Stories

Category: Writing

  • European MOOC Summit: What looks tasty – for organizations thinking about transforming how they learn

    European MOOC Summit: What looks tasty – for organizations thinking about transforming how they learn

    This is a quick overview of what I found of interest for international and non-governmental organizations in the program of the Second European MOOC Summit – possibly the largest and probably the most interesting MOOC-related event on the Old Continent – that opens tomorrow at Switzerland’s MIT-by-the-Lake, EPFL.

    The first interesting thing I found in the program is that it includes an instructional session, titled “All you need to know about MOOCs”. Indeed, the more I meet and talk to people across a variety of international and non-governmental organizations, the more it is obvious that the so-called “hype” has remained circumscribed to a fairly narrow, academic circle – despite international media coverage and a few million registered users. That makes it both smart and relevant to offer a primer for anyone attending the conference who is discovering MOOCs, before they get plunged into the labyrinth of myth, paradox and possibility that is the future of education. Where the most current knowledge about MOOCs changes too rapidly for any one individual to keep up, it’s now possible to break down the basics – never mind that it might all be very different a year from now.

    Now, my beef is that the raging MOOC debates have been focused almost exclusively on higher education, and been restricted to academic and edutech circles. That is changing – just look at George Siemens’s prediction that “corporate MOOCs will be the big trend of 2014”. I’m still not sure what “corporate MOOC” means but I’m assuming we’re talking about workplace learning, which meshes nicely with what I’ve been arguing all along: continual learning in organizations is a key driver for organizational performance, and only the affordances of technology can make this strategic (ie, help to realize the mission). This is true for the humanitarian sector (where I’ve worked for 21 years, and where I’ve just started LSi.io) but really extends to any mission-driven, knowledge-based organization, irregardless of whether profit is the motive.

    First, some blunt (and possibly caricatural) ideas. Traditional learning and development is dead or dying, one face-to-face workshop (or one behaviorist, compliance click-through e-learning module) at a time. In the United States, the majority of higher education students are already “non-traditional”, ie they are working or looking for work, adults with family and professional lives alongside the need or wish to learn more. In Western Europe, unemployment for under-30s is structurally high, with many twenty-somethings spending years as “interns”, exploding the baby boomer model in which affordable university leads to job security. Learning looks like it’s going to be lifelong, as the EU keeps proclaiming, but not necessarily by choice… Last but not least, in the BRICs and other connected countries in what was known a long time ago as the Third World  (sorry, nostalgia of sorts), educational opportunities and social mobility may not be uncoupled (yet), but most middle-class professionals see continuing education as a key to their development.

    For international organizations  and NGOs, the stakes are high. We know that traditional higher education produces young people without the practical skills, competencies, or critical thinking capacity to do the work of 21st century humanitarians. Worse, most of our own organizations’ training efforts are still premised on unscalable, expensive face-to-face training – training as if it were 1899. And from educational technology we have, so far, retained only the most reductive, behaviorist kinds of click-through e-learning, using it to transmit information in “pre-work” before the “real learning” can start in the classroom. (Of course, there is a more optimistic story to tell, given the number of brilliant humanitarians leading innovative efforts around learning – just drawing the broad, pessimistic strokes here).

     These complex issues are most likely to be addressed at least implicitly in the Summit’s Business Track, where on Tuesday at 11h00 IMC’s Volker Zimmermann will moderate a session on MOOCs as “training instruments” for employees and partners. So that’s where I will go. Nevertheless, in the Experience Track, there is also a session on SPOCs (small, private, online courses – think Moodle on MOOCs) which could be useful to learning contexts where small-group work is a key to success.

    I’m betting that Tuesday afternoon’s session on MOOCs for online external corporate training and communication will turn into a showcase for new companies trying to corner the corporate MOOC market. So off I will go to listen to Barbara Moser-Mercer’s talk on MOOCs in fragile contexts, which include refugee camps.

    On Wednesday morning at 9h00, I will moderate a small-group discussion on MOOCs for international and nongovernmental organizations, hoping that MOOC providers and academics will attend in sufficient numbers to hear about how badly we need solutions to transform the way we do learning, education and training.  IGO and NGO online learning pioneers Sheila Jagannathan from the World Bank Institute, Dominique Chantrel from UNCTAD, and Patrick Philipp from IRU will be sharing their early experiences. Let’s hope that the folks who build, sell, research and think about MOOCs will be listening.

