It's hard to believe but this year is the 10th anniversary of Lifewide Education. Over the last six months we have been expanding our small core team of supporters and prepared a vision statement for the next decade. Last week we agreed our work plan for the year and our first activity is to try and engage in a research project that aims to develop a better shared understanding of what lifewide learning means in our own lives. For the past few weeks I have been working with my co-facilitator Rob Ward to prepare for the 6 week project which begins on Feb 1st. This is my story so far.
Looking back I can see that a project like this begins with an idea which expands into a vision – an idea that inspires and a rough idea of how it might work. It continues with presenting the idea to others and persuading others to be involved (since this is intended as a social learning process) and it continues with designing the process in detail and developing the tools (eg guidance and exemplars) and the technological infrastructure to support the social learning process. Then you have to find and persuade people who have not been part of the design process to participate. And once the process has started you have to facilitate – encourage, provoke, support, guide – do whatever is necessary to try to make it work. Then, stuff emerges from the process, you have to help synthesise and curate it, for only then will you know what you have explored. And all this has to be done within the time frames you have set for the project. The net effect is to provide many affordances or opportunities for learning. Every stage of the process, every communication and other form of interaction and every artefact that is produced contains within it the potential to use existing learning and to extend or adapt that learning in the current situation and circumstances. The whole process and practice might be conceived as ‘learning to do it all over again for the particular situation and set of circumstances.’ Although we might pull out examples of new leaning in any part of this process, for me the most important learning is the metalearning, ‘the execution of the whole and what emerged from the whole.’ In an ecological sense this is the way that everything has been woven together to achieve the result. It’s the metalearning that provides the platform for the overall advancement of understanding and achievement.
Looking back I can see that a project like this begins with an idea which expands into a vision – an idea that inspires and a rough idea of how it might work. It continues with presenting the idea to others and persuading others to be involved (since this is intended as a social learning process) and it continues with designing the process in detail and developing the tools (eg guidance and exemplars) and the technological infrastructure to support the social learning process. Then you have to find and persuade people who have not been part of the design process to participate. And once the process has started you have to facilitate – encourage, provoke, support, guide – do whatever is necessary to try to make it work. Then, stuff emerges from the process, you have to help synthesise and curate it, for only then will you know what you have explored. And all this has to be done within the time frames you have set for the project. The net effect is to provide many affordances or opportunities for learning. Every stage of the process, every communication and other form of interaction and every artefact that is produced contains within it the potential to use existing learning and to extend or adapt that learning in the current situation and circumstances. The whole process and practice might be conceived as ‘learning to do it all over again for the particular situation and set of circumstances.’ Although we might pull out examples of new leaning in any part of this process, for me the most important learning is the metalearning, ‘the execution of the whole and what emerged from the whole.’ In an ecological sense this is the way that everything has been woven together to achieve the result. It’s the metalearning that provides the platform for the overall advancement of understanding and achievement.
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