Fire next time...

Dear colleagues & co-students at University of Tampere, this is our 10 min of fame at SUD...










Informal learning does not exist!
... at least not as an supplement to the institutional sphere

inhibitors of "informal learning" (from Anne Bartlett-Bragg):
i) organisational'
ii) individual
iii) pedagogical
... +
iv) ideological
- ideology naturalizes the socially constructed patterns of behavior and ideas making them taken for granted and self-evident. The question is, who nowadays constructs ideologies and which are the ruling ideologies? -- Formal education as an ideological state apparatus...

Foucault (The Masked Philosopher): ”I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is there; the things to be known are infinite; the people who can employ themselves at this task exist. Why do we suffer? From too little: from channels that are too narrow, skimpy, quasi-monopolistic, insufficient. There is no point in adopting a protectionist attitude, to prevent "bad" information from invading and suffocating the "good." Rather, we must multiply the paths and the possibilities of coming and goings.” -- identity politics

Zizek (A cyberspace Lenin: why not): ”Today one is thus tempted to paraphrase Lenin's well-known motto, 'Socialism = electrification + the power of the soviets': 'Socialism = free access to internet + the power of the soviets.'” -- transformative politics

- informal learning – is it a concept used in an ideological vacuum?

• the contexts of learning... It's all ideological...
• ”formal learning with a human face” (the supplement argument)

- institutions of formal learning: are they public spaces?!?

• ex. can you use a lecture hall for spontaneous teach-in?
• can you have a wiki on the uni server and if you do, what 's the big deal?

- ”social software” -- open collaborative content

• where's the social? How about collaboration, or co-operation?

- formal learning in an organisation – informal learning with an disorganisation
-- ownership?

• practical problems with gated and open parts of communication (financial vs educational contents)

-- responsibility?

• who is responsible for GNU/Linux, Apache, Wiki?
• teacher vs students (Freire: Pedagogy of the Oppressed, student-teachers & teacher-students in a dialogue changing the world)

-- planning phase vs teaching phase

• who is actually learning? And for what?
• self-directed vs group directed

-- democracy

• disorganisation: direct
• organisation: representative (at best)

-- recognising learning where and when it happens

• disorganisation: must ('you have to give what you got')
• organisation: measured, ”as if”-learning
• A related question concers the relationship between certainty and uncertainty (see Jussi Silvonen's blog entry--only in Finnish, sorry)
  

- unintended uses/contents

• literacy: when you teach one, you get two! (Williams: On Television, bible – radical press)
• over/dis/misinterpretation
• reading the word/reading the world, changing the word/the world -- supplementary or parallax views?

Comments after the presentation:

- how do you deal with the practical problems of social software platforms?
- it's all ideological... so welcome to the desert of the real...
- the same problems in companies etc.
- in some professions like educating physicians, it's necessary to have institutional frame for learning the right things vs voluntary fields of interests (like philosophy, or human and social sciences)