    Reda Sadki

    Corrected on 11 February: the session on MOOCs for IGOs and NGOs starts at 9h00!

  • Learning beyond training, to survive and grow

    Learning beyond training, to survive and grow

    Humanitarian organizations already organize and deliver training on a massive scale. For example, the Red Cross and Red Crescent train 17 million people each year to practice life-saving first aid, in addition to the training of its 13.6 million active volunteers. Training has been tacitly accepted as the primary mechanism to prepare volunteers and staff for humanitarian work, from the local branch (community) to the international emergency operations (global).

    However, the humanitarian sector lacks a strategic approach for learning, education and training (LET), despite a widely-acknowledged human resource and skills shortage. In addition, the sector is deeply ensconced in face-to-face training culture, with many humanitarian workers earning at least part of their livelihood as trainers, and training events are key to developing social and professional networks but not necessarily to developing key competencies needed in the field. Whatever its merits, this approach to training cannot scale up to face the consequences of climate change, deepening gaps between rich and poor, or other growing humanitarian challenges.

    Also, the sector suffers from high turnover, lack of standardization in training practice, proliferation of education programs with no measurable benefits or relevance to operational needs, and a dearth of evaluation of learning outcomes. There are several cross-sector initiatives that are trying to address these problems, but these initiatives have ignored the potential relevance for the humanitarian context of both the rapid change in workplace learning and the disruption and potential transformation in higher education through educational technology and 21st century pedagogy.

    First, a reductive focus on formal training is unlikely to lead to improvements in service delivery.

    Second, the strategy should leverage both innovation and history to do new things in new ways, mobilizing multiple appropriate technologies to accelerate all dimensions of learning, and updating them whenever this demonstrably improves outcomes. It should rely on rational experimentation linking research with learning, even when this may involve a risk of failure.

    Third, this strategy needs to conceptualize learning from a global perspective, and provides solutions to both scale-up (take a successful local innovation and increase its impact so as to benefit more people) and scale- down (localize and adapt to local knowledge and needs) to foster policy and programme development on a lasting basis. It should provide practical solutions for staff and volunteers from the periphery (branches, village) to develop, peer review, improve, and circulate their own knowledges, in addition to harnessing, remixing and augmenting knowledge from the center (headquarters, capital city).

    Fourth, knowledge will be characterized as a process (“know-where”), not as a reservoir (“know-what”), and the strategy will serve to connect with others to cull out the most current from the flow of knowledge, however rapid its pace. An adaptive, individualized lifelong learning strategy should encompass accretion (learning is in the network), transmission (learning as courses), acquisition (self-motivated learning), and emergence (learning as cognition and reflection).

    Fifth, learning analytics (scalable, continual analysis and feedback loops learning outcomes), leveraging the affordances of technology, should feed research and drive innovation and improvements in delivery science.

    Sixth, the learning strategy should address not only the levels of action (from local to global) but also the connections between them (ex: how local volunteers and global teams learn from each other before, during and after emergency operations). Leadership and team work development (ie, nodes and networks) will be recognized as cornerstones to learning in our hyper-connected world.

    Like the outcomes it aims to produce, the strategy development process should be practical, agile (iterative), adaptive, evidence- and results-based, and demand-driven. New, practical approaches to learning (ex: George Siemens’ connectivism, Bandura’s social learning, MOOCs) first theorized less than ten years ago can already deliver a KISS (Keep It Simple Strategy) with scalable solutions effective in both outcomes and cost.

    At the end of the day, a learning strategy needs to be laser-focused on a single question: how to further learning in all its forms to leverage an organization’s (or sector’s) mission. Building on the already-central role of learning, education and training, a learning strategy is urgently needed for the sector to survive and grow. We need to do new things in new ways to deliver on our mission faster, better, and further.

