Prince of Peace: ICEM 2013 : We-learning?

What exactly is "We-learning"? By now, we are well aware that the education paradigm had shifted to embrace collaboration, communication and constructivism. The primary underlying idea of 'We-learning' is not only focussed on catapulting the learner in the centre and be contented with learner-centricism, but to now enlarge the focal point to include learner-learner sharing and co-teaching. A lot of new ideas could be generated and harnessed out of this very collaboratve linkages established between learners when they get together and communicate!

It's the 63rd year that ICEM is organising the conference in Singapore and I'm pretty excited to be part of this learning fiesta! Running concurrently is a LAMS conference as well. For those of you who are not familiar with LAMS, it actually stands for Learning Activity Management System. The fundamental design purpose of this system is different from the LMS and based on my limited understanding, an enterprise or IHL would acquire a LAMS if the management really wants to focus on the effective management and deployment of learning events, sequences, sharable and re-usable content such as OER. Whatever the case is, these heavy weights are here to stay and they are no longer seen as peripheral tools playing second fiddle in supporting learning. In fact, the LMS has been lurking around since the '90s and in recent years, has penetrated the education landscape as a core engine driving and impacting organisational or instituitional learning.

Moving on, I would like to share an interesting presumption put forth by one of the presenters. The poor fella was trying his level best to put together the presentation though he misses out on what he's supposed to say! Nonetheless, he challenged the fixated frame of belief that people have on learning and how the belief is guided by norm-referencing how institutions are organised. To put it simply, he asked " why should there even be discrete blocks of audience and roles in a learning context, especially against the backdrop of a collaborative setting?" For instance, why can't teachers and students learn together, especially in common topics such as digital literacy. A further question was thrown to the floor, " Why does students 'learn' and teachers 'develop themselves professionally'?" On the outset, the idea to 'break down the 2nd order barrier' seems seductive to me but on closer examination, I thought the proper functioning of any processes or structures should be anchored on some form of legitimacy? Surely, some form of structure should be in place to power and steer the entire learning process with certain rules of engagement embedded in it. Yes, some of you may argue that as long as the frames are built in, the targets shall then be able to operate within the parameters to achieve the desired outcomes. Unfortunately, I do not think this would be true for our social construct where a 'figurehead' needs to be established to sheperd or worse still, to 'whip them into shape'!

Anyway, I have sumed up the day's programme... Let's hope that Day 2 will be packed with more interesting stuffs!

XoXo