The UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning VIII international seminar with the theme of teacher training has just ended today. For two days, we’ve been hearing presentations and engaged in discussion about teachers. Quite aptly, the seminar started just after the 5th Teacher’s Day. The message of the seminar is clear: the role of the teacher has to change, the old practices and methods invented for the needs of the industrial society are not working anymore. This is 21st century, knowledge society, network age, participatory economy – there are many definitions.

But of course we know this. You know this. We all know this. Anyone who has attended any education events or read any publications – scholarly or not – about the topic must have heard all this before. For a few years already, this has been the topic of keynote presentations, editorials and opening ceremonies at the beginning of the semester in different educational institutions.

I believe we’ve reached the point of awareness that leaves us with the question: now what? Yes, we know things need to change. We need to educate students for the future, not for the past. We need to cultivate innovation, creative thinking, problem solving and collaboration. It’s no longer news to us. Just tell us, how do we do it? Sometimes we get the feeling that we teachers are just supposed to teach ourselves a whole new paradigm, a bunch of new literacies and the corresponding pedagogies, just like that, on our own and preferably yesterday. It doesn’t work like that.

Ferran Ruiz Tarragó, expert in and author of books on ICT and Education and currently President of the Education Council of Catalonia, gave a great presentation at the seminar with the title “The Usual Suspects? Teachers, Their Challenges and Development“. He pointed out how teachers are the ones getting all the blame on all kinds of shortcomings, from low student performance to bad employability. Most critics don’t realize that teachers are unrealistically being required to be excellent in a totally outdated system. An education system, after all, is only as good as its managers.

The crazy thing is that “the system” is doing the wrong thing and taking a u-turn to the wrong direction instead of accelerating towards the knowledge society. Or what do you say about the incredibly ignorant trend of increasing control in the form of standardized tests, standardized curricula and standardized teaching methods when the right way would be increased flexibility, increased trust and collaboration and increased personalization? If we wish to promote 21st century skills, that is. Stephen Downes shared a post today where he discusses this, referring and linking to Joe Bower’s recent blog post, Paradoxes of the Finland Phenomenon (and no, I’m not sharing this because I’m from Finland but because Joe is making such an important point!). The standardization serves as a bad excuse for quality assurance. A friend of mine and a great innovative educator pointed out that it’s the “McDonalds quality assurance” – everything standardized to the point where there is no variation and absolutely no gourmet meals.

Julià Minguillón, Academic Director, UNESCO Chair in e-Learning and UOC listed barriers education has to overcome in his conclusion of the seminar. Among these are school and university structures and bureaucracy, assessment and testing, coping with the ongoing change, isolated and fragmented knowledge and poor transfer of education research into practice. His list did not emphasize teachers’ bad motivation, ignorance or unwillingness to change – the reasons that we often get to hear.

My feeling after the seminar – and already before it, resulting from discussions with hundreds of educators all over the world – is that the greatest obstacle on the way of education to the 21st century is that teachers are not given their well-earned status as knowledge workers. For many a system, they are unpredictable variables in the perfectly standardized “McDonalds Quality Assurance Process” and thus they need to be controlled. The culture of control is then repeated in the classroom. And we all know what control and surveillance do to innovation, don’t we.

The bright side here is that the system didn’t just fall from the sky or emerge from the ground. People created it. Therefore, people can also change it. Let’s get started with it today.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ozlady/

But now I’ve just read something that I really need to comment on and hopefully also discuss with you. Here it comes.

A recent study revealed that the writing skills of school children in Finland have deteriorated, especially among 9-grader boys (they are 14-15 years old in Finland). Moreover, children don’t like school and their motivation is on a lower level than before. This, of course, is bad news for us Finns, who have just learned that our school system is one of the best if not the best in the world! What has gone wrong?

Today’s editorial in Iltalehti, a major Finnish tabloid (in Finnish, sorry!) suggests a reason that, unfortunately, many are likely to buy without criticism. The writer believes that computers in schools are the problem and that instead of offering a healthy relationship with an adult, the teachers are hiding behind their computers. And I’m reading this just minutes after I’ve read a student of mine, an in-service vocational school teacher, write about his worries that vocational schools are being left behind in the knowledge society as they are not providing computers to all the teachers. The editorial says schools should offer a stable alternative to the chaotic Internet world. The vocational school teacher says there’s a gap between the real world and school’s working methods.