     Reda Sadki

    Photo credit: Claus Wolf/flickr.com

  • Community health into the scalable, networked future of learning

    Community health into the scalable, networked future of learning

    Preface to the IFRC Global Health Team’s Training Guidelines (2013) by Reda Sadki

    “At the heart of a strong National Society” explains Strategy 2020, “is its nationwide network of locally organized branches or units with members and volunteers who have agreed to abide by the Fundamental Principles and the statutes of their National Society.” To achieve this aim, National Societies share a deeply-rooted culture of face-to-face (FTF) learning through training. This local, community-based Red Cross Red Crescent culture of learning is profoundly social: by attending a “training” at their local branch, a newcomer meets other like-minded people who share their thirst for learning to make a better future. It is also peer education: trainers and other educators are often volunteers themselves, living in the same communities as their trainees.

    Although some National Societies have been early adopters of educational technology to deliver distance learning since the early 1990s – and IFRC’s Learning network has scaled up global educational opportunities since 2009 –, such initiatives do not appear to have changed the local, community-based, face-to-face training processes that start in the branch-as-classroom.

    Quality in the history of Red Cross Red Crescent learning, education and training (LET) has been based on this combination of practical knowledge you can use, building social ties through face-to-face contact, and leveraging the power of peer education to learn by doing. No other humanitarian organization has ‘brick-and-mortar’ structures on a massive scale to embed public health education in each and every community.

    The global volume of health training delivered by the Red Cross Red Crescent is indeed massive. For example, every year, 17 million trainees learn first aid skills face-to-face programs run by National Societies. These trainees then use their first aid skills to provide assistance to 46 million people.

    In 2011, IFRC’s research into the social and economic value of its more than 13 million global volunteer workforce concluded that, while many volunteers work across multiple fields, the most volunteers – and the greatest proportion of value – are related to health promotion (IFRC 2011:7). Although the Red Cross and Red Crescent is “known mostly for its role in disasters”, this study highlighted that “the area in which most volunteers are engaged is health.” (IFRC 2011:8)

    The social value of the health services delivered by Red Cross Red Crescent volunteers is particularly poignant in the context of a global, critical health workforce shortage. However, the recognition of our unique volunteer workforce is premised on our continued ability to ensure that they continually improve skills, knowledge and competencies to contribute to strengthening health systems.

    In 2012, IFRC’s secretariat spent 18,485,821 CHF on a budget line titled “workshops and training”, roughly equivalent to 360,000 hours of in-person training – nearly a thousand hours per day. Every subject matter expert in IFRC’s Global Health Team includes the delivery of face-to-face training in his or her work plan, and many also develop training materials in the form of printed manuals or, more recently, online courses for IFRC’s Learning platform.

    With the publication of these guidelines, the Global Health Team aims to recognize the significance of the pedagogical dimension of these training activities as the key determinant of quality in training. Indeed, it is only with a clear framework for how we teach and how we learn that we may know how to measure the learning outcomes, impact and effectiveness of such activities.

    These Guidelines for face-to-face training provide detailed instructions first in how to assess learning needs to determine whether these can be addressed by face-to-face training. Only once this is established should training be developed using a rigorous methodology based on available evidence of how adult volunteers learn in Red Cross Red Crescent contexts. Last but not least, training activities should be evaluated not only with respect to improved knowledge and skills, but also improved performance for both the individual and the organization.

    By adopting an approach based on needs analysis, these guidelines also highlight the potential for innovative approaches to training that leverage the amazing economy of effort achieved by appropriate use of educational technology and broadened approaches that synergize learning and education with training. A paradigm change is needed for training if it is to remain relevant to delivery science, primarily because of the changing nature of knowledge in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.

    In 1986, according to research by Robert Kelly of Carnegie-Mellon University, 75% of the knowledge needed to do your job was stored in your brain. By 2006, Kelly’s research found that this percentage had dropped to 10%. 90% of the knowledge we use depends on our connections with others. This is in part why, more than ever before, most of what people do in their jobs is currently acquired through experience, regardless of the amount of formal training received. If learning is less and less about recalling information, what then should training focus on?

