For day five I chose VS Ramachandran: The neurons that shaped civilization. This talk introduces the idea of “mirror neurons”, elements of the brain which trigger when observing other people’s behaviour, and goes on to imply that the existence and sophistication of this brain biology is what enabled the spread of human learning and the development of culture. As far as that goes I generally agree. Later in the talk he gets a bit metaphysical, deducing from some mirror neuron behaviour in cases of amputated or anaesthetised limbs that all people are linked.

Learned helplessness in the workplace.

Mark Needham and his commenters offer come compelling arguments that it might actually be re-reading which brings the greatest value.

Re-reading books at Mark Needham.

Talent is Overrated: Book Review at Mark Needham

For me, participation in open source projects – particularly the ones I initiate myself – serves a very useful purpose as deliberate practice. While it may not be immediately obvious, I find the psychological structure of making my work public, combined with the ability to refactor and rewrite as I need to learn more, help me to get the most from the time I spend working on such projects.

InfoQ: How Agile Benefits the Individual

Classroom response systems – elearnspace

The thrust of the article is that the use of specialist handsets is limiting, and it considers alternatives such as commodity mobile phones using bluetooth, SMS and so on. But it still misses the point. Even while acknowledging that students have massive access to communication technology, its use in education is almost universally limited to answering multiple-choice quizzes.

This is “in the box” thinking. A quiz is an extremely blunt instrument for measuring student engagement and learning. The lack of a “back channel” of information flow to the teacher has been a limitation of education ever since the first students gathered at the feet of a master. This unidirectional transfer has become such a part of the educational process that it is no longer questioned. Sometimes it is even seen as a virtue, rather than an unfortunate consequence of scale. Communication from student to teacher is carefully isolated in the small bubbles of tutorials, seminars, and one-to-one chats. “Proper” education, it appears, takes place when listening to lectures and reading textbooks.

With pervasive communication technology we now have a way of breaking out of this constraint. Think of the possibilities!

• Imagine every participant gets to indicate privately whether the pace is too fast or too slow.
• Imagine every student is free to raise non-interrupting questions or misunderstandings, and others get to answer them or vote them up if they have a similar problem. Common problems can be addressed immediately, others can be dealt with individually later.
• Imagine student notes, thoughts, and problems could be shared both with the teacher and the other students during a session, as well as being recorded for later use, rather than each student having his or her own “silo” of bafflement.
• Imagine a screen with a real-time “dashboard” of student interests and concerns as the session progresses, so a teacher can adapt and drive the session with open eyes.
• Imagine students could “log in” and “log out” of sessions without disturbing other students or the teacher, and yet still be able to track what they have missed.

All of these things are technically possible. Most are possible using commodity “clicker” hardware, let alone the power of a modern mobile phone, Wi-Fi iPod, or laptop.

Before dismissing this as a pipe dream, consider that these things routinely happen at technical conferences, where it is not uncommon for a large proportion of an audience to be twittering, blogging, messaging and commenting throughout each presentation. Strangely enough, this does not seem to result in the wisdom of the presenter being swamped by mindless chatter, rather that it is amplified, distributed, and even sometimes corrected.

lizkeogh.com » The problem with Scrum

As with so many other attempts at “e-learning”, the emphasis seems overwhelmingly on “learning and teaching resources”. But this is the easy part of the problem. The hard part is institutional change; moving away from the legacy idea of classes and courses to a new model which decouples learning from teaching, and both of those from assessment.

So far I have not found any indication that educational institutions in the UK are willing to step away from the traditional, everyone in one room, everyone being taught at the same time, lecturer as source of all wisdom approach to the distributed, asynchronous, collaborative, multi-sourced model needed for real “e-learning”.

Even the Open University, despite being centred in distance education, still has synchronized course start dates and assessment deadlines, for example. This is not only inflexible for students, but also places a much heavier load on tutors at certain times of the year. As far as I can tell, this sort of practice is done solely because, well, that’s the way it has always been done.

Educational institutions, please wake up. Successful on-line study and assessment should be available to everyone wherever and whenever needed.

UK universities to lead global e-learning : JISC

Pragmatic Learning and Thinking: Book Review at Mark Needham