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Mis pensamientos ocasionales sobre el WikiEducador y su comunidad
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- ► Functional Literacy --> Functional Anything. In the Community Empowerment methodology, there is a large module about Functional Literacy. In the tradition of "Deschooling Society," it suggests to avoid pre packaged curricula, and make the content of the teaching something practical and useful, and those differ from community to community. It goes further to also recommend that the method of teaching and learning also be unorthodox, and custom designed for the varying needs and interests of each community.
- ◊ If there is more interest in the content and method by the teacher than by the learners, then something is unbalanced.
- ◊ Although it suggests to the participants that they design each course themselves, it gives a few examples to illustrate. In a fishing community, for example, where the learners are illiterate adults, the classroom becomes a planning meeting room, and the learners choose fish and their various prices as the content, and choose to go on a field trip to look at fish being bought and sold. They decided that they would make signs to post in public, although they had considered making a pamphlet with the prices. After the field trip, they returned and made the posters, learning words for fish and their varieties, and learned numbers as they applied to fish prices, almost as a secondary result. They did not learn an alphabet, or grammar rules, or lists of useless vocabulary. ("useless" in the sense that they would not be functional for them in their community).
- ◊ This approach is tested and vetted. The challenge is, in the context of developing free and open educational resources, can it apply to topics other than literacy? If so, how would we go about this? What topics are better than others?
- ◊ What constitutes practical and interesting topics may be surprising to some educational specialists. Shakespeare, for example, is often seen as highly impractical, except for teaching the finer characteristics of the English language. When I taught in rural Ghana, 1965-7, the staff and students put on a Shakespeare play every year. It included a narrator who translated the material into the local vernacular. The series was very popular, and the auditorium was filled over capacity by peasant farmers each year. If nothing more, this should serve to illustrate that we should be open and tolerant to many different unorthodox and unexpected approaches.
- ◊ The lesson we should be learning here is that we must be strong and resist formula planning of classes, and often stop and put the objectives and purpose at arms length from us and ask if there is another way, or ways, to plan content and means of educating. Although mistakes will be made, this approach leads to the best quality of education, what we need to develop as part of the OER (Open Educational Resources). --Phil Bartle 18:12 27 sep 2009 (UTC)
earlier rants:
- ► Alms, Altruism and Strength. In the Community Empowerment methodology, there is an apparent paradox in that we argue against alms and other forms of charity which weaken the recipient community or organism. In contrast, when we identify the sixteen elements of strength of an organization or community, altruism is at the top of the list (alphabetically).
- ◊ The major element in the difference is whether the organism is giving or receiving the charity. Giving is not only easier than receiving; it makes you stronger.
- ◊ For over half a century, bilateral (government to government) aid to Africa was based on charity and the result has been increased poverty, more dependency, a climb in corruption, and a decline in good governance. When you give alms to a beggar, you train her or him to be a beggar. In community work, in contrast, when you encourage a community to find its own resources, to plan its own future, and to act, then it becomes stronger and more self reliant.
- ◊ How does this relate to open and free education? Or is it more than one way? Some people might argue that if you provide people with free education (like those teachers who have had people sitting in the back of the class with their arms folded, their feet up and daddy is paying the bill to babysit them until they know what they want in life), that if you give them free education they will think it is worth every penny they spent on it. In my varied teaching career, I have taught students in a penientiary and I have had students at different levels in Africa and it was so noticable that those students demonstrated more respect, and they did so much better in their studies.
- ◊ We aim to provide educational resources for every level from K to PhD, vocational, professional and academic. Does this mean we are providing charity and weakening or that we are making opportunities and assisting in providing strength? Does OER contribute to strength or weakness?
- ◊ The answer to this dilemma comes from our animal characteristics, that our offspring are born or hatched weak and helpless. They need nurturing and the opportunity to play so as to learn how to survive and thrive. It also looks like that it applies at all ages, not only the young. In a complex social system as we have in human society, education is an important element of that play. When we play and learn, we become stronger. If society as a whole takes on the responsibility to provide the environment and necessary utensils for that play, then we become stronger. OER takes the provision of educational resources out of the hands of profit oriented organizations, and makes it available to all of us. We all get stronger.--Phil Bartle 16:20, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
Previous rants:
- ► Alms, Altruism and Strength. In the Community Empowerment methodology, there is an apparent paradox in that we argue against alms and other forms of charity which weaken the recipient community or organism. In contrast, when we identify the sixteen elements of strength of an organization or community, altruism is at the top of the list (alphabetically).
- ◊ The major element in the difference is whether the organism is giving or receiving the charity. Giving is not only easier than receiving; it makes you stronger.
- ◊ For over half a century, bilateral (government to government) aid to Africa was based on charity and the result has been increased poverty, more dependency, a climb in corruption, and a decline in good governance. When you give alms to a beggar, you train her or him to be a beggar. In community work, in contrast, when you encourage a community to find its own resources, to plan its own future, and to act, then it becomes stronger and more self reliant.
- ◊ How does this relate to open and free education? Or is it more than one way? Some people might argue that if you provide people with free education (like those teachers who have had people sitting in the back of the class with their arms folded, their feet up and daddy is paying the bill to babysit them until they know what they want in life), that if you give them free education they will think it is worth every penny they spent on it. In my varied teaching career, I have taught students in a penientiary and I have had students at different levels in Africa and it was so noticable that those students demonstrated more respect, and they did so much better in their studies.
- ◊ We aim to provide educational resources for every level from K to PhD, vocational, professional and academic. Does this mean we are providing charity and weakening or that we are making opportunities and assisting in providing strength? Does OER contribute to strength or weakness?
