Freelearning

"31 Days to a Better Blog" Finale

I've decided to bow out of the Better Blog competition.  My most important goal was to start a blog and I have done that.  Now my challenge is to stop procrastinating and keep posting--it's almost always more fun to find new information than to set myself the task of bringing my own ideas together.

Thank you to Michele Martin for initiating this group challenge.  Her support, modeling, and capable teaching have given me a great start.

Guarantee that Learning is Free

       Guaranteeing education and its universal availability is another meaning of freelearning.    

        In 2005, the United Nations set 8 goals to reach by 2015.  The second UN millennium goal is to:

"Ensure that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling."    Literacy is a right of every child.  This is not a reality at this time.  Poverty is a major deterrent (the eradication of poverty and hunger is the first goal).

        Because of my involvement in supporting education of poor children in Pakistan, through ibtida.org, I am familiar with the statistics on  the difficulties of getting a primary education there.   

• The overall literacy rate in Pakistan stands at 28%. For males, the literacy rate is 39%. For females, it is 25%.¹
• Pakistan's Dawn newspaper online reported on Unesco’s Education For All Global Monitoring Report 2007: 
  
  • According to the report, a study of primary school attainment in rural areas of Punjab and Northwest Frontier Provinces (NWFP) concluded that economic constraints on households are a key factor in explaining the out-of-school phenomenon. The sudden loss of remittances from a household member or the birth of an extra sibling both significantly increase the likelihood [of being unable to attend school].

        Pakistan needs support to move toward the second millennium goal, as do many other countries.  Teaching in most of Pakistan is based on rote learning.  Textbooks don't usually have pictures and classroom discussion is almost unheard of. 

A Step Forward in Pakistan       

        In the ibtida schools, newer,  interactive methods of teaching are used to avoid rote learning.  Human rights, respect for others, and  environmental concerns are taught.  Professional development is provided for teachers because they were trained in traditional methods.  At ibtida.org  click on the light green project names to see specifics for each school.  Last winter a drama workshop  was held for some of the students.  They eagerly participated in creating expressive stories about situations in their lives.

An Alternative from MIT

        One-Laptop-per-Child is another approach to providing education to children around the world.  Nicholas Negroponte (link to TED talk 2006) and colleagues created a $100 laptop they are distributing to children in impoverished countries.  Developing education through conventional channels (building schools, hiring teachers, etc.) they anticipate will be too slow to meet the needs of the world's children.

Why do children in developing nations need laptops?  Laptops are both a window and a tool: a window into the world and a tool with which to think. They are a wonderful way for all children to learn learning [Papert] through independent interaction and exploration.

They envision constructionism as the most relevant path to education around the globe.

A New Approach from India

Dr. Sugata Mitra and colleagues did extensive research that established that children can teach themselves to use the computer.  Those who get ahead will teach the others.

MIE [Minimally Invasive Education) was defined and extensively researched by Dr. Sugata Mitra, in an amazing project called, “The Hole in the Wall.” This experiment began in 1999 with a single computer literally placed in a hole in a wall between the New Delhi office of NIIT (a computer training school) and the slum outside. The computer was accessible to children and became an instant hit. Local children, many of whom did not attend school regularly, quickly picked up how to use the computer tools, including word processing software and graphics programs and learned to surf the Internet. Some progressed to more complex skills. All of this without understanding a word of English or being able to read at all, even though all the programs and interfaces were in English.

Pupils and Teacher Learn in Nigeria 

The quote below from Mr. O. is from a teacher who has also become a learner.  This is a critical part of the change in style of learning and teaching.  This resulted from interacting with the children and the computer.

“Pupils go even beyond what I can teach in the class. It's a very interesting thing to use. I personally have a better idea about teaching... We discovered that giving them time to discover something and to do it in their own way, they feel more happy and they are so excited in using it that, ‘Yes, I discovered it! Yes, I can get it!! Yes, I can do this on my own!!!’ Teaching is getting more interesting and less stressful.” — Mr. O., Galadima School, Abuja, Nigeria

Global Freelearning

        The UN millenium goal is designed to unite the efforts of nations around the global toward creating universal primary education.  A small nonprofit like ibtida works at the school level.   One Laptop Per Child will have its initial distribution through the Ministries of Education in seven countries.  Teachers and children advance the millennium goal.

        Please share with us other projects you are aware of that are  working toward this millenium goal.

Update on 31 day challenge

I can report on the first 5 days.