    This dilemma is compounded by the diminishing half-life of knowledge. As learning theorist George Siemens explains, “courses are fairly static, container-views of knowledge. Knowledge is dynamic—changing hourly, daily. [This] requires an understanding of the nature of the half-life of knowledge in [a field, to select] the right tools to keep content current for the learners.” (Siemens 2006:55). How do we train when knowledge flows too fast for processing or interpreting?

    If improving performance of health workers in a rapidly-changing world rested solely on more structured, better-designed curricula, this would primarily reveal the underlying assumption or notion that the world has not really changed. Attempting to do more of what has been done in the past is not the answer. We need to do new things in new ways.

    As acknowledged in IFRC’s Framework for building strong National Societies (2011), “in a world of changing needs, expectations and opportunities, our knowledge, skills, and competences must keep up to date to meet new demands. We need to address familiar problems by being more proficient in applying what works as well as by using the innovations and insights from new research and technologies that have the potential to bring better results.”

    Traditional approaches are unlikely to be scalable. With 13.6 million Red Cross Red Crescent volunteers, no classroom is large enough. No individual is smart enough to tame the knowledge flows, no intervention is complete enough, no training program lasts long enough, and no solution is global enough.

    The skills and processes that will make us health workers of tomorrow are not yet embedded in our educational structures. We do know, however, much of what is needed: The capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known. The ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.

    These guidelines recognize the value of existing local knowledge, practices and understanding, and that incorporating them into the learning experience is a key challenge. Our local branches form a vast, global network of brick-and-mortar structures which can be used to anchor public health activities, but they currently reside at the bottom of each National Society’s top-down vertical pyramid. They are rarely linked to each other.

    Strategy 2020 calls for IFRC to “draw inspiration from our shared history and tradition” while committing to finding creative, sustainable solutions to a changing world. Meeting the challenge in the future – to reinvent Red Cross Red Crescent health education in order to strengthen National Societies – may well depend on connecting branches to each other to extend our learning culture’s social, peer-based learning to form a vast, global knowledge community. In the 21st Century, such connections may no longer be a ‘nice-to-have’, and may well prove indispensable for anyone working for change at the community level, most obviously on global public health issues with local impact and consequences.

    Branches connected to each other could support new forms of community-based public health practice in which local volunteers are linked to international delegates and public health and medical expertise in fluid, real-time, two-way knowledge conversations. Such networks will open new possibilities for a new learning system where community and global health workers create together, giving each other feedback (and even feedback on feedback), sharing their inspirations and discoveries. Within their knowledge communities, they will work at their own pace, according to their own interests and capabilities. They will use digital storytelling to explore and implement solutions, embracing complexity and adapting to volatility and uncertainty in ways that rapid health assessments, operational plans, and other current tools simply cannot. We will be lifelong learners, teaching each other practical skills and refining not only the methods but also the conduits for teaching and learning through constant practice.

    These collaborative, flexible, motivating, participatory and supportive approaches are neither wishful thinking nor simply a nicer, kinder and gentler form of learning. Their pedagogical patterns closely emulate core competencies of twenty-first century humanitarian workers, who are expected to be able to manage complex crisscrossing knowledge flows, to work in networked configurations (rather than command-and-control structures), and to use participatory methodologies to partner with beneficiaries.

    By asking questions about why we do training, by exploring why and how training can improve performance, these Guidelines represent a milestone on the road to the reinvention of the Red Cross Red Crescent delivery science that underpins how we service the health needs of vulnerable people.

    Preface to the IFRC Global Health Team’s Training Guidelines (2013) by Reda Sadki

    Image: Ancient Mayan port city of Tulum, Yucatán Peninsula. Personal collection.

  • Power of Humanity, Power of Education: Presentation at the AIESEC Youth 2 Business Forum, Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt (20 August 2013)

  • Learning in a VUCA world: IFRC FACT and ERU Global Meeting (Vienna, 31 May 2013)

    Presentation at the IFRC FACT and ERU Global Meeting (Vienna, 31 May 2013), exploring how we learn in a complex world. 

  • Mobile learning: the “anywhere” in the affordance of ubiquity

    When I look at my Facebook friends online, I can see that most of them are connected, almost 24/7, via their phones. Those connected from a laptop or desktop computer (shown by a green dot instead of a little phone icon) are an ever-dwindling minority.