- ◊ The answer to this dilemma comes from our animal characteristics, that our offspring are born or hatched weak and helpless. They need nurturing and the opportunity to play so as to learn how to survive and thrive. It also looks like that it applies at all ages, not only the young. In a complex social system as we have in human society, education is an important element of that play. When we play and learn, we become stronger. If society as a whole takes on the responsibility to provide the environment and necessary utensils for that play, then we become stronger. OER takes the provision of educational resources out of the hands of profit oriented organizations, and makes it available to all of us. We all get stronger.--Phil Bartle 16:20, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
- ► Agricultural Revolution, Culture and Open Education. Without doubt, the most profound event in the history and development of human beings was and is the Agricultural Revolution. Without it we were gatherers and hunters living in small bands. With it we developed complex social organization, cities, states, industry, the Internet, increasingly faster production of new inventions and technology, and the creation of complex ideas and perspectives.
- ◊ If we look at the classical Greek teachers, we see a frequent reference to education as cultivation (eg Epicurus) using an agricultural metphor to describe and analyse learning and teaching.
- ◊ We usually see the process of education as one of transferring ideas, knowledge, skills and wisdom. Here let us also use an alternative approach which sees education as caring and cultivating. This approach tends to emphasize moral development (although not exclusively) and the idea that our minds are like gardens or farms. We grow and develop organically, and what is needed is the nutrients, sun and water, not a forceful moldling of our ways of thinking.
- ◊ If agriculture has had such a revolutionary effect on human society, think what education, as a form of cultivation, is doing to humanity.
- ◊ If we see our developing of open and free educational resources, not only for the transfer of kowledge, but also for the care and cultivation of the learners, then we will be contributing to a new and incredibly valuable body of knowledge and understanding in this world. Some anthropologists have argued that it was not so much the domestication of plants and animals which transformed us, but our domestication of ourselves. The cultivation of ourselves, as learners, knowing that teaching and learning is best if a two way process, will take us, as they say in Star Trek, where no one has gone before.
- ◊ I see education as a gardening process, and the development of free and open education as a revolutionary process that will have as important an effect on humanity as the agricultural revolution. The force is not only with us; we are The Force.
- --Phil Bartle 12:35 28 ago 2009 (UTC)
earlier rants:
- ► Epistemology: It might be time to add a few questions about epistemology (how we know) to our discussions on WikiEducator. Lots of good debate on "How do we learn?" and its converse (but not its mirror image), "How do we teach?" Now we should ask, "How do we know?" If we learn something, how do we know if and when we know? If we teach something, how do we know if and when the taught know?
- ◊ In classical Epistemology we have only four ways of knowing: (1) Observing (sensing, empiricism), (2) Logic (calculating, reason), (2) Belief (faith, worldview), and (4) Authority (Mommy said so). While we educators pay much lip service to our students discovering for themselves (by logic or observation), we rely considerably instead on Authority (because we, or the text book, said so).
- ◊ There are issues, problems and criticism for each of the four ways. Observation: we have no way of being certain that what you sense is what I sense, even if we give it the same name, and no objects, including observers, can occupy the same space at the same time, so everyone has a unique observational experience. Reason: There is nothing intrinsic abut two when we see two apples; the "twoness" is in our minds. Belief: If you do not believe in dwarves, that makes you a dwarf atheist. Authority: proselytisers for a particular belief cite some Authority, usually a book, omitting to mention that all books are written by human beings.
- ◊ Now how does all this relate to open and free educational resourses, which is what we are all about? Is learning different for the four ways? Should our teaching be different? I once taught at a seminary and noticed then that the teachers of religion ("our kind" of course) did not like to take a critical and epistemological look at beliefs, like the creed, or that God exists, because Authority and belief have neither logic nor witness to back them up. No wonder they talked about sheep as a role model.
- ◊ We often forget that there is no finite amount of right knowledge, and what we know as a society constantly changes. There is no right answer. Administrators in schools and colleges, however, ask us for a course outline that portrays a finite quantity of information as the curriculum. There is no curriculum!
- ◊ What is the lesson to be learned here? The solution? We should always promote unorthodox methods of learning and teaching on WikiEducator and in the classroom. Those lacking courage and creativity will revert to the orthodox. Not all new methods will work, but a key feature of WikiEducator is collaboration. We can help each other in developing new methods. Let us keep on so long as we are having fun. --Phil Bartle 07:32, 20 August 2009 (UTC)
- ► Education and Empowerment. An important element of the reasoning behind community empowerment is that charity weakens. If we do everything for a poor community, then it does not get stronger. It becomes dependent upon our charity. This is not universal. There are times and places where charity is necessary and does not weaken. During a disaster, emergency response requires charity to ensure the people can survive (but it must end when it should). If a person becomes blind, it would be charity to read to that person, and that does not make the person more dependent. Most of the Aid to Africa, especially bilateral (government to government), in contrast, is based on charity, and it encourages corruption, inefficiency, and it releases more resources for war and oppression.
- When we support open and free education, are we contributing to charity which weakens? We should think about this, because WikiEd and similar endeavors now comprise a major thrust in providing education which is free. I do not think so. There is charity and there is charity. The young of animals need nurturing until they become adults, and the higher up the phylum, the more complex they are, the more nurturing they need. Humans now need education to survive (and to reproduce physically and culturally). Education has been available to the privileged of the world, and it has not weakened them, to the best of my knowledge. If we nurture the young and vulnerable, allow them to play and grow strong and skilled, then they will develop the strength they need to carry on to reproduce.
- The OER (Open Educational Resources) that are made available freely on sites like WikiEducator, provide the tools to allow the young to play and get skilled, no matter in what part of the world they originate and, most importantly, in spite of the historical disadvantages they might have had. --Phil Bartle 03:25, 21 July 2009 (UTC)
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