Just a quick surfacing… this morning I had the good fortune to snag some of Derek Wenmouth and Margaret McLeod’s time. They were in town for a conference on the School of the Future. I asked if I could take them out a bit for breakfast and to see a bit of Seattle outside of the downtown core. This shot is looking east from the Hiram Chittenden locks, in the Ballard neighborhood. It was great to get outdoors and enjoy a rare sunny winter Seattle day.
As we chowed down on some delicious breakfast, we talked about this idea of “blended learning” and what it means to discern what medium and what approach at what point in time. How do our choices reflect the developmental and content needs of the learners? For children, how does it balance freedom and safety? How do you keep an eye on the polarity between individually driven learning and the experience of learning with others — which has more to do than just learning about something. It is about learning together and social interaction. It is a complex and interesting stew. My head was stuffed full of ideas.
This dovetails in with something that came up last week at the United Nations University meeting on e-Learning that I facilitated in Bonn – the idea that the “e-learning” is not just about classrooms and courses, but about “e-stuff” –> how tools and processes can enable us to weave in and make visible learning an any turn, in many places, formal and informal. Virginie Aimard and I want to write up this “E-Stuff Manifesto” — in our spare time. (I hope you appreciate the humor here.)
I don’t have time or mental bandwidth to capture it all now, but this is a little bookmarker for those interested in this more systemic approach. What do you think?