Curriculum And Instruction

Posts Tagged ‘Curriculum and instruction’

Knowledge, Learning and Information – Learning Transformation pt2

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

: Image by everdaniel via Flickr

I want to start this post with a question;

‘What is learning?’

A definition of learning that was put forward in 1985 is that learning is ‘the process of acquiring knowledge’ (1)

So if learning is acquiring knowledge, what is knowledge?

I would offer to you the following definition that knowledge is information that has been acquired, retained or memorised and which can be demonstrated upon request or in response to a question or as needed.

So knowledge is retained information and learning is the process of acquiring that knowledge. It would seem that many decades our education system has been based upon this approach. For most of that time, the means of acquiring knowledge and the sources of information have been few and limited. By which, I mean that the sources have primarily been parents, teachers, books, friends and some television and radio programmes.

One problem which I am sure many of us will identify with, is that some, perhaps much, of the information we retained as learning from our own time at school, has turned out to be useless or redundant. For example, I know that the capital city of Paraguay is Asuncion yet I have never needed to know or use this piece of information, it might be useful in a pub quiz but that question has yet to pop up. I also learned how to perform monetary calculations in pounds, shillings and pence (£sd), a financial system which became obsolete in the 1970s.

So, traditionally, the sources of information had been limited and we often learned unnecessary knowledge.

Taking the first point first, we have to ask ourselves whether the sources of information are still as limited as they have been in the past. I think the answer is an unequivocal ‘no’; not only do we still have teachers and parents but we also have more television and radio programmes. The internet has opened up a wide range of information sources and made access to them more readily available. Not only that but, believe it or not, we also have many more books. Even without the internet, ICT through computers and software, has opened upon a wide range of new information sources and learning opportunities.

So, with all these new and wide ranging sources of information and new opportunities for learning, can we expect the traditional approach to cope adequately? I think again the answer is an unequivocal no.

Taking the second point made earlier; that we often learned unnecessary knowledge. We need to ask whether this is still a possibility and a problem. I think the answer is that it is still a problem, in fact I would suggest that it may even be more of a problem. I say it is more of a problem because today’s learner has more sources of information and therefore more opportunities to learn unnecessary things possibly to the detriment of important items. I would go further and say that today’s learner needs to be able to distinguish what information needs to be retained (learned), what information needs to be obtained, used, then discarded and what information needs to be rejected, ignored or possibly avoided.

I don’t think that anyone would disagree that it is the responsibility of learning professionals to enable learners to learn and to identify or use appropriate information. I don’t think many people would argue that our traditional approaches to learning and teaching, that were evident last century, would do this. We can only conclude, therefore, that our approaches to learning need to change from what we used in the past.

(1) Buchanan, D and Huczynski, A (1985) Organizational Behaviour, Prentice Hall