Which one of these stories is right? Are there too many or too few computers? What do computers have to do with this anyway?

The Iltalehti editorial suggests that the most important thing is school is a good relationship and cooperation of the teacher and the pupils. This I can agree with. But as I think back to my own school years, it becomes less straightforward. There were no computers in the early 80s when I went to school. Of course not. But, let me be quite honest with you, there was no good relationship and cooperation with the teacher either. In other words, the absence of computers didn’t guarantee a good relationship with the teacher. We were sitting in neat rows, obeying orders and being quiet. How was that a warm, close relationship with the teacher? I can’t avoid the feeling that the writer of the editorial is one of the people who find “the good old days” the best solution to just about anything. There’s a lot of that going on in Finnish politics these days as well.

The world has changed in many ways, and it’s true that the attention span of children is not what it used to be.  I’m not saying it’s a thing to celebrate, but I don’t think we can stop the world from changing by “offering an alternative to the Internet” and sticking to traditional teaching methods.  Shouldn’t we rather try and find new, innovative methods and ways of teaching, learning and collaborating in a meaningful way that doesn’t feel completely detached from the real world? With and without computers.

Keynote & invited speakers and organizers at IEC2011

On January 13-14, I attended the IEC2011 in Bangkok. The crossing theme of the conference was empowering human capital through online environments. The keynote speakers included Markku Markkula, Advisor to the Aalto Presidents (Finland), Professor Denise Kirkpatrick, the Vice-Chancellor of Learning, Teaching and Quality at the Open University UK, Professor Carol Yeh-Yun Lin from National Chengchi University (Taiwan), Joanne Kossuth, Vice President for Operations at Olin College of Engineering (USA), Professor Dae Joon Hwang from Sungkyunkwan University (Korea) and Lucifer Chu (Taiwan), founder of the Foundation of Fantasy Culture and Art and the Chinese translator of more than 20 fantasy novels – one of them being Lord of the Rings.

Markku Markkula’s presentation, titled “Inventing the Future Through Digital Agenda and Other European Flagship Initiatives”, discussed the rapid changes business and public sector are facing through digitalization and globalization. The points Markkula made are exactly the same that have influenced our work at the School of Vocational Teacher Education: the knowledge society imposes entirely new requirements on learning, working methods and working cultures. He addressed this issue by introducing three approaches: EU 2020 strategy, lifelong & e-learning and e-skills for innovation. Markkula also pointed out that new generation innovation activities are getting increasingly complex and international; they must be created within collaborative global networks and communities. Also the role of universities needs to change radically; instead of providing information, learning to learn and learning to create new knowledge and expertise must be in focus.

Our own presentation continued with the same theme, from the point of view of 21st century teachers’ professional development. Our paper, written with Dr. Marjatta Myllylä and Marko Teräs, was titled “Empowering Teachers to Meet the Digital Native Learners”. In the new era that Markku Markkula also described in his keynote, graduating students need new, 21st century skills in order to be successful in the new world of work. Traditional teaching methods and learning environments don’t support them in acquiring these. On the contrary – we’ve found that even the generation of “digital natives” who are supposed to be collaborative, innovative and globally oriented (see Tapscott 2009), become passive learners when they go through the process of formal education. Educational practices are rooted deep; even young teachers often tend to repeat the methods of their teachers, who in turn have learned from their teachers, and so on. It doesn’t take very many teachers to go all the way back to the industrial revolution. A completely new approach to teacher education using social media and team learning seems promising in empowering new teachers to build a 21st century professional identity and working culture. You can find more information about the teacher training program in my previous blog post. The slides of our IEC2011 presentation are here.

All in all the conference was very useful and interesting. The emergent trends and crossing themes throughout the conference seemed to be personalized learning and personal learning environments, teachers as facilitators (and how hard this seems to be in practice), the use of social media and smart technology, and getting the fun and engagement of gaming into learning. The latter was especially the message of Lucifer Chu who demonstrated in a visually captivating way that the world that we live in has changed irreversibly.

