WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...
What with a new Macbook, marking AS-level History exam scripts for Edexcel, and the World Cup, it’s a wonder I’ve managed to read anything this week! But I have found time to read a bit and, in fact, found a whole new set of blogs I didn’t know existed, thanks to Dave Warlick’s Hitchhikr site. Please put any grammatical mistakes or excessive sporting analogies down to me watching Portugal vs. Holland as I write this post… 
Doug over at Borderland made an excellent post about An Internet of Classrooms in which he discusses ‘classroom change, design, technology, culture and institutional resistance’. He starts off by saying that the phrase ‘technology in the classroom’ has been bandied about for the last 25 years or so. What about if we turn that around and think about ‘classroom in the technology’?
It occurs to me that if we stop thinking about classrooms as places, and instead consider them things - things that blog - or ‘blogjects’ then we will inevitably begin to recognize new possibilities for working with them, rather than “inhabitingâ€Â? them.
This reference to ‘blogjects’ comes from a reference made on Knowledging across life’s curriculum where the idea of an ‘Internet of Things’ is quoted:
The Internet of Things is the underpinnings for a new kind of digital, networked ecology in which objects become collaborators in helping us shape our individual social practices towards the goal of creating a more livable, habitable and sustainable world. “Blogjects� � or objects that blog � captures the potential of networked Things to inform us, create visualizations, represent to us aspects of our world that were previously illegible or only accessible by specialist.
So, a convoluted way of saying that the Internet is going to get more ‘artificially intelligent’ and develop more into a semantic web. I can’t really see the need to call them ‘blogjects’ really. I think it’s pretty much just a way of putting new clothes on an old(er) idea…
The spin that Doug puts on this, however - that classrooms are not physical places, but are ‘objects’ (I would prefer to call them ‘concepts’ or something similar) - is a sound one. As society continues to be organized and connect in more physically disconnected ways I can see the traditional classroom becoming less and less relevant. Of course, this will not be recognised by those in charge and problems will ensue which will be put down to other factors. 
If anything’s going to change, therefore, it’s going to have to come from a grassroots level. On the Brian Crosby’s Learning is Messy blog he’s made a post (Change - Start a Ripple) which references Miguel Guhlin’s post, Pearls on a String. Brian discusses how the ‘ripple effect’ can be a greater stimulus to change across complex organizations than a top-down approach:
For new ideas to really be valuable they need to have some level of transference. Can others be successful using your technique (even if they have to tweak it to match their style)? If it works for you – truly works for you but others can’t reproduce your result, that doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable – it’s just not going to work for others or lead to change in others. But if it does work for others and they start doing it and are successful, you’ve made a difference for that group. If the group is successful then there’s the possibility that others will be drawn in and maybe, just maybe it will grow from there.
Miguel Guhlin develops this in Pearls on a String by offering the following advice to those wanting to effect change:
- Write about your experiences (i.e. blog!)
- Commit to deep change
- Watch movies about change agents
- Share your fears
Although the above sounds a bit life coach-eque, its worth a read! 
How one changes ones environment as an educator depends on the conception one has of education and, in particular, learning. George Siemens, as well as posting links to some excellent neuroscience resources has this week looked at the Constructivism as a model of learning (Constructivism vs. Connectivism). He criticizes it first of all for its vagueness, as it has not been well-defined by its adherents meaning that it is an ‘idea without boundaries, a philosophy without root’. George discusses an article entitled Why Minimally Guided Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching (PDF) which argues that ‘constructivism is at odds with what we currently understand about “human cognitive architecture”.’ The problem, he says, is that theories such as constructivism are too ‘monochromatic’ and two-dimensional:
The numerous factors that impact learning is overwhelming - I’m almost at the stage of throwing up my hands and saying the real challenge lies in defining context, need, and intent of learning. Most often when we are debating about learning theories, we are really debating how we’ve framed the questions and the context of learning. As always, monochromatic views of learning fail. Each tool for the task (or the context).
The main problem George has with constructivism is that it doesn’t take account for ’social’ learning as it assumes that learning goes on in the heads of individuals. Constructivism cannot take account of socially-constructed knowledge:
Constructivism, as with other learning theories, assumes that learning happens in our head. In fairness, various flavours of constructivism acknowledge the importance of the social context in which the learning happens, and that learners learn from each other. The act of learning itself is still perceived to be in the head of the individual. Most learning needs today are becoming too complex to be addressed in “our heads”. We need to rely on a network of people (and increasingly, technology) to store, access, and retrieve knowledge and motivate its use. The network itself becomes the learning. This is critical today; the rapid development of knowledge means that we need to find new ways of learning and staying current. We cannot increase our capacity for learning ad infinitum. We must begin to conceive learning as socially networked and enhanced by technology (it’s a symbiosis of people and technology that forms our learning networks). We need to acknowledge our learning context not only as an enabler of learning, but as a participant of the learning itself.
George’s argument against constructivism goes something like this: my learning is a product of the environments I have found myself in; when new knowledge enters my space I attempt to understand it in relation to environmental factors; I cannot simply ‘construct’ knowledge from this as ‘many of the elements that comprise the base of my knowledge come previously constructed (by a discipline, the teacher, the article, etc.)’; knowledge is constructed through connecting information together, not by constructing it in toto. I understand where George is coming from, but I think there’s a signficant overlap between connectivism and (some formulations of) constructivism here.
And finally, some blog posts which I’ve come across due to their involvement in blogging the upcoming NECC conference:
- Digital Crosswalks >> The Evil That is Powerpoint
- eLearning Blog >> Top 10 Favourite Ed Tech Blogs?
- In the Heart of a Teacher is a Student >> Homework: Responsibility verses Compassion
- Musings about Social Computing and Ed. Tech. >> Blogging Do’s and Don’ts
- Musings about Social Computing and Ed. Tech. >> Connectivism and Web 2.0
- Musings about Social Computing and Ed. Tech. >> Have you heard of the new learning theory?
This last one has lots and lots of links to good websites for educators: Edutopia >> Spiral Notebook >> Favorite Websites for Educators
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