    As Scholar is meant to be a social application for learning, I thought it might be useful to reflect on what mobile means for learning. Recently, I invited mobile design expert Josh Clark to explain to a Red Cross audience why we should design our applications (including those for learning) using a mobile-first strategy. He’s not a learning guy, but I haven’t been able to find a learning expert with useful insights on these issues (as I explain in my conclusion). You can read about Josh’s work on the web here, for example:

    Josh’s first point is that we have a “condescending” view of mobile, seeing it as a “lite” version of the “full” desktop experience. This view is wrong, and to demonstrate this he debunks several mobile myths: “We have some really stubborn myths about mobile users, really screwing up the way we provide mobile services.”

    Myth #1 is that “mobile users are rushed and distracted”, with a short attention span. With mobile learning, this has translated into little info tidbits or short exercises. MIT’s Open CourseWare (OCW) iPhone app, for example, starts up with a message warning that it’s “a subset” of the OCW catalog.

    Yes, sometimes you use your mobile device for information on the go. But that’s far from the only use case. Mobile is also on the couch, in the kitchen, on the bed, or during a 3-hour layover… and, last but not least, sitting on the throne (according to Josh, 40% admit to using phones in bathroom).

    Those mobile contexts allow us to concentrate and focus on content. They are non-traditional (for now) contexts of engagement which can make learning more pleasurable (because of the level of comfort, by saving us from boredom during that layover, etc.).

    So what do users expect from a mobile application? 85% expect mobile to be at least as good as desktop. Why would this be any different for students or other learners? We do everything on our phones that it seems obvious we are now at a point where the concept of a distinct, discrete mLearning makes no sense.

    OK, so if mobile doesn’t necessarily mean rushed users, what about small screen sizes? Doesn’t that physical limitation place limits on learning?

    The screen size raises the issue of visual presentation of learning content. Yes, we have built a lot of user interaction and interface conventions on the assumption of a 4:3 or 16:9 screen ratio. This goes back a while for machine learning, starting with Macromedia Director interfaces in the 1990s that imposed 640 x 480 pixels as a “standard” screen size for interactive, animated content. So we have at least 20 years of thinking reliant on the model of eLearning that some are now trying to painstakingly reduce by changing the “e” in learning to the “m”.

    I agree with Josh that the real answer is not in this alphabet soup. Don’t confuse context with intent. We make too many assumptions from screen size. Screen size should not be an excuse to limit functionality. Using small screen does not equal wanting to do less. It would be like saying that because paperbacks have smaller pages, you have to remove entire chapters. The trick is to make complexity uncomplicated. There’s a difference.

    Mobile websites/apps should have full content/tools. Yes, they may be displayed differently and hierarchy may change. Some devices may be better suited to some tasks than others — so EMPHASIZE different content on different devices. But don’t arbitrarily give me LESS. That goes not only for individual sites but for families of sites.

    A lot of people ONLY use their phone. And of course perhaps the more expected numbers from developing world: In Egypt, 70% of net users rely solely on their phones. In India, it’s 59%. Ghana: 55%. Kenya: 54%. Nigeria: 50%. OK, you say, but these are developing countries where desktop computers and broadband access are expensive. But wait, what’s this… 25% in the US and 22% in the UK use only their phone. Another 28% of US mobile web users mostly use mobile web.

    And, if we are talking about teaching young people, I’m sure these stats are much higher.

    This group of mobile-only or mostly-mobile users definitely expect to do everything on mobile. If we care about reaching them or teaching them, we have to care about hitting them on mobile.

    For individual-learner click-through online learning modules, I’ve recently sent out two requests for proposals to over 20 companies that specialize in building such modules to support adult learning. Not a single one actually can currently deliver a mobile-first strategy. Yet, the tools and techniques to build a single code base (using HTML5 to replace Flash for animation and a technique called responsive design) already exist and are in wide use in other areas — just not in learning. Yes, they all know it’s a long-term trend, but in many of the responses I received they proposed to build a separate, “lite” version of the “real” learning modules. Exactly the opposite of what I think is needed. And the stats cited above (as well as more insightful analysis from Josh and other designers) make a strong case that this needs to happen today, not in some distant future.

