I wrote about the future of education before, about the future of knowledge and what it could mean for universities.
http://ed-leading-edge.blogspot.com/2008/07/future-of-knowledge.html
Here, I upon receiving some tweets from my dear friend Shaun, I'm going to map out how things might look like some few decades (maybe 2 or 3) about how the future of education might look like.
Given that there is already this major thing called independent learning going on, where students just go on their own path and learn new things themselves, the current system as it is, based strictly on syllabi and curricula feels rather anachronistic - students find their mental faculties constrained by such ideological boundaries. Yes, syllabus and curriculum still have their place in helping students organise knowledge, and a good syallabus should be a starting platform for students to explore on their own, but in a world where information and knowledge is *free*, what we need is the skills to enable students to manage the information on their own.
In other words, I propose that students be able to manage their own syllabus about what they want to learn, and how they want to learn. And bringing this to university, it means that students take lessons from whatever profs teach, but do not stick to modules, but rather combine ideas from different modules and come up with something synthetic - something that is relevant to themselves in their own context.
Yes, logistics will be a nightmare, and frankly, it will be impossible to introduce these kinds of systems. The module system still has its place, no doubt, but the influx of information and knowedge out there... that is going to pose quite a challenge to the current system anway.
The main problem, is of being constrained, that people feel trapped in what they are allowed to learn...
But I think that individual modules, independent learning, creation of individual syllabi - that seems to be how the future might look to be...
Then again, we could all have memory implants into our brain...
Saturday, 22 November 2008
future of Education
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1 comment:
The moment you used the word "logistics" I realised that it could be done.
It's a tough problem; but it's something that can be solved given enough time and effort.
If you're interested on exploring these ideas further, we ought to get together and form an idea exploration group.
It would work simply; we'll discuss and research the issue at length over a fixed period of time (say ... 2 weeks?). We'll shoot to end up with a "prototype" of sorts. At the 2 week market, we'd determine what we want to do; really develop "final" products, hand off the development to someone else, share the ideas in a blog, etc. Then, we'll move on to the next problem to resolve.
Think about fast track prototyping for ideas and programmes (like IDEO, we we don't necessarily make stuff, we devise programmes!).
Whaddaya think?
Shaun
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