I and Timo @School Forum / Online Educa Berlin 2010

I have recently returned home from Berlin where I was talking about our new approach to teacher training. I and my colleague Timo had a stand at School Forum, which was one of the pre-conference events at Online Educa Berlin 2010. We enjoyed many great discussions and met great people – hope to work together with many of you in the future! I gave the address to this blog as reference, so I’d better fulfill my promises and explain here what exactly we were talking about! So, here we go:

We at TAOKK (School of Vocational Teacher Education at Tampere University of Applied Sciences) have been offering pedagogical teacher qualification studies through a distance learning program for many years now, but what’s different and new is that we’ve given up on using Moodle and moved completely to open social media environments. The studies are directed to teachers of vocational subjects, and most of the participants are already practicing teachers on secondary or higher education. They just haven’t had the pedagogical qualification yet. This is something you need to have in Finland in order to be a teacher of a vocational subject. The studies take 2 years when completed alongside work, and we also offer them f2f supported by Moodle. But what we introduced in Berlin was the new approach using social media.

So, why social media instead of Moodle? There are two big reasons for that. First of all, Moodle is not necessarily the best tool for non-linear, open-ended, learner centered, inquiry-based, collaborative, team-based, authentic e-learning. Now that’s some definition, but that’s basically the approach we use. Two more questions arise: 1) why is Moodle not suitable for this; and 2) why are we using such an approach?

We’ve found out through experience and research that, being the learning management system it is, Moodle is rather teacher-centered. The participants don’t have the same privileges as the instructor. They can’t upload new material, start new discussion forums or change anything in the process. What we get is a traditional classroom setting: expertise on stage, delivering a one-way message to the audience. We didn’t want that. We wanted to get rid of hierarchies. Moreover, we had found out earlier that this setting also made the formation of teams and the sense of community very slow and sometimes difficult. The participants didn’t feel they formed a community of practice, rather they felt they were in school. This was again something we had to change.

The reason for the approach described earlier is that we want to promote the acquisition of 21st century skills. Have you read the book of the same name by Trilling & Fadel? If not, read. At least open the link and read what’s there, you’ll get the picture of what we too have had in mind. We didn’t feel that a traditional, hierarchical e-learning approach would serve the purpose. This is how the social media assisted approach was born.

So, what does it mean in practice? I’ll try to summarize it here:

• We use Second Life, blogs, Twitter and Skype, and there are also a few f2f meetings.
• The students work in small teams throughout their studies.
• We have our own learning café in Second Life. The teams use that as a meeting place and starting point as they leave for excursions. They observe teaching in SL, participate in events and meet people.
• There’s a lot of reflection, discussion and sharing. That’s what the blogs are for.
• Networking outside the university is important. The participants follow interesting people on Twitter, find resources way beyond the ones provided by the university and stay on track with the latest research results. They learn to find and process information and create knowledge together, instead of reading set books and memorizing facts.
• We don’t have set books. We have learning goals. The students define them, not just the teacher.
• There are no traditional exams.
• There is no numeric evaluation.
• Instead, there’s dialogic evaluation. It’s ongoing, reflective and it helps students learn and internalize. The students also write digital narratives in teams to reflect on what they have learned.
• The students get to decide for themselves where they wish to publish their narratives. No tools are determined by the teacher.
• There is no central place with a linear learning process described. There is no linear learning process.
• There is no instructional design.
• The teacher’s role is to be a facilitator. This doesn’t mean she’s invisible, far from it. She has just given up on her role as the expert on the stage and become a guide and a coach instead.

So far, the results have been incredibly encouraging. The sense of a community has been created faster than ever. The students say that after just a couple of months they have established networks and found resources they could not have imagined possible. They have been very happy with the support they have got from the teacher. What’s remarkable is that they say their idea of teacher’s work has changed.

This has only just started some 5 months ago, so unfortunately I can’t give you any research results yet. But I definitely will! If you’re interested in hearing more about this, you can always ask me. We’ll also be talking about this in a few international conferences in the near future, you’ll see the details on the publications page.

