Democratized learning Vs Elitist gate-keeping censorship

Democratization - seclawcenter.pli.edu

Steve Foreman from Myicourse, a free open courseware development site, states

 “We believe in personal knowledge and the wisdom of the ages. We do not believe all of life’s necessary knowledge and wisdom is contained within the walls of universities or between the binders of books.” 

He sees the power in the Web 2.0 internet platform allowing every person on the planet to not only have open unfettered access to learning on any topic but to have that learning provided by home/community schools, small businesses, clubs, specalist interest groups or individual members of the global community. 

For the past hundred years or so, the educational elite have assumed a position of power in regards to the process of accrediting and certifying (censoring) knowledge (books & published articles) fit for student consumption. They have become the gate-keepers of knowledge transfer. Now, while new information arrived at a pace commensurate with their capacity to accredit it, there was no problem. But what if Berkeley researches [12] are right, in that 800 megabytes per person of unique information is created each year. That’s the equivalent of 30ft of books per person per year piling up at the gate awaiting accreditation, and that’s just their 2003 estimate. I think the game is well and truly up on that activity.

To cope with the exponential growth in information, we are going to have to find an entirely new way of accrediting knowledge. Those countries without the 'benefit' of an educational elite will simply devour knowledge as it happens and through a process of ‘trial and error’ will have applied the gems to their great advantage long before we will have had the chance to even accredited it.

I suggest that we should do with knowledge as we have done with our governments – let the majority of stakeholders decide on what is best and by stakeholders I mean government policy makers, educational institutions, teachers, industry and the vast number of learners themselves.

Democratized learning should be incorporated in the same way that 'opinion' has been democratized with blogs, social networks and YouTube thereby limiting the power of the commercialised news media to 'manufacture concent'.

Many educational institutions across the world, in order to deliver education in a cost effective manner, have tended towards the model of delivering de-contextualized information to an auditorium of students. Whilst this serves the needs of the institution and their 'purse string' holding government élite, it hardly delivers effective learning for the student.

To a large extent we will need to re-contextualize information and learning but this can not be achieved without the input of the context experts scattered across the globe. To rebuild the contextualised information base we will need to provide an open online platform on which it can be built.

Richard Baraniuk from Rice University Texas has develop just such a platform with the Connexions educational website and it's located at cnx.org . Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond in his latest book, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," , speaks of the important history lesson to be gleaned from the study of failed societies. He says,

“The ruling elite often insulated themselves from the problems affecting their societies, failing to solve them and contributing to the collapse of the society.” 

By sheer numbers, the most important stakeholders in the education society are our learners. Yet ask any of the 'coal face' workers (teachers) or beneficaries (industry) in this society, if they believe that the learners are having their problems solved and you will get a picture of a system 'past due', particularly when compared with the emergence of a highly desirable alternative - open online learning.

Maybe its time to apply the concept of democracy to our education system and trust the major stakeholders of learners, teachers and industry to set the learning agenda and information accreditation rather than the ruling elite of government policy makers with their conditionally funded educational institutions.

"I never let my schooling interfere with my education" - Mark Twain