  • Badges for online learning: gimmick or game-changer?

    As I’ve been thinking about building a MOOC for the 13.1 million Red Cross and Red Crescent volunteers, I’ve become increasingly interested in connectivism. One of the platforms I’ve discovered is called P2PU (“Peer To Peer University”), which draws heavily on connectivist ideas.

    Surprise: on P2PU there is a debate raging on about badges, of all things. I initially scoffed. I’ve seen badges on Khan Academy and have read that they are very popular with learners, but did not really seriously consider these badges to be anything more than gimmicks.

    It turns out that badges are serious learning tools, and that makes sense from a connectivist perspective. A white paper from the Mozilla Foundation summarizes why and how, drawing on an earlier paper from P2PU’s co-founder Philipp Schmidt.

    George Siemens’s (2005) connectivism theory of learning is said to go “beyond traditional theories of learning (such as behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism) to include technology as a core element”. So badges in this theory would use technology itself ot make connections between learners.

    First, it is claimed that badges can capture and translate learning across contexts, with more granularity (detail) than degrees or cumulative grades, with a badge for each specific skill or quality — and showing off progression over time as badges accumulate (like medals pinned to a soldier’s chest or a general’s stripes). Therefore badges could signal achievement and be matched to specific job requirements.

    Second, badges are meant to encourage and motivate “participation and learning outcomes”. They are feedback mechanism — both gateway and signpost — on a learning path, ie showing what can be learned and when, as in Khan Academy’s Google-style map going from basic addition to multivariate calculus. In addition, they can also cover or highlight informal or soft skills of the kind that formal education doesn’t account for. And, in fact, making new badges available can be done in real time, fast enough to keep up with the pace of the fastest-changing fields (like IT or web development).

    Third, badges are thought to formalize and enhance social connections, as they can be considered a mechanism to promote identity and reputation within a learning community. By doing so, badges may in fact foster community, bringing together peers to formalize teams or communities of practice.

    There’s quite a bit of enthusiasm online for badges as successors to pre-digital forms of accreditation and authority, like university diplomas and CVs. For example, Jacy Hood, director of College Open Textbooks, declared in a blog comment:  ”We are optimistic that Mozilla Badges will become the new international educational currency/credentials and that traditional education institutions will recognize, accept, and award these badges.”

    Edutech blogger Mitchel Resnick explains that he is an increasingly lone voice to express skepticism about badges: 

    I worry that students will focus on accumulating badges rather than making connections with the ideas and material associated with the badges – the same way that students too often focus on grades in a class rather than the material in the class, or the points in an educational game rather than the ideas in the game. Simply engaging students is not enough. They need to be engaged for the right reasons.

    For Resnick, it is the perception of a badge as a reward that throws back to behaviorist thinking: 

    When we develop educational technologies and activities in my research group, we explicitly try to avoid anything that might be perceived as a reward – what Alfie Kohn characterizes as “Do this and you’ll get that.” Instead, we are constantly looking for ways to help young people build on their own interests, and providing them with opportunities to take on new roles. 

    However, it really depents on the “Do this” component: what is the learner being asked to do? If it can be performed without engagement, then Resnick may be right. This implies that the reward component may not be the sole function of the badge itself but will depend on the activities required to obtain it.

    I started writing this as a badge skeptic. Yet, I’m already starting to think of additional benefits: in a visual online world, badges are visual indicators, rather than text on a screen. They can therefore mobilize visual symbols to trigger our cultural and emotional sensibilities, without requiring reading effort on our part. By looking a badge, we can recognize its shape, colors and design and identify its meaning. This is pretty powerful stuff for learning.

    What do you think?

  • Maybe old learning isn’t so bad, after all?

    When I first saw Professor Cope’s photos of a 1983 elementary school classroom, I scoffed. It was so obvious that the “communications and knowledge architecture” was one-way, focused on rote learning and rewarding good behavior which involved staying safely “inside the box”. How easy to critique, deconstructing all of the ways in which this particular “banking” form of education was unlikely to intentionally “deposit” anything that might actually be useful to the future lives of these school children. How awful, I thought, and how at odds with everything I try to put into practice with respect to my own professional role. Today’s MOOCs and flipped classrooms, with their objectives of making active knowledge-making ubiquitous, make 1983 look like the Dark Ages of education.