Day 1: Email a new reader.
    I emailed the first person who posted to my blog and thanks to our support group, I did have someone comment :-)

Day 2: Watch a first time reader navigate your blog.
    I have navigated several blogs that are new to me and since I am a newbie and just learning my way around my own blog, I thought this might be the most useful way for me to fulfill this exercise.  Some Blogs have explicit directions on how to use the tools that show on the front page.  Others assume the reader can navigate on his own. 

Both Michele at The Bamboo Project and Tim at My Technology Addictions plan for part of their readership to be newbies.  They both provide directions for those just learning to navigate blogs.

In addition, Michele's blog has a large number of articles that provide ways to find and/or teach yourself to use blogs and other interactive (Web 2.0) tools.

Day 3: Join forums. 
    At the beginning of 31 Days, I joined Michele's challenge group.  (See earlier post) I also visited a forum I already belong to SCoPE, to see what discussions are coming up.  We also have records of previous asynchronous seminars on PLEs, Learning Centres, and Informal Learning.

Day 4: Link back.
    In Day 3 above, I link back to a previous post.

Day 5: About me.
    I have reworked my About Me section.   I don't know how to  change the form so at the moment my brief bio is there twice and my description of my blog is right under "biography".  I like the description I have so far.  Getting clear enough to write a description of my blog has made me much clearer about how to select what I want to write about.

    I am ready to begin the tasks for Days 6-10.

 

DELIGHTED BY LEARNING

I'd like to collect stories of times you felt delighted to learn.  We can look at these together to see if we notice any patterns.

Tell me about a time when you got so involved in a situation that you didn't even realize that you were learning until you looked back.
    Describe the situation.  What were you doing?
    What filled your attention?
    How did you feel?
    When did you realize you were learning something new?

I'll start by giving an example from my experience.
    I was staying near my Mom.  She was hanging clothes or pulling weeds from the garden or sitting on the porch.  She would say, "That's a cat bird, warning the other birds," and make sure I was hearing what she was hearing.  Or, "That's the sound of a Blue Jay."  And she would point up to the tree and show me where the Jay was calling from.  And she'd mimic the chickadee, saying, "Chickadee, dee, dee."  My Mom made sure she had my attention and helped me find the hidden birds she heard.

    This year we hung a bird feeder outside our row of windows onto our backyard.  I was amazed to discover how many birds and bird calls I knew.  I thought back to figure out where I had learned them.  To my surprise, I had learned all of them from my mother when I was a young child.

What is your story of learning without even realizing it?

31 Day Challenge Support Group

I've joined the 31 Day Challenge Participants at Michele Martin's blog.  She has been very supportive of me as I've worked to get this blog up.  Having been hanging around the blogosphere for years, with her challenge I decided to start a blog now.  Count me in.  The chocolate challenge seems way over my head and besides, I'm allergic to chocolate.  I will be tagging along.

Lots of ideas run around in my head.  Now I have the challenge of organizing and integrating them.  Michelle's first question to me was "What do you want to write about?"  Focusing on the "what"  and then mastering the learning process for getting a public blog up for the first time took me several days.  I'm glad I can now say, "Here I am." 

If you want to see some of the diverse content running through my attention these days, my del.icio.us tags are at nanri53.  This week I also came across recommendations for several books for middle schoolers.  Strong plot and characters.  Just my kind of reading.  Got them from the library this afternoon and am off to read Polly Horvath's The Trolls.

Freelearning

Freelearning is like free-writing.  You write what comes into your head without censoring or correcting it.  One meaning of freelearning refers to learning that is not censored or squished, not goal-directed or focused.  It is based on curiosity, hunches and synchronicity.  I'm very good at this kind of learning.  My mind likes to take a broad perspective before it moves back in to consolidate what I've learned.  Writing this blog will encourage me to sort,  condense and interrelate what I've perused.

Freelearning also means making learning separate from institutions.   We confuse ourselves when we call much of what happens in schools and colleges"learning".  Then we want adults to become self-directed learners.  It's got to be difficult to comprehend this concept after all the years of training we get in school to follow the rules.  What could we possibly mean by "direct your own learning"? 

Personal Learning Environments (PLE) are seen by many as a concept, rather than an implementation, about using Web 2.0 for self-directed learning--combining collaboration, communication and knowledge creation. Michele Martin has posted a mindmap of her PLE and includes several important references.  Graham Atwell answers questions about PLEs on his blog and SCoPE has a July 2007 discussion and wiki on the topic.  I suspect that to get faculty to adopt Web 2.0 in their courses,  they need to first experience the excitement of being self-directed learners using PLEs.

More on what freelearning means to me in a future post.