Image: Terriseesthings

Wednesday’s keynote speaker, Dr. Michelle Selinger from CISCO, made me remember all the steps and stages of development with education technology I have experienced during the 11 years I’ve been working with it. She talked about a new blend of learning, where diverse collaboration tools are available to enhance social learning. Bulletin boards, threaded discussions and email – the dominant collaboration tools during 1995-2005 – have been replaced or supplemented by telepresence, web conferencing, audio conferencing, virtual campuses and other applications that enable real-time social interaction.

Still one of the main arguments from the opponents of education technology is the supposition that using technology reduces human interaction and impoverishes the social skills of learners. Interestingly, the very same people don’t see a problem in mass lectures or book exams, the traditional approaches to higher education. Just exactly how do these promote social interaction?

It’s sad but true that e-learning is still widely suffering from the same problems as ten years ago. On one hand the problem is administrative: there are many ignorant decision-makers who have the misconception that using e-learning will enable major savings as one teacher can have a virtually unlimited number of students attending their online course. This is not true. Of course, this can be done, but I claim in most cases it ceases to be e-learning. It’s just e-delivery of content. Learning is something that the student does. Delivery of content is usually done by the teacher, but it’s not yet teaching. Correcting assignments is not teaching either. Learning cannot take place if students are treated like products on an assembly line.

On the other hand, the problem is pedagogical. Linear, teacher-centered methods of the industrial age are easily reproduced in the online environment. In this case too, e-learning is in the danger of becoming e-delivery of content and e-assessment. It’s hard to think outside the box, but it’s about time to do that. Both our students and the environment they will work in have changed, and they’ll never learn the skills they need in the 21st century environment with methods that were created to produce skills for the industrial age.

What do students themselves expect from blended learning? Michelle Selinger discussed at least the following:

• choice
• coherent learning experience
• exposure to experts
• communication
• collaboration
• “just learning” (Just in time, just for their needs)
• easy access to faculty and peers
• support
• they expect blended learning to be as good if not better than traditional, on-campus learning!

These things are not impossible (or, in my opinion, even very hard) to achieve. It just requires we stop thinking about e-learning strictly as learning management systems and content delivery, and actually start to blend creatively. Blend good-quality f2f tutorial sessions, video resources, social media elements, books, web conferencing or telepresence, expert lectures… you name it. Blend synchronous and asynchronous, online and offline live, team and individual work, formal and informal. And make the blend with best possible ingredients. Artificial flavors or just adding water to make the same soup serve more people will not do the trick if the blend is actually supposed to create some learning.

Image: Two Ladies and Two Cats

I’m currently attending AACE E-Learn 2010 in Orlando, Florida. It’s great to meet colleagues from all over the world and share thoughts on what’s going on in education. Today we had a very good chance for sharing and discussing as I and my colleague Timo Nevalainen hosted a roundtable session with the title “Teacher training in the knowledge society – Web 2.0 and new professionalism”. What we did was that we asked everyone to write down on a piece of paper what they thought were the most important skills of a 21st century teacher. After that the papers were passed on to the next person who built new ideas on the ones already listed. And so on, for several rounds.

The most important things that came up were

• Facilitation skills: facilitating online learning & self-directed learning, “Guide on The Side” vs. “Sage on The Stage” .
• Trust: focus in learning, not teaching; student-centeredness.
• Ability to use technology in a pedagogically meaningful way.
• Eco-awareness, cultural awareness
• Accurate world view and authenticity: not hiding the complexity of real life problems.
• Shared expertise and learning from others.

All these observations are in line with the day’s keynote speaker, Dr. Paul Kim from Stanford University, who was talking about educational evolution. All living things evolve; so should education. No business can stay the same forever and flourish; why would education make an exception? Just about everything about the context has changed, what makes us think education could – or should – remain intact? Paul Kim also emphasized the importance of the global community and value-based evolution. It’s not about me or about our school anymore. It’s about the global community.

The school system as we know it was designed for the industrial age purposes, aiming to produce workforce for assembly lines. Issues like self-direction, global responsibility or solving complex problems in teams were not a part of that reality. The industrial age idea of a teacher is rooted very deeply in our minds; young teachers are influenced by their teachers who were influenced by their teachers who were influenced by their teachers – and it doesn’t take much longer to track it back to the industrial revolution. Everyone has been taught one day. Therefore everyone has an idea of a teacher – and that idea is rooted extremely deep in our mindset.