    And yet. And yet this classroom very closely resembles the ones in which I grew up, with 5th grade in 1980 as a reference point. And I was one of the kids for whom it was an enjoyable experience. I thrived in that environment. I wanted to sponge up the facts and figures, and was proud to raise my hand, hoping the teacher would pick me. Group work simply wasn’t as much fun or rewarding as the individual recognition and praise from the teacher. It’s only when I jog my 42-year-old brain to recall what made me enjoy school so much that I realize it was the interaction, the creativity, and the serendipity. But the scaffolding was sturdy and reassuring precisely because it was so rigid and didactic.

    The same with university. In my professional life, I proclaim my belief that the time for “post-campus education” has arrived. Speaking to a group of young interns, I explained recently that they could expect that their life-long learning had only just begun, and that by abandoning the oh-so-twentieth-century sequence in which you complete your degree and then go to work, they could more actively shape their future careers.

    And yet. I was a first-generation college student, going to a university in the U.S. when both my parents never made it past elementary school. My father was put into an orphanage. My mother was denied the education she strived for when her school was closed by the French colonial forces when the Algerian Revolution started. The university campus was for me the site of life-changing experiences.

    Today I am also the father of three boys. Nassim, my six-year-old, learned reading, writing and arithmetic this year. When it comes to his education, my approach is far-removed from cutting-edge education. I make him read and re-read texts, do and redo addition and subtraction exercises, drilling it in and checking constantly to see if it’s sunk in yet. Rewards are limited or non-existent with me. Sometimes he resists, complaining about the repetition or that it’s “too hard”. But he also seems to genuinely enjoy completing the exercises. I do this because I’m concerned that his public school teacher is going to be too “slack”, because he goes to school in a poor neighborhood in Paris where many of the kids face tough life circumstances, have parents who do not know how to read and write, and are considered by many (including teachers) to be destined for vocational training leading straight to unemployment. Especially if they are of Arab or African descent.

    So, what to do with such blatant contradictions between my professed interest in “new learning” and my personal experience? I believe this contradiction can be productive, meaning that I try to mobilize it to understand why colleagues and other interlocutors express skepticism about innovation in learning, whether explicitly or implicitly. And, yes, I’m also trying to rethink how I work with my sons after school. The world is changing. If we want learning to be supportive, participatory, inspiring, motivating, flexible… it’s not (only) because that will make learning a more pleasurable experience. It is because this is how our children (or those of others, for those to whom parents have delegated mass public education) will get the chance to develop the knowledge and skills they will need to not only survive but thrive — in the online classrooms before they learn the hard way, IRL.

  • The End of Paper: Interview with Richard Padley of Semantico

    At the 2010 Tools of Change for Publishing conference in Frankfurt, we met Richard Padley of Semantico. He spoke at the conference about mobile platforms from the perspective of publishers faced with multiple delivery models including apps and the web.

    We started off our interview with Richard Padley by asking:

    What does the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement mean to you?

    So, is it the end of paper?

    Even if I tell you that 30% of IFRC’s membership don’t have e-mail?

    Many people seem to think that PDF is a usable digital format for publications. So, what’s wrong with PDF?

    Even though EPUB is the basis for eBooks, in 2010 few people are familiar with this format. What’s right with EPUB?

    The Kindle is a single-purpose device. It does one thing, and is meant to it well enough to convince people who love printed books to cross the digital divide. The iPad is a multi-purpose tablet. So, Kindle or iPad?

    We hear about mobile platforms. What’s that about?

  • Katja Mruck on starting a peer-reviewed open access journal

    In 2001, Katja Mruck started a peer-reviewed multilingual open access journal FQS – Forum on qualitative social research. In this interview, recorded at the Third Conference on Scholarly Publishing in Berlin, Germany (28 September 2011), she explains what ingredients were needed to make the journal’s launch a success. Mruck is the Coordinator open access and e-publishing, Center for Digital Systems CeDis), Freie Universität Berlin.