Brains working towards machine consciousness

 First, a disclaimer - I am not doing the CCK09 course, but I have tagged this post with cck09 because it should have some relevancy. 

I went to the Future of Technology in Education conference on Friday (2009-10-09), and a couple of conversations I had there reminded me that I have been meaning to blog about one of the possible futures of education, a future which is enhanced and enabled by technology, but which, in many ways, returns to some of the things we used to do before the industrial revolution.

I have a confession to make - I am often very bad at remembering people's names.  Consequently, I can't really thank the wonderful people I was chatting to in the afternoon break - possibly this is to their benefit, as they left early, so I won't be naming and shaming them!  But it was a good conversation about distributed accreditation, and how we can provide some form of authentication across a wide range of platforms.  This is a topic I often find I have with people, and the solution I think may work is based on Henry Story's (@bblfish) idea of FOAF+SSL.  This provides authentication backed up by a network of trust and reputation, and still allows for the delegation of authority which occurs with educational institutions.

As a brief aside, I was musing some time ago (when I was an undergraduate, so between 2002 and 2005, but I cannot really remember when) about how that delegation of authority, with regard to qualifications, really works.  I believe the generally held opinion is that certain degree granting institutions can delegate authority to various colleges to issue degrees if they are sufficiently convinced by the abilities of the student who is graduating.  The degree granting institutions are given the authority to do this by the Government, which in turn is really given the power to do so by the people in the state.  But I think, actually, it is a bit simpler than this - each and every one of us who has any interest in whether someone holds a particular qualification is delegating the task of assessing somebody's abilities to 'the system'.  We are the ones who want to know if someone is capable or not, and the 'easy' way of doing that is to ask someone who already, in theory, knows.

Technology can change that, to some extent.  With global communications being as easy as they are, we are already seeing educationalists, such as George Siemens (@GeorgeSiemens) and Stephen Downes (@downes) talking about learning in new ways (connectivism).  The idea of Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) is not really all that new, but is being given a tremendous boost at the moment, especially in connection with the idea of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs, the set of tools we use to communicate with our PLN and to interact with learning resources across the globe).  What is generally held to be missing from the equation is a good way of assessing someone's abilities in this framework, and thus how to accredit their abilities and knowledge.

Why does the institutional system of accreditation we have now work?  Some might argue, of course, that it doesn't work as well as we would like it to, but that is another matter.  It works because of the reputations of the institutions, and the trust we put in them to be providing a sound, impartial, assessment of the learners who pass through the system.  Many of the details of what happens are hidden from us, though.  Wouldn't it be great if we could go and have a look to see why it is that Joanne Blogs scored so highly in such-and-such a subject?  And wouldn't it be good to know that they were judged as being good by Fiona Finglestar, a well respected expert in the area, who in turn learned from and was accredited by the great and good in the domain?  I can't help it might be better still if we could see how Joanne Blogs had gone about learning the subject area - what mistakes had she made, and how had she corrected them and learned from the experience?  Not only would that help us work out whether she would be the right person to work with us, but would also provide useful pointers to other learners on how they might improve their learning experience.

Of course, Joanne might not want to share all her learning experiences - but that's fine.  If she is prepared to share her best practice, and particularly if experts in the field and expert educationalists are prepared to give feedback on the good points, then it builds her reputation, as well as theirs.  It gives us something we can really trust, because we know the provenance of the learning experience.

I was particularly taken by the SchoolOfEverything talk by Dougald Hine (@dougald), and I think that a form of distributed authentication of a distributed ePortfolio would fit with what they are doing really well.  It all fits very neatly in to the ideas we have been having as a result of the This Is Me project we have been running, and which Prof. Shirley Williams (@shirleyearley) talked about at the conference.  Trust and reputation - that is what your Digital Identity is really about, and it can provide you with so much in terms of feedback, confidence, and opportunity.  The people in your PLN help provide the scaffolding you need to support you as you build your personal portfolio of learning (in an entirely internal sense, here).  They help extend your Zone of Proximal Development, as Lev Vygotsky described it.

And that brings me to Lindsay Jordan's (@lindsayjordan) talk about the Social Revolution - social, collaborative learning.  In great piece, backed up with sound references to the underlying pedagogy, Lindsay also took a gentle swipe at my comment on Darcey Moore's (@darcy1968) post on PLEs and PLNs that "Looking back, I find it amazing that I was never taught how to nurture a network of people to help me learn" - and to be fair, I have to agree wholeheartedly what we seem to have managed anyway, despite not having been taught how to do it.  In general, I am a great fan of learning by doing (although I think of myself as a theorist!), and the experience of nurturing the PLN is one I don't think you could really replace with any form of instruction.  It is, as I think it was Nick Skelton (@nick_skelton) pointed out, an organic process.