Food for thought

Last 28^th of September in the FHUC (Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias) in Santa Fe city, Hugo Pardo Kuklinski delivered a conference called “Digital education and culture”.

In his conference, there were some ideas we agree with, and some others we do not.

It is true, as Hugo says, that we need to make huge changes in the way we teach because learning and learners are not the same they were before mass media access appeared. Digital tools are not just “ingredients” to make teaching and learning more fun. These tools can become important elements that enrich the teaching and learning, giving access to information and knowledge that could have been impossible some years before. [read SAMR Model in this blog] He gave some examples about the podcast teaching and the importance of face to face teaching [read blended learning in this blog].

 Other point we agree with is the importance of giving the possibility to choose topics relevant to the students, and to their particular context. This is related to Task Based Learning and CLIL, which in our field and in Santa Fe especially are the bases of the new curriculum. [read more about NIC] He also talked about students doing tasks related to some topics and learning the contents through the tasks, which we consider crucial in the process of learning.

Another important element in his projects is the creation of significant webs in the classrooms. This means to stablish relations between the different participants in the classroom and the school to make possible the creation of knowledge, or the distribution of information between the participants as equals, without taking into account the hierarchical relationships.

However, as we mentioned before, there were some shadows in Hugo’s projects and developments. First of all, he is not a teacher, he does not know how difficult is to make those changes for those teachers that had learned to teach and have been teaching (and who have had good results with learners) in the old fashion for many years. Secondly, he has proved his theories or ideas in few schools, and it is still in the process of development, so even though his talk was very inspiring in some ways, there are a lot of work to do and not much knowledge about it. The most controversial point to us is his view of teachers and learners as sellers and buyers: the logic of the commercial system, which is in fact very different from the process people undergo when teaching and learning at school or at any place.

BUT, we consider that the ideas that he presented and the projects are very enlightening. We know that technology came to make a change in the way we think and we need to change the way we teach. We need to be open minded, creative, not to be afraid of trying new things. He talked about “border knowledge”, that is to say, the newest knowledge will become old in less than 5 years from now, so we and our teaching need to be updated.

Please, read more about Hugo Pardo Kuklinski in Digitalismo and Outliers schools