Subject: [IFETS-DISCUSSION:1218] RE: IFETS-DISCUSSION digest 175
gjn@bton.ac.uk
Date: Wed 21 Feb 2001 - 23:42:55 MET
From: gjn@bton.ac.uk Subject: [IFETS-DISCUSSION:1218] RE: IFETS-DISCUSSION digest 175 Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2001 11:42:55 +1300
Yes Chris (O'hagan) we do need to meet the growing demand from learners to
get an education, and understand the complex modes of commodification of all
aspects of our lives which require us to provide the much vaunted knowledge
workers who in turn will provide the commodities (for those with the money
to buy them) including some might suggest a commodity called education. I
personally have my doubts about how appropriate that concept which reduces
learner to customers is to a process where we provide a 'product' called
learning, but then test our 'consumer' as to how well they have performed
using it!! How well did you do at driving your new intelligent car and is
your satisfaction with that product predicated on the driving test? More
likely on the dream of the open road and the toys for the boys and girls
built into it. Is satisfaction guaranteed in a learning module if it
entertains, enthuses and excites our learners but in the end doesn't provide
them with the result they wanted? No I don't want to enter into the
'assessment as the driver debate' (pun -oops).
But ...
We need to meet the human needs of our learners as well, and if technology
can enhance that experience then we need to adopt it. If it meets only the
need to reduce costs rather than enriching the learning environment then we
should, like the luddites (misunderstood people who were not against
technology but against the change in working conditions those changes
threatened to impose) be wary of those who think that learning is about
meeting the needs of individual dispersed learners rather than bringing
dispersed learners together to learn from one another. There has been a lot
of contructivist talk but in the end they have the interpersonal high ground
in offering models of learning which are person centred not technically
pushed. And we have all read Greville Rumble (1997), as well as Paul Bacsich
& Ash (1999) and we all know there is no proven cost benefit in online or
other technology lead solutions!!!
In the end we still need to address the problem of balancing the needs of
our learners in terms of their extrinsic job centred approach, against the
socially desirable need to produce concerned citizens capable of challenging
the prevailing orthodoxy and questioning for whom a system is working or
more poetically 'for whom the bell tolls'.
Gavin Nettleton
University of Brighton
e-mail: gjn@bton.ac.uk
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