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Alternatives to Institutional Learning.


I was sitting in my accreditation course last week with a room full of Saskatchewan teachers, some of whom still consider Wikipedia to be the devil and many who think Facebook inherently evil. During one discussion, the idea of changing methods of education afforded by evolving technology was introduced. After some debate, the idea that online and blended learning could mean the death of schools as we know them arose. One of my colleagues offered up the notion of schools without sports teams or cafeterias, where students come and go on radically different schedules. This brought up the well-documented ‘fear of change’ response from many in the room. Perhaps ‘fear for our jobs’ was more likely.
     I was immediately reminded of John Taylor Gatto and his works Dumbing Us Down The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling and The Underground History of American Education where he ties learning systems to the industrial revolution. Just as industry has spread from its assembly line model, so should education. I strongly believe that technology (both systems and hard/software) offers an opportunity to present more choices to more learners and a way out of the one size fits all system that clearly is not working for many.
In my blog I would like to chart some of the options as (I hope) we begin to move towards more individualized learning. Here in Saskatoon, the Media School, the Outdoor School and various online programs like Credenda already exist. My question is - What are the other options? The next question, and one I will probably not deal with this summer, is - How do we implement them? And, why do more not exist already?

Comments

  1. Richard Schwier13 July 2011 at 13:19

    This is a great topic, Stephen, and I do hope you can find a little space in each post to talk a wee bit about implementation of each alternative.

    ReplyDelete

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