Day 1: Adult Learning Symposium 2014

Here I am attending the biennial Adult Learning Symposium 2014. This year's theme " Innovation in Workplace Practices and Learning" places emphasis leveraging technology to innovate local CET practices. The Singapore Workforce Development Agency (WDA) had also announced plans to insitute technology platforms and pro-technology learning initiatives to cement and sustain the growth of the overall CET landscape and to keep abreast of disruptive technology or like what my colleague says, "To be ahead of the curve". Some key initiatives in the pipeline include the Learning Space - an online repository which supposedly houses e-elarning content made accessible to the public; a national-level Learning Management System (LMS) [Think Moodle, Blackboard etc.] I thought that this was a good attempt to emulate the success (or failure - some may argue) of the Massic Online Open Courses (MOOC) that took the education scene by storm. To date, close to 40 e-learning courseware have been developed and uploaded to the "e-CET LMS" rendering it operational. Another initiative which I find was rather similar to that of MOE's EduLab was the Innovation Lab (In. Lab) where practitioners, researchers could congregate to ideate, share best practices and to innovate and sustain adult learning best practices and pedagogical models.

I can't help but to draw a parallel between the application of technology in the education sector and in adult workplace learning. As a former school teacher, my embodiment and experiences have always prompted me to redefine my understanding, perceptions and perspectives in learning in the world of adult learning. To begin with, different camps exist, arguing for and against the universal relevance of pedagogy - the art and science of teaching and learning - to both PET (pre-employment) and CET (continuing education) learning. A relative well-known advocate on adult learning principles, Malcolm Knowles (Andragogy) argued that adults learn differently from that of school children, citing that adults need compelling reasons to learn; require learning to be situated to meet their immediate needs and for transference of competencies and that they assimilate new knowledge/skills best when prior experiences are being built on.

Having said all these, the question would really be "Can similar learning technology practices and initiatives that have exhibited some form of success in schools be adopted by the CET to reap the same benefits?". Yes and no, depending on the intent, educator, coupled with the affordances of these tools. Notice I deliberately ranked the enablers in order beginning with the intent or rather the purpose of innovating the way educators design instructions, follow by the pedagogical capability of the educator and lastly, the technology tool as a static piece of, tool. To delve a little deeper, I think many have conjured a technology-biased connotation on what "innovation" means. According to Dictionary.com, "innovation" refers to "something new or introduced". Nowhere can you see the word "technology". To me, "innovation" can even simply refer to revising or transforming current processes or even reinvent an existing model and situate it to current context. It's about adaptation and evolution, not necessary creation.

Back to the earlier question, I definitely welcome the slew of new initatives in the pipeline to scale the CET landscape. However, I thought we would probably need to approach the subject of applying e-learning in adult learning setting with caution. At the very least, I think as adult educators, we need to be fully aware of whether there's a need to do something differently and not just having another novelty. 

ICEM 2013 : We-learning? - Day 1

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