Serendipity35

I was catching up with some conference podcasts in iTunes from last summer's Building Learning Communities 2007 Conference.

The one that really interested me was a presentation by Angela McFarlane, Professor in Education, University of Bristol, UK. Her podcast is called "Online Communities of Learning: Lessons from the Worlds of Games and Play" and listening to it in the car, I (once again) did that dangerous notetaking in motion activity.

Four notes I made led me to go back & listen again and I recommend you listen to the actual presentation if any of my takeaways interest you. Some of her observations probably wouldn't be popular with many educators and readers of this blog, but I agree with them.

She believes that most collaboration and community online fails. It "fails" in comparison with the informal communities that emerge around interests like fan fiction, hobbies and technology users. How do we learn from those less formal communities to build educational ones? Have we yet to take anything really useful away from looking at Second Life, Facebook, MySpace and all the rest of it?

Individual production is rewarded in formal education, but we often "punish collaboration" or see it as copying or cheating. Obviously, she's not talking about blatant cheating & plagiarism, but that hard-to-deal-with area of groups working together in classes formally or the informal learning that goes on outside our classroom. Considering collaboration and collaborative software is so in the forefront today, I believe this is an area that we really need to deal with more directly.

Those of us who get to do what we love as a job are incredibly lucky. If you look at the etymology of education, it derives from the Latin educare, meaning "to nourish" or "to raise". She questions whether or not education (all levels) is making richer the lives of our students. She say that we don't educate kids as much as train them. That's why they can decode text but they are not really reading. They take tests but don't learn.

Note 4 was Socratic - good learners ask good questions and students need to get much more experience doing that.