Sunday Posts

Can you be in the business of Education and stop selling courses?  It is a tough ask, as everyone in business has a course-fetish. Courses are the big hammers that the whole sector uses to solve the problems of the world. No matter what you come up with, the educator is likely to say - there is a course for that! We may not quarrel with the essential idea. Course stands to mean a route, or a procedure, originating from the Latin word for Run. But the course, as it appears in our jargon today, is a frozen thing, and means not a journey but rather a static feast of textbooks, lectures, assignments and exams.  Indeed, many people are dismayed by how it is usually done - often with little consideration or care for the person involved. However, course is such a common currency in education that, eventually, everyone seems to fall in the Course trap. It is so endemic that being educated and being Coursed (which indeed means chased) have become two different things alto...

Elizabeth Losh of University of California San Diego contends that it is a mistake to view education as a product and not as a process. But even this is stopping short, because the question, process towards what, also must be asked. Burying ourselves in the process paradigm, powerful as it is, may obscure our inability to find a purpose. Many of today's debates centre around the question - education for what - and not answering this adequately may inevitably lead to this idea of education-as-a-pill. Indeed, the purpose question can be limiting too. The proposition, education is for an employment, is presented as a self-evident and universal truth all too commonly. While an education-for-employment must undoubtedly have its place in a modern economy, in many ways, this also serves as the key rationale for stripping education from its all other functions, that of joy, discovery and of being, and this is the process element Professor Losh is concerned about. Besides, this is the...

Online Learning is poor experience! How much was I reminded of my past life, when I was an young e-mail evangelist and was forced to comparative charts of fax and email, when I was confronted with that statement. There was an element of surreal in the setting too: I was talking to a Senior Manager in a large corporation based in Philippines who do most of their work remotely anyway. But the tone was sincere - it was not an attempt to end the conversation as the coffee had even arrived - and this was a point being made, as I guessed, from the person's own life experience.  This is a difficult debate to engage into. Because it is difficult to argue against experience: If you had a bad meal in a restaurant and I had a good meal there, I can't convince you that the restaurant is good. I can only convince you that your experience was not typical, as much as you can convince me that neither was mine. There was a lot going on in online learning, and every tom and his friends hav...

I wrote about the contrast between John Dewey's concept of Learning from Experience and the conventional ideas of Experiential Learning ( See here ) and the limitation the latter may have, despite its popularity, as we climb into a future with smart machines and pervasive globalisation. I see Dewey's concept of creating engaged individuals to be central to the system of education we ought to build - and indeed see that the modern education system, with its focus on creating humanoid workers, is precisely its anti-thesis - and believe that we need to promote the concept of experience not as isolated special events but as an opportunity to interact with one's world.  The key difference that this different approach to experience makes is in the idea of inquiry. Learning from Experience depends on the emotional engagement with the world and asking questions: This much everyone agrees upon. But it matters what kind of questions we are asking, because they shape our abiliti...

Experiential Learning is the old hot thing. Not only everyone likes the idea - that learning should happen from practical life - it has a great pedigree in education theory. The new formula of competency-based learning, that learning should focus on useful competencies required at work, takes this idea further, and tightly weave all learning around experience, making all else superfluous. However, while this has become the new orthodoxy, one limitation of this conception is how to fit this into a rapidly changing world. When everything changes, and today's competencies may not translate into any future advantage, one would wonder whether experiential learning is enough. Besides, one ought to ask how to approach learning when change happens in our life and work so rapidly. The answer may lie in learning from experience. I use the term in the classical sense, as used by Dewey, and as opposed to the idea of experiential learning. Dewey himself contrasted his idea of 'experie...