Subject: Re: Empowering Learners
From: Ania Lian (ania@lingua.arts.uq.edu.au)
Date: Thu 13 Apr 2000 - 03:28:06 MEST
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 11:28:06 +1000 (EST) From: Ania Lian <ania@lingua.arts.uq.edu.au> Subject: Re: Empowering Learners
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On Sun, 9 Apr 2000, Barry Kort wrote:
> Ania Lian asks, "What does it mean to empower learners and how can we
> make it possible? And where does here technology come in?"
> There is an important distinction between teaching and learning. The
> distinction revolves around who is determining the subject being learned,
> and where the sources of information reside.
> At its most extreme, this distinction shows up in the difference between
> education and therapy. In education, one learns good and valuable stuff,
> but one learns it well before the need for the knowledge has manifested
> itself in ones life. In therapy, one learns good and valuable stuff,
> but one learns it well after the need for the knowledge has turned up
> in the course of one's life, and after one has already suffered some
> difficulty by being unprepared.
So the difference can be illustrated as (a) in the case of therapy, people
learn according to the demands that their experience places on them and
(b) in the case of learning where people learn things that are not
a product of the demands generated by their experience. If we now consider
that meaning is a product of history, i.e. of the relationships mobilised
according to one's history, therapy is a case where the need and the
product of learning will be based in one's history. In the case of
school-based learning, meanings are generated in relation to history
that has not happened for the learner at least. But someone does make
decisions as to what should be taught and these decisions are not free of
contextual context. Now, question is, 'How can a meaningful learning be
facilitated where the conditions for generating meaning are absent in the
case of school-based learning?'
> In empowering people to learn what they are most primed to learn next
> in life, we split the difference between education and therapy,
> facilitating just-in-time learning. The notion is that every day,
> everybody is ready to learn *something*. What are you most ready to
> learn right now? Let's learn that.
How can people identify the answer to this question? How can we help them
identify without reducing this help to an act of telling?
> Technology helps, because people can more readily access information,
> experts, and communities that match their current learning needs.
> That's why I'm a big fan of online learning communities which provide
> the means for people with common interests to learn with and from each
> other. And for online learning communities to work, the technology must
> foster and support the learning process.
So learners' needs drive their learning and technology is to support this
process. From the perspective of the teaching methodology, the functions
attributed to on-line learning may be more a matter of discourse which
acompanies computer-sales. What concerns me are the grounds on which we
see our teaching environments as supporting or enabling meaningful
learning. Thus if we do believe that on-line means empowering, maybe we
coud systematise the ways in which we think about power, what power is and
what would this mean to access, manage and gain power. I would think that
maybe such an execrise would open up some issues that remain concealed
behind the self-legitimising discourse which assumes that on-line and
Internet = power. For example, why is it that some people think that such
a power (or they mean here flexibility) can be too much? Can we ever have
too much power? What would that mean?
Ania Lian
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