This sentence from Stephen Downes post A
World to Change best exemplifies one of the key drivers behind a conference
like EDGEX2012: We need to move beyond
the idea that an education is something that is provided for us, and toward the
idea that an education is something that we create for ourselves.
With EDGEX2012
coming up just round the corner, I must say that I am super excited. It’s getting
a bit difficult to focus on my daily work, the BAU stuff and not wander off in
my head to the conference. Thanks to Viplav
Baxi, we finally have speakers and thought leaders like Stephen Downes, Jay Cross, Clark Quinn, Dave Cormier, et al. coming together in a
conference in India.
But I am jumping ahead as usual. I wanted this to be a blog
post on what the conference is and why I think all educators—teachers, CLOs,
L&D consultants, policy makers and policy breakers, and anyone who has
anything to do with enabling others to build capability—should attend. If you
believe that the current education system is failing us, is no longer
sustainable, is neither fair nor equitable, then this is the conference for
you. If you have ever been inspired by the writings of Paulo Freire (Pedagogy
of the Oppressed, Pedagogy
of Hope), then this conference is for you. It is about disruptive education.
About freeing education from the shackles of a building (call it school,
college, what you will) and democratizing it. It’s about handing power back to
the learners and creating the environment for learning to happen. And it will.
We have experiments like the Hole
in the Wall by Sugata Mitra to prove us right.
The Connectivism
and Connective Knowledge MOOC (massive open online course) that Downes, Siemens and Cormier started in 2008 exemplifies
networked learning, and the transformative impact of technology on learning. Most
importantly, it does not have a “fixed body of knowledge” that learners need to
go through. “Rather, the learning in the
course results from the activities you undertake, and will be different for
each person.” And this is the fundamental, quintessential personalized learning
taking place on a massive scale year after year. I had joined the MOOC in 2010
for the first time. Since then, I have been a sporadic visitor to the MOOC and
have always found nuggets of learning that suited my need at the moment. It
empowers you—the learner—to architect your own learning.
Closely aligned to this, we have Jay Cross—the proponent of Informal
Learning. At a time when organizations were investing in formal, top down
training programs, a vestige of the Industrial Era and Taylorist ideas of productivity
improvement, Cross, Marcia Conner and a few others were busy advocating
informal learning, workscaping, the power of social tools and the importance of
building one’s personal learning network. I find this coming together of the
different strands that constitute how we learn and perceive and make sense of
the world today in a single conference quite remarkable.
The conference also has speakers like Grainne Conole, Martin Weller, Les Foltos, Douglas
Lynch and others. And the overarching themes are:
- Informal Learning, Communities of Practice, Connectivism
- Personal Learning Environments, Open Distributed
- Learning, Net Pedagogy, Learning “Design” in a 2.0 world
- Learning Analytics, Ubiquitous learning
- MOOCs, OER University, Stanford AI
- Role of teachers and coaching in an open distributed learning environment
- New forms of assessments
There are resources here for those keen to know more
about connectivism, learnscapes, communities of practices, open design, social network
analysis and more.
