Stephen Downes sparked a lot of ideas this week, all of which require some serious reflection to come to grips with. Included amongst these would be the concept that content is the tool to support learning, not the object of learning. With so many of our ideas about teaching revolving around how we can best transfer content from the instructor to the learner, this is a pretty radical notion. By presenting us with this idea, Stephen is asking us to think carefully about what education is about — is it about acquiring a pre-defined skill, or is it about developing as an individual. I think we continue to need a combination of both, and these tend to roughly fall under the broad categories of “training” and “education”. Training is about that direct transfer of a skill — “I know how to do a mail merge in Microsoft Word and I’m going to help you do it too”. There isn’t much expectation that you’re going to grow as a result of learning to do a mail merge, but it might help you keep your job. In this kind of learning, there can still be a role for more traditional aspects of education, such as content experts, lectures, exercises, etc. A “sage on the stage” can still be useful here. Education, on the other hand, is less about the content, and more about the personal development, the individual growth, the learning how to learn, and, importantly, the connections one makes with others on that journey. Here we can see less emphasis on experts and lectures (although they can still have a role to play), and more on interactions, explorations, and discussions. As educators, it is part of our responsibility to figure out when we should be training (and focusing on the content), and when we should be educating (and focusing on the connections). Ideally, we won’t be doing this in isolation, but as part of a learning community that includes students, parents, supervisors, neighbours, and others impacted by the process. The power of the connections is something new to me, and I’ve encountered some of the ideas in connectivism, but I think I need to explore this further.

Another key point from Stephen’s talk was the multiple roles of the educator. You can see a good summary of these roles (there are 23, so I won’t repeat them here) in this Huffington Post article. Stephen argues that these roles are becoming too complex for any individual teacher to do them all. Many teachers are feeling extremely stretched by the expectation that they should continue to do them all. Instead, these roles need to be shared in the wider community and advances in technology are making this more feasible. This reminded me of arguments made Ivan Illich in Deschooling Society, where the entire concept of institutionalized education is criticized as outmoded and ineffectual, and instead outlines an alternative based on decentralized learning webs, where students could select what they want to learn, from whom, and how. Everyone would could become teachers and everyone would be learners. Instead of isolated institutions called schools, the roles of education would be shared throughout the community. It is a very radical notion, and requires questioning many of the fundamental, taken-for-granted ways of viewing our world, but is a valuable source of broader thinking. I don’t think there is a clear blueprint in place for this, or that society could switch to this model overnight, but it does generate some deep critical thinking and questioning of our own assumptions, which can generate unexpected innovations. I really appreciated Stephen putting everything on the table like this. And I’d rather talk about this than learn how to do a mail merge

In thinking about these ideas over the past few days, I’ve tried to place them into a practical context that I’m familiar with. I’m not a school teacher, but I am involved in helping people learn at work. Traditionally, a lot of workplace learning has been focused on classroom-based training — learning how to do that mail merge, listening to an expert lecture on customer service, or doing an elearning module or simulation on occupational health and safety. These will continue to be important aspects of workplace learning, but I think the concepts of devolving educational roles and the importance of connections are highly relevant here. Instead of focusing exclusively on the training role, workplace educators also need to pay attention to knowledge management. Knowledge management understands that knowledge exists throughout the organization, is largely contained within the minds of individuals (as tacit knowledge), and is only sometimes written down (as explicit knowledge) and rarely captures all of the richness on paper (or in knowledge databases). The way to tap into the tacit knowledge of the organization is to help individuals connect with one another — to get them meeting, talking, debating, arguing, sharing, and otherwise interacting. The stronger the connections, the better that critical tacit information can be shared and more widely valued for the entire organization. Writing it down can capture some of it, but some of the richest knowledge can only be shared through connections — and through the process of interacting (connecting), new knowledge can be generated. In this way too, everyone in an organization becomes a teacher, sharing what they know best, and everyone becomes a learner, benefiting from the expertise of others. The workplace educator will continue to train in a classroom, but must also work to connect people with information to people in need, and encourage everyone to be both teachers and learners, all the time, throughout the organization, across units and hierarchies.

David Wiley‘s EDUCAUSE presentation, Openness: Decoupling the Future to Radically Improve Access to Education, was an excellent discussion of the problems in higher education (increasing costs, decreasing capacity) and the opportunities provided by open education.

David made a great comparison between education and knowledge sharing – teachers share their knowledge, their expertise, their time, their compassion, their support; students share their questions, ideas, desire to learn, help for one another.

David also highlighted the fact that technology now allows sharing to involving “giving” without “giving away”. You can create a book of your ideas digitally and share it. You still have a copy, and so can millions of others — without any production or distribution costs (beyond having access to a computer and the internet). In this way, technology enhances sharing and therefore enhances education. BUT — and this is a huge BUT — traditional copyright breaks the connection between cost-free sharing and education. Traditional copyright is based on an out-dated production and distribution model but continues to be a barrier to the free sharing of information. As an alternative, David highlighted the development of the creative commons license to facilitate sharing, and thus improve education. I was surprised to learn that there are now over 500 million open education resources available. My own work with the Public Knowledge Project is part of this movement toward open access to scholarly content.

In the second part of his talk, David described the process of uncoupling in higher education. Traditionally, higher education has involved content, support services, assessment, and credentialing. These services are now being decoupled, or broken apart. It is possible to get content from a wide variety of open educational resources, and he named several. A new resource I learned from David was CK12. Support services are also freely available on the internet, such as OpenStudy. As a librarian working for a post-secondary institution, I’d argue that the university still has a critical ongoing role here, although it should be re-thought and open to innovation. My belief is that these “support services”, whether library services, counseling, writing assistance, providing facilities for student collaborative learning, instructor office hours, instructor interaction with students, etc. are all fundamental to learning and will remain a core function of the university.

In addition, assessment services are now available from other organizations, and credentialing is also evolving. Some jobs no longer demand traditional credentials (e.g., see the growth of private credentialing from Microsoft or Redhat and others), prior learning assessments are increasingly available, and institutions such as the Western Governors University and Athabasca University now offer degrees based on your educational accomplishments, not courses taken from them. I also learned about the Open Education Resource University, and look forward to finding out more about it.

I was impressed by how far this decoupling has already progressed and inspired by the opportunities it will present in the next 5 to 10 years. I’m sure it will not only have profound implications for higher education and K-12 education, but also for workplace training. With more content being freely available, with online learning support communities becoming more common (think of the professional learning environments we are all developing through our blogs, twitter, delicious, rss feeds, etc.), with assessments being available from external organizations, and with credentials being offered by institutions at reduced costs, those responsible for training will have a significantly wider toolkit to continue to enhance staff development even while budgets are under strain.

If you have a chance to watch the archived video (it is so worth the time), I’d be very interested to hear your reactions.