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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'>Hiya Everyone,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'>I haven’t had much to
contribute this week because I have been engaged in a couple of projects that
will I hope eventually offer open and free access to learning.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'>- Personal Learning Environment –
<a href="http://ple.elg.ca">http://ple.elg.ca</a> – this project, which
is an application and systems development project being undertaken by Canada’s
National Research Council, is intended to enable learners easy access to the
world’s learning resources from their own personal environment<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'>- Critical Literacies 2010 –
<a href="http://elg.ple.ca/course">http://elg.ple.ca/course</a> - this is an
open online course, on the model of the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge
courses George and I have offered in the past, designed to study and foster the
fundamental capacities learners need to flourish in an online environment<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'>For myself, I have little to no
interest in ‘trends’ in higher education, nor am I interested in
the ‘globalization’ of higher education. Where perhaps once I
thought mass movements or mass phenomena were important, these no longer
interest me. And where I once thought the needs of learning could be addressed
institutionally, I now see institutions playing a smaller and smaller role.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'>I come to this field originally as
a bit of a futurist. I was working as a web developer and instructional
designer when I posted ‘The Future of Online Learning’ <a
href="http://www.downes.ca/future%20in%201998">http://www.downes.ca/future in
1998</a>. This paper, written originally to explain to my managers what I was
working on, caught people’s imagination and, because of its accuracy, had
a remarkably long shelf life. A couple of years ago I wrote ‘The Future
of Online Learning: Ten Years On’ <a
href="http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2008/11/future-of-online-learning-ten-years-on_16.html">http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2008/11/future-of-online-learning-ten-years-on_16.html</a>
to update the predictions and draw out some of my thoughts on them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'>Today, my work is still very much
forward-directed, but I do not (and never have) believe in the inevitability of
the future. Yes, we can detect patterns and regularities in events, as I
describe in ‘Patterns of Change’, an article I wrote for Critical
Literacies last week. <a href="http://ple.elg.ca/course/?p=33">http://ple.elg.ca/course/?p=33</a>
But as I state near the end of that article, I believe that choice, decision
and selection play a major role in shaping the future.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'>Thus, while I often think of the
future generally, and the future of education in particular, as a gradual
migration of mass phenomena to network phenomena, I do not see this progression
as inevitable, and indeed, I observe on the part of many quarters efforts to
keep us firmly entrenched in the world of mass (I document these and other observations,
for those not familiar with it, in an online newsletter, OLDaily <a
href="http://www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.htm">http://www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.htm</a>
). Change is not only progression, it is also conflict (and it is also
cooperation). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'>So, I don’t care what the
majority of educational institutions are doing, I don’t care what the ‘best
practices’ are, I don’t care how ‘higher education can make
you a better leader’, I don’t even care about debates such as ‘equity
or utility’ (sorry George) because these are all things that trade on
commonality, general principles, massification, manipulation and control, and
ultimately, corporatism and statism (the twin pillars of the mass age).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'>What I do care about is the
personal. This is not some pseudo-Randist individualism, not some sort of
Lockean atomism, not a definition of the individual as the granules who, when
assembled together, create the commonwealth. I am interested in the person as
embedded in society, the person as a member of a network of communications and
collaborations, a person who works and creates with and for other people, a
person who experiences sociality, but also, and contra the mass nation, a
person who is self-governing, guided by his or her own interests and
principles, and is living a fully engaged life in a technological civilization.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'>It is the development of this sort
of person that I had in mind when I wrote ‘Things You Really Need to
Learn’. <a
href="http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2006/08/things-you-really-need-to-learn.html">http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2006/08/things-you-really-need-to-learn.html</a>
I am by no means the first to advocate such an attitude toward education. This
is certainly what Illich has in mind in ‘Tools for Conviviality’. <a
href="http://clevercycles.com/tools_for_conviviality/">http://clevercycles.com/tools_for_conviviality/</a>
:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='color:black'>if we
give people tools that guarantee their right to work with high, independent
efficiency, thus simultaneously eliminating the need for either slaves or
masters and enhancing each person’s range of freedom. People need new
tools to work with rather than tools that “work” for them. They
need technology to make the most of the energy and imagination each has, rather
than more well-programmed energy slaves.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'>So little of what we read or see
in the field of online learning is concerned with providing people with the
tools they need to create their own freedom. Study the work on e-learning and
you will find a preponderance of material addressed to achieving corporate
objectives and ROI, advancing the interests of colleges and universities,
meeting employment needs and developing industrial strategies, assisting in the
privatization or corporatization of the learning infrastructure, extending the
reach of a given technology or product network, or subsumption of learning
entirely under the individual’s relation as ‘consumer’ with a
corporate entity (whether that entity is government or private sector).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'>“The master’s tools
will never dismantle the master’s house.” This phrase from Audre
Lorde <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audre_Lorde">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audre_Lorde</a>
has haunted me ever since I first hear it. The develop of, and provision of,
tools for the higher education sector, the corporate e-learning sector, or even
for the school system, parents, priests or non-profit agencies to use, will
never provide the degree of conviviality envisioned by Illich. In these tools
there is, and will always be, embedded a dependence back to the originator of
the tool, back to the system of mass that makes it both possible and necessary.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'>I have struggled with the role of
the mass in relation to individual freedom and autonomy. <a
href="http://www.downes.ca/presentation/53">http://www.downes.ca/presentation/53</a>
I can certainly see the benefit and need for everything to do with mass, from
that sense of belonging we all get from being a part of a team to the organized
production we require to sustain a modern technological society. I am no myopic
idealist looking for the utopian society of perfectly enlightened autonomous
individuals working in perfect harmony. But I also write wishing that the mass
had some sort of ‘escape’ or ‘no-harm’ clause, or that
educators had their own version of the Hippocratic Oath, pledging first, to do
no harm.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'>In the meantime, I work with and
for what I believe the internet truly is – an explosion of capacity
thrust into the hands of people worldwide, the instrument not only for the
greatest outburst of creativity and self-expression ever seen, but also of the
greatest autonomy and self-determination, and as well on top of that an
unparalleled mechanism for cooperation and cohesion. My view of the internet is
as far from the factory as one can imagine. But not as an inevitable or guaranteed
future. Only one where there is a determined and directed effort to place the
tools – the physical tools, the digital tools, and the cognitive tools –
into the hands of a worldwide population, to do with as they will.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'>I’ve followed the
discussions on this list with some interest. But these, too, seem in many respects
distance to me. The distinctions of academia, the dialectic of class struggle –
these seem to me to miss the essential nature of the change. In the end, to me,
the meaning of the internet boils down to a simple utility. One person, one
voice. The freedom of each of us to form and to have and to share our own
thoughts, created by us, contributed freely to the world, and a society built,
not on the basis of a propagation of ideas, but rather, on the basis of a
gathering of them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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