Spaced repetition – revisiting old material you’ve studied over time, often has some interesting results. As the year closes, I was revisiting some older videos on education that I had in my OneNote Notebook. I came across this interesting video that I’d put aside some time ago after watching it and the title drew me back to rewatch it.
Posted in 2013, I wondered how it would look in late 2021 – after almost 8 years of which the last 2 years found many of us remote teaching and students forced online learning as their only option. It holds up well.
The constant talk of up-skilling, re-skilling, and new-skilling people for our increasingly digital world cannot be taken seriously unless we discuss the process of how that learning will occur. Not as digital delivery of old content using old methodologies, but as a fundamental reexamination of the how, what, why, and when of learning and teaching at a foundational level – and only then having the conversations on the methodologies of delivery.
The language of up-skill and re-skill comes a bit too close to the language of re-tooling a factory for my taste; as if we were re-building a machine that was no longer producing the right widgets. Maybe it’s semantics, but I prefer to think of learning as a maintenancee function – or, ideally, a component of self-development over a lifetime.
It is especially important to develop ways of creating lifelong learning patterns and then enter into a relationship of guiding and supporting that lifelong learning in our students (by any name: employees, colleagues, etc).
Some people may think of the term “micro-credential” and call it a day. I’m thinking it runs a bit deeper than just taking bad practices and making them smaller. My thought is that we need to take a systems approach to life-long learning as a core component of everyone’s life. In the same manner in which we look at health and fitness as key to long-term success.
There is certainly much more to be said on this topic (and I suspect I will be writing more in the future), but the video above was a good reminder that change, even if delayed, will happen. The world of remote learning in a system of resources guided by teachers/mentors will be an opportunity.
This wasn’t the only older video that came into my orbit while reviewing. Another topic of great interest is the concept of Learning Incubators – but more on that later.
