Frances Bell’s Blog

How can education change in a connected world?

This blog post was in answer to a question on the CCK08 forum, but I enjoyed writing it so much, I thought that I would post it here as well.

Illich identified three purposes of a good education system:

1. “it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives;
2. empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them;
3. and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.” http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/chap6.html

I thought that I would examine those by exploring some current ‘free’ and ‘open’ models related to software and web services to relate to a possible future scenario for education.

What is the best model for providing access to available resources sustainably throughout the future?  At face value, a distributed ‘web’ model, where multiple copies of resources are available seems attractive.  This approach can protect us against us failure at a central point but raises the problem of knowing which version we are looking at. Let’s compare that with Open Source Software where multiple forks exist all over the place but there is likely to be a version-controlled store at the OSS web site - hmmm! sounds like a library. A big incentive for the investment of resource involved in the management of this configuration-managed code library must be the possibility for the volunteers in OSS communities to make money on their day jobs, offering paid-for professional services (training, hosting, consultancy) associated with the OSS.
(Semi-)’Free’ services like flickr offer structured and more imaginative ways of finding and managing content but how sustainable are they?  A future where the plug was pulled on a service like flickr is not inconceivable.  I have backups of all my flickr images but what about the links to others, dialogue, etc.?  Alternative approaches to the quasi-commercial and commercial described above have been public service organisations like libraries and non-commercial organisations (e.g. BBC) that become ‘institutions’.
Now let’s look at “those who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them“.  To me they sound like people who become some of the best teachers.  So for fun and delight, they could do this on open online forums, but how do they eat and buy the baby a new pair of shoes?  In the OSS model, they could make their ‘content’ freely available but offer add-on services for payment.  What are the consequences of this for the availability of high-quality learning support across society?  There is a (compelling) theory that the middle classes create structures for education (often with the most respectable of motives) from which their offspring derive the maximum benefit.  The ruling elite are not constrained by these structures but know how to get a very effective education for their own, networking being an essential component.

It’s easy to see the problems with schools, but somewhat more challenging to replace them with social organisations that can still address underserved communities and disadvantaged individuals without acquiring some of the undesirable attributes of institutions. Open source/content teachers may or may not become more effective outside do of ’school’ as we know it now.  The question is  how do we find out if and how to make those changes?

Our last challenge (should we choose to accept it) is to “furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.”  An education systems that wishes to do this can certainly take advantage of the affordances of the web in making public the ideas of a wider range of people.  Unfortunately, this does not guarantee an increase in influence, and the reality of making your challenge known may be much more to with pre-existing power relations.  Herring et al’s findings would suggest we should not be too sanguine about the democratising effects of blogs and other ‘read/write web’ tools and services with regard to public discourse.

“The observation that men are more likely than women and teens to create filter blogs provides a key: It is filter blogs that are privileged, consistent with the notion that the activities of educated, adult males are viewed by society as more interesting and important than those of other demographic groups. ” http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html

I remain an optimist who believes that a ‘good’ education can offer the chance of empowering individuals to influence the power relations within which they may struggle, as well as  expanding their knowledge networks.

The question is, of course, what is a good education?