More from Beyond Current Horizons

Some additional reports are now available from the Beyond Current Horizons Web site:

• The schooled society and beyond: the modernizing role of formal education as an institution - considers the growth of formal education, and celebrates the success of formal education; theorizes that formal education largely determines society, rather than prepares students for society. Schooling doesn't prepare; it transforms. Rather than being oppressive, schooling is founded on principles of egalitarianism and actualisation; where schooling is genuinely oppressive, it is usually so because of suppressive political influence. Formal education focuses on "academic intelligence", defined as "those cognitive skills needed to do abstract reasoning, problem-solving, higher order thinking, multiple perspective taking, and effortful thinking"; this increasingly replaces the "more traditional academic skills such as recitation, disputation, memorization, formalistic debate, formulae application, accuracy, and authoritative text reading and exegesis". As a result, fluid IQ (thinking) scores are increasing significantly while crystalised IQ (recall) scores are increasing moderately.
  
• Knowledge, creativity and communication in education: multimodal design - with a focus in particular on the evolution of textbooks, in terms of style, content and participation.
  
• Summative report: Identity, communities and citizenship - a wide-reaching and well-grounded consideration of issues; the 'potential for schools' section has much in common with that of Gilbert (2005), who argues for a focus on training for thinking. 

I particularly enjoyed the first of these three contributions, not least because it portrays formal education as being on the right trajectory for the future. Formal education is working, and that, well. Continuous improvement is a part of that success.

1.3.*; 5.*: Solid stuff on the future

The "Beyond Current Horizons" research programme was established to "examine how social and technological change overthe coming 20 or so years may present new challenges or opportunities for education". The Futurelab project has just released some interesting new insights into what the future may hold.

Usually I am skeptical of such reports, but there is a depth to the analysis in the "Beyond Current Horizons" work that stands it apart. The quality of the Expert Advisory Group demonstrates the level of expertise the project has drawn on, adding significant depth to the analysis and findings. The six proposed scenarios have not been merely brainstormed; rather, they have been carefully fashioned from the results of clearly documented evidence (over 60 papers written by experts, also available from the site).

The six potential futures (and their implications for education) are:

World 1: Trust yourself

• Scenario 1: Informed choice - Learning is a bespoke, life-long journey that develops and builds upon your unique strengths. Educational providers work with you to tailor education to your needs.
• Scenario 2: Independent consumers - Learning is an individual responsibility, educational providers are suppliers responsible for ensuring quality of delivery.

World 2: Loyalty points

• Scenario 3: Discovery - Education helps you to understand and develop your capacity to make distinctive and useful contributions to a range of different communities, organisations and networks.
• Scenario 4: Diagnosis - Education is about organisations diagnosing learners' pre-existing strengths and determining where they will fit in future.

World 3: Only connect

• Scenario 5: Integrated experience - Learning is a process of participating in meaningful activities and developing competencies and knowledge to better contribute to the wider community.
• Scenario 6: Service and citizenship - Education is a process of learning about the skills, competencies and roles that individuals play in the 'real world'.

The beauty of these scenarios is that they are realistic, discrete, and are not driven by any sense of technological determinism. There is plenty to muse on here, and plenty to study; the various papers I have scanned (such as "Learning to learn", "Digital natives and ostrich tactics?", "Reworking the web, reworking the world: How web 2.0 is changing our society", "Argumentation and dialogic teaching: Alternative pedagogies for a changing world") that inform the scenarios are all worthy of deep study in themselves. This study provides a good, substantial reference point that acknowledges the complexity of the issues involved as well as the fact that the future can often be anticipated but not pre-determined.

A must for anyone considering the potential futures of education wanting to engage with a serious consideration of the issues!

5.1.2, 3.4.2: Open Education Resources

I deliberately left Open Education Resources out of the E-Primer series, as there still seems substantial work to be done for them to go beyond being a 'good theory' and something 'inevitable' into something with a track record. OER has a host of dedicated adherents, and it seems they are close to achieving a form of critical mass and proof of concept. OERs have been of interest to me since Stephen Downes' classic paper on learning objects in 2001(Learning objects: Resources for distance education worldwide). It seemed a little like wishful thinking, but it had a definite attraction to it; at the time I was reading about (and practising) instructional design, and the barriers to a learning object economy at the practical level seemed more significant than some were letting on. Next in my journey was David Wiley's excellent differentiation (DOC) between 'Lego' and 'atoms'. Other pre-2003 works are linked to from here.

