Spartacus Learning

I am on a train, as I write this, heading back from the Mimas (The University of Manchester) Mobile Learning – Telling Tales event at the University of Westminster. I’ve had time to have a great conversation with Graham Brown-Martin, Carl Smith and Sara Wingate Gray after the event. One of those great post-conference chats where you cover the world, the Universe and everything.

If Douglas Adams is wrong and there is not a restaurant at The End of The Universe, then there should be. Anyone who gets there deserves a slap up meal. This train feels like it is heading there, over crowded and smelly. Trains have been delayed and cancelled because some idiots have stolen signalling wire over near Lichfield. The mood is resigned, no one complains – what’s the point it is travel in recession era Britain. A complaint would be logged but the train that comes tomorrow will still be delayed, maybe the same reason, maybe something else.

It leaves me in a reflective mood. So much has been said about the purpose of learning today. Rather than turn my thoughts to how rail executives should have to spend two hours in a cramped smelly compartment for every one that commuters have to endure I turn my thoughts to learning.

In ancient Greek and Roman society they used slaves to ensure their children turned up to class and were supervised. Some might argue little has changed. Pedagogy is to ‘lead the child’ and it was strange at a conference which was focused on Higher Education to hear a word so often which has its roots in the control of learning and direction. I have yet to hear much about Pedagogy’s counter-part ‘Andragogy’. A term used by Alexander Kapp to look at how adults learn. It is less about leading the child and more about self-reflection and understanding. But UK education seems to want to lead the child, and all its learners are considered children.

That creates a problem for Mobile Learning. There is a big debate about whether or not Mobile Learning is technology or education driven, but generally speaking if something is labelled ‘Mobile Learning’ then you will see or read descriptions of small digital devices being given to learners. It really worries me how many people still celebrate as a success the image of children in schools with uniform mobile devices sitting in rows doing pretty much what they did before they had the devices but now on a smaller screen. Mobile Learning it ain’t! Good photo opportunity though.

This image carries on throughout education because fundamentally we still want to ‘lead the child’. Whether the child as learner be 8 or 80.

Mobile Learning is personal and just think, for well under £100 I can buy a device which fits in my pocket and gives me access to the power of the Internet and more importantly the opportunity to interact with it.

It is time to shift the viewpoint. Lecturers and teachers of today can no longer afford to occupy the inheritance of their professional slave ancestors. Mobile Learning is important because for the first time in recorded history we can access so much, so immediately anywhere, anytime.

It is subversive, it’s dangerous and fun. No one knows the rules anymore because no one has been here. The opportunity for society at large is tremendous. But it will take courage to take the chance.

When I was younger my school nearly put the local McDonalds out of business. You could a get Trivial Pursuit competition scratch-card and if you got the answer right, you got free food and another card. Of course we would gather up the cards and head back to the school library and go through Encyclopaedia Britannica and pick the right answer. Then go and get our burger for free and another card. It was a huge phenomenon; the cards fed hundreds of kids and became a trading currency. With the Mobile Web, you would be out of business in seconds running a competition like that. The library is in your pocket.

So the knowledge is there but the wisdom isn’t and that’s what we need. It is not safe or sensible to ban Wikipedia from universities or schools, or Facebook or MySpace. These are the fabric of all our lives now. What we need are educators who will impart the wisdom of how to make the best decisions when using these. The genie is so far out of the bottle that it forgot it ever had one to live in, but still some educators cling to its broken shards, only being hurt in the process.

Teaching has become a slave to the system. Pedagogy is returning to its roots. But it does not, should not stay that way. Roman society relied heavily on slavery and one group of slaves, the gladiators, were made to fight for the entertainment of others. Once a gladiator called Spartacus raised a standard and called the slaves to rebellion.

Education needs Spartacusses to rise up now. We need to recognise the radical shift that access to knowledge is no longer an issue and that the need of the institution to control access to learning damages education itself and the learner suffers most of all. It is time for the Spartacusses of education to go out with the learner and throw off the shackles that have held them in the classroom and explore the world in a new way.

We are not born with wisdom and as long as education does not recognise the digital revolution fully then today’s leaner will be entering the new world without the wisdom to make it a success.

The train is crawling along, like every delay it gets worse each mile. Around me the young and old try to get through it. It’s been a long day, their mobile devices, glimmer in the fading daylight as their users reach out to the world beyond the train.