There’s been an on-going industrial-institutional complex at play here for at least the past 30 years that has ensured the continued irrelevance of technology to learning in the formal setting which has been a gift to those in government who would like to opt our learners out of the 21st century and return to back to basic teaching practice. This would be fine of course if our learners where joining a back to basics, 1950’s world after they leave their formal education.
You know what I’m talking about here, technology designed to replicate and support existing teaching practices and formal learning environments which quite frankly haven’t changed a great deal since the mid-20th century. As I’ve oft said the problem with this approach is that we get the same, often mediocre, results only quicker.
This is a fascinating video…
When I retired the Handheld Learning Conference after 5 years at the height of its growth and success (2,000 international delegates) it was because I believed that the argument had been won. I just couldn’t see the point of more navel-gazing about devices. There could no longer be a question about the value of the connected learner who had near permanent access to learning via their mobile device.
Or could there?
Naively I didn’t count on the legion of practitioners or IT job-worths who were still thinking in the context of the mobile or tablet device as a laptop replacement and set about retro-fitting these modern marvels with the same garbage that didn’t work very well even on laptops. They must have missed the memo about the shift in computing that has left the desktop PC all but dead and the laptop on death-row.
So my question is what will happen when every learner has their own iPad like device, permanently connected to the internet without filtering and other controls?
What disruption might this enable?
So the analogy or even challenge that I make is what would the Napster of learning look like?
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