Workshop designing a Knowledge portal

Last Thursday the 8th Renee Filius asked me to help me out in a workshop. I did and it was great fun. I do enjoy getting people inspired and watching ideas rub off and start to live a life of their own. The challenge was to redesign a website (vraag Sofie) for personel advisors and experts on social security employed at universities in The Netherlands. The idea was to facilitate the exchange of information and knowledge through a portal. The challenge is to find a way in which the audience can and will easily participate. There are plenty of technical solutions, but are the users ready to rewrite each other's texts in a wiki for instance?

The photo's are out there on Flickr and if you look carefully you will notice I took them using my new Sony Ericsson mobile which has a quite reasonable lens and chip.

Hole in the wall in real life

It was quite suitable, after all the buzz on the hole in the wall project, to hear Professor Sugata Mitra speak on technology and the application of ICT in education. After a keynote on the envoy of the minister on implementation of ICT in ed in Ghana, Sugata defended a very different appraoch. Rather than working on teachers and ICT facilities, Sugata argues that children are capable of learning on their own. They are capable of learning the basic ICT skill of browsing the internet. Children may be able to learn a language on their own, if they want to! Children in the south of India even managed to learn Biotechnology, being triggered to learn on their own, rather than being taught. Put these computers in public spaces rather than in the classroom. Children used their networks to extend their learning.
The final hypothesis: Can children complete the schooling on their own! still remains unanswered.

Do we need professors?

As a last session at the Onderwijsdagen I went and listened to Jacob van Kokswijk, this session had been arranged by a sponsor. I suppose it was a good resume: examples from other sessions came back: he named new findings regarding the links between short term and long term memory, and subsequent theory on students learning differently. Just as Stephen had done he mentoined the hole in the wall as an example of children learning of their own accord (informal learning).
As an example of people becoming organised in multiple virtual social networks he named the Google Open Social api. This is just an example of how we are all becoming connected and sharing knowledge. By the way: I am not quite sure I wish all my networks to be the same. Certain network sites are for certain goals...

But all this was leading up to the conclusion that teaching is going to have to change. However he offers no proof that old learning works (nor does he name proof for a different position). He has picked up all the news circling the web without wondering how applicable all these findings are. It brought me back to the question: do students want to have their learning taking place in their free-time space? This is a point Antoine van der Beemt questioned in his presentation.

For me the question 'do we need professors' was certainly not answered in this presentation. I believe we do still need some kind of professor even if it is a team leader (as in the example of the Kaos Pilot pedagogy....