Learning to learn is really more important than being taught well. It always was but is even more relevant today. Pedagogical approaches such as problem based learning and building your knowledge via the Internet exploits the full potential of ICT.
There has long been a focus on distance learning; universities and other teaching institutions set up teacherless classrooms in remote areas. This still reflects traditional thinking about how people should learn; a set agenda, curriculum, topics, distance teaching. The focus is still on teaching. But ICT and the Internet offers much more in terms of revolutionizing the building of peoples’ knowledge.
In teaching the onus is on the teacher to ’give’ people knolwedge, as in management the onus is on the manager to deliver orders and profits. Managers and teachers are active and employees and students passive recipients of orders and knowledge.
But receieved, unprocessed and unreflected orders and knowledge is less valuable knowledge than that which has been processd, discussed, and eventually digested and understood. Remembering facts, and doing well at tests at school may be perceived as knowledge, but it is not! Knowledge can be used for clever action, facts remembererd but not understood cannot!
Genuinely modern organisations and leaders/managers rely on proactive employees, who understand the goals and strategy of the company and then take the right initiatives without waiting for an order by the boss! The same should go for those who want us to learn!
People, especially kids really like to learn! From the day we were born, we started to learn and the child continues to ask why. Why until parents lose their patience! But curiosity and asking why is the essence of learning! That is why we explore. That is how we discover. It is the explorer and discoverer in us that is fundamental to building our knowledge not the teacher.
Until we start school we are all explorers, building knowledge as best we can. Then when we start school we are for many years taught as more or less obedient students until we go to work. Then some of us stop learning, but the more successful ones restart their learning, going into the academic career of creating new knowledge, or working, anticipating what he will need to know in the future and proactively learning to deliver what is wanted without being told so!
IT and the Internet are ideally suited to learning by exploring and discovering alone or together in a group! Just like advanced management likes to leave management to autonomous people or teams given they understand and accept company objectives and strategies, the new breed of teachers will abdicate teaching to autonomous learners or learning groups given they understand what knowledge they are supposed to build. When the managed learnt to manage and learners learnt to learn we will have an enormous productivity boost in society, freeing a lot of capacity; managers, teachers from the daily routine tasks of managing, following up and teaching.
The long term potential of learning with the help of IT lies not in developing new teaching methods but building learning friendly environments, facilitating learning by learners themselves. The potential of learning will depend much on peoples’ ability to learn to learn and the development and distribution of learning friendly technology and easy access to information via the Internet .
Learning to learn and learning to use learning technology may be the single most important contributions to rural and poor populations!
Schools and teachers are bottlenecks in the traditional education system, to increase the knowledge of rural and poor people. It is hardly realistic to believe those bottlenecks will be overcome. It would require extreme efforts by poor nations whose privileged rather prefer to spend their money on the eductaion of their own children. It would require international assistance of a magnitude totally unrealistic.
That leaves the poor with but little hope unless new solutions are brought to bear, solutions combining new pedagogical thinking with modern technology and building on the natural instinct and will to learn. Creating simple but effective learning environments with the help of IT may have a major impact, in elevating the ignorant and marginalised poor to levels of knowledge allowing them to be integrated into the society of the privileged.
International knowledge assistance should concentrate on familairising the poor with IT, making It available and Internet and then to set up learning centers linked to the Internet .
This kind of refocus in national education and international aid would require less money and achieve better results than todays many well meaning but inefficient and insufficient educational programs!
