Sunday 1 February 2009

It's all about shifting paradigms....

Having a background in sociology, I am always drawn to notions of how the world changes. Sometimes this is slow, incremental, like ice melting, you're not really sure anything is happening and then you look back and see how different the world has become. Othertimes there's a crash, bang, wallop and the world has shifted on its axis and become something previously unthought of.

I think at the moment we may be witnessing the beginning of a paradigm shift. Writers and thinkers (some of them internationally known speaking to millions of people, some of them only known to a few who seek out blogs, podcasts and strange bits of info on the net) seem to be raising the prospect of a new way of looking at the world, a new way of being, living, growing and creating. A new way of society organising itself.

With my interest in learning and education, combined with an increasing fascination with how the current credit crunch will work itself out, I came upon a blog called Rippling Pond (ripplingpond.wordpress.com) which talks about how the economic crisis (cuts in public spending on education, less teachers in schools) could force the new ways of learning which rely less on traditional pedagogies and more in rooting learning within communities using technology to bring about anytime study with smaller schools using downstreaming and other techniques to share knowledge and information. Take a look and see what you think.

1 comment:

  1. Hi Kate, I am the author of rippling pond. I have been posting for 2 years and didn't realize I had never posted an about the author page! It's up now. I'm curious. What is your relationship to education? What do you see in Britain's educational future? I follow several UK edubloggers including: Terry Freedman, Jane Hart and Ewan McIntosh. Lot's of innovation occurring on your side of the world.

    BTW, I passed along your gardening blog to a kindred spirit.

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