Personal Blogs

We need to get off our devices. A decade or more ago I swore in favour of all things digital. I wouldn't read a book; it had to be on an iPad. Now I want the physical artefact. I didn't want to travel to a lecture; I wanted a Zoom call or Webinar. Now I want to make the journey, meet the prof, eyeball my fellow students and talk over the topic before and after the talk. I do not want 'slides' after the PowerPoint. Ideally, there is no slide show anyway - we are expected to take notes and do so - pen on paper, not furiously typing into a laptop or recording it on a phone. That is not engaged. It is delayed interest. 

We have to learn how to learn, learn how to read, learn how to take notes. 

I think 'Learning how to learn' should be a class taught throughout the first term of every new school year, from primary school to university. Postgraduates need it too.

We spend years teaching people what to learn without spending nearly enough time teaching them how learning works, or why we do all these strange things called lessons, homework, projects, fieldwork, tests and exams.

So teach that first.

Explain why classes matter. You are not simply there to receive information from a teacher. You are listening, questioning, comparing what you think with what other people think, discovering what you have misunderstood and learning to articulate an idea.

Teach people how to take notes — and, more importantly, what notes are for. They aren’t a transcription of what the teacher said. The act of deciding what matters, putting it into your own words and connecting it with something you already know is part of learning.

Explain homework. It isn’t punishment for having spent the day at school. It asks you to retrieve, practise, extend and apply something without the teacher standing beside you.

Explain tests. A test isn’t merely there to produce a mark. It tells you what you can retrieve when the book is shut. Getting something wrong can be extraordinarily useful if you discover why you got it wrong.

Explain why projects matter. They make you plan, investigate, select, discard, organise, create and finish. Explain why fieldwork matters. The map, textbook or screen is not the territory. Go outside. Look at the river, building, rock, tree, factory, street, coastline or community. Measure something. Interview somebody. Discover how untidy reality becomes when it refuses to behave like the diagram in the textbook.

Explain exams too. There is value in sitting alone with a blank sheet of paper and discovering what you can summon, organise, argue and communicate without assistance. Then reflect on the result. What did I know? What couldn’t I retrieve? Where was my argument weak? What will I do differently next time?

Teach people to learn from one another. A classmate may explain something in a way that suddenly makes sense because they have only just understood it themselves. A teacher brings another perspective. Another teacher brings another one. Books, lectures, conversations, documentaries, museums, podcasts, videos and the internet approach the same subject differently. Learning from multiple sources teaches us something enormously important: knowledge does not arrive through a single authorised pipe.

And now we have AI.

It should be part of learning how to learn in 2026 because pretending it doesn’t exist would be absurd. Teach students how to question it, challenge it, check it, use it to explain something differently, interrogate an argument, generate questions, practise retrieval, explore counterarguments and find gaps in their understanding. Teach them that getting AI to produce the answer is not necessarily learning. The important question is: what can I now understand or do that I couldn’t understand or do before?

Teach languages across subjects too. I once heard that in Germany you could study Geography in English. I would have loved to study History in French or German. Imagine studying the wars and religions of Europe partly through the languages of the people involved. Language would cease to be a sealed-off school subject and become another way into history, geography, politics and culture. The additional difficulty might be precisely what makes some of it unforgettable.

And teach the biology and psychology of learning.

Sleep matters. Nutrition matters. Exercise matters. Attention matters. Curiosity matters. Friendship matters. Family life matters.

Laughter matters enormously.

Fear may produce obedience, but it is a rotten foundation for curiosity. Threats and punishment can make a child desperate not to be wrong when education should be giving them the confidence to discover why they are wrong. Teachers therefore have to coach as much as teach: observe, question, encourage, challenge, give feedback, adjust the task and gradually make themselves less necessary.

Perhaps most important of all, teach children how to ask questions and how to live for a while without an answer.

What do I know?

How do I know it?

Where did that information come from?

What evidence would change my mind?

What don’t I understand?

Who sees this differently?

What happens if I try it?

Can I explain it to somebody else?

Can I use it somewhere completely different?

And what have I learned about the way I learn?

That last question should follow almost everything: the lesson, homework, field trip, project, conversation, failure, success and examination. Learning followed by application followed by reflection becomes another round of learning.

We used to say it takes a village to raise a child. Perhaps it takes the world to educate one now.

The classroom, teacher, friends, family, library, playing field, laboratory, landscape, museum, workplace, another language, another country, books, films, conversations, the internet and AI are all available to us.

Use them.

The purpose of education shouldn’t be to produce someone who has finished learning.

It should be to produce someone who knows how to continue.

