Planet+Chasten

The Constellations of Planet Chasten

 * Case in Point- Humpty Dumpty with his Head in The Sand
 * Future Case

Case in Point- Humpty Dumpty with his Head in The Sand
"A suitable model for encouraging DE is least likely to be present in the very milieu where it is needed most." (Beaudoin, 2007, p.94).



Ironically, in the very education faculties that prepare teachers to teach, most Canadian provinces forbid or delimit DE courses to non-Methods courses. This humble DE practitioner was forbidden from counting minimal time spent in a learning management system (Desire 2 Learn) as course hours in strict adherance to the no DE policy in undergraduate education courses by teacher certification and records.

Deans of education in Manitoba and in four other Canadian provinces believe: "//If learning requires genuine participation, then distance learning provides its illusion only; while actually keeping students at a disempowering distance//." (Keller, 2008, p.75).

Nor do Manitoba-based faculties of education incorporate the knowledge base of instructional design as a discipline in teacher preparation programs. Instead wannabe teachers learn to teach in subject specific methods courses (Science Methods, Math Methods, English Language Arts Methods etc.) and these courses are considered too personal and important to be learned through DE, as in the rational offered by Brown and Duguid above in George Keller's book, //Higher Education and the New Society//.

Even though courses offered in faculties of education at the undergraduate level are openly characterized by prominent academics as unchallenging, lacking the rigour and grounding in a professional body of knowledge akin to the professional knowledges of medicine, engineering, pharmacy etc., (Ball & Forzani, 2007, Merseth, K, 2009) education faculties lack the sense of urgency to change or associate a body of knowledge that is truly professional with education faculties. As such the great promise and transforming capability of DE in HE and in public school will be untapped and will threaten rather than enhance the aforementioned faculties of education.

With the authority to provide professional training for certification purposes, these education faculties lack the sense of urgency to test self-serving assumptions that teacher course-training can not be learned via DE. If Humpty Dumpty is higher education teacher training, then humpty dumpty ought to take his head out of the sand. All the King's horses and all the King's men won't put Humpty together again. We are in the state now, before the great fall, but HE Humpty is still precarious.

Future Case
In the future, the body of professional knowledge developed about teaching and learning through distance education practitioners like Gagne, Merrill, Laurillaird etc., will chasten, come together with and organize the offerings of undergraduate teaching degrees. Teaching knowledge will fuse with instructional design, providing a micro and macro level of consciousness for educators.

The time capsule's tour of Manitoba's learning landscape 2030 will show learning and teaching within the public school sector to be:
 * personalized along lines of meta-cognitive awareness,
 * penetrated and saturated by the affordances of learning technology,
 * more efficient,
 * rife with choice,
 * competency-based,
 * creative and empowered,
 * effectively encompassing the affective realm to instill necessary dispositions, attitudes, etc.
 * continually upgraded to an eportfolio that contains multiple sources of feeback, goal statements, reflection
 * life long and on-going.

All of the above applies as well to the educators who matriculate in Manitoba faculties of educaton. Faculties of education will focus more on providing training to certify a wide range of educators beyond just school teachers to meet the needs of the global economy where learning, unlearning, and upgrading will be critical for competitiveness, competence and growth. The industrialized system of public education will be dismantled and students will take personal, individualized pathways to a range of competencies. Teacher education will be rooted in a body of professional knowledge.

Planet Choice visits the leadership theories available to negotiate UniBURSity Supernova.