Brains working towards machine consciousness

John Davis wrote a piece for the ALT newsletter in which he advocates a broad system boundary for eLearning pointing toward the field being a means to improve the learning process for everyone.  As so many people in the education sector, he seems keen to emphasise the technology playing second fiddle to the existing culture and processes; a view I was also trained to accept working as a developer.

The general model adopted can be viewed, as Davis describes, in terms of the 'fried egg' diagram:

Obviously this is a simplified model, but let us explore it a little.  The first thing that leaps out of the page at me is the one-way nature of this model.  It does not allow for the impact of tools on process, because we have tended to have a view that the tools should really just support the existing processes.  But some tools allow a radical change to the way processes work - they can open up entirely new processes.  And new, or improved, processes can fundamentally change the organisational culture.  So the diagram should really be two way - each of the directional arrows can be double headed.

The 'old' view that technology should not be disruptive to the way people work or learn, pre-supposes that we use the best ways already.  I think it is about time we tok a serious look at that view and challenged it.  One of the things that I can see happening as people adopt new technologies in to their Personal Learning Environments is that they are challenging those assumptions.  People are adopting and adapting third party tools, and using them to support changes in the way they work.  The 'old' way of thinking about new technological developments was largely about maintaining the status quo - but the way people are actually adopting technology seems to be more about maintaining a rate of change.

Adding the feedback loops into the technology/organisation model allows us to envisage how it can support working with the rate of change approach instead of the more static approach.  Of course, we can then look at the process of maintaining the rate of change; how the technology supports the process of continual adoptance of further new technology.  This is the area where inter-operability and fluid data exchange become most important, enabling people to transfer from one technology to another. 

One thing Davis also touches on is the issue of whether we understand the process of learning enough to dare to think we can make interventions.  In many ways, I don't think we do - but I also think one of the best ways of learning more about learning is to make small, careful interventions and observe the effects.  Typically in education in general we hear about the grand schemes, normally driven by political ideology, which a few years later can generally be seen to have had detrimental effects (unless looking at the situation through politically-tinted spectacles).  As it happens, I actually believe we need a radical change in educational culture - but if such a thing were to work, it would require having suitable technology and processes in place beforehand.

I often hear and see educationalists proclaiming that the technology should not lead the pedagogy (or, as they normally really mean, the andragogy) - but why not?  Education is about getting people ready for contributing to society fully - even if we want to dress that up in terminology relating to the cult of self (empowerment, realising full potential etc.) - and outsde of education, people are adopting new technologies at an increasing rate.  Are we absolutely sure that existing pedagogy/andragogy is up to the challenge of preparing people for the environment they will be living and working in?

Of course, on the other hand there is a sizable minority of the population, in the UK at least, who see no reason to use the latest technologies.  Any changes to the education system and the tools at its disposal needs to continue to provide for those who have no need for the hi-tech.  But I think we have to explore letting the technology lead the pedagogy at least occasionally; and we need to design systems which support the process of improving the rate of change in a stable way.