What we don’t necessarily come to think of is that there’s a new revolution going on already. The emergence of knowledge society is at least as groundbreaking as industrial revolution was. We’re in a desperate need of a new mindset in what comes to teaching, learning, and assessment.

Image: Colton’s Photography

I happened to overhear a group of students in the bus the other day. They were students from our university and they were talking about the day’s lecture. The conversation went on something like this:

Student 1: I SO wasn’t able to concentrate on the lecture. At least half of the time I was just facebooking.
Student 2: Me too! Well, at one point I really tried to concentrate; I logged off Facebook and forced myself to stare at the lecturer. But I didn’t understand anything and after some time I realized I wasn’t really in the classroom, my mind was wandering somewhere else. I just couldn’t follow it!
Student 3: These lectures are so useless! And what really strikes me is that there’s a lecture after the exam! Why would anyone go there after the exam? What good would it do?
Student 1: I know! It’s so stupid! There’s just no point!

After this they went on talking about parties and free time activities.

The old-school teacher in me was annoyed. Students! They’re always like this! They just don’t bother to work hard enough! Facebook should be banned in schools! (Well, not that one. Not even at that stage of annoyance. But I know people who would have thought that.).

But then I calmed down and reconsidered what I had just heard. After all, this brief conversation was like a mirror that sharply and mercilessly revealed some great flaws in our education. Interestingly, they are very similar to the greatest flaws in management at workplaces.  Finnish Business and Policy Forum EVA has recently published a report (in Finnish only, sorry!) discussing the need for change in management and leadership at workplaces, composed by researchers Ilkka Halava and Mika Pantzar.

According to the report, employees have changed. They are not as committed to a certain workplace anymore, instead they are interested in personal growth, meaningfulness of the work and possibilities for self-realization. If they don’t find this in the work, they either find another job or concentrate on finding these things outside work. Old type of management with orders, regulations and traditional sticks and carrots won’t do any good. The new employees don’t respond to dictatorship. Instead, the respect for natural authority and interest-based team organization are current and future trends.

Moreover, a system based on regulations, directives, surveillance and control creates “mental outsourcing” of work: the employees are physically present but mentally absent, not committed and unable to create or innovate. Companies are busy finding new indicators to measure the performances, but these are often forced at the employees and they in return tend to find them useless and irrelevant.

On top of it all, there’s process thinking – or process (wishful) thinking, as Halava and Pantzar call it. Process thinking tries to tame everything that is creative, non-linear, contradictory or surprising into a clearly defined process. This is supposed to be a part of quality control, but from the employee’s point of view the purpose of a process is to systematically prevent seeking alternatives, trying, disruptive thinking or challenging status quo. The management wants to ensure that everyone does the same thing in the exactly same way, according to the instructions.

According to Halava and Pantzar, the great challenge for working life is to recognize and replace the practices that make work a dull process that the employee can tolerate only by mental outsourcing. Rethinking leadership and management are in a key role. Hierarchies must be replaced with teams and networks. Work should be meaningful.

Now, what does all this have to do with the students talking on the bus? Interestingly enough, everything.

The traditional, teacher-led and teacher-controlled learning situations are dull to the learners who don’t find the meaningfulness or possibilities for self-realization in them. However, they are required to be present and there are indicators to measure attendance. Just like the uncommitted employees, the students tolerate the situation by mental outsourcing (= in this case facebooking). Stricter regulations (e.g. banning Facebook) won’t help, these people don’t respond to dictating. They’ll find their means of mental outsourcing.

Moreover, the indicators for measuring performance (exams) feel irrelevant and detached from reality. Students study only to pass the exam (=memorize enough things and keep them stored in their short-time memory on a given day) and fail to see the connection with real life. Why else would they find it useless to attend the lectures after the exam? Process thinking is prominent in education, no matter what we say. Everyone must behave in a similar way, complete the same tasks with similar outcomes.

Just like management, we must rethink educational practices. Halava and Pantzar point out that there is no way to change the employees, it has to be the work that adapts to the values of the 21st century citizen. The same goes for education. We must find new ways of making learning more meaningful, the connections to reality more crystallized, the opportunities for personal growth and self-realization more frequent. There must be more room for questioning, challenging, alternative ways of doing things, discovering, trying, failing and innovating. It’s sad and plain harmful if the role of social networking and sharing in education remain that of a tool for mental outsourcing.

