A Learning Society?

EAD860 - Concept of a Learning Society interested me because I had now explored the basics of each of my interest areas and this course had the potential to connect them all . Wieland's class didn't involve much interaction with the other students, but we sure did engage with great ideas. We read several books and numerous articles and web resources over the course of eight modules.

The objective of the course was to complete a very brief essay at the close of each module. I've attached examples of these assignments at the end of this page.

The books I took the most from include...

Mary Catherine Bateson's "Composing a Life" whose narrative allowed you to walk in her shoes as a stranger in another culture. Bateson's work reminded me how much we have to learn from those around us, and how other cultures can provide alternative ways of looking at ideas showing us what we take for granted.

Gene I. Maeroff's "A Classroom of One" provided a sweeping guided tour of online education . Embedded in his text is a history of some of the early adopters and a variety of interesting models and motives for online learning. Maeroff take an almost journalistic approach in trying to document the early state of the industry before it evolves before him. Given my background in online learning, I didn't cover much new ground here. However, since the course was self-paced I did spend over a month in this module because it provided so many connections and branching-off into familiar territory that I was extremely interested in. I keep the book in my office as a reference to early literature on the trend of online learning. It was always somewhat surreal to be reading about a hypertext learning environment, from within a hypertext learning environment.

Studying articles from scholarly journals, the New York Times , the Chronicle of Higher Education, Educause, and National Public Radio provided a diverse set of opinions about the forces at work in our society. There is more pressure than ever to learn continuously throughout a lifetime. People are expected to switch employers if not careers several times in a lifetime. In moving from the knowledge age from the industrial age there are already great disruptions in the balance of power globally. Even so, the divide has never been greater between connected and unconnected or between rich and poor. I fear both the growing energy crisis and water crisis will continue to exacerbate the gap between those that exist in the information rich networked world and more basic agrarian or industrial economies.

Michael Pollan's "A House of My Own" provided an interesting counterpoint to the larger concerns of lifelong learning, society, globalization, and formal education. This was a great lesson in informal and experiential learning that focused on one man's solitary quest, or at least his quest for solitude. This is learning at it's purest, completely parochial and driven by personal interest. The author almost commits to learn and build the house, just because he can. By choosing to learn and do it himself, he is taking ownership and redefining himself. I thought of the writing house as a place he had chosen to preserve a part of himself, while recognizing that he would be changing with his home with the birth of his child.