"Colonial Industrial Training vs. Democratic Web Education: The Experts vs. the People?"
by Richard C. Close
by Richard C. Close
ISTE Journal for Computing Teachers, Paper available for conference in Denver June 26th
Download at ISTE http://tinyurl.com/34cdqga
Download also available in the Ning Forum http//globallearningFramework.ning.com
Sample:
1.
Introduction
Colonial or industrial training is a one-way street training method for the learner on how to behave in order to fit into an organization. Whether it is military training or business processes, it is a one-way, trickle down, industrial approach. It assumes that the elite know what has to be done and the worker bee student must obey to pass or keep a job. Driven by the powers of industrial workforce management, we have built learning management systems (LMS) as machines for one-way authoritarian instruction. Industrial learning methods are expensive, time consuming, and filled with standards, restrictions, and ironically out of sync with how we actually learn everyday in the real world and on the Web. In colonial learning, we actually hoard knowledge, protecting it as intellectual property or SCORM standards. This contrasts sharply with the Web that gives knowledge away. WebMD (http://www.webmd.com/) is global, free education.
Democratic learning (“search learning,” Web-based learning) is common in people using the Internet to solve problems, discovering solutions, collaborating with students, and publishing results. All of this goes on while reshaping the knowledge base of the entire planet dynamically and in real-time. It is free, fast, liberating, massively scalable, and unstoppable. In democratic Web education, it is the free flow of the creative talent of the globe currently running through over 300,000 education Web sites that are ever growing,
Close, R. (2010, Spring). Colonial-industrial training vs. democratic Web education: The experts vs. the people? Journal for Computing Teachers. http://www.iste.org/
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