The problem of contextual learning is strictly linked to another issue: response to current situation.
On Online Spin for Thursday, January 29, 2009, Dave Morgan wrote “It’s impossible to avoid the constant flow of news, criticism and finger-pointing related to the financial crisis. [...] In a discussion on this topic yesterday with a close friend of mine, we were speculating how the country’s business schools were coping with this crisis. Certainly, many of them have suffered significant losses in their portfolios. Of course, many of them may also be seeing record numbers of applications as laid-off workers and jobless recent college grads look to business schools for a two-year respite from the crisis. But most importantly, how many business school leaders are looking past these two looming issues and asking themselves the really hard question, which is: Where did they go wrong in training the last generation of business leaders? [...]”
In my opinion the current is a moment when the learning systems should stop and rethink its nature:
- the system is still based on what set by European Jesuits in 1800, when books were rare and only high class people could be educated; now education is formally available to everybody and books are less important due to the “big library”, the Internet;
- courses are centrally set and rarely revised on the current social and economical situation; we have to admit that all schools and colleges are settled in our global system and should react to it, leaving behind the “educational standardization” that is more negative than positive;
- Dave’s question should make us realize that social, intercultural and ethical knowledge should be more important than standard educational knowledge. It’s true that you cannot understand the first without knowing the last one, but the system shouldn’t stress on the last one leaving the real understanding of the first one to personal or to specialized education.
To make a personal example, I waited my 21st year and second year in college to understand the Medieval times, with all the relevant links to West and East European and Muslim cultural collision. But, still, nobody went on telling me how all that could have a link to current cultural impact.
And that’s not due to the fact I was educated in Italy.
PS: great John Robb’s post on the same issue:
“Education, in its current form is an admixture of industrial and artisan processes. While the quantities of product (graduates) produced and the facilities resemble industrial processes, the actual production is most closely akin to artisanship (with guilds, no less!). Regardless, this process has become an albatross of cost and stagnating quality. For example, costs for collegiate education have increased 4.39 times faster than inflation over the past three decades and has now eclipsed affordability for most households (median incomes have stagnated during this same period) with no appreciable improvement in the quality of graduates. Worse, there is reason to believe that costs of higher education (direct costs and lost income) are now nearly equal (in net present value) to the additional lifetime income derived from having a degree. Since nearly all of the value of an education has been extracted by the producer, to the detriment of the customer, this situation has all the earmarks of a bubble. A bubble that will soon burst as median incomes are adjusted downwards to global norms over the next decade.
Fortunately, with the implosion of this bubble, the opportunity to introduce improvements will emerge. The most interesting of these improvements is the ability of collaborative online education to replace much, if not most of in person teaching.”
I came along the “iTunes University & Open Source Learning: Is College Obsolete?” on PSFK (BTW, great job Piers) and got a flash.
The main point is not (as anybody would say) the “new” opportunity to free lectures (instead of paying $50K/year in class). The issue that struck me was the use of “context” related to “lectures”, arguing that only in class one can get the most of it.
I see that the opposite way:
- I was educated a few decades ago, when information was not available the way it is now through the Web;
- I had to search for it on books, either buying them or reading them in libraries;
- I just finished lecturing in one of the local universities, seeing that:
- the students mainly used digital information and I myself used much of it as references in my lectures;
- but the nature of these references were on current issues, practical cases, examples, thoughts, opinions, news, … a lot of information tightly linked to the current moment, to today’s issues, … a lot distant from all information one could get from books (that naturally do have month’s delays from the current moment);
- so my opinion was:
- the class I was lecturing in was merely a practical location where students were gathering to listen;
- any other reason (i.e. research) was linked to the ability of the university or the lecturer to link its speech to outside context (either inviting companies to let students work on their projects in the campus or letting students have a learning stage in companies).
My personal conclusions are those:
- education is half information and half experience transmission: the first part could be gathered by using the Web, the second part could be achieved by interacting in professional networks;
- the real contextual education (now that specialization is extremely important) has a logic if only companies start to lecture within their organizations, to get the ability they need from the people they choose;
- maybe we all should go back to ancient Medieval times, when headmasters were lecturing their juniors, who could start their experience with hard work and could eventually start their own activity as soon as their ability was ready to let them do their way.
Welcome to online lecturing: it that is another universities’ marketing activity I fear it will develop into the start of a new way of educating our children, one that is potentially current and needs only those contents to become reality.
