by Alan Nelson
My last couple of blogs have focused on our belief that we should strive to find ways to put learners in charge of their learning, respecting their different interests and previous experience. One way in which we do this is to try to bring out of them things they already know and use that as a starting point for new learning. Very little of what we learn is brand new – even quite big steps of understanding often involve applying lessons already learnt elsewhere to new situations. I was reminded of this recently when an unlikely parallel struck me.
I have been reading about the origins of the First World War. I don’t remember being very interested in this at school but now I find it fascinating. What has struck me is the parallel between the escalation of events in the early 19th Century and the current world financial crisis. I’ll try to explain and keep it simple!
The war kicked off very suddenly but the foundations of the situation in which that could happen had emerged over many years. The arms race, the trading rivalries, the complex network of treaties etc meant that when some bloke named after a pop group was shot in the Balkans (always a painful place to be shot) it was almost inevitable that it would escalate into war, but that wasn’t the reason it did.
Likewise the interdependence of the credit system exaggerated by hedging activities in the derivatives markets all emerged over a long period and were the backdrop that made it possible for it all to come down like a house of cards. (I am trying hard not to use the phrase “tinder box”.) To extend the analogy, traders continue to behave as though they believe they can still turn a profit out of the situation, not realising that in fact the whole system is under threat and they are all likely to lose – “It’ll all be over by Christmas!”
Now you may think that this is a glib and tenuous piece of analysis. That doesn’t matter though. The point is that my understanding of one situation has helped me to get clarity about the other. The more we can bring learners’ experience and knowledge from outside their professional lives as well as from within, the more we can get them to help each other to grasp complex new subjects.
Of course, as history tells us, we humans haven’t always been good at learning from the lessons of the past. So there is a job for us learning designers – and in any case, I never said it would be easy!
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