Polycentric Learning

The Digital Bridge

Technology changes our relationship to space and place. We experience distance -- its increase or decrease, our journey "there" and our arrival "here"­less acutely. In business settings and educational settings, (1) we no longer need to feel the limitation of being in a particular place. We can interact with business partners or learn from experts anywhere in the world. We can invest in any market or explore repositories of information anywhere. The boost this factor gives to education, resulting from radically improved access to information, has been known for a long time: In the U.S., the totemization of the Internet as an engine of learning has been realized as annual Net Days, devoted to the goal (to be achieved at a cost of $10 billion) of wiring every school in the nation for "connectivity."

But if the "here," in the wired world, has been enriched in terms of access to information and communication, it has been depleted in terms of particularity, in the terms of its "hereness." (2) In rural sectors of northern Portugal, younger Portuguese regularly leave a strongly functioning traditional economy to fill low­end service roles in Lisbon, Geneva, Paris, because the cachet of the "here" has diminished in contrast to media­delivered images of "there." The potential effect of Internet­based technologies is similar but far greater: Cyberspace, and the creation of cyberplaces within it, can completely dis­place the individual, tying him or her to virtual communities in which bonds of taste, occasion and performance replace those of tradition and common need. The local runs the risk of dissolving into the global, or to be more precise, into the globalized.

The lessened intensity of distance and the depletion of the "here" are complemented by a second transformative effect arising from digitization: the interchangeability of information and experience. Digitized still images, video, and audio can stream our lives, or "captures" of them, into the spatial accordion of the World Wide Web. Online simulations, multi-user domains, and virtual environments deliver to us "cyberlives" that can be more vivid, more engaged and engaging, than our lives outside the screen, the box, and the net. As information, then, experience becomes manipulable, communicable.

What is the effect on learning?

Learning itself forms a bridge between experience and knowledge. When experience (of all kinds­textual and verbal, corporal and spatial) is understood, it becomes knowledge (a special form of information). Such knowledge engenders the capacity to create information (as communication) and to guide further experience.

By rendering experience as information, the digital bridge of technology gives us the opportunity to make the learner's own curiosity and the issues critical to the local community into stepping­off points for investigation, calculation, exploration, and the building of skill in thought. We are able to relocate learning in the connection of learners to the world around them. We are able to reaffirm, to replenish, the experience of "here."

And at the same time, the digital bridge blends the near and the far to remove the boundaries on newly-localized learning. Within a given community, region, or nation, there can be many concurrent "centers" of learning; we can (re)invent a system of learning that is polycentric, addressing the needs and desires of learners within the context of broad­based knowledge.

Such polycentric learning is dependent on the identification of local "occasions" for the building of knowledge. New technologies facilitate the translation of those occasions into learnable information.

The interchangeability of experience and information can thus comprise a critical factor in the nurturing of polycentric systems of localized learning.

Who does this learning?

If learning can be made local to both the community and to the individual (as it must if it is to be successful in opening opportunities for and increasing the capacities of learners), the prospect of learning is enhanced for anyone. Or, for everyone: students learning with each other; teachers learning with other teachers, and with students. Adults. Families. Actual and virtual communities.

What is to be learned in a polycentric system?

What is to be learned is what possesses, or what appears to possess, meaning for the learner and the community.

What is learning?

Learning is an increase in the capacity of the individual or the community to draw relationships, comprehend and construct information, and solve problems. Learning is also what is to be learned. (3)

The information tools needed to transform our teaching/learning practices exist today. Moreover, versions of those tools that are appropriate for the developing world­in terms of cost, durability, flexibility, ease of localization, and the capacity to bypass the barriers of limited infrastructure­are available, or will be available before education projects making use of them are past the planning stages.

One simple and effective combination of technologies, potentially appropriate for rural communities, involves the following: the eMate 300, a simple, powerful, inexpensive laptop computer that is resistant to dirt and moisture (4); a solar­powered battery charger adapted for the eMate's rechargeable batteries; a bandwidth­scanning radio­based Internet connection, bypassing the installation of telephone lines and the cost of cellular or satellite means. Such a combination can deliver low­cost, powerful computing almost anywhere in the world.

The usefulness of this combination, however, is contingent on the availability of appropriate, localized digital learning materials. For the developing world, especially those countries where mature software­development industries have not yet emerged, such tools and materials will be both in short supply and difficult to create within a reasonable timeframe. However, in this case again, powerful and appropriate tools are becoming available. Object­oriented or component­architecture software environments, such as OpenDoc (5) or Java, enable the development of simulations and other interactive learning tools by skilled teachers, learners, and experts rather than by software engineers.

Such a combination of technologies creates the capacity to deliver content­rich computer­based support for learning (and so for commerce­the connection of business to education must continue to be teased out into the development of productive capacity, of consumer demand, of the eradication of poverty) to all but the most inaccessible reaches of the world.

Appropriate technologies for learning, then, are at hand.

But to translate these technologies into localized learning and enhanced lifestyles among the rural and urban poor, as well as among those currently served by systems of education, non-technological factors need to be addressed. These factors are generally legal in nature when they pertain to commerce and government, bureaucratic as they pertain to education.

