# Learner Led Design of Learning
Professionally controlled, politically influenced institutions are all at risk of missing out on users’ wisdom and context. (Ivan Illich, Paulo Fierier, Joel Spring, Miles Horton, Donald Schon, Christopher Alexander).
# (Education Marc-ed Up)
Meta-education: Learning to Learn, individually. The real gift to be sought from a mentor or guide.
“Teaching” is not capable of more than pointing. The learner must teach them selves, find ways to grapple with what it is they wish to understand or use or do. Each learner is on a very individual journey, mostly private, as they make sense of their experiences. Profound learning is more than familiarity, naming, recalling, and reciting.
# Design goal: Weaving knowledge (academics) into the fabric of individual learners lives.
Niel’s Summerhill was like a bacon on a hill for me. I discovered it while in college. That is what I wished I had had during by youth.
I personally did not learn much in class, but a few teachers did Inspire and Introduce topics that I learned about at home, on my own, with books and much later with on-line resources.
What is an educational VSM's recursion zero? I think that it is the individual learner. I don’t see them as environmental customers of an educational system. They are the root of the system. The environment is the customer and supplier of the individual learners.
If home schooling works, ever, what does that say about the dominant educational institutions?
If there are successful autodidacts, what does that say about the dominant educational insidious.
If employers are not willing to pay the bill for the dominant educational institutions, what does that say?
What would an (educational) learning) co-op look like? A hybrid “consumer” and “worker” co-op?
US Health Care kills a massive number of people every year. We can count the bodies if we choose to. How many learners are “killed” by US Educational Institutions. I hesitate to speculate. Bored or misdirected learners are harder to count than bodies.
Let me share a simple exercise that we did in Whatcom county. One teacher, one administrator, five students. * Teacher’s map. * Administrator’s map. * Five student’s map.
Now we know something about what these young people want to learn and experience. How could our communities, and maybe our institutions, accommodate them?
These five students had each rejected the institutionalized version of learning. Here is what they wish for.
Local Self-Education More work to do to translate their shared graph into Graphviz for FedWiki. I'm working on it.
Why can’t they have it? Why can’t we assist?
Show me how you think about X so I can decide HOW TO THINK ABOUT...
Metaphors and models.
Thinking involves sensing distinctions.
Making sense of distinctions by:
Connecting through metaphors or models.