What put me off including them in the E-Primer series was the book by Littlejohn (2004): Reusing online resources, which, to my knowledge, remains an important read in the area. The book highlights the potential and (considerable) challenges the development, storage and re-use of learning objects face (and, again to my knowledge, continue to face). Issues of granularity, searchability, suitability, licensing and the establishment of a 'learning object 'economy' for reimbursing authors seem to remain as challenges (the issues have not seemed to have changed in the intervening years based on Conole & Oliver's (2007) Contemporary perspectives in e-learning research. My main personal objection beyond those listed is the potential loss of meta-narrative; what story ties the little bits together (related to granularity)? Further, thus far OER repositories have fallen well short of their ideals.

What prompts this post is the work being done by Wikieducator (see their OER Handbook for educators) and the recent (Vol.10, No.5) issue of IRRODL, a special feature on open access. I am yet to read it (my current research lies elsewhere), but it is encouraging to read in the editorial (PDF) these words from David Wiley and John Hilton III:

Overall, this special issue presents an excellent discussion of open education issues ranging from useful descriptions of successful projects to empirical data about user attitudes to thoughtful criticisms of present work. These criticisms are particularly valuable because so much of the extant literature about open education is almost uniformly positive in tone. We hope this special issue will help to begin a more balanced discourse about the benefits and very real challenges of open education.

It is encouraging to see some primary research being performed; the account of open textbook creation, an honest appraisal of sustainability,  and the results of a survey looking at incentives and disincentives for use (showing that the classic benefits and caveats I mentioned above still exist). On the theoretical side is one by the editors (Openness, dynamic specialization, and the disaggregated future of higher education) suggesting that "every institution must begin addressing openness as a core organizational value if it desires to both remain relevant to its learners and to contribute to the positive advancement of the field of higher education"), and another proposing peer-recognition over formal accreditation.

One of the ironies in is the tension between OERs replacing current formal education and OERs promoting and serving formal education; for OERs to be sustainable, it seems they may need to be supported on the scale only made possible within formal settings (see the Friesen article). I still view OER as a work in progress, with significant barriers to overcome; there is much enthusiasm for it. However, I also know that enthusiasm will only get a great idea so far. For OER to truly come to fruition it requires a critical mass and an inevitability in terms of institutional shift. I'm not (yet) convinced that either of these are imminent. Using OERs doesn't take the 'work' out of education design!

1.4: Is this the future?

I received an odd RSS feed relaring to existing Beyond Current Horizons essays, once of whcih I hadn't blogged on before (see previous posts concerning these). "The digital landscape and new education providers" considers how digital technologies have lowered the barriers of entry to higher education and how many large corporates are making the most of the opportunity. The growth of home-schooling, blended learning and online question-and-answer sites is discussed, as are trends in ebooks, learning in virtual worlds and assessment. Inspiring stuff... if these trends continue, the future of education will be very different!

The article addresses the arguments of openness, quality, IP and the importance of revenue streams. Most interesting to me, though, was the very interesting section on "Lifelong learning and the learning society", which seems to emphasise training and workplace skills over classic liberal education. There are serious costs here; an industrially-based and pragmatic education is not the same thing as an emancipating, self-actualising one. "The Future" section (Part Three) ends with an excellent quote:

...we all value open-ness, participation, communication and collaboration, and that we value professional expertise and quality assurance. We value individuals and their free pursuit of ideas and interests; we value communities and the compromise that they necessarily entail. We value knowledge and innovation; we value health, the body and genuine sustainability. We value our economy and the role for education policy in ensuring a good fit between what is learnt at all stages of life, and what is needed to sustain a healthy economy run by competent, confident, adaptive people. We value the classics, the arts, and learning for the sake of personal development and wellbeing. We value diversity and flexibility; we value cohesion and manageability. We work together, with hope, towards a future of physical and social technologies that reflect these values.

Yep, I'm into that.