Learning and environments of learning: plus ca change…? Gunther Kress School of Culture Language and Communication Institute of Education University of London
The shift from Teaching to Learning: a story from the mid-eighties A centre for teaching and learning vs A centre for learning and teaching The issues: diversity and authority
The issues The changing environment: the State vs the Market; Authority and Power Authority, Learning, Design The changing world of representation and communication Modes, media, genres Processes: transformation, transduction and arrangements
A pedant’s question E-, m-, online -, ubiquitous -, life-long -, life-wide -, personalized, etc learning So what is “learning”?
Two examples Early writing “being scientific”
Alphabetic writing: work
Character based writng:work
Learning and environments of learning ‘What is to be learned?’ Attention, framing and engagement
Semiotic work and meaning Semiotic work produces change Semiotic work changes the tools, that which is worked on and the worker Semiotic work produces change Change produces meaning Semiotic work produces meaning
Meaning: a focus on communication Learning: a focus on resources as tools for acting in / on the world Learning as the augmentation of resources as tools Meaning and Learning
Onion cells eyepiece
Onion cell bricks
What is learning? Early writing and “being scientific” What is framed? Who has framed? Whose attention? Whose power? Whose work? Whose agency? What learning?
Pedagogy and learning Whose power? In what form? In what domain? Whose agenda? How presented / shaped (modes and media)? Whose design? From pedagogy to rhetoric?
“Mobile learning” and contemporary environments The state vs the market The state as servant of the market The learner as consumer
Mobile learning Who is mobile? What is mobile? The affordances of technologies
Mobile learning The triumph of pedagogic discourse or the victory of the neo-liberal project? Personalized learning and the curricularization of the world What place for community?