elearnspace

Stephen Downes’ presentation at ED-MEDIA 2009 is available: Beyond Management: Personal Learning Environments. The talk is an advancement (integration) of Stephen’s ideas over the last several years and looks like a precursor to his large PLE research project at NRC. During the talk, he makes a distinction between complicated and complex that resonates with my own work around learning theory (and Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework, Ronald Barnett’s work on super complexity). In this distinction we find the driving motivation for reform of education. Web 2.0 is an instantiation of change. It is not the core change. The shift from settled and stable information (complicated – like a jigsaw puzzle where every piece has a place in our curriculum) to adaptive and emerging (complex – like a weather system where numerous combinations of factors will produce outcomes that cannot be fully predicted) is the core change. New education models must be built on this change. Any system that is out of synch with the market it intends to serve risks irrelevance.