tyranny of technique
DESCRIPTION
Presentation to University of QueenslandTRANSCRIPT
The Tyranny of Technique. The Promise of Social Learning.
George SiemensTechnology Enhanced Knowledge Research
InstituteDecember 14, 2009
https://tekri.athabascau.ca/
www.elearnspace.org (weekly newsletter)
http://twitter.com/gsiemens
“Technique transforms everything it touches into a machine…technical methods are not multipurposive, or adaptable, or interchangeable.”
Jacques Ellul
“The universal problem for every citizen of the new millennium is how to get access to information about the world, and how to acquire skills to articulate and organize that information.
Edgar Morin, 1999
“What we have here is a transition from a stable, settled world of knowledge produced by authority/authors, to a world of instability, flux, of knowledge produced by the individual...”
Institute of Education, London, 2007
“The current economic transformation is as big and as challenging as the transformation from agriculture to industry. Our economy is shifting away from jobs based largely on physical skills or repetitive tasks to ones that require analytical skills and judgment.”
Martin Prosperity Institute (2009)
Trends Shaping Education, OECD (2008)
Americans consumed 34 GB of data per day in 2008Global Information Industry Center
Trends in Global Higher Education: Tracking an Academic Revolution (2009)
Gross tertiary enrolment by geographical region
Quantity alters the qualitative
Addressing complex problems
Ideals of democracy, identity, liberty, equality are being translated into, and renegotiated in, the digital realm
Participatory sense making
Our world makes sense through our interaction with information and others
....(and in turn, their interactions with information and others)
De Jaegher, Di Paolo, 2007
Network as cognitive agent
“The intelligences…are distributed…across minds, persons, and the symbolic and physical environments”
Roy Pea
SARS
H1N1
Complexity requires adaptivity
Adaptivity requires systemic flexibility
Social/technological sensemaking
“Quality assurance in higher education has risen to the top of the policy agenda in many nations.”
UNESC0, 2009, viii
Why do we do this??
“The highest-ranked universities are the ones that make significant contributions to the advancement of knowledge through research, teach with the most innovative curricula and pedagogical methods under the most conducive circumstances”
World Bank
A learning management system is a great tool for the wrong era
Narratives of coherence
Courses are inadequate to the task
Social and technological networks
Open courses
Socialization as information object
Society creates institutions to reflect what is being done with and around information…i.e. institutions map reality
Frank & GablerMcNeely & Wolverton
Disrupting (destabilizing) courses
Levers for learning transformation
Policy: Allow for bottom up initiative
Tertiary Education for the Knowledge Society: Volume 2
Role of technology/learning research centres
Position needed in universities: director of systemic innovation