Here Comes Everybody

  Obligatory pic of horrific looking 19th cen school that should add impact to the post.

In a previous post, I talked about what language learning 2.0 meant to me. In the coming weeks and months I’ll try to elaborate  through examples from projects that I’ve been involved with. I begin with a description of a key concept in learning 2.0 - its non-linear nature. I’ll try to outline my thoughts on this before showing how it has affected the design of ChinesePod and SpanishPod in the next post.

Linear learning 

Textbooks, curricula, and our educational system itself are the products of a mechanistic past.  School knowledge is pre-determined by a centralized authority, and delivered in a linear format to a mass audience. The system is standardized, mass produced, scheduled, etc. In the classroom, the emphasis has been on teaching - it is expected that the learning will simply follow. The act of teaching, then, is seen as transfering information in a controlled sequence, a process that eliminates context - all learners receive the same content in the same format - but fails to accommodate variations in learner needs.  

At the individual level, traditional learning is also ‘linear’. Most textbooks stagger information - you can’t proceed to Unit 2 until you’ve learned Unit 1, type of thing. Let me give you an example: English languge textbooks for decades, have begun with present tense (aspect) verbs with an emphasis on the 3rd person. It’s always the first lesson. Thereafter the books invariably proceed with simple past tense, then past continuous, and so on. In fact, however, most learners of English do not ‘acquire’ the earliest items until they reach an advanced stage of fluency. It’s obvious that these sequence of items are presented out of expediency. The question is, however, whose expediency - the teachers’ or the students’? (There is no natural order of language learning that can be described as a linear set of morphemes.)

Non-linear learning 

 In nature, linear learning doesn’t exist. Children learn their mother tongue through random exposure and make sense of the language by identifying patterns.  Our brains are designed to work/learn this way, but it is a subjective process because each individual experiences distinct social and psychological phenomena.  

If there is a metpaphor for learning in the natural environment it may be the network rather than the line: our neural networks forms the basis of memory/knowledge and even the brain itself. Which is interesting because all networks come down to two elements: links and nodes. (This is as true for the internet as it is for the human brain.)

The internet is changing the way we learn and that’s because of its  network qualities. I believe we’ve moved beyond the Mechanical Age, and beyond the Information Age, to the Age of Networks, and therefore to the Age of Networked Learning. Networks are every where and, as Jay Cross persuasively argues, they are changing everything, including how we learn. The last time that happened we had the Enlightenment on our hands.

 In the next post I’ll try to show how we’ve applied these insights in the real life design of our learning programs. In the meantime, feel free!

 Ken Carroll 

In this New York Times article, David Brooks describes the relationship between China’s ruling elite and its school system. The ‘phenomenal feats of memorization to learn the Chinese characters’ are symptomatic of the ends and means of Chinese education - churning out a class of like-minded wonks to run its bureaucracy. This, he says, is a process that has evloved over 1,000 years. (I would argue that it is  more like 2,000 years.)

These practices, combined with its cultural values, shape the Chinese technocratic state. Brooks continues:

The exams don’t reward all mental skills. They reward the ability to work hard and memorize things. Your adolescence is oriented around those exams — the cram seminars, the hours of preparation.

 This description is accurate. (If anything, he understates it.) It is not uncommon for 3rd graders to work late into the night on homework assignments. Parents and teachers push kids relentlessly, particularly in math and in memorizing information, up to and including  the university level. I actually doubt that parents generally think in terms of the Communist Party as the goal for their kids, but there are after all 50 million members in the CPC and it is a real career possibility. No parent would balk at the opportunity to see their kids in a position of power there.

You don’t get very far in the Communist Party without a PhD these days. This affords the universities, the political recruiting grounds, a level of influence unlike in other countries. The payoff is that the Party has demonstrated an incredible level of efficiency in going about its tasks. It can claim, with some plausibility, to have helped hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in recent years, despite (or is that because of) the widescale corruption within its ranks. In this snese the bureaucracy works.

Nonetheless, the educational system is stunted, and profoundly irrelevant to the needs of the vast majority of its students.  It evaluates talent and ability in an absurdly narrow, stultifying way. If memorization is the most highly prized ability, then creativity, innovativeness, and other things are necessarily suppressed, a potentially huge problem for China’s competitiveness in the post industrial era. But perhaps even wsorse is the fact that, most Chinese children have a nightmarish time in the system. They leave it, for the most part, with few practical or intellectual skills to equip them for the realities of the 21st century.

As Brooks observes: 

 Perhaps it’s simply impossible for a top-down memorization-based elite to organize a flexible, innovative information economy, no matter how brilliant its members are.

 Again, he understates the scale of the problem, if anything.

I understand that the article is reductionistic - describe anyone’s life in this way and it will sound kafkaesque. But the problems of Chinese education are real and Brooks has put them into context in a compelling way. From where I sit Chinese education looks pretty stunted.

Ken Carroll