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"So (still working within my initial understanding of the Visitor/Resident concept), I found myself asking whether it mattered that my student-teachers feel and behave like visitors rather than residents in our online learning spaces. Learning is not supposed to be comfortable; it requires the expansion of boundaries and questioning of assumptions. The last seven months have certainly been challenging for the learners I work with, but we got there, and I can honestly say it has been the most rewarding time of my life, seeing them change and grow. In addition to having grasped the fundamental concept that teaching is something that is best done with one’s mouth shut, many have also now realised that sharing their practice on the open web will not result in the sky falling on their heads. The others are at least peering around the doorframe and are on the way to crossing that particular threshold."

[...]

"However… talking with Dave White during the afternoon, I began to realise that the visiting/residing distinction isn’t just about perceptions of comfort and safety, familiarity and control. It dawned on me that ‘residing’ is an immersed state of mind. Delegates on a residential course or conference, for example (or undergraduates living in halls for another), are engaged in the learning experience full-time. Although their engagement during that time is variable, it is persistent, and there is a blurring of the boundaries between formal and informal, professional and personal."

Something to think about when changing education "businesses" online.

"In a fast-moving world, it is perspective, more than anything else, that a person and a society needs — the perspective that lets one distinguish the significant from the trivial, the enduring from the transient, the true from the false. Such perspective is at the very heart of what it means to be truly informed, and being truly informed is at the very heart of democracy. As Thomas Jefferson long ago warned: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

[p. 132]

"Then, while the hard-nosed science professors were decrying the softness of the "soft subjects," Europe marched off to war once again — acting out the historical-social studies-literary stories that were presumed only to be "enriching the mind." Surely we could do better at understanding ourselves and our mad lurchings. Poison gas and Big Berthas might be the deadly fruits of verifiable science, but the impulse to use them grew out of those stories we tell ourselves. So should we not try to understand their power better, to see how stories and historical accounts are put together and what there is about them that leads people either to live together or to maim and kill each other?"

[p. 90]

"Our Western pedagogical tradition hardly does justice to the importance of intersubjectivity in transmitting culture. Indeed, it often clings to a preference for a degree of explicitness that seems to ignore it. So teaching is fitted into a mold in which a single, presumably omniscient teacher explicitly tells or shows presumably unknowing learners something they presumably know nothing about. Even when we tamper with this model, as with "question periods" and the like, we still remain loyal to its unspoken precepts. I believe that one of the most important gifts that a cultural psychology can give to education is a reformulation of this impoverished conception. For only a very small part of educating takes place on such a one-way street — and it is probably one of the least successful parts."

[pp. 20-21]

"One neat, but therefore only partly adequate, formulation says that while schoolchildren are taught, university students study. Undergraduates are being introduced to the modes of enquiry appropriate to various disciplines; what they develop, ideally, is not simply mastery of a body of information, but the capacity to challenge or extend the received understanding of a particular topic. For this reason, university teaching has more than its share of the paradox involved in telling someone to 'be autonomous!' Learning what is involved in conducting enquiry in a certain discipline partly grows out of being exposed to examples of such work and then being incited, not to reproduce them, but to produce a piece of work of one's own that is informed by having come to understand what the examples are examples of. This can only be done by becoming acquainted with work in a particular discipline: simply being exhorted in general to pursue truth, cultivate accuracy, express oneself clearly, and so on, will not achieve the desired goal, though being encouraged to subject those abstract expressions themselves to analytical scrutiny might conceivably be the beginnings of an education in philosophy."

[p. 9]

"I believe it is a serious mistake to view education as an inevitably progressive process, as an enterprise in which we succeed to the degree that children learn more, become more skilled in literacy and numeracy, give evidence of higher stages of psychological development, and so on, while ignoring or neglecting the losses associated with each gain. To beleaguered schools and teachers, I recognize that this may seem a somewhat exotic new complaint. And while so many students seem to acquire so marginal a degree of basic literacy and numeracy, the idea that even these meager successes might be snatched away can be very depressing. Depressing or not, it needs to be faced. I think the result of facing it can, in the context of the discussion of Romantic understanding, be liberating rather than the opposite because then we can see better how education might go forward during these years."

[op. cit., p. 97]

"¿Hasta qué punto las sociedades innovan, más allá de sus sistemas de inovación tecnológica, científica, productiva y económica? Vivimos, efetivamente, en una sociedad descompensada: entre la euforia tecnocientífica y el analfabetismo de los valores cívicos, entre la innovación tecnológica y la redundancia social, entre una cultura crítica en el espacio de la ciencia o en el mundo económico y un espacio político y social donde se innova poco, donde hay una escasa capacidad para articular el equilibrio entre el consenso y el disenso, para canalizar los conflictos y diseñar modelos de convivencia."

