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Last week I wrote a post called “learning’s first principle“. In it I tried to explain a thread that I’ve been seeing as the fundamental issue facing my colleagues and I (and by extension, probably some other people) in education. If you are like me and too lazy to click links to read context pieces :) the excellent David Wiley posted a comment in the comments summing up one of the main issues
“Why bother learning how to use all these ‘effective instructional strategies’ when people aren’t even going to engage with them?” – David Wiley from 1998
Or, put another way, if students don’t care about learning… nothing else matters. Stephen Downes responded on OLDAILY
My take is different. I see education less as an enterprise in making people do what they don’t want to do, and more as one of helping people do what they want to do. And there’s something wrong with the selection mechanism when a student can pay and spend four years at a university and still not be engaged in learning.
It sort of sets things up nicely to be between Wiley the ‘Iterating towards openness’ guy (read: pragmatic approach to reform) and Mr. burn the schools down himself, Stephen Downes. I vacillate between these two positions… i find myself choosing many pragmatic options in my efforts to understand the administration of education at the same time that i work on what is seen by many as a fairly radical approach to learning. This time, I’m on Wiley’s side – Let’s breakdown Stephen’s comment.
Via Miloš Bajčetić
