Old and cynical

Reading through the posts of so many of my classmates on the Coursera What Future for Education? MOOC, I feel a little old and cynical. So many of my new colleagues have the fervour of revolutionaries. Old classrooms are bad, modern technologies are good. Transmissive pedagogy is bad, Vygotsky and collaborative constructivism is the way children learn.

And I reflect that if the old ways are so awful why have they lasted so long? Because there is no doubt that people today are better educated than they were one hundred years ago.

And they will say that the old ways may have been satisfactory (not good, never good) but that they are manifestly inadequate for the new world where people no longer need knowledge and where learning is available online. But the majority of e-learning opportunities are entirely transmissive. And I worry about whether they are ditching the baby with the bathwater.

OK, so this MOOC has the transmissive video lectures, the collaborative discussion forums and the reflective learning journals: all three elements of education. But so does my old traditional classroom. And there are benefits to the classroom.

When I stand in front of a group of students and lecture them I am continually processing instant feedback. They tell me with their body language (and sometimes their disruptive behaviour) when they are bored or when they are struggling with the concepts and I choose an alternative mode of transmission. Sometimes you can sense little 'eureka moments' pinging all around the class and you tweak what you are saying to make it more challenging, to explore higher and higher concepts. At other times you scaffold. But you can't do that with a pre-recorded video lecture. (Though the advantage of the video lecture is that you can replay it as many times as you wish, as if repetition of the same material necessarily leads to enlightenment.)

And when I encourage students in my classroom to discuss, I carefully structure their discussions and I continually eavesdrop and interject. Most discussion boards contain a series of statements without dialogue (unless the students on the course are severely limited in number). If you have thousands on a MOOC it is impossible for the teacher to respond to all but the tiniest fraction of them.

So that just leaves us with reflection. I don't do that very well in my classroom: it is too noisy and if they were all working in complete silence I would be scared of someone coming in and criticising this. Perhaps the really traditional classrooms where kids sat and worked through problems from the book in silence were better! In my class. homework is where reflection goes on and many students don't do that. So perhaps it is this aspect of learning that needs modern methods most.

How I like to learn

Things I like about learning:

• Reading and writing
• A bit of peace and quiet so I can think about the ideas I have encountered
• Working at my own pace

Things I hate about learning

• Role play. Yuck, yuck, yuck. I mean, yuck. 
• Big group discussions where some windbag keeps interrupting with their weird views (I have found that the real bonus of text based discussions on discussion forums and in second life is that you can chat to more interesting people at the same time as the windbag is droning on)

This is just me. I know I am a shy, weird geek and most people are normal. 

But I am finally old enough to stand up for myself and say that there are probably a small but significant if rather silent minority who do like learning on their own in quiet. You find them in every classroom. They're the ones the teachers mostly ignore but rely on to get decent results. The ones the teachers can't think of anything to say at parents' evening.

But the fashion in education at the moment seems to be massively in favour of collaborative learning. Get them into a group and they will learn. Sugatha Mitra (http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves?language=en) suggests that collaborating kids and no adults are the two essential conditions for what he calls Self Organised Learning Environments. 

And I understand that collaboration is essential. Newton's ideas didn't come from introspection, they were generated through lots of late night conversations at coffee houses. He had to have input from other people before he could create his theories. But the difference between Newton and, eg, Robert Hooke is that Newton then went home and spent two years or so in solitary thinking, reflecting on the ideas he had heard and remixing them into his own theories.

David Thornburg talks about the primitive pedagogies. He suggests that learning has evolved in humans in three ways: the campfire (where people, eg teachers, tell us stories), the watering hole (where we discuss with the rest of the tribe) and the cave (where we hide away to think). At some stage even the most collaborative learner has to file new knowledge into their brain. And I fear that some teachers with their love for frenetic group work in the classroom mistake all this activity for learning and don't give their pupils time to hide away and ponder and process.

But maybe that's just the weird geek talking. Maybe the multi-tasking kids of today really can watch TV whilst tweeting and facebooking and googling and chatting to their friends and followers. I know my step-daughter flicks from website to website before I have even had the chance to read half a page. Perhaps she is just quicker than me.

But I think (and this may be just inter-generational arrogance) that I learn faster, better and more deeply than she does. And I know (but this may be just a self-limiting illusion) that I could not learn so well if I tried to learn in her way.

I need peace and quiet.

PS: Just watched the first lecture. Glad to know that I'm not alone!