Joel Josephson is a member of the Learning without Frontiers Group on LinkedIn. He describes himself as follows:
“an uneducated educator, he never went to university but today is involved in initiating European Union education projects that are targeted at creating learning systems and methodologies for the future education of children.”
In April 2013 he spoke at a TedX on education. (“Joel’s talk” )
In late July he posted on the LinkedIn group: “8 rules for education”
Joel lists:
1. Autonomy
2. Personal relevance
3. Collaboration
4. Self-criticism
5. Autodidacts
6. Creative and emotional
7. No stress
8. Parents
I replied: Nice set of goals, Joel. I look forward to visiting you other postings to see whether you address how to implement these. I have a number of suggestions in case you are looking for more ideas. Please let me know.
Also, perhaps one more goal would be helpful to add to your list for young learners: being aware of one’s own learning modality strengths and weaknesses. By this I mean that even 4, 5 and 6 year olds can become conscious of whether they acquire information faster and retain it longer by looking at still pictures, videos (with or without audio), audio only or spoken live. The same type of differentiation can be explored within the medium of text as soon as they learn to read. When learning a motor skill children can understand whether they prefer to watch a demonstration first or jump right in to the activity. They also can pace themselves in terms of how far to break a task down into small steps. With mastery of these parameters of their own learning in hand youngsters can more effectively decrease their stress and become the autodidacts you admire.
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I find social media to be a good screening device for locating people who have interests similar to mine. But I’m always disappointed by the difficulty of having a serious discussion using these communication tools. Joel’s comments are tantalizing but lack the detail I look for to understand how his ideas might be implemented in real world schools. Of course, he has given us links to his TED talk and his blog. Still, I want dialog, no, I want multilog. I want to put my ideas together with those of other people so we can generate a document or product that someone can use after we’ve hashed out the details.
Wikis were designed to do just this kind of collaborative work. Sadly, even though the platform is quite flexible, my experience is that very few people are willing to engage on a wiki and the ones I start end up more like blogs — I write a lot and occasionally someone adds a brief comment.
Perhaps I’m seeing the result of not enough of Joel’s #3 and a little too much of his #4. Is there a better collaborative platform out there that I’ve missed?
For more on Joel, see: https://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=3141501&type=member&item=5903577365379837952&qid=47f489e3-292f-46e8-b356-415c38d03f0b&trk=groups_most_recent-0-b-ttl&goback=.gde_3141501_member_22653084.gmr_3141501