Archives For spaces
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The other day in our online class meeting in EDLD 5313 – Creating Significant Learning Environments course, one of the core courses in the M. Ed. in Digital Learning and Leading at Lamar University, one of my students asked me why this particular course that deals with learning theory and creating significant learning environments was not one of the first courses in the program. I explained that we run the learning theory course after EDLD 5305 – Disruptive Innovation in Education, the course in which the students research and develop a learning innovation proposal and plan, because 5305 creates a context for which you need to explore your beliefs about learning. Without having a context to look at how people learn, the work on learning theories is just theoretical. The genuine context provides the real world need or application where one needs to explore how best to design and create learning environments.
I am more than likely articulating this better in this post then I did in the meeting and as I thought about what I wish I would have said, Clayton Christensen’s perspective on learning came to mind. In a conversation with Jason Fried published in Inc in 2012, Christensen and Fried talked about innovation, the trap of marginal thinking, and learning. The perspective on learning that really caught my attention was the notion that someone can’t be taught until they are ready to learn. Christensen frames his perspective in the following unique way:
Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question — you have to want to know — in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.
When viewed in this light the reason we run EDLD 5305 – Disruptive Innovation in Education first and get students to start the process of creating a learning innovation proposal and plan, is that 5305 disrupts students enough or disrupts their typical thinking about teaching and leanring enough, where they start asking the types of questions that will be addressed in EDLD 5313 and many other courses. Many students lament in the class discussions, class meetings, and in their reflections that this course and program has forced them to re-think many of their ideas about teaching and learning. Students often feel unsettled or uncomfortable because they may feel they have more questions then they have answers.
We have designed the DLL program and the courses to push students to start questioning conventional thinking about teaching and learning, the educational system, their schools and classes, and their process and methods so that their minds are opened up enough to the point that they want to know how to do things different. The program and courses are design to open up spaces in our learners minds for new ideas to fit and when we explore those new ideas in the next module or course many of those disconcerting questions or spaces are filled with the new ideas—only to have new questions that start to open up new spaces in their thinking.
In an age of standardized testing, of covering the content, of checklists masquerading as rubrics, and the need to regurgitate the right answer, getting learners to struggle with challenging questions is unfortunately a foreign concept. But learning has never fundamentally been about spouting off the right answer; it has always been about making meaningful connections and to make those meaningful connections you have to start with the questions. The type of questions that open up the spaces in our thinking and motivate us to want to know and to make those meaningful connections—only to have the whole process start over. This is learning—this is life.
References
Fried, J. (2012, September 25). A Conversation with Innovation Guru Clayton Christensen. Retrieved September 7, 2016, from http://www.inc.com/magazine/201210/jason-fried/a-conversation-with-innovation-guru-clayton-christensen.html
I regularly monitor a variety of sources that report on advances in learning technologies and I try to compare the real progression in educational technology to the hype that is offered through the local, regional and national press. When I read the Globe and Mail article What universities are doing to create a more exciting learning experience I had mixed emotions.
On the one hand it is exciting to see that institutions like Wilfrid Laurier University, McMaster University, Queen’s University and many others in Canada are finally implementing some well researched and established best practices in learning spaces. On the other hand referring to brightly painted and decorated rooms, round tables equipped for laptops, video conferencing and integrated projector controls; whiteboards mounted on the walls; portable collaborative stations; flexible room configurations and well designed informal learning spaces as turning “everything upside down” or as “hugely disruptive” is frustrating because these claims are excessive and do not accurately reflect the fact that innovative use of learning spaces has been happening for the past fifteen plus years.
If you consider the Open Classroom/School movement that started in the late 70’s we have over forty years of research in the use of flexible learning spaces to draw upon. Rather than go that far back all we need to do is refer to the seminal and authoritative work Learning Spaces that was edited by the President of EDUCAUSE Diana G. Oblinger. Learning Spaces offers thirteen chapters of best practices and principles followed by another thirty chapters of case studies. Back in 2006 at Lethbridge College our Learning Spaces & Classroom Standards committee used this book as one of several foundational works for how the College should create active and dynamic learning spaces that used technology to enhance learning. If you put this discussion on Learning Spaces into the context of Gartner’s Hype Cycle of Innovation you should recognize that we are well into the Plateau of Productivity.
I really do not intend to be critical of the wonderful improvements that are happening to the learning spaces discussed in the article; we should applaud these institutions for finally implemented well established ideas. I am just calling into question the hype and using the terms turning “everything upside down” or as “hugely disruptive” to describe or refer to these activities. Disruptive is the latest trendy term that too many people are attaching to too many things. Dan Maycock points to research of the top 1000 companies in his post The Ugly Truth About Disruption & Innovation that too many managers believed that:
everyone thought being disruptive was something that happened all at once and only took one brilliant idea so they spent money on white board and clear glass conference rooms believing they were planting the seeds for disruption because everyone felt more innovative due to a trip to Ikea and a TED seminar on disruption.
Maycock argues that focusing on the disruption or the disruptive technology is wrong and that companies should focus what is that they really do and make sure they are doing that well. He offers the following question as an example of what happens when you have the wrong focus:
How many railroad companies went out of business, when planes and trucks came into the picture, because they said they were focused on building better trains vs building better ways to transport?
Higher education can learn from these corporate examples and rather than look to learning spaces or technology as the magic bullet or quick fix we need to focus on what is most important…learning.
Perhaps the most redeeming part of the Globe and Mail article was the very end where Prof. Brockett used the learning space to change his teaching strategy which resulted in the following:
“They are working a great deal harder and so am I,” he says. “The result is that they are happy and learning and I am happy because I can see the learning.”
Its not about the technology or the space, its about the learning.
