Public Learning Communities (PLCs) and Communities of Inquiries (CoI) (Team Learning)

I know we call it public education because it is publicly funded and because students all go to school together, based on age generally. But, in many ways public education is a very private affair, because each student is responsible for their own learning through papers, tests, class participation, reading, etc. How about if we adopted a more public view of public education? Using public spaces, creating public spaces through public lectures and science experiments, expressing our learning through interactive media like wikis and blogs. The Public Learning Communities movement is based on the realization that content is not in one particular space (the classroom) but everywhere, with collaboration and building on content the key, most often using technology.

Perhaps by making public education more public, we could open it up to different skills like leadership, creating cohorts and other learning communities that could exist outside the traditional classroom. An example of public learning would be the public animal dissections they are doing in Denmark, as noted in "These Museums Take Visitors Inside the Animal Kingdom -- With a Scalpel"
in the Wall Street Journal.

Public learning is different than learning about the public, as with surveys, polls, etc. Learning about the public is essentially a very private affair. Beware of this and other types of pseudo learning and teaching. When people and content appear to be engaged but are not. A lot of pseudo events.

Public learning has a strong chance (maybe a stronger chance) of capturing the zeitgeist of "Community of Inquiry," (CoI) the environment spurred on by interaction and collaboration between students in an environment created by an instructor with the foundation that knowledge is created within a social context.  The example of CoI given in Wikipedia is the fable of the blind people and the elephant, each person convinced that the elephant is something different based on their limited awareness of the elephant because of what they touched. If the blind people had communicated, chances are they would have come to a more holistic and accurate view of the elephant.

In a CoI, the teacher's role is: cognitive presence; social presence; and teaching presence. Teachers are facilitators/experts but recognize that they are part of the process, not a part from it. Classroom is not so much about knowledge transmission but creating the intellectual and social structure to let ideas and relationships become apparent.

In some ways, CoI posits that learning is more a byproduct of the situation created by the teacher rather than a product of his/her knowledge transmission. More than anything I think motivated students look to instructors to create meaningful learning opportunities, through assignments, assessments, discussions, readings, or any other vehicle. There are both formal and informal ways to do this, either in the classroom, outside the classroom, or engaged in everyday life experiences. Build and be Built in the way the early pioneers in Israel (and probably other places as well). We learn as we do, as long as the doing is explained and/or there is a consciousness attached to it. Of course, this learning can change over time, as well.

This collaboration can also take place within a formal classroom setting, with blended/technology tools playing an enhanced role. As instructors we can combine projects across disciplines to create interdisciplinary learning opportunities. For example, a possible blended project for information literacy and database building might include a computer science class building a database of open educational resources for use of students that might then search for specific articles. This would give computer students a chance to develop a database and student researchers a chance to build database searching skills within a fixed environment and in that way scaffold research skills. This might be helpful for ESL students.  

Maybe if we looked at blended learning as a team sport, we could embrace it more because team sports are a successful American export, as according to Frank Deford it has invented  Americans invented all their team sports, but imported the individual games--golf, tennis.

One reason that we might be so good in terms of COI's is because the general level of education is very high, not only in terms of literacy but in terms of history, geology, and other topics. A program at a public library is likely to attract numerous people with sophisticated backgrounds in relevant topics and the social openness for everyone to share their ideas in a relatively open way. Although this is public, if we can capture it through video or other processes, it can become part of COIs. 

And, let's not forget the role of historical events themselves are excellent blended learning activities. I was at an Israeli Independence ceremony where participants read from the Israeli Declaration of Independence and then reflected on what those words meant to them. It was a very powerful juxtaposition of historical text and reflection. "Lakeview synagogue to host reading of Israeli declaration of independence."

Private corporations obviously produce or create things, but those that are most effective are problem solving organizations. As something comes up that encourages or discourages production, the company should evolve as it faces those challenges. Educational institutions are also social organizations and as such we can view them as problem solving units. How do our bureaucracies function to solve problems? Do we encourage meritocracies, creativity, etc.?