Every year I tune in to the Reith Lectures on Radio 4. They provoke new ideas, challenge assumptions and often connect previously disassociated notions and concepts. This year sees a break with tradition, as the lectures have been split into two parts, due to a guest pulling out at the last minute. With the overarching theme of ‘Securing Freedom’, Aung San Suu Kyi, a Burmese opposition politician, started us off this morning with a lecture entitled ‘Liberty’.
In reflecting on her own experiences, she places the human need for freedom into context, touching on the works of Max Weber, on dissidents such as Vaclav Havel, Irina Ratushinskaya and Anna Akhmatova and finally to a comparison about how nations in the Arab world have recently dealt with political change.
And here there is one key difference. She calls it the Communications Revolution (take THIS LINK for examples of this), which has kept the focus of the world on countries like Tunisia, Libya and Egypt unlike the historical context of uprisings in Burma.
In short, communications means contact.
The current communication revolution has enabled change at a pace never experienced before and as well as bringing about an almost instantaneously new political landscape there are also, perhaps unsurprisingly, inherent problems arising from this. I was talking to an Egyptian friend of mine recently, who was explaining the lack of security and fear that some have at walking along previously safe streets. There seems to be a disconnect between freedom and responsibility, that one necessarily comes with the other and that the rapid pace of change, which we have recently witnessed in some Arab nations, has not given people the time to develop this understanding or capability.
Moving away from political upheaval and towards the communication revolution in the world of education, new technologies can at first glance have created new, more immediate ways of learning. Or have they?
Do we really learn differently because of technology? A simplification of Vygotskian theory, suggests that we firstly learn through social interaction and then secondly through internalizing this experience. Does this still happen when our social interactions are online or is something else at play?
My gut instinct tells me that this may well depend on how learning activities are constructed in the online environment and all too often, little thought is given to this. In using new technologies for education, we should be mindful of what constitutes ‘deep learning’ and ‘superficial learning’. The communication revolution can both help and hinder processes associated with different kinds of learning and all too often I see tools added into learning activities without consideration of the pedagogical implications of the tool upon the learning experience itself. A classic example is the misguided use of the ‘forum’ or ‘conversation’ tool.
Keri Facer, in her new book Learning Futures suggests that, “the relationship between technology and society is far more complex than the narratives of ‘technology-led change’ would have us believe” (2011, p6) and to this I would agree.
In shaping our education futures, we should be giving greater thought to what we are trying to achieve and how we are trying to learn. Only then will we know how best we can support this with the technological innovations of the communication revolution.
Tags: communication · learning theory · online facilitation · pedagogyNo Comments.
