The
transition from industrial to knowledge based economies will require deep
changes in the way we educate children, students and adults.
Libraries and library educators need to accept these changes. The future of education lies with the web rather than with paper documents. In this presentation I describe the transition from paper-based to web-based learning through a concrete case: an international three week course - designed on and for the web.
The LATINA course, as we call it, is run by the library. But we use a different word: the Oslo University College Library is now called the Learning Centre.
We have found that the web is most suitable for a student- and production-oriented – rather than a teacher- and lecture-oriented – approach to learning. The web also allowed us to engage and to integrate a very mixed group of participants in a lively community of practise.
Big change
Modern organizations are accustomed to change. We live and work in societies that
develop all the time. Every year is slightly different from the last. But most
changes are small and gradual. They can be handled by established procedures
and existing personnel. They do not threaten our working habits and our
professional peace of mind.
Big change is different. When big change hits a
social system, the old routines stop working. In order to cope with the new
environment, we must be willing to change our own intellectual foundations. The difficulty we face today is not to
predict big change, but to accept its practical consequences in our own lives.
In the nineties, most people looked at the digital revolution as a form of
technological change. By defining it as technology, they kept it at a distance
from the things that really mattered: family and friends on the one hand,
colleagues, clients and customers on the other.
Computer enthusiasts - the famous nerds - were seen as friendly and intelligent, but alsi as somewhat strange people. Personal relationships, professional activities and political struggles continued as before. The human basics - love and work and power - were not touched by the web.
As
we approach 2010, this is no longer the case. Digitalization has started to
change our society and our daily lives as deeply as the industrial revolution.”
Today it takes a great effort to understand how disturbing the new industrial society was for the people who actually lived through the major changes. We are accustomed to technical change, of course, but have never experienced a deep technological revolution. Our ways of thinking and acting have been shaped by the late industrial societies of the twentieth century. People my age - or even twenty years younger - react to the changes with industrial habits and responses.
The industrial revolution meant a
transition from agricultural to mechanized production. The digital revolution
means a transition from material to mental or intellectual production.
Instead of steel,
we process symbols. We create texts, performances and learning events rather
than cars, clothes and buildings. The new society has been called many things: post-industrial, post-modern, information or
network society - but none of these labels have been generally accepted.
But the term knowledge - as in knowledge society, knowledge economy and knowledge production - is on a rising curve. This is easy to demonstrate by a few Google searches.
The relationship between networks and
knowledge production is clear. Hierarchies based on command and control is not
functional in a web-based environment. The purpose of traditional bureaucracies
is to standardize production. But digital systems take care of
standardization without human intervention.
Repetitive processes can be analyzed, programmed and handed over to computers. Humans are not needed on assembly lines anymore, but in labs, workshops and learning centers. Innovation, creativity and design are no longer a prelude to production. To understand the new economy, we must treat innovation and learning as the core of production.
I did my university studies in the 1960s, when the old academic tradition remained strong. I respect the search for knowledge as a goal in itself.
“tertiary education is a major driver of economic competitiveness in an increasingly knowledge-driven global economy. ... The imperative for countries is to raise higher-level employment skills, to sustain a globally competitive research base and to improve knowledge”.
I agree with the OECD experts, and I think China is one of the countries that have really accepted this conclusion.
What happens to learning and teaching under the new circumstances? What can educators and librarians do?
The case of LATINA
LATINA, which stands for “Learning and Teaching in a Digital World”, is both a concept and a training course. As a concept, it represents a learning environment that combines intensive pedagogical work in small groups with full and constant use of web-based tools and media.
We believe
that Web 2.0 represents an educational revolution as well as a business
revolution. Education
2.0 is the learning and teaching revolution caused by the move to the Internet
as a platform.
Libraries, schools and universities are knowledge
institutions. In the knowledge economy, they become production rather than
service units.
The course was developed by a small group of e-learning enthusiasts at Oslo University College and first given as a three week summer course in 2008. Both course and concept have strong library components. The three persons in the development team have a background in librarianship as well as in teaching and adult education. The course facilities are located within the OUC Learning Center, which unites the library and the audio-visual support section of the College.
LATINA is a learning environment where we use the open web - rather than paper or proprietary software systems - as an educational platform. LATINA is an experiment. We are trying to understand the rules for effective teaching and learning on the open web.
· Digital technology is transforming the way we learn and the way we teach.
· Traditional education takes place in a closed physical and social space, with limited technical resources, and with a single person in charge.
· In countries where web access is widespread, teaching and learning can take many other forms.
Seen from the outside, LATINA may look like a technological or a tool-oriented course. But this is a misperception. LATINA is not about tools, but about the learning and teaching that use the new tools.