Image: dotbenjamin

During this autumn I’ve had the great privilege to enjoy the high-quality teaching at the Research Centre for Vocational Education at the University of Tampere. I’m doing my PhD there, which is fantastic as the professors and researchers there are really, really good. It’s been great to experience the joy of learning again! The fact I’ve had to use my weekends for the studies and ride the bus for more than an hour each direction to get there hasn’t bothered me at all. I feel I’m gaining so much that these minor sacrifices are indeed minor.

This has given me a great opportunity to reflect on motivation and learning. Being a teacher and education developer myself, I’ve been thinking what it is that makes my learning experience so meaningful and inspiring. Maybe I’d find answers that help me with my own work.  I don’t have any definite answers yet, but at least the following things are true about my case:

• I’m genuinely interested in vocational education in the 21st century. It is the field I want to develop and learn more about.
• I know my studies are essential steps on my way towards this goal, namely the PhD. The goal is so meaningful to me that it turns every step on the way meaningful as well.

But I’ve got to pause here. This is not an extraordinary situation, is it? Isn’t it actually very typical for any student both to be interested in their field of study (that’s why they applied there in the first place, right?) and value the degree or qualification they are aiming at? Why is it then that this wonderful joy of learning seems so absent in many cases? It cannot be that the joy is only reserved to PhD studies, it should be just as prominent in undergraduate studies! This is obviously not enough, I need to think further and find more explanations. Let’s try again.

• I already have enough knowledge about the subject to be able to connect the new information to my previous experiences. This is because I’m applying the relevant theory into practice all the time in my work. Not in artificial, sand-box learning tasks, but in authentic, real-life situations.

This is more like it, isn’t it? This is a dramatic difference when comparing my learning experience with most undergraduate students. Most of the time, studies offer plenty of theoretical knowledge, but the authentic applications may be years ahead. By the time they are at hand, the theory has already been forgotten. Learning is not something you can stock and take from the shelf when needed. Although this is what our education is largely based on, it is not how deep learning works.

• I study together with a colleague and spend long hours reflecting and sharing ideas regarding the new information with him. Not because we are instructed to do a “group work”, but because we work in the same team and we see that the collaborative knowledge construction benefits us both. Besides, it’s fun.

Another difference. Students don’t usually work in teams, they only do group works when instructed to do so. But most of the higher education practices, learning environments and assessment methods strongly support individual performance. This is just plain crazy if we think about the 21st century working environments, where teams and networks are the norm. Team learning would be the authentic way of learning, but it is very seldom practiced in higher education.

• The professors treat us like colleagues, not like students. They respect our expertise. The discussions during the lectures and seminars are all about true sharing and building common knowledge, not about one-way communication, checking homework or teacher asking questions and waiting to get the right answer from the students.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I have the feeling that this type of approach seems to be very difficult for many teachers. Teachers are used to being experts. They are used to knowing the right answer, giving instructions and controlling the situation. But a more coach-like approach wouldn’t diminish the teacher’s status as an expert! There is no way I’d think my own expertise in vocational education would somehow surpass that of my supervising professor’s. However, I might have greater expertise in some other field. Recognizing this enables the types of expertise meet, opening the possibility for an enriching interaction and new innovation. This is the kind of learning organizations would die to establish. But our students are seldom trained for it, thanks to old hierarchical conception of expertise.

There might be more reasons, but already these are enough to illustrate some of the weaknesses of present-day higher education in transmitting 21st century professional skills to their students. I’ve said this before, will probably say it a thousand times more: new working environments require new skills that cannot be taught by old means. Attempting to maintain the status quo despite of the changes in the society does not only make studying less effective, but it also makes it much less motivating and fun.

Image: Scott Webb

Time flies! I know it’s been quite a while since I last wrote anything here. I’ve been on a holiday in July, and now in August the beginning of the new semester has kept me busy. New challenges are waiting and I must say I’m very eager to start facing them!