(p. 214)

"When it comes to the debt crisis," says Eco, "and I'm speaking as someone who doesn't understand anything about the economy, we must remember that it is culture, not war, that cements our [European] identity. The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other. Today, we've been at peace for 70 years and no one realises how amazing that is any more. Indeed, the very idea of a war between Spain and France, or Italy and Germany, provokes hilarity. The United States needed a civil war to unite properly. I hope that culture and the [European] market will do the same for us."

(via @danicar)

"Knowledge exists only as a function of living tissue. Knowing where to find knowledge or poems or speeches is nothing like having that material as a part of one's living tissue. It affects how we think and feel, and education is about precisely improving these things. The emphasis that has led away from rote learning, and in this way eventually learning by heart, has been one that gradually and greatly impoverishes minds. This is how progressivism's flaw — in the name of the best impulse — has gradually undercut again and again the great purpose it was framed to serve."

[p. 68]

"In a blended online world, a local professor could select not only the reading material, but do so from an array of different lecturers, who would provide different perspectives from around the world. The local professor would do more tutoring and conversing and less lecturing. Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School notes it will be easier to break academic silos, combining calculus and chemistry lectures or literature and history presentations in a single course."

(via @hjarche)

"Some would argue that covering more ground exposes the speeding driver to more of what is real. But, ironically, the faster we go, the less we truly see. Speed insulates us from organic detail, and space becomes not homes, neighborhoods, and individual lives, but a disembodied medium through which we move. Though more is seen, less is observed, for the depth of our understanding is inversely proportionate to our velocity. Life itself in turn becomes one big "commute," devoid of that density that only caring and commitment can yield. Indeed, we become so inured to motion that our greatest stresses occur when our movement is impeded against our will — by a long check-out line, a traffic jam, a delayed flight — each a blunted by-product of society's quest for speed. Meanwhile, those who love to live in the fast lane curse the impediments in their path, never realizing that those impediments would never have existed if only they had chosen a lower speed."

[pp. 107-8]

"What I’m saying is — as I was reading it I was struck by this passage. And that sentiment is freeze-dried. Maybe no one ever defrosts it. Maybe it just sits there as an informative piece of meta-data. Maybe it doesn’t make any difference to anybody. But maybe, the fact that I picked out that passage causes it to surface in someone else’s search. Or I could see everybody that picked out that passage. Or I could do a search where I filter for everyone who cared about that passage and show me the other passages they agreed about to get the commonality of the books they read. The point is, by switching to default public, the aggregate value of that information is so much larger than anybody believed it would be in the 1990s."

(via @adfig)

"In the face of this, one has to make, over and over again the obvious point that a society does not educate the next generation in order for them to contribute to its economy. It educates them in order that they should extend and deepen their understanding of themselves and the world, acquiring, in the course of this form of growing up, kinds of knowledge and skill which will be useful in their eventual employment, but which will no more be the sum of their education than that employment will be the sum of their lives. And this general point about education takes a particular form in universities, where, whatever level of professional or vocational 'training' is also undertaken, the governing purpose involves extending human understanding through open-ended enquiry. From wholly laudable motives, we constantly fall into the trap of justifying an activity — one initially (and perhaps for long thereafter) undertaken because of its intrinsic interest and worth — as something which we do because it yields incidental benefits which are popular with those not in a position to appreciate the activity's intrinsic interest and worth. If we find ourselves saying that what is valuable about learning to play the violin well is that it helps us develop the manual dexterity that will be useful for typing, then we are stuck in a traffic-jam of carts in front of horses."

(p. 91)

"But the real disruption comes when you stop measuring academic accomplishment in terms of seat time and hours logged, and start measuring it by competency. As all employers know, the average BA doesn’t certify that the degree-holder actually knows anything. It merely certifies that she had the perseverance to pass the required number of courses. The most subversive element of Western Governors University is that it certifies students by competency, not seat time. In fact, students don’t sit in a “class” at all.

There’s no prescribed curriculum. Students are assessed before each course to see which concepts they already grasp and which ones they need to master. Then they’re offered a variety of “learning resources” – textbooks, videos, online simulations, conversations with a tutor – to close the gap. They can complete a course in eight weeks or 80. Routine assessments along the way – and a tough exam at the end – ensure they’ve mastered the material. As one graduate told Washington Monthly, which recently profiled WGU, “If you can prove your competence, why pay all of that money to sit through something you already know?”"

(via @AnaCristinaPrts)