XplanaZine

The Potential of Personal Publishing in Education III: Where to now?

James Farmer

So, in part one I briefly pondered what was happening, in part two what was working and am now, not-at-all-predictably, casting an eye to the future and making a few rash predictions about the role personal publishing might play in online education over the next x years or so and why it might or might not.

Ahem.

When I first considered the weblog as learning management system I genuinely thought that it could work, and I still do. However, as Greg Ritter pointed out, there was a fair bit of hammering nails with a saw going on there. To assume personal publishing will meet peoples needs and to assume that it’ll be used just because it can do something doesn’t really cut it. What matters is what it does better than anything else and far more importantly the degree to which it does what people want to do.

This article attempts to scratch the surface of these whats.

Among other things educational personal publishing can do but adds very little to:

Traditional Individual Journaling: What’s the point? Might as well write in a book! The value of reflective individual journaling is well documented, but who does it? And if they do, why would they bother doing it online? Links… who cares, that’s not the point? Archiving… um, ever seen a bookshelf?

Traditional Assessment: Why should someone bother writing their essay on a weblog if it’s just getting viewed, marked and returned in the same way as all the essays they’ve ever written? It adds nothing apart from hassle.

Traditional Teaching and Learning Models: When teaching and learning is based on transmission and/or transaction models, personal publishing becomes simply another way of disseminating information. Remember the hype over the use of television and video in education… same old passive story.

And can add very much to:

Open & Community Driven Journaling: Personal publishing allows for public expression in a previously unprecedented manner. Learners reflectively and creatively publishing form and join networks related to their ideas, themselves and their peers. Learners have an audience which they can express themselves to and empathise with.

Holistic Assessment: When assessment is driven by holistic principles, when the ‘extent’ of a persons learning and understanding is measured by the learner, through observation of the learner’s experience and by learner-driven tasks then personal publishing comes into it’s own. It allows for informal, networked, ongoing learning and recording of this, it provides a voice and heaps assessment on the individual and their community through post-publishing filters and individual empowerment.

Non-Traditional Teaching and Learning Models: Personal publishing allows for incorporated subversion and volatile design in online education. It’s online unplugged. Indeed, the socially and individually constructivist principles which supposedly inform current teaching practice (but which, in fact, rarely do) find their closest allies in the ‘edit this page’ button of a wiki or the unedited expression and knowledge network development of a weblog.

So…

Does personal publishing do what people want to do?

Short answer: ‘no’. While personal publishing offers volatile, informal, organically structured, decentralized, individually-relevant learning… that isn’t what people want! They don’t, believe me!

Institutions are looking for discrete point testing tools, for content management solutions, for authentication, for rigidly structured (and thus easily quality controlled) environments, for funky tools that nobody will ever use, for what they think works, to give to their teachers and learners, to keep them in check, to satisfy their educationalist egos, to keep ‘em hanging on our every word, to reinforce and reinvent our neuroses. Because change isn’t easy.

And to say ‘We’ve got x% of our courses online, na na ne na na.’

But that is only half the problem, because when you lock someone up their whole life and you open the gate… they won’t leave unless someone is really helping them out. Even if you give them a key.

Um, where to from here then…

Well, I reckon that personal publishing and related technologies will only take off in education in as much as education, and especially online education, is able to accept volatile design, incorporate subversion and respect and facilitate the development of creative independent thinkers.

For now, progressive and driven educators will continue to pioneer these practices and some amazing things will happen. Not, thankfully, in isolation, but unfortunately not far off it. Quite simply until the prevailing approach of online education steps away from passivity, control and the figures, simply providing the tools won’t work. The question that really warrants asking is whether over the next however-many-years, if and when this might happen? Anyone got any answers?

Pardon my terrible French but perhaps we need a coup de pedagogue?