Jul
06

Access centered learning instead of place centered learning

Future kids will learn from the internet via mobile devices wherever they are: at home, on the bus, on the beach, at the workplace, and yes, perhaps at school. For 21st century learning to move ahead, we have to get it clear in our minds that having a place where children spend all day is not the same thing as learning.

As a long-time high school debate coach, I judge this contention by Michael Horn to be a red herring:

“It seems obvious to me that for a variety of reasons, roughly 90-plus percent of students (that number is derived from some projections we ran when we were researching the book) could never take part in a fully virtual school program because of family structures and associated economic realities and the like, which is why hybrid-learning of various sorts will ultimately be so important to the future of education. Having a physical place for most students to go will always be important.”

Sure, kids need a place to spend the day. In the future, though, that place is highly unlikely to be where very many of them can find the best material to learn for science, history, math, technologies — and even the 3Rs, like this sampling of math study pages that go far beyond standards teaching in the grade trap of each individual student.

Forgive me if I use the debater’s tool of narrowing the contention I challenge. I realize that in the excellent book Horn co-authors, Disrupting Class, traditional education practices are helpfully called into question. Yet I would go farther than trying to repair schools as the platform of education. Radically, I know, my suggestion is that the individual student connection to the internet must become the platform for learning. After that, it will be time to figure out what use places we require our children to spend most of the days of twelve of their years may have.


3 Responses to “Access centered learning instead of place centered learning”



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  1. Michael B. Horn Says:

    I agree — this is the point I tried to make in my actual debating remarks, which was to narrow the contention to saying that the real question was limiting learning to the bricks-and-mortar, which was detrimental as we need something that cuts across physical place and so forth. I agree with you–the platform for the learning job must shift. That said, a physical location–be it school or perhaps something very different–to do other jobs will likely remain a reality. I don’t think I’m using my comment in the blog as a point to argue against your observation or to advance an argument, so I don’t know that I would call it a red herring. Just an observation. I suppose there should be a better term, however, than hybrid learning because it has certain connotations that mean many different things to different people.

  2. Judy Breck Says:

    Thanks, Michael. “Red herring” is too strong, I suppose. What I am hoping, though, is that somehow the discussion can be shifted — not continually going down the increasingly troubling and disconnect trail into the problems of schools (especially the awful schools minorities endure).

    I would like to go down the trail that starts with this question: Now that learning is centered in the internet and accessed personally by individual students, what can we add to complement that? What we now call schools might be eliminated as an answer by other complements: apprenticeships, daytime centers for sports and arts, etc. You and I seem to think alike on this, and I appreciated this opportunity to sharpen some language.

  3. Michael B. Horn Says:

    You’re right — and we do think alike on this. I think the possible answers you put forward are where I imagine the future should (and I hope will) go. I suspect some of the alternative schools we’re seeing that serve drop-out students with ever more flexible hours and designs and so forth with a backbone of the online curricula might be a precursor to this.

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