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Eric Perlberg

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  1. A few comments about learning, e-learning, schooling and life. I recently decided to take up photography. I found a great website, DP Review which is basically some guy in London who reviews digital cameras and built some discussion forums for discussing cameras, technique, computers in their relation to "digital darkrooms" etc. Well, since Jan. 1999 these forum have had (and I'm taking this off the website now... 222,504,066 posts. Talk about a learning community this discussion board must be receiving 100s of posts an hour on all kinds of topics 24 hours a day every day. Now here's something interesting. If you go in and start wading through some of the posts, and if you know anything about the topic, you'll see that there's a wide range of contributors from people who haven't a clue what they're saying but say it quite emphatically to people who are arrogant and obnoxious to people who give highly technical information to people who are kind and supportive to people who actually answer a question and more. And the dear reader is left to sort through this and make sense of it. Now what I find interesting about this is that its a great place to learn quickly and its a great place to pick up lots of mis-information. In fact, this is the general problem faced in the 21st century. The real problems we face today are not of the nature of ... what is the definition of bit or byte or e-learning... the real problems we face today are which camera should I buy at least as a metaphor for... how do we stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons and waste, how to have a meaningful life, how to manage our environment while satisfying our desire to have an easier life which lasts longer, how to end injustice and inequity when the money spent on buying iPods will keep half the world's population free of malaria if the money was otherwise spent, who is right, Kilroy or Osama bin Ladin and how do we prove it to people who feel the opposite, etc (I'm sure you know the litany). In other words, the problems in real life we face are how to make sense of a chaotic and confusing amount of conflicting facts and no clearly discernable ways forward. I sometimes enjoy watching CNBC, a cable channel here in the UK (and elsewhere) which has lots of interviews with CEOs and top-line management. I always hear the same things. They want creative, independent, self motivated work forces where people are able to take initiative and yet be good team members, where people have to know how to play their role and yet have the courage to speak up when things are going wrong and where people move from position to position because more important than being specialists (a 1940's need) they want people who can innovate and think outside of the box. Lastly, they need people who can sift through a mountain of information, separate what's relevant from what's less relevant and out of a maelstrom of competing factoids, ask insightful questions and develop meaningful answers. Does this sound like the kind of people we're educating in our classrooms? I think not. Our model of education lies somewhere between the factory system for mass production popular in the 18th century and the tutorial system reserved for wealthy elite prior to mass education. Sure I believe in studying the classics. Of course I believe you have to crawl before you walk. But take them out of the context of human life and all you have is a boring assembly line designed to march people through a system which favours some personality types and disadvantages others. I taught 10 year olds when I first started teaching. At some point the school I worked for encouraged me to take students back-packing and on wilderness trips including hiking and canoeing. It really taught me something. Many of the compliant young girls and boys who were so likeable in the classroom, who always did their homework, who had nice readable handwritings and knew how to write a good essay were suddenly hot and sweaty and kept saying... "Are we there yet" and "I'm hot" and "ooooh, there's a bug" etc. And some of the kids who were a real pain in the class, frequently boys who were hyper and couldn't sit still, couldn't spell well and didn't do their homework, these same boys were gently pointing at plants and naming them, were gathering wood for our evening fires, would set up the tents in no time in the pouring rain, etc. OK forget the political incorrectness of some of the characterisations, my point is that ...school is not real life... Someone earlier in this forum mentioned that they saw e-learning as a bunch of kids who sat at home in front of a flickering computer screen with no social interaction. Sorry, but that's not the only option for e-learning and its a limited view of its potential. In fact, if there's any system which keeps us from developing good social skills its the walk in two lines, sit quietly in class, walk quietly in the halls 4 walled buildings called schools. Freed from the tyranny of the box, we could develop all sorts of paradigms for learning, socialisation, social responsiblity, caring, etc. What elearning can do is help break down the walls of schools which as Ivan Illich posited is the enemy of learning. Schooling in a box formalises knowledge in a way which makes it something to master rather than a tool for living. Currricula have their place but to my mind they have become the point instead of a tool to help in the education of an individual to face the world they live in. Far from e-learning being kids sitting in front of a computer turning sallow from lack of sunlight, the computer should be freeing us from the tyranny of the box, letting us work and learn in a multifasceted way which includes formal lessons, real work experience, mandatory service to greater society, helping others, working in teams to solve undefined problems, etc. No longer relying on local resources, students can work with various teachers throughout their days even teachers who don't live geographically near them but who are doing teaching on something that is important to them just as I learned a massive amount about photography from Photo.net one of the greatest learning resources for photography. Sound too idealistic to you? Are you thinking... yeah, sure, Eric, you must have had some unique kids because the kids in my school are bored, unmotivated, disrespectful, and only care about sex, drugs and rock and roll. IMHO these are the real effects of the factory model of education and this is where e-learning comes in. With tongue only partially in cheek I would love to see the government sell off all school buildings in the major cities for development into trendy flats. What a windfall of profit we would have. Plus the environmental benefits and traffic flow benefits of removing the whole set of problems