Coming down out of the threes

Came across an interesting notion: the "iron triangle" ... a play off of the Iron Curtain of old, that is, a barrier that you really can't do too much about. The iron triangle, when it comes to elearning, of course, has to do with accessibility, quality, and cost [1]. Making adjustments on any single leg of the triangle will have an impact on the other two, and as Daniel et al. (2006) put it, this has been "a straitjacket on the expansion of education throughout history" [1]. I suppose the best we can do is strive for balance, but is that just another dead end?

That's one triangle, but it turns out there are more. While wading through Richardson (2005) on teachers' and students' perceptions of teaching and learning, it occurred to me -- again -- that there are three fundamental elements to every formal learning scenario: the teacher, the learner, and whatever it is that is being learned (the "stuff", if you will). For the longest time, the teacher was the center of attention. In some cultures, like Germany, the "stuff" was. More recently there has been a (n alleged) shift toward the learner. Isn't this triangle, just as iron as the one above?

That, in turn, got me thinking about what is supposed to come out of all this. In other words, the latest educational buzzword came to mind: learning outcomes. I couldn't help but thinking of cyclicity of things, since my old friend Bloom (1956) who really wanted to address not only the cognitive aspects of the learner, but also their affective and psychomotor aspects as well (another threesome). You can't talk about learning outcomes these days without Bloom getting into the action, and though only one of the dimensions of the person is usually addressed, or at least emphasized, aren't they all equally important?

But, I can't think of Bloom without being reminded of Pestalozzi [4] who emphasized the tripartite nature of the learner as well, though his language was more direct and natural than Bloom's. Dear Pestalozzi, in his simplicity, only spoke of "heart, head, and hands". This works very well in practice, too, as my eight years of experience at the Hermann Lietz-Schule demonstrated, for we, too, took him as our starting point. So, with all respect to Bloom, his ideas were not that original, but they were reformulated for modern times. This is certainly no reason to reject them, but is it a signal to accept them as blindly as we seem to?

And there is one final triangle that ties into all of this as well, and it deals with the heart of the entire matter, namely learning itself. The discussion of learning outcomes, at least as seen through the eyes of vocational education, involves three different types of learning as well: formal learning (what we supposed to be learning), non-formal learning (what we learning instead of what we're supposed to be learning), and informal learning (what we do practically every minute of our lives). This is another triangle that needs be thrown into the mix, is it not?

I know we moderns like to focus on the details, but this is often at the expense of the big picture. When considering education today -- online or off, present or distant, or in any other mode -- it would do us good not to forget that there is more involved than we may first perceive. This means, too, that when we're looking for solutions to educational problems, making an adjustment on one leg of a triangle may not get us the results we seek, but all of these triangle are in fact interrelated. We may always be unadjusting much more than we think we are fine-tuning.

References
[1] Daniel, J., West, P. and Mackintosh, W. (2006) "Exploring the role of ICTs in addressing educational needs: identifying the myths and the miracles", NADEOSA 10th Anniversary Conference, Pretoria, South Africa, 23 August 2006; also available online at http://www.col.org/resources/speeches/2006presentations/Pages/2006-08-23.aspx (accessed 2010-05-05).

[2] Richardson, J.T.E. (2005) "Students' Approaches to Learning and Teachers' Approaches to Teaching in Higher Education", Educational Psychology, Vol. 25, No. 6, December, pp. 673-680.

[3] Bloom, B.S. (ed.) (1956) Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals, Chicago, Susan Fauer Company, Inc.

[4] Pestalozzi, J.H. (1979) "Über die Idee der Elementarbildung (Lenzburger Rede) und 5 Schriften um 1810", in E. Dejung (ed.) Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Ausgabe, Band 22, Zürich, Orell Füssli.

[5] Cedefop (2008) The Shift to Learning Outcomes: Conceptual, Political and Practical Developments in Europe, Luxembourg, Office for Official Publications of the European Communities.