Learning networks

Christensen’s 5th chapter proposes a valuable (but ultimately incorrect) three-part business model lens through which he proposes we consider education: consulting (services); value-chain (manufacturing); and user networks (black market). The parenthetical examples are mine: Christensen claims that telecommunications is a user network when in fact it’s a service (access to “wires” owned by a telco) as well as a value-chain (resale of bandwidth); consulting could also be viewed as experts providing a service within a user network rather than a distinct type. However, the metaphor of current public schools as a value-chain model is accurate, as is the view of special education as consultative and unscaleable one-to-one education.

The dismal evaluation of and outlook for textbooks is well-supported (although his terms are inaccurate: commercial systems are actually delivery mechanisms; “high fixed costs” are actually “sunk costs” because a business can have continuing high fixed costs whereas sunk costs such as the investment to create a book are one-time). His argument falls apart, though, in the claim tha,t “people will assemble them [learning kernels] together into entire courses.” If this were possible, libraries would have precluded the need for schools. Learners don’t know how to structure the learning they need because they don’t know the end goal. Learning opportunities or situations or problems must be constructed by experts, although not necessarily subject experts who often make unexplainable leaps in problem-solving.

The attempt to equate Web 2.0 technologies with the need for educational reform also falls short. QuickBase is not a replacement for SAPs’s ERP software; it’s an online service from a software company seeking to change its value-chain distribution model. Second Life is not a 3D world “‘created entirely by its residents;'” it’s a hosted software application whose creators charge real dollars for the service afforded by a virtual space. And finally, the idea that learners can self-educate smacks of self-medication and the potential for uninformed abuse. At the same time, the vision of public school education replaced by user networks guided by experts is enticing.

Differences

Christensen’s Disrupting Class is a good read–the stories seem real. The first chapter starts by revisiting Gardner’s multiple intelligences but adds a couple layers I missed before: inside each intelligence are different learning styles (VARK design types) and within each style are different paces (time on task). Good additions.

Designating only two types of interface (modular and interdependent) seems overly binary; interfaces are more like a continuum, and even if you can segment them, I think there are more than two (for example, a modular interface can be unpredictable when humans form part of the chain). I’m also not sure there are only 4 interdependencies (temporal, lateral, physical, and hierarchical) in public schools. However, the argument that we know we should provide customized education but cannot do so because (in part) of these interdependencies is compelling.

Purpose

I especially appreciated this article as it clearly delineated between education and learning; while acknowledging the role of the latter in the former, the author emphasizes that education is “a process of changing the behavior patterns of people.” Although written 60 years ago, the distinction between “needs” as a gap between a current set of behaviors and a desirable norm (TAKS), and “needs” as an equilibrium state was eye-opening.

The author discusses three means for determining educational objectives:

1. learners
2. culture (contemporary life)
3. subject matter experts

In a forward-looking manner, he advocates using culture as the primary basis for determining objectives. He also distinguishes between education for things that are important today versus things that are important for conditions that will be encountered in the future.

The discussion of subject matter experts could have been more prescriptive when the author asked the experts, “What can your subject contribute..?” The admonition from Wiggins to discover the central questions of a discipline was more useful.

The coverage of learning theory, constructed as a dichotomy between S-R behavioral learning and Thorndike’s “generalizable” learning, was just as useful (although perhaps not as research-based) as the tripartite theory models explored earlier; constructivism and cognition both fall into the generalizable category. However, the two-dimensional chart was the real contribution of the article; not only did it provide a specific application of the ideas advanced in the article, but it also made clear the definition of objectives covering both the “kind of behavior” and the “content (context) or area of life in which this behavior is to operate.”