I’m unduly proud of having now served on two eLearning Guild research reports – ILS (read: games) and mobile. I’ll argue that it’s due to my approach rather than genius (I know too many people that are way smarter than me), and of course from having great mentors. It’s believe it’s because I try to have a conceptual understanding of many models as tools to think and solve problems, both frameworks and approach. My PhD advisor’s focus (at the time) was on applied cognition, and that’s what I try to bring to bear. It necessarily includes an understanding of how our brains work, how to be systematic in examining problems and trialing solutions, organizations, and quite a bit of background in technology.

I’d started drafting this post and then read Jay Cross’ comments on lots of models, loosely joined, rather than one overarching approach. Exactly!

I want to suggest that these are great curriculum goals as well. Understanding the societal context, including economics and business, understanding technology systems, and how people think and interact, are critical components of an ability to meet the coming needs. Also having systematic processes of information gathering, design/problem-solving, and execution, driven again by a conceptual understanding of where and how they work (so you can adapt them to the situation) is a component.

Of course, your pedagogy has to have you working on complex problems and pulling models in to solve them, so you have practice and can meta-reflect as well. We’ve the knowledge, and the technology, now if only we had the political will. I’m afraid it won’t be done tinkering around the edges of No Child Left Behind, but throwing out the whole thing except the notion that we might want to assess learning, and starting again. I suspect the end result will be annotated portfolios, with profiles of performance, not ‘scores’. But I’ll leave that to the people who solve this particular problem.

Jim Schuyler, CTO of the Dalai Lama Foundation (and colleague, mentor, friend), writes in his blog:

My contention is that much of what we have to accomplish in educating people is to help individuals understand the limits of their own cognitive (and memory) abilities and find ways to interface with memory and cognition-devices in the external world so they can effectively and productively learn – and I mean learn and learn and learn for an entire lifetime – and make use of what they have learned.

In one sense this sounds a lot like George Siemen’s connectivism, and in another like the meta-learning (learning to learn) that I was promoting with Jay Cross and several others. I still think that meta-learning is a big missed opportunity in the corporate world, and it’s definitely part of the curriculum I’d like our schools to be working on.

It’s about developing a mind-set to steadily and systematically learn along our lives, and having the skills to do so effectively and efficiently. Sounds like the best investment I can think of. We know our limitations: great pattern matchers, poor arbitrary rememberers. Which is why I push my ‘external brain’ (my Treo) to see how much smarter it can make me (part of my mobile learning learning).

As a side note, I wish Sky allowed me to put this comment on his site, but he requires having a log-on and I’ve enough of those already. In general, when I’ve read others’ comments on my blog in their blog, I leave comments on their blog rather than reiterate them here. And maybe I’m missing one of the benefits or responsibilities of blogging? Live and learn, so opinions welcome.