Talk Summary and Comments: Stephen Heppell & Fundamental Change

I attended an online keynote speech by Professor Stephen Heppell, a professor at Bournemouth University in England. Called Europe's leading online education expert, Professor Heppell titled his talk “It Simply Isn’t the 20th Century Any More Is It?: So Why Would We Teach as Though It Was?” The video can be viewed at http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=268

Here are a couple of highlights I thought were especially powerful:

• Now that technology can "do jolly well what we want," the challenge is not ‘what can we make the technology do?’ The challenge is ‘what do we want?’


• He asserts that education as we know it—the factory model and the emphasis on productivity over community—needs to be completely replaced or schools will disintegrate. He says the signs are there and points to the indicators that preceded both the current financial crisis and the current trends in online learning.
  


• He called attention to the big, BIG picture context of new technology and media: We are seeing fundamental change, which he says can be described as the end of oligarchy or, more simply, as the end of "they" and the beginning of "us." He linked this to the dominant paradigms of prehistory and more "primitive" civilizations, which were/are "not locked in a world of narrative linearity and ownership of knowledge."
  


• He says we are witnessing "the death of education and the birth of learning."

As someone who spent much of the 90s writing about technological revolution, I was thinking about how that revolution was just the tip of the iceberg. So much attention was focused on that while all the structures of our society and how we think were being reconfigured.

I began to think about the ideas of the scientist Ilya Prigogine who many may remember was cited in Margaret J. Wheatley's Leadership and the New Science: Learning About Organization from an Orderly Universe (1992, Berrett-Koehler). I pulled out my copy and read that while it makes sense to stabilize machines and structures as a way to prevent deterioration, living systems (organizations) need non-equilibrium to change and grow because they exchange energy with their environments. Prigogine said living systems are "dissipative structures." In Wheatley's words, they "dissipate their energy in order to recreate themselves into new forms of organizations" (88).

In ecosystems, for example, external fluctuations in the environment exert great pressure on the system and the system uses its energy very inefficiently, but "as the ecosystem matures, it develops an internal stability, a resiliency to the environment that, in turn, creates conditions that support more efficient use of energy and protection from environmental demands"(92).

Wheatley applies these ideas to organizations. In the factory model, she says, "managers watched for departures from the norm so they could "make corrections and preserve the system at its current levels of activity"(78). Systems that are organized around core competencies but open to information from outside are less vulnerable to environmental disturbances. Their more fluid structure ultimately leads to an internal stability. As expressed by one scientist she quotes (Jantsch), "the more freedom in self-organization, the more order."

On other words, there is much more happening in education than a change in tools. Trying to impose the old factory model using new tools will not work. Openness, creativity and freedom to innovate are the system of learning that is being born as the old system of education dies.

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Belousov-Zhabotinsky Reaction: A chemical reaction caused by changes in temperature and mix (disequilibrium)