On August 18 I gave a keynote session and workshop in a seminar for language teachers in Turku, organized by the Language Centre at Turku University of Applied Sciences. My topic was social media and the evolving professional challenges in the knowledge society. The seminar was very interesting and I had some really good conversations with teacher colleagues both at the workshop and more informally over coffee and lunch. Sharing our experiences strengthened the idea I’ve had for quite some time now:  there are a few things universities tend to go (repeatedly) wrong with when dealing with social media.

Here are some of my observations. You may have more examples (or you may disagree), and I’d like to invite you to discuss these ideas here in my blog!

1. Social media is not primarily about technology.

Sure, it involves a lot of technology, but it’s not the technology the teachers should worry about (unless you teach software engineering). It’s about social behavior. Aren’t we teachers supposed to be good at this? Why is it so hard for us to see beyond the technology and find the real opportunities social media offers for education?

2. Staff training and competence building related to social media should not be about technology either.

If the core idea of social media is social behavior, not technology, why is it that all staff training offered to teachers in the use of social media is about learning to use a software? It’s a terrible waste of resources. This is not what we need, we are smart enough to learn by doing what happens if we click on one button or another. Give us a break! What we do need is pedagogical support and understanding of the knowledge society as well as the impact of learning environments on the learning results. It’s a much more complex thing than learning to click on the right button.

I’m going to have to share a real-life story to illustrate my point. I attended a wiki training at our university, where the guy from the computer center explained us how to use the software. It was all nice and smooth until one of the teachers was bold enough to ask: “How can I use this in my own teaching?” The guy was a bit confused and answered finally that he didn’t know if it could be used in teaching at all. Another teacher, refusing to be put off by this news, said: “This will surely be a good tool for international projects!” But the trainer had to disappoint her: the software could not be used without the user ID and password of our own organization.

Now I’m not blaming the trainer, of course not. The guy was doing his job and he is very good at it. I also realize and agree that it is essential to teach the staff to use the information systems of the organization. However, something is very clearly missing: teachers will not become better teachers simply by learning how to use a program; they become better teachers when they realize how they can use a given tool to help the students learn better, learn more, or learn more relevant skills. Still, the trainings continue like this, and I don’t think we’re the only university to be doing so. It’s like teaching people how to use a hammer, but leave out the information on how to actually build something.

3. Social media stops being social media the very moment it becomes teacher-led and closed.

Universities would love to have their own, closed and controlled version of Facebook, Second Life and Twitter. There are many real-life examples of these “replacements” around. Our wiki is a good (or should I say bad) example of this. Now let me say this loud and clear: it’s not social media. Sorry.

Getting back to point number 1: social media is about social behavior and interaction. I think we can agree with that. Facebook lets us communicate and interact with faraway friends and colleagues, Twitter helps us interact and learn from colleagues and experts around the world, Second Life makes it possible to attend seminars on the other side of the globe. That’s the whole beauty of it. In the closed versions all you can interact with are your classmates and fellow students – the same people you’d interact with anyway. There might be some added value in following your fellow students on Twitter, but compared to the real thing it’s very limited indeed.

Conclusion: you cannot take conventional learning and make it fit in social media.

You may replace the word “learning” with “leadership” or “management” or “advertising” or just about anything. It’s not just schools and universities, it’s the entire society that is changing. The industrial age rules just do not apply anymore. It’s both liberating and terrifying: we must learn to question, rethink, and instead of repeating create something new.

I’ve given staff training in e-learning many times before, and I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. I didn’t.

At this point some might be thinking to themselves that I probably mean power cuts, connectivity problems, scheduling, equipment, or something like that. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

What I mean is that the teachers and professors are the most amazing audience I’ve ever had. I’ve never seen such enthusiasm, team spirit, curiosity, dialogue and readiness to learn by doing, experimenting and testing. This group of people is wholeheartedly committed to developing their own skills and the programs offered by the College of Education. They are proving that the joy of learning is not only reserved to children learning things for the first time in their lives, but can just as well be enjoyed by adults with a long learning history.

The million dollar question is: how could such an attitude spread to all teachers and students everywhere?

It is also obvious that these teachers really want to help their students learn. I’ve also read articles on e-learning written by UDSM teachers. I’ve been impressed with the advanced student-centered pedagogy and learning community thinking.

With such spirit and skill, miracles can happen. Just watch, African e-learning and mobile learning might very well be the most innovative in the world in no time.