Provocative Ideas about the future of teaching and learning.1

Hi everyone,

The purpose of this blog is to capture in it ideas from myself, the doctoral students I mentor and others how to most effectively (and with ease, fun and laughter) jump the hurdles set up for us in a research dissertation. These will be the notes and help part. Since I am an educator and the students I mentor are in education, this blog will serve a dual purpose of letting us all muse together on the future of education. These posts will make up the ideas.

To that end, I start with a copy from a post I just made in response to George Siemens: http://connectivism.ca/blog/2008/02/learning_and_knowing_in_networ.html because: 1) I think the theory of connectivism needs to be considered in all educational solutions, and 2) this is the first time I have seen someone ask about what happens to the role of the teacher in today's world of self directed learning.

Dear George and others,

Lots of comments come to mind (in no particular order) to your post "learning and knowing in networks" focused on your question about "what happens to the teachers?" By the end of my musings you will see that I solidify to the need to redefine the role that used to be teacher - coming full circle to your question.

a) I have lead numbers of groups of people simultaneously coming up with local solutions to issues by facilitating participatory action research (my favorite process for learning) online. The learning results have been transformative. For me this a piece of this larger puzzle.
b) I think the word teacher helps keep us in the old paradigm. We really facilitate more than teach - and it is best and most fun when I learn as well - (my current standard for refelctive measurement of the experience.) Keeping standards for measurement for myself and the "student" seems part of the role.
c) As I work with doctoral candidates I see what I do most is help them set in their own mind the size and shape of hurdles they need to get over and then make suggestions about tools that might help. Using this metaphor teachers really are coaches (and again the standard of measurement idea shows up).
d) What is fun for me about the "academie" is the height of the hurdles we set for each other - unfortunately these also may lead to ego issues but that is another story.
e) In another post I read today (http://kwhobbes.wordpress.com/2008/02/06/lets-meet-them-at-the-door/) a woman self identified as a teacher wrote of the difficulty of creating new networks, when others (she mentioned you by name George) had been doing it for so long. I really hate silo's of ideas, thoughts or people - what can we do in our new redefinition of the role that used to be teacher that will help us avoid these traps? This woman reminds us that part of this role is to give a helping hand up as we look upward our outward ourselves.
f) Finally I always come back to wondering what other cultures have by ways of understanding the roles of student and teacher that can help. Perhaps concepts of elder come in here, a concept I like because it seems without ego.

Thanks for the provocative question,
Alana