Learner Enthusiasm

I stopped Adam Frey on the show floor at NECC and asked him what the future of learning looks like. Adam doesn’t make a distinction between the student and the teacher in his answer. Instead he focuses on “enthusiasm”.

Adam is one of the founders of Wikispaces and we spoke on a panel about education at Office 2.0 last year. He sees that enthusiasm of online spaces and online collaboration everyday at wikispaces where teachers, students, and all kinds of regular folks create collaborative online spaces to work together. If you’re not ready to wiki’s in your classroom, why not start one for a family event or to plan your next vacation?

When I hear schools talking about Web 2.0 technologies, everything has to be aligned to existing structures, scaffolded, and pinned down. But these tools resist structure, hierarchy, and order. It is not that learning or ideas do not need structure, but that the tools we use to explore them offer more ways then ever to bring order and structure to learning. What works for me, may not work for you.

To meet the needs of long tail learners, we need more options, we need to think “AND” not “OR”. If the scaffold you use doesn’t work for me, I want access to a different one. The challenge for today’s teacher and school district is providing channels for learner enthusiasm to help each individual reach their potential and find a group of learners who share their goals. Opening up to the innovation happening in Web-based tools creates will help schools offer many more pathways to learning.