Learning in the environment of e-business

Many of the reviewers reading the last chapter made comments on the dilemma the student had found herself in - when she realised that she was faced with an impossibly large range of knowledge requirements applicable to her intended career as a Web master. Several pointed out that Web masters could and did perform quite satisfactorily with only a subset of this list. However, this was missing the point; the student would have to make some kind of decision as to what subjects she was going to learn and there were no obvious right choices.

One of the readers, Steve Howard, had been saved from this educational choice problem by being educated in computer technology before the multimedia and information technologies had taken off. His education hadn't been confused by the myriad of different niches that has sprung up to overwhelm the subject area. His education had been limited to only the fundamental principles that provide the foundations of computer technology. He'd had a fifteen year gap, between learning these basics and plunging into the deep end of this technological revolution just as it exploded into a maelstrom of different directions. But, his fundamental knowledge stood him in good stead to tackle any niche speciality that came his way. Here is part of Steve Howard's post commenting on the student's situation:

There is every likelihood that any tools selected for study today will be obsolete in 4 years time. I would suggest that aiming for an education that gives a sound foundation to the market niche you plan to specialise in would be a better strategy. With a little forethought, a course that covers enough of the niche with sufficient spread across the basics of related technologies would, IMHO, produce a more employable graduate.

<snip>

Dora's study plan concentrated almost totally on modern 'popular' tools, with no consideration whatsoever for 'first principles'. Most modern tools, especially the 'visual' tools seem to try hard to hide the inner workings of the software and hardware from the user and the developer. I think that this creates developers who have a limited understanding of what is happening in their code. A limited understanding equates to a stunted ability perhaps?

I'm not suggesting all young programmers are inept - most of them are probably more skilled than I am - but what I am suggesting is that someone trying to take Dora's course plan seriously might well make themselves inept, by trying too hard to get a grasp on high-level tools without spending enough time on low-level understanding. Lay good enough foundations, and you can build anything on top.......

Steve Howard

Steve Howard nicely pin points the solution to Dora's problem. She shouldn't decide to go for any of the narrow speciality areas because for one thing she would be unlikely to get sufficient depth in any of them for the learning to make her professionally proficient; besides which, the limited choices she would have to make would stunt her development (much the same as a body builder might stunt his body if he relied upon just a single exercise).

The sensible advice for Dora must be for her to get a fundamental education that avoided all the speciality areas but would put her in a good position to learn any speciality after she had finished college. This begs the question, "How is Dora to going to learn the appropriate speciality skills that will enable her to apply for a well paid job after she has completed her university education?".

Here is where a paradigm shift is needed, to be able to take a fresh look at education to see how best to acquire knowledge in a field where there is an impossibly large range of choice and too much to learn. For this we need to look at some of the more forward looking learning strategies that are being proposed by some of the educators who are beginning to get to grips with this problem.

Rather than trying to explore the whole field of education in a search for ideal solutions, I've chosen a single educator, who seems to have come up with just the right answer at just the right time: Dr. Theodore (Ted) Panitz, professor of mathematics at Cape Cod Community College,W. Barnstable, MA, USA . Dr. Panitz explains his philosophy on education in detail on his Web site at http://www.capecod.net/~tpanitz/tedspage, but, here I'll just give a brief outline, sufficient for the purposes of this book.

His starting premise is a proposition put by John Dewey over eighty years ago: "Education is not an affair of 'telling' and being told, but an active and constructive process". In explaining that the acquisition of knowledge is more than simply the transference of information from one head to another, Dr. Panitz makes a critically important distinction between cooperative and collaborative learning. He defines cooperation and collaboration as follows:

Cooperation is a structure of interaction designed to facilitate the accomplishment of a specific end product or goal through people working together in groups.

Collaboration is a philosophy of interaction and personal lifestyle where individuals are responsible for their actions, including learning and respect the abilities and contributions of their peers.

At first sight, these definitions would seem to be saying much these same thing, or, at the most, to involve a considerable amount of overlap. Dr. Panitz's insight shows them to describe two totally different mind sets. Just as the box like shape in figure 6.1 can exist in two perspectives, there is a paradigm shift involved here where it is easy for the conscious mind to get stuck in one of them and to be totally oblivious of the other.

The old paradigm for teaching and learning was that the knowledgeable should teach the unknowledgeable: those with knowledge should pass this knowledge on to receptive students who accepted and absorbed the knowledge in a passive way. More modern educators are dropping this approach in deference to much research that has shown knowledge isn't learned parrot fashion, but, involves individual processing by the students - who construct their own internal ordering of any knowledge or information they receive.

This newer wisdom says that knowledge learned by students isn't simply put into some kind of neural database to be withdrawn on demand, but, is used to build cognitive structures that can apply the knowledge in novel situations. In this way, knowledge is thought of as building blocks that not only create new cognitive structures but also modifies and extends existing ones.

In this paradigm, the teaching is not simple a matter of transferring information but assisting students in the dynamic process of creating internal mental models. As each student will have individual abilities, capabilities, brain structures and prior knowledge, no two individual cognitive structures will be identical, so, no student can make identical use of any information or knowledge they receive.

Given that learning is very much an individual process it is incumbent upon each individual student to test out their own mental structures to ensure that the mental models they are building for themselves are viable and will lead to rational predictions and decision making. For this purpose, the modern educators will encourage students to interact and communicate with each other, so that they can use each other to test, modify or reinforce the cognitive structures they are building, during the learning process.

With the teacher also becoming involved in this interaction the knowledge of the teacher will gradually propagate throughout the group, in some cases by direct transference of knowledge and information , but, also indirectly as students learn from each other.

This paradigm then, sees learning as a combination of a personal and social activity where teachers have to be able to build positive relationships with students and create the conditions within which students can establish caring and committed relationships with each other.