Networked Learning Conference 2010

Clearly this already has in the post-doctoral context! Are we not all learning and exchanging information without a recognised teacher. You could question how important or widely used digital networks are in this context, but the example of physical networking is there. The question should perhaps be more tightly focused on to what requirements there are on a learner to benefit from such a network without a teacher.

Any teacher who can be completely replaced by a learning network should be!

I sing the praises of PLNs all the time and am researching them in education and teacher professional development,  but I think there is still an important role for a professional teacher. But that teacher has to live and breathe the PLN themeselves as learners or become redundant . Teachers need to model of what this networked learning looks like.You can't understand PLNs from just a theoretical stance - you have to have been be immersed in one/some to truly realise what it has to offer. When you see a shout out on twitter from a teacher who says "my class just asked... and I am seeking the help of my network to answer" my heart sings. These teachers are explicitly demonstrating the value of networks and you know that they will be guiding and scaffolding their students toward relishing this exciting but messy kind of learning. I say messy because it can be overhwelming and part of what learners need to cultivate is a tolerance for messiness and not trying to capture all knowledge that flows by you. They need to develop strategies and find tools that suit their preferred ways of engaging and a professional teacher can support this.

I was wowed by a presentation as the NMC Consortium conference this year by Jackie Gerstein. She did a 5 minutes of fame of the projects her grade 5 students developed in class. As she did she named the tools the students used and asked the room full of educators (300) if they had used them. 90% had not heard of and certainly never used any of them. Many of them Jackie sourced as the students developed a need for them, and as she did she modelled how she went about finding tools  fit for the desired purpose. The students began doing the same and became evaluators of tools, brought new tools to their peers and were able to rate tool usefulness. All that happened because of Jackie - as superb classroom teacher, but also a supremely connected professional. Follow Jackie on twitter and you will see @jackiegerstein.


OK stepping off my soap box now ;-)

bronwyn stuckey wrote:

Any teacher who can be completely replaced by a learning network should be!

I think that while being "teachers of each other" is essential to NL, there needs to be an overall steering mechanism independent of the curriculum. I mean, even with a course that is repeated again and again the students will always differ. This means that the learning situation will be hard to formalize in a way, that enables us to let it run itself as we can never fully take into account the differences between the learners. We can only do without a reflecting teacher if all the constants of the communication situation (medium, subject, learners, context and so on) is stable. This will never happen, I think. Therefore I think we need to kill the dream of learners operating completely autonomous. We need to harness the power of collaborative learning but to do this we need insightful teachers. I believe that the role of the teacher in NL is exactly this: To steer the ever changing student material towards learning. Yes, there is a lot of untapped potential in collaborative learning, but there will always be a need for the expert that can guide the students. Even if it's ever so little once in a while like a subtle push in the right direction.

I think of it as a satellite in space. We prepare it until launch. Here we take into account the mission and the problems it may run into. Every time we send up a satellite we take into account what the needs of the previous ones were as to make it even more autonomous, but no matter how much we prepare we can never take everything into account. We can not prepare it to run everything by itself. Simply put - there will probably be a need to sometimes fire the steering rockets manually to get it back on course. (I am no rocket scientist so this metaphor may be flawed, but I hopes it serves the purpose :-).

My point is that the teacher is needed but his/her role will shift from "the person that teaches" to "the person that guides students towards teaching (and thereby learning)".