Of the many talks Stephen Downes, Senior Research Officer for the National Research Council of Canada, gave during his recent tour of Australia, his Learning Networks paper presented at the Australian College of Educators and the Australian Council of Educational Leaders Conference in Perth, Australia (9 Oct 2004) should give us all pause for thought. Stephen Downes is one of the few people in the global e-learning community who seem to be asking the questions that need to be asked. In my opinion, Downes' paper highlights how we are in danger of creating worlds where so called learning technologies are becoming more about administration, management and control than powerful tools in the service of learning and learners. OK, some may see Downes as idealistic and that the 'real' world is about big student numbers and constraints on physical estate and finance; which translates to the need to employ technologies in the 'optimization' of teaching/learning. But when this 'reality' translates into yet more mechanisms for delivering prescriptions of pre-packaged content and process maybe Stephen's idealism is no bad thing. Otherwise, the concept of student-centredness become mere rhetoric.
What his paper isn't promoting is anarchy and chaos, instead he is highlighting that there are serious limitations to the ultra rationalistic world of centralized e-learning specifications/standards, learning objects, content management, and repositories.
“Learning resources would be authored by instructors or (more likely) publishing companies, organized using sequencing or learning design, assigned digital rights and licenses, packaged, compressed, encrypted and stored in an institutional repository … they would then be unpacked and displayed to the student, a student who, using a learning management system, would follow the directions set out by the learning designer, work his or her way through the material, maybe do a quiz, maybe participate in a course-based online discussion … That’s the picture. That’s the brave new world of online learning. And honestly, it seems to me that at every point where they could have got it wrong, they did.”
Ouch!
And on the standardization of e-learning content packages and the 'lock-in' to proprietary VLEs he says:
“… this model is about as far from the model of the internet as one could get and still be in the realm of digital content. It resembles much more a school library or a CD collection than it does the world wide web. It also resembles the way publishing companies view the sale of digital journal subscriptions and e-books, as prepackaged content, the use of which is tightly controlled, or of software, complete with encryption and registration, that has to be licensed in order to be used, and requires an installation process and close interaction with an operating system, in this case the LMS. And, of course, without an LMS, the learning content is effectively useless. You can’t just view it on your web browser … if online learning held the promise of reducing the cost of learning materials and opening access to all, this model effectively took it away.”
Ouch!
An on attempts on standardization of Learning Design (capitalization deliberate) he focuses right in on that high teacher control ethos:
“Learning Design is, in my opinion, very much a dead end. A dead end not because it results in e-learning that is linear, predictable and boring, though it is that. A dead end not because it reduces interaction to a state of semi-literate yes-no, true-false multiple choice questions, though it is that. It is a dead end because it is no advantage over the old system – it doesn’t take advantage of the online environment at all; it just becomes an electronic way to standardize traditional class planning. It’s not cheaper, it’s not more flexible, and it’s not more accessible.”
Mega ouch!
He then goes on to draw a comparison between useful learning objects which are more like a multimedia blog entry than the high processed artefacts of the e-learning industry (my terminology).
“Learning objects may be constrained, learning design preordered, their authoring cumbersome and their distribution controlled. Blogs are the opposite of all this, and that’s what makes them work.”
But how are we to find learning objects/resources? In Downes' view, for which I have some sympathy, the federated searches implicit in centrally controlled systems are not what works, and is not what's always required. At this point his well known advocacy of simple syndication technologies, like RSS, comes to the fore.
“What makes RSS work is that it approaches search a lot more like Google and a lot less like the Federated search … Metadata moves freely about the internet, is aggregated not by one but by many sources, is recombined, and fed forward.”
So if Downes isn't arguing for anarchy and chaos where does the order come from? His answer is learning networks which make sense of, and thrive within, apparent disorganization and diversity.
“It should not be surprising that order emerges from a network of disorganized and disparate sources … Order emerges out of networks because networks are not static and organized but instead are dynamic and growing … Connections come, connections go. A connection may be used a lot, and grow stronger. It may be unused, and grow weaker … Like attracts like. Clusters form, concepts emerge, and small worlds are created.”
He perceives the learning networks to be:
” … the ecosystem, a collection of different entities related in a single environment that interact with each other in a complex network of affordances and dependencies, an environment where the individual entities are not joined or sequenced or packaged in any way, but rather, live, if you will, free, their nature defined as much by their interactions with each other as by any inherent property in themselves.”
There are many more interesting quotes but I'm in danger of republishing his complete paper so you'll have to read the original for yourselves. In his conclusion he provides some timely advice for would be purchasers of e-learning systems which makes the paper worth a read in itself.
Is he right?
Probably.
Will contributions like this stop us in our tracks?
Probably not … at least not for a long time.
The global e-learning business is, as Downes himself alludes to, just that, a business. There's an awful lot of investment in time, money, and reputations gone into and going into the creation, support, and maintenace of systems which are as much about, if not more about, managing, controlling, and limiting as they are with learning and education. The irony of course could be that once we've created this chocolate box that the consumers don't actually want the chocolates inside at all, but that they find some use for the box:)
What's important, however, is that we find space for the Downes' vision of e-learning and not have it crushed underfoot by the putative Behmoth. The difficulty here is of course the seductive myth of the e-learning solution which we all know is just a matter of selecting the best off-the-shelf proprietary product … right?
For readers interested in pursuing the Learnng Networks concept a bit further then Rob Koper's recent presentation at ALT-C 2004 entitled Moving towards learning networks for lifelong learning provides a 'systems' view of learning networks. The irony here, in the context of this Auricle article, is, of course, Rob Koper's academic home is the Open University of the Netherlands, some would say the crucible of IMS Learning Design.