The array of government policies that can negatively influence the mobilization of information technology for learning can include import taxes and tariffs, and high communications costs, and the allocations of capacities. When these and other barriers are minimized, education systems can speed the mobilization of information technologies for learning. Outreach to software developers and strong advocacy of the importance of information technology are critical first steps. However, it is by acting as centers of demand that education systems can have the greatest effect. By positioning themselves as emerging markets within their national economies, education systems can engender the development of computer­ and network­based learning materials.

But centralized education systems, as they are currently conceived, are inimical to localized learning. The result of a non-responsive and ineffective school system is that its graduates lack the problem­solving and other skills that a nation, its businesses, and its people need. Generalized curricula geared toward nationwide testing fail to take advantage of a learner's desire to learn and that desire's specific fields of focus. And, as success in the tests is critical to success in higher education, the school system is often augmented by a gray market of "cram schools" that assist in test taking. These gray­market schools divert substantial funds, in the form of families' investments in tuition, that could be invested in capital improvement of the schools as environments for learning. (6) And, geared exclusively to success in the tests, the cram schools do no better at developing cognitive capacities than the government's schools. Assessment is a critical issue, but it must (in a network of localized learning environments) assess what has been learned, not what has proven itself to be unimportant to or unlearnable by the learner. (7)

Increasing the efficiency of an ineffective education system is a worthless enterprise; the mobilization of technology in this enterprise is, in addition, a costly one.

It is easy ­- given the shifts in focus brought about by information technology, from the classroom, from content, from curriculum onto the learner ­- to overlook the teacher and the critical role she plays. For policymakers embedded in education systems, there is no more effective expenditure than investment in teacher development. Prior to (or even without) the introduction of information tools for learning, teachers must be seen (and trained) as agents of change, creating connections between learners and the community (as for example, to a doctor for health information, to a fisherman for the woven patterns of nets), and between the learner and information resources. In a system of polycentric learning, it is the teacher who helps the learner transform curiosity, or even passionate interest, into the development of experience, knowledge, and cognitive skills.

Such mentoring is more natural than the regimented transmission of information and the objective assessment of skills; the knowable, for the learner, is not bound by the teacher's knowledge. But providing such mentoring for groups of learners, for classes, suggests training in management of group work, in inquiry­based learning, in navigating knowledge resources. These skills enable learning that is polycentric within a single classroom or community to take place. They are not esoteric; they are learnable. The goal of teacher development, then, is in a sense to engender in the teacher the modeling of the skills to be gained by the learner, to recast the teacher as a learner herself, of teaching practices, of new knowledge, of technology­and, essentially, of learning.

Endnotes

1) For the moment in the multinational private sector and among international development agencies, success in education and in business are correlated. This linkage can be supported and sustained.

2) See Heidegger's discussion of the transformation of distance and place, see "The question concerning technology," in The question concerning technology and other essays (translated by William Lovitt (New York: Harper Colophon Books; 1977). See also The condition of postmodernity, by David Harvey (London: Basil Blackwell; 1989).

3) As part of our re­vision of learning, we would do well to commit ourselves to the development of higher­order thinking skills and cognitive capacities, while crafting mechanisms whereby "basic" skills can be mastered as outcomes of these endeavors.

4) The eMate 300, currently sold by Apple Computer, has been designed as a portable "distributed learning" computer to augment the desktop computers installed in schools in the United States. However, it features a PC/MCIA slot for telecommunications, battery life of up to 24 hours, and extreme resistance to the elements, based on its lack of a hard disk drive and other moving parts. The eMate's stylus­input feature and handwriting recognition suggest that it could make relatively transparent the transition from traditional learning tools to the computer. At present, cost of one eMate 300 is $700; that price is expected to fall.

5) OpenDoc is component­architecture container software, originally developed through the partnership of IBM, Novell, and Apple Computer, that enables the development of "parts" or objects that perform several of the functions found in traditional applications. Parts, such as a button, or a spell­checker, can be combined (or contained within each other) to create custom­designed materials. Currently, a teacher­development project funded by the National Science Foundation is leading to the creation of an inventory of physics­education­oriented parts and simulations. Other work has included NSF funding of calculus simulations for middle­secondary students.

6) A Turkish colleague has suggested that the cost of helping his son prepare for university entrance exams exceeded the costs of tuition (at a private university) once the son was admitted.

7) The English language at the moment raises questions about the desireability of standards, and even about their possibility. English is now undergoing a transition from its original role as a national language to that of an international language, a language on which communication among individuals around the world is based. The language has become community property, affected by each speaker, "revitalized," "vulgarized," "mongrelized," transformed for the sake of communication. This transformation is in at least one sense the reverse of a long and significant transition undergone by many European languages at the close of the Middle-Ages from systems that were based wholly on spoken or handwritten communication, to one that relied increasingly on mechanically printed texts. As the arbitration of spelling became concentrated in the practical hands of typesetters, words became regularized. Standards of correctness other than the functional standard of communication emerged. Now, in polynational communications, including interactions in U.S. cities (such as New York and San Francisco), functionality is again the primary standard. The prior transition, which began in the Renaissance and was mature perhaps in the 18th century, is being reversed.
Is this a cause for alarm? The greatest age of European literature­spanning the lives of Dante, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Chaucer, and Cervantes­took place when their cultures were engaged in such as centuries long transition. During this period, William Shakespeare spelled his name five different ways. So much for the importance of standards.