centering around the school traffic phenomenon. Instead, I'd take that money from selling off the schools and not having to build ever more roads and put it into a series of programmes of local computer centres staffed by subject specialists supported by university students and local parents for more formal learning, then find activity centres which would be hubs out of which students would work on socially relevant tasks like helping old people do their shopping, keeping the environment free of trash and litter, working in hospitals, etc. If you're not familiar with the successes of the home schooling movement you may find all of this fanciful but it is possible to have another type of learning system which is more structured towards the individual, which better prepares students for the kinds of skills needed for the 21st century rather than the 18th century. And maybe one result of such a system change is that when people leave formal education they wouldn't be so keen to stay away from learning, being susceptable to easy manipulation by tabloid newspapers and entertaining themselves to death sitting on sofas while downing massive amounts of bad food while the world around them falls apart. end rant ;-)
  2. Hi All, I'm Eric Perlberg, Founding Director of ASW2, A School Without Walls (www.ASW2.net), an online school offering A levels and IB. I began my career in rural New York State (in a small town between Kripplebush and Krumville!) teaching primary school and after 12 years I moved to Basel Switzerland to start the International School of Basel's high school programme. During that time I had the dual career of teaching almost all subjects through to and including GCSE and even some A levels while consulting on desktop publishing and doing the graphic design work for printed publications for one of Basel's multinational pharmaceutical firms. I was recruited to teach in London in 1996 with the goal of creating a top IT programme as well as teaching ITGS, the IT programme for the International Baccalaureate. My early years of teaching primary school were a good foundation for me as I believe that education is about people and not subjects. I also believe that real learning is an intrinsically enjoyable activity (but not necessarily *fun*) and schooling is one of the worst enemies of real learning for most people. I spent most of my years in Basel teaching in a one room multi-age school environment. Despite the fact that we were resource poor (we literally sat around a coal fire with blankets on our laps to keep warm in winter) and the fact that our cohort of students in the class ranged in age from 12 to 16, these were the best teaching years of my life. All of these students have done quite well and most are still in touch and believe that that multi-age classroom was one of the magic times in their lives. Fortunately we weren't trapped in the paper game and a typical week might include formal lessons in the classroom, visiting museums, wandering the streets in Basel talking about its history and spending time at the Cafe des Artes discussing contemporary painting. We took frequent trips around France and Germany, ate lunch on the Rhine and visited the ateliers of my Basel artist friends. It was a magical time. In London I began to develop ideas for extending my teaching using online tools like discussion boards, content management, polls, etc which led to coming up with the idea of starting an online school. Through the encouragement and support of the adminsitration at Southbank International School I was able to hire a talented programming group called Runtime-Collective and designed an online learning environment programmed in Java and running on an Oracle 8i database. Today I am a big believer in the power of online learning and trying to move the discussion away from the better than/not as good as dialog and try to find ways to innovate in a field that I feel has lost its way.
  3. First, I'll introduce myself, I'm Eric Perlberg and I'm the Director of ASW2, the first UK school to offer A levels entirely online and soon we'll be offering the IB online. I was a classroom teacher for 30 years (USA, Switzerland, UK) previous to starting and directing the ASW2 project (short for A School Without Walls, a term coined by the radical educator Ivan Illich). The project has been totally funded by Southbank International School in London. E-learning has the power to really radically alter the ways we learn. But not in the way generally talked about in the media (replacing teachers, boring, mechanistic style programmed learning, etc). For starters, you might want to read work done by the Pew Symposia on learner centered programmes based on high-quality, interactive learningware, asynchronous and synchronous conversations, and individualized mentoring available here (http://www.center.rpi.edu/PewSym/Mono4.html) . These ideas lie at the heart of ASW2. Additionally, for certain population groups interactive (ie with a tutor) e-learning would bring a big improvement for example 1) students who have severe restricted mobility issues like hospitalised students and prisoners 2) students who are statistically low in number and geographically dispersed like high maths students and "gifted and talented" 3) students in very remote areas 4) young professionals who are constantly on the move like youth league football players 5) mature students who work but want to learn (we get a lot of these at ASW2) 6) in certain cases, where there are teacher shortages, an online class is far better than no instruction at all. And I don't want to imply that online learning is not as good as face to face learning because for motivated students, it is and there's a growing body of research to support this. Equally, blended learning or the use of elearning tools in the context of traditional classrooms can also be very useful (and remember, we don't need a computer for every student in every classroom, more and more students these days already have a computer at home) 1) streaming videos of, for example, science demonstrations or working through maths algorythms available over the internet could be accessed by students who were absent on the day they were demonstrated or taught or used for revision 2) databanks of lessons on syllabus topics geared for different ability levels, available online could support what teachers have taught during the day when students are struggling with their homework 3) uni students could be enlisted to support secondary students over online discussion boards during homework hours solving several problems at the same time (eg the current debate about uni top up fees) 4) resources for such regular activities as filling out UCAS forms or activities we never get time to teach like time management, study skills etc could be online and be used to support the regular curriculum Edited to activate hyperlink
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