Tyranny of Technique

The Tyranny of Technique. The Promise of Social Learning.
George Siemens
Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute
December 14, 2009

https://tekri.athabascau.ca/
www.elearnspace.org (weekly newsletter)
http://twitter.com/gsiemens

“Technique transforms everything it touches into a machine…technical methods are not multipurposive, or adaptable, or interchangeable.”
Jacques Ellul

“The universal problem for every citizen of the new millennium is how to get access to information about the world, and how to acquire skills to articulate and organize that information.
Edgar Morin, 1999

“What we have here is a transition from a stable, settled world of knowledge produced by authority/authors, to a world of instability, flux, of knowledge produced by the individual...”
Institute of Education, London, 2007

“The current economic transformation is as big and as challenging as the transformation from agriculture to industry. Our economy is shifting away from jobs based largely on physical skills or repetitive tasks to ones that require analytical skills and judgment.”
Martin Prosperity Institute (2009)

Trends Shaping Education, OECD (2008)

Americans consumed 34 GB of data per day in 2008
Global Information Industry Center

Gross tertiary enrolment by geographical region
Trends in Global Higher Education: Tracking an Academic Revolution (2009)

Quantity alters the qualitative

Addressing complex problems

Ideals of democracy, identity, liberty, equality are being translated into, and renegotiated in, the digital realm

Participatory sense making
Our world makes sense through our interaction with information and others
....(and in turn, their interactions with information and others)
De Jaegher, Di Paolo, 2007

Network as cognitive agent

“The intelligences…are distributed…across minds, persons, and the symbolic and physical environments”
Roy Pea

Complexity requires adaptivity

Adaptivity requires systemic flexibility

Social/technological sensemaking

“Quality assurance in higher education has risen to the top of the policy agenda in many nations.”
UNESC0, 2009, viii

Why do we do this??

“The highest-ranked universities are the ones that make significant contributions to the advancement of knowledge through research, teach with the most innovative curricula and pedagogical methods under the most conducive circumstances”
World Bank

A learning management system is a great tool for the wrong era

Narratives of coherence

Courses are inadequate to the task

Social and technological networks

Open courses

Socialization as information object

Society creates institutions to reflect what is being done with and around information…i.e. institutions map reality
Frank & GablerMcNeely & Wolverton

Disrupting (destabilizing) courses

Levers for learning transformation

Policy: Allow for bottom up initiative
Tertiary Education for the Knowledge Society: Volume 2

Role of technology/learning research centres

Position needed in universities: director of systemic innovation

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Tyranny of Technique

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