out (November).
And finally
a gem from the research I referred to at the start of this post. If you haven’t already, add Mike Wesch to the pantheon of people to check in on every now and again. His talks are even better than TED which is saying something. His Youtube channel is Digital Ethnography. Below a classic about Youtube itself