Read pp. 3–8 of Hammersley’s paper, up to the heading ‘Context as virtual’. Identify the ways in which Hammersley talks about context and, in particular, what he identifies as ethnographic understandings of context.

In Week 8 context was identified as an issue in research methods generally. How do you think Hammersley addresses the issues concerning context raised in Week 8?

The point made introducing Activity 8.3 is that ‘ Crook and Dymott (2005) adopt a different theoretical approach to learning and context. Hence their research adopts different methodologies compared to the studies discussed by Tolmie.

From Tolmie (2001). Surroundings mean different things to different people. It is naive and deterministic to think that people are so easily governed by their context. The individual over the surroundings. Unless we think students are like a uniform tribal grouping.

‘They are necessarily employed within pre-existing contexts of educational and social activity’. Tolmie (2001) But such ‘contexts’ are or have been radically overhauled, take ESSA in Manchester by way of example. Both how and where the students and teachers interact matters. Rather like product design - form and function. The two are complimentary.

Crook and Dymott (2005) seem focused on the interaction between the various media of life, in particular written texts, lectures and social interactions affect the manner in which we think and express that thinking. Writing to me is a function of the communicating clusters in our brain and will produce the similar ‘comprehension’ results whether cunieform on clay, hieroglyphys on stone, handwriting on papyrus, printing on paper, text on a screen or an annotated animation in a video. The way the brain interlinks with other parts of the brain, and does so in different ways every time a fact is remembered will differ. An item listed on clay will be associated with the act of tapping a hammer into the clay, or an idea expressed via a QWERTY keyboards and printed off might recall the smell of the printer ink .. but does the kernel of the thought differ? To what degree is context the wrapping and associations rather than the information itself?

Learning is both an artefact and a process - the artefact exists as a potential in the brain and when stimulated can in part, through the complexity, be seen in a fMRI scan. The process of learning takes place as an interaction with the world around us, more people, but also the context and ours.

From the recorded memoirs of my late grandfather Jack Wilson, (Vernon, 2008) I wonder how, as an office boy age 14-18 he responded or changed to going from a ‘copy writer’ using 'copying ink' and using carbon paper to using the Blickenfurentstater typewriter that was brought round to the office one morning … and handed to him to master. It intrigues me that even a hundred years ago one generation might hand ‘new technology’ to the youngest member of the team or group … as if we expect the youthful mind and attitude to be more plastic? He lived through a period of extraordinary change - first motorcars, typewriters, telephones, aeroplanes … ‘total war’ … part and parcel (his expression) of these technological innovations were changes in society, not least caused by the First World War. Yet in all of this I can’t see how the context can be isolated from the far more significant influence of the person as an individual or in their community … that historically calamitous events and physical change to the environment fail to have a profound effect, collectively, on who or what we are as humans. Was it Prof. Robert Winston who said that Homo Sapiens doing Cave Paintings has more, not less, in common with a concert pianist in the 20th century? I do rather think that the capacity and scope of the human brain rather outweighs context.

Is context a red herring? Would it not be more interesting to understand what is going on in the brain of the person? That internal ‘context’ is surely where the ‘action’ i.e. the learning and memory formation, is taking place?

REFERENCE

Crook, C. and Dymott, R. (2005) ‘ICT and the literacy practices of student writing’ in Monteith, M. (ed.) Teaching Secondary School Literacies with ICT, Maidenhead, Open University Press.

Tolmie, A. (2001), Examining learning in relation to the contexts of use of ICT. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 17: 235–241. doi: 10.1046/j.0266-4909.2001.00178.

Vernon, J.F (2008) That’s Nothing Compared to Passchendaele (accaessed 9th May 2013. http://machineguncorps.com/)

When it's a photo-journal.

As I work from home I alleviate the boredom of the day by at various times moving to my wife's desk.

Assuming she is not, which she often isn't because she has a laptop and also likes to spend part of the day looking out the front window.

Meanwhile I might shut myself in here. Actually at the end of the bed like a teenager doing A' Levels, in this case on an iBook which I think is eight years old, which in dog-years makes it about 86. The battery has been replaced, the screen has gone and the operating system doesn't support most Flash and crucifies MyStuff. I did H807 on this and nearly didn't survive the experience.

And then I get fed up with computer screens, and do this (onto recycled paper used for professional projects which risks getting me very confused if I look at the wrong side of the sheet).

And so I spend an afternoon away from the computer and have found this an effective way forward.

Which is often the case.

I also like to write on wallpaper backing sheets that come in long scrolls. I have one taped to the wall above the bed right now. My wife tollerated its presence last night, she may not once I've scrawled H808 ECA stuff all over it.

Of course, if a picture is worth 1,000 words then I have once again said far, far too much.