rElearn

image by Arash Behshadpoor

There are two types of learning: Institutional Learning and Idealised Learning.

Idealised Learning is eternal and unchanging. It has an idealised learner and an idealised teacher. The idealised teacher:

• Wants to teach
• Is capable of teaching
• Knows more than the learner

The idealised learner:

• Wants to learn
• Is capable of learning
• Knows less than the teacher

Idealised Learning is simple and seductive. It pervades our thinking. Debates about education always use it in some way as a reference point. The way things are and the way things should be are always approximations of Idealised Learning.

Institutional Learning is complex and changing. It contains lecturers, tutors, students, buildings, Virtual Learning Environments, Degrees, Diplomas, Doctorates, grades, plagiarism, pens, blackboards, human resource managers, teaching and learning policies, university strategic plans, best practice, Re-usable Learning Objects, careers, costs, collaboration, collusion, research, anonymous marking, incompetence, bullies, genius, disability, talent, industries, job markets, peer-review, peer pressure, Contracts of Indefinite Duration, suicide, pregnancy, email, twitter, Google, copyright, timetables, progression, Learning Outcomes, libraries and lunch-time projects.

Institutional Learning was different yesterday and will be exponentially different tomorrow. It is comlexifying at an increasing rate. Each successive generation wakes up to an increasingly complex culture, awakes surrounded by ever more accretions from the past, in the same way that coral reefs build up slowly over time into beautiful multi-coloured jungles of the sea.

Because we are creative and irrational beings we always attempt to reconcile Idealised Learning with Institutional Learning. Our compulsion is to map the idealised models of learner and teacher onto the incomprehensibility of Institutional Learning, to simplify and abstract a massively multivariate phenomenon. We have built it, now we must understand it.

Institutional Learning is not just something we have created, it is also something that is creating us. As Winston Churchill put it: “We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us”. We exist in a recursive relationship to our environment. Our Institutional Learning environment has a life greater than the sum of its individual participants.  Althusser said it was obvious that “a social formation which did not reproduce the conditions of production at the same time as it produced would not last a year.” Institutional Learning wishes to preserve and propagate itself.

Is Institutional Learning a monstrous system that attempts to defend and grow itself? Do we define it or does it define us? Does it contain inexorable centralising tendencies that attempt to:

• define and then replicate “best practice”?
• merge faculties and departments?
• increase the ratio of admin, technical, HR and accounting staff to teachers and students?
• standardise curricula via qualification frameworks within programs then institutions then countries and then ultimately supra-national organisations?
• homogenise the delivery of education via standardised course formats in VLEs?

Institutional Learning might be all these things. It can also be benevolent. It can still nurture and protect people and provide a sufficient buffer so that industrial skills are not simply grafted onto individuals. Anything that grows and complexifys can look scary to us – perhaps our minds can’t contemplate any human system more complex than an average size family. Our instinct is always to turn to  try to reinterpret or change Institutional Learning through Idealised Learning.

However Idealised Learning can never explain Institutional Learning. The institutions we have did not happen overnight. They were not the product of one mind. They are too complex for us to understand and explain with our very simple Idealised Learning model. Institutional Learning was not created at all. It is too complex to have been designed or predicted. Institutional Learning has been evolved.