We focus on
the texts, events and presentations you can produce with the tools. We have deliberately chosen tools that are
available - free of charge - to everybody on the web.
Since the tools will be new to most participants, we must provide some instruction in their use. But that is normal in all subjects. Carpentry is not about drills and handsaws, but the tools must be mastered. The goal of cookery classes is dining rather than boiling and frying. But students must still learn to create an omelet without cremating the eggs.
· Digital education requires a technical infrastructure. But technology by itself is not enough.
· The new technical possibilities must be understood, embraced and developed. Good teachers use books, classrooms, blackboards and chalk effectively.
· In LATINA we approach digital tools in the same spirit.
The deep relationship between technology and teaching is often forgotten.
People who teach theoretical subjects
tend to take traditional technologies for granted. Anything electrical or
digital is technology. But
blackboards and chalk, pencils and notebooks, textbooks and marking pens are
just things. The objects we use in
our daily lives only become visible as technical tools when technologies
change. People that participate in the change, have to master the new digital
tools before they can use them in learning and teaching. People that just
observe the change, tend to notice the struggle with tools rather than the
teaching.
Teachers that innovate may be called technology freaks. What freaks think and say can be disregarded. This means that professional debate on the role of the web in education must be avoided. Only those who accept the consensus are taken seriously.
Most teachers are conservative in terms
of their practices. They want small change rather than big change; reform
rather than revolution.
Most of them will accept digital technologies - like word processors, email and PowerPoint - as long as they work within their current way of teaching. But they do not want digital technology to transform the way students should learn and teachers should teach.
They will not commit themselves to radical change. There is a proper way of
teaching and learning which should not be challenged. Some have called this the grammar of schooling. In the conservative view,
PCs are seen as advanced notebooks that hardly affect the organization of
teaching .
· We stress creative learning and challenging teaching.
· Superficial learning is accumulation - or more of the same.
· Deep learning is different. We are committed to change - and ask the participants to go beyond their current skills and conceptual models
As teachers we believe - from experience
- that deep change is possible. But it requires a supportive environment.
Teachers wanted to hear about our opinion, they were very helpful and patient (I had a feeling that teachers loves teaching, giving us advices and a lot of explanations by theory and practice). I have never worked with such wonderful people.
In our case students are asked to work with a variety of new digital production tools from the moment the course starts. We do not spend much time introducing each tool - just sufficient to get started on doing something. We also expect the participants to try to solve problems they meet on their own - or with some help from their peers - before they call for the instructor.
Our teachers have full of experiences,they know how to give the idea of pedagogy and they have full of technical assistance. they used pedagogical system technologically.
Many students find this challenging. Library students are often perfectionists. They are accustomed to slow and detailed guidance, step by step, to avoid mistakes.
We believe in learning by trial and error - which requires lots of mistakes in
order to succeed. A real expert, the great physicist Niels Bohr said, is “someone
who has made all the mistakes it is possible to make in a very narrow field”.
This does not mean a low level of support. The hours students and instructors
actually spend together are a precious commodity. When people are struggling
with new tools in class, we try to offer a student to staff ratio of 4 to
1.
We want to combine steep learning curves with rapid climbing. After a
tool has been (barely) mastered, participants are asked to work with them outside
class - and to present the results on their blogs and in class. Complex digital
skills erode quickly unless they are used on a regular basis.
A supportive environment
At Oslo University College we now have
wireless access throughout the building.
In the LATINA course the Learning
Centre has equipped every participant with a portable computer. The teacher’s
PC is of course connected to a video projector. Our class room has a smartboard
as well as a whiteboard. All course materials are published on a local WordPress
blog platform.
All students have been introduced to blogging and have created their own WordPress blogs. We work in a digital environment where WordPress is integrated with the Google platform. We use Google Search, Google Reader, Google Translate, Google Docs and Picasa - locally and on the web. Both students and teachers now have easy access to cell phones and digital cameras - usually included in the phones. For more demanding work with sound and video we can draw on the equipment and the helpful technical staff of our audio-visual centre. At the same time we have access to all the resources of the web.
This rich material environment is new. The
tools allow us to experiment with new forms of teaching and learning.
In the old system, teaching
meant transfer of knowledge from teacher to student. Learning was reproduction.
In the new environment, we are surrounded by knowledge. Here learning means to
undertake original production - and teaching means to support the production
process. LATINA depends on digital technology. But its purpose is to explore
practical ways of teaching and learning - in an environment where we can take
universal access to digital tools and texts for granted.
At my college all teachers who wanted to
do so could publish to the web ten years ago. The teaching staff had access to
computers in their offices. Those who wanted web publishing tools could also
get the necessary software installed. The ICT section provided at least some
technical support.
Only a few classrooms had overhead projectors, but teachers
who required them, could usually manage. Students were less favored. They could
access the web through computer stations in the library or the computer lab.
Many had home access as well. But we could not assume that all students had
regular access. Nor could they write to the web. Publishing software like
FrontPage and Dreamweaver was quite expensive.
Today, both the technical and the economic barriers have vanished. The newest
generation of cheap portable computers cost less than a fancy cell phone.
Simple and powerful tools for web publishing are available free of charge.
Blogger, WordPress, Google Docs, flickr, SlideShare and many other services
offer free storage of web documents in various formats. Scarcity is no longer a
problem. The barriers that remain are social and cultural.
As a teacher of librarians and library students I turned from paper to the web
about ten years ago. This implied a small change in technical tools - and a big
change in attitude.
In terms of writing, I simply replaced Word by FrontPage.
Since FrontPage was designed to emulate an ordinary word processor, the basic
transition was relatively easy. Publishing to the web required some additional
skills - which could be mastered in twenty to thirty hours.
The big change was
psychological rather than technical. On the web everything I write is visible -
at once - unless I decide to hide it. This causes a fundamental change in the
relationship between the text and the writer.
“Once the files are on the web, we find ourselves in a different working environment. ... Writing has always had a double nature: deeply individual and deeply collective at the same time. But when we write on paper, the collective nature of writing is hidden. Paper is inherently private. … The web, on the contrary, is essentially a collective medium. When we write to the web, we must struggle to avoid being read” (Høivik, 2004).
When we ask our students to blog, we ask them to expose themselves.
In traditional teaching students write for and get feedback from the teacher. On the open web they are visible to each other and also to anybody who might care to "drop in". Since normal blogs include comment buttons, they may - in principle - also get written responses from surprising corners.
It rarely happens, of course. Web based courses do not attract lots of visitors from the outside. But the possibility is always there.
As a teacher I find it very useful to read
the ideas of people in their tentative and formative stage. I use my own blogs to talk to myself in public and like to
follow people who are doing the same in my professional field.
Starting to write
openly, for the world may be scary. I say to the students: relax. Use the blogs to
explore ideas and to share good stuff you discover.
Write every day, if
possible. People don’t
expect polish and perfection from blogs. If somebody should criticize you for releasing
unfinished work, they don’t understand the medium.
Blogs straddle the division between the
private and the public sphere.
We are accustomed to treat publication as
something special - and private as the normal state of affairs. With blogs,
Twitter, flickr and other social tools it is the other way around. Web
publication is the default rather than the exception.
This does not mean to
abandon privacy. The public/private boundary is one of the important structures
in our life-worlds. But blogs shift the boundary. We should ask our students to
protect their essential privacy. But there is much to share that can increase
understanding and support learning.
In LATINA we ask students to reflect on what they have learnt - which includes what they learn from each other.
A library student
from Spain wrote:
Web 3.0, I like very much some of
the ideas from [a student]’s presentation.
… I
remember the first website that I did. Was on 1998, I think, and my
brother of
13 years old help me. I did it using html code, very very boring, and
some
guides from internet and uploading in a free space that use my page to
put
advertisements.
That website worked, now you could see it because is
still
working. Later write became easy and easy with the blogs. With the
social
network I feel integrated in my community of friends, and also
academic.
Changing roles
We treat LATINA as an OER - an Open
Educational Resource. This means that we put all materials created for - and
during - the course on the open web. Creative Commons is our default license. Others are invited to re-mix, improve and redistribute.
In the knowledge economy, knowledge is both a result of - and an input to production. When we look at knowledge as a productive input, we are far from academic culture, where knowledge is seen as a value in itself. The peer-reviewed article and the published monograph are its final products. The new production perspective also differs from that of the craftsman, whose knowledge - which is manifested as practical skills - is traditional, experiential and often non-verbal.
LATINA is an international course and
draws participants from different countries, cultures and professional
backgrounds. This means that the class is much more heterogeneous - in terms of
age, language and computer skills - than is usually the case in regular
programs of study.
Industrial societies tend to standardize their
teaching. The ideal class consists of similar students, with the same levels of
skill, who move forward at the same deliberate speed - like a Prussian army on
the move.
Such synchronization makes teaching easier, no doubt, but will hardly work under digital conditions. The new economy demands innovative individuals and groups. In post-industrial countries the demand for labor shifts from replaceable factory and office workers to persons that can create and to teams that can integrate deep and different skills.
We define LATINA as a course for
students, teachers and librarians that want to develop their educational skills
on the World Wide Web. The course is aimed equally at those who teach and at
those who learn.
In digital environments, in fact, the line between student and teacher is often blurred.
The knowledge economy challenges the autonomy of the academic sector by linking knowledge to production. Education 2.0 undermines the old status of the teacher by removing the traditional distinction between leader and follower, master and disciple.
This does not mean equality however. Teachers are still in charge, but in a different way. The LATINA staff is responsible for design and infrastructure, for the introduction of new tools and concepts, for practical support and guidance, and for day to day management of the course. But we require participants to take an active part in production, presentation and feedback from Day One.
I am impressed by learning and teaching methods (pleasant atmosphere, teachers didin't behave like a boss - unfortunately teachers in our country still want to be the boss). All participants could learn a lot from each other. I have never received a feedback before (so precision and well-considered advices, suggestions).
In LATINA we invite all participants to explore the learning possibilities of
the web in a concrete, practical, group-oriented social setting. We define this
as a collective undertaking.
Multilingual learning and teaching
In LATINA English is our common working
language. This does not mean that everybody is a fluent English speaker or
writer. International students from Europe generally have a good working
knowledge of the language. Participants from Asia, Africa or Latin America
represent more of a challenge. The Summer School asks for a proficiency test,
but still face a great variety.
Study programs that last several months or
years can include some language training. In a three week course, that is not
feasible.
But since the course is web-based, we have an alternative. Since our
class room is equipped with an interactive whiteboard, most presentation and
discussion includes the web as a partner.
The parallel use of written and oral communication - which often includes sound
and pictures as well - helps people with limited English understand what goes
on.
During discussions we try to illustrate important points with materials from the web. The old show and tell principle is still valid. Since all teaching materials are available on the web, students may go back and consult them during and after class. They depend less on their master's voice.
Since the training is production oriented,
students spend much time creating multimedial texts. Sometimes they work in
groups and sometimes individually, side by side. In either case it is easy for
them to consult and assist each other. When they share a language other than
English, they will use this for communication.
Lectures and plenary discussions take place in English, but much of the time the air buzzes with different languages: Chinese and Arabic, Spanish and Norwegian.
We see this as a strength of web based
learning. We are also exploring additional linguistic possibilities. Wikipedia
is one of the most popular web sites in the world. In LATINA we favor Wikipedia
as a lexical source because it covers many different languages. Students who
are less familiar with English can use versions in their native language, or
another language they know well, as a reference source. They may also use other
versions to help them understand the English text. Since inter-language
links are built into the Wikipedia structure, it is very easy to shift between
languages. Occasionally, we also ask students to compare different versions and
to explain why they differ.
Combining Wikipedia with Google Translate
opens additional possibilities. In LATINA we find that real-time translation of
educational materials can help teachers present new topics to multilingual
classes. Students can also use translation tools to explore texts they find it
hard to understand in English - and to translate documents and notes from their
own language into rough English. At the moment we have just started to
investigate these three possibilities, but we are quite exited about the new
pedagogical opportunities. All LATINA web pages have been equipped with a
translation button.
By integrating real-time translation (Google), parallel versions (Wikipedia) and other multilingual tools in our educational designs we believe teachers and students can learn to work effectively in more diverse environments than before. We asked the students what they had learnt. Many mentioned the multicultural aspect of the course. Some of their (anonymous) comments were:
Translation tools are likely to improve. During the next decade I expect functional recognition and translation of speech to be added. As the world becomes more intensely global, the demand for multilingual education and communication will grow. Advanced language technology and large-scale multicultural projects will be part of the response. And both teachers and librarians will be needed.
The
web as platform
Teaching is moving - slowly - from paper to digital technology. Print on paper defines one type of learning environment. The read/write web defines another. Already the web offers a vast range of resources for study, experimentation and exploration. Web tools allow students and teachers to produce new materials continuously. In the digital environment many traditional ways of working lose their purpose. They must be phased out - to give space and time for the new. This is a matter of big change.
Today our teaching and learning
environments are divided. In the traditional area, work goes on as before. In
the digital area, new ways of working are tried out. But they remain marginal.
There is no transfer of practices from the periphery to the core. The
institution only changes when computers and web access are available everywhere
and at any time and learners, teachers, planners and leaders accept and build
on the web as a platform.
Our task today, as librarians, as teachers, and as teachers of librarians, is to make the transition from industrial to digital education - with open minds, with lots of experiments and with a basic willingness to learn from experience.
Resources
Faculty of Journalism, Library and